Hussein Aboubakr Mansour: A Metacritique of Palestine

From Substack: On the Political Economy of a Word-Symbol

A Metacritique of Palestine

Hussein Aboubakr Mansour

The Abrahamic Metacritique, May 18, 2026. Read the full essay here.

There is no shortage of writing about Palestine. This small and provincial conflict has generated more commentary, more theory, more denunciation, more advocacy, and more counter-advocacy than any comparable political question of the modern era, and the volume of this commentary has stood in inverse proportion to its analytical value.

The reason for such a lack of value is that what has been written is, with rare exceptions, written from inside the very structure that the writing claims to describe, and the writing therefore serves the structure rather than illuminating it. The liberal who writes about human rights, the leftist who writes about settler colonialism, the realist who writes about regional security, the conservative who writes about the clash of civilizations, the Islamist who writes about Crusaders, the Arab nationalist who writes about Western betrayal, and the post-Christian European who writes about the unbearable irony of Jewish power are not, despite their mutual hostility, engaged in incompatible projects. They are engaged in the same project, which is the conversion of the victimhood, regardless of its details, produced at a particular site into a particular kind of symbolic capital usable within a particular ideological market. They quarrel about the terms of the conversion. They do not quarrel about the conversion itself, because the conversion is what they all live on.

This essay is an attempt to step outside that conversion long enough to describe the system that makes it possible. The attempt is necessarily imperfect, because no one stands fully outside the system, and the writer who claims such a vantage is either lying or mistaken about his own position.

What is possible is the more modest achievement of seeing the Palestine system as a structure rather than as a contest within which one has already chosen a side. This requires the reader to suspend, at least for the duration of the essay, the question of which party is right and to consider instead the question of what kind of arrangement produces the very ground on which the question of rightness gets posed. The reader will recognize, I hope, that this suspension is not a refusal of moral judgment but its precondition. One cannot judge what one has not first understood, and the Palestine word-symbol has been, for at least three generations, a question about which everyone has had opinions, and almost no one has had understanding.…

Continues here. Hussein Aboubakr Mansour is an adjunct fellow at the Z3 Institute and editor of The Abrahamic Critique on Substack.