The Political Economy of Palestine (with Hussein Aboubakr Mansour)

Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ John Roberts, of Shalem College in Jerusalem, and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to EconTalk.org, where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links and other information related to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006. Our email address is mail at econtalk.org. We'd love to hear from you. Today is June 30th, 2026. And my guest is author Hussein Abu Bakr Mansour of Jinsa, the Jewish Institute for National Security of America. His substack is the Abrahamic Metacritique. And our topic for today is a rather extraordinary essay he wrote there. The title was A Metacritique of Palestine on the political economy of a word symbol. Hussein, welcome to econ talk. Thank you, Russ. My pleasure. Now, I want to say something before we start, and that is that, you know, Palestine, which is a rich, complicated word, it means different things to different people, but it has somehow become a incredibly salient political issue, not just here in the Middle East. But throughout the world, it was a serious issue in recent local British elections, local British elections, local California elections, of course here in Israel, all over the Middle East. And in some sense, your essay is trying to explain why the issue of Palestine is so salient, is so ubiquitous, is so central to so many conversations. I'm going to start with a quote from the piece. And then Hussein will get to talk. Quote, 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 the crusaders, the Arab nationalist who writes about Western betrayal, and the post-Christian European, who writes about the unbearable irony of Jewish power or not. despite their mutual hostility engaged in incompatible projects. They're 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, but they do not quarrel about the conversion itself because the conversion is what they all live on. So I want to unpack that a little bit. Why don't you start and give us an idea of what you're trying to say there? Well, first of all, thank you. Thank you very much, Russ. And I'm extremely glad that my essay resonated with you. And as you said, people can disagree about a lot of the claims. But they have to engage and at least try, attempt to find a way to really understand the conflict.

outside of all the morality plays that have dominated. And the morality plays, as I explained in the essay, and that's kind of actually what you lay down right now, are actually part of the problem. And whether you care deeply about Israel or care deeply about the Palestinian people, you have to take these claims seriously because ultimately, if this is any truth to the claims of the essay, helping these people ultimately means dealing with this very difficult problem. So ultimately, what I'm trying to explain here, that Palestine, as it exists today as a global phenomenon, as you said, a globally salient... issue, you know, and you have a list of the leftist and the liberal and the international system, so on. So it's extremely globally, it's probably the most globally salient issue today is not really primarily a place or a people or a cause. It's really a self-producing, reproducing system of political economic extraction. I call it an auto... poetic, symbolic convertibility machine that converts victimhood in that particular site of conflict into mutually reinforcing forms of value across all of these different stalls at the ideological market at once. That is, it became central to our own ideological meaning making. and the politics that come around this. This has not been always the case. This is why I insist people to understand that I'm talking about as it is today. This is not... There's a background of how this came to be. There's a history, but this is how it became to be today. It has been like this in the Middle East for quite some time. As a matter of fact, one could make the argument, and I would make the argument that it originated like this, this system of symbolic convertibility or a mining site of value out of certain story of victimhood. It started like that in the Middle East since 1948 already, probably perhaps even before. But with the great ideological systems of the Middle East, primarily Arab nationalism and revolutionary third worldism, and both of them were closely linked, and later Islamism. And what we have seen in the last 10 years or so is the... complete success, the catastrophic success of the globalization of that system, that political economic extractive system, really on a global scale that operates even in domestic Western and American politics today. Now, tell us a little bit about yourself, because part of the reason this essay is effective is your own personal story and your background, and you use, you're from Egypt originally, you use your Egyptian,

background is a way to help us outside of the Middle East or outside of the Arab world, more accurately, understand the water that people are swimming in. And we don't understand it. So talk about yourself and then how this extractive mining operation operates in Egypt, which is extraordinary. Well, it's quite pervasive. That is, Palestine slash anti-Zionism. There is a question here if there is actually any distinction. How much distinction actually is between both? There is obviously, there is some distinction, but a lot of the content of Palestine as a word symbol is that. negationist impulse that is entirely directed and concretized in Israel and Zionism. It's central to Egyptian identity, sadly. Now, Egypt, the entire Middle East is an extremely complex place, everywhere in the planet's complex place, but the Middle East, as everybody, every learned man knows, has been a very dysfunctional region for quite some time, and this functionality goes on many levels that confounds, has been confounding, experts, scholars. You have religious problems, political problems, you have constant state collapse, inability to produce stable structures with notable exceptions. Israel, the Arab Gulf. You have revolutionary regime, seemingly endemic radicalism, anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism, so on and so far, all the phenomenon of dysfunction that everyone knows. And Egypt is one of the bitter cases. I mean, it went through waves of instability. It suffers from extremely persistent authoritarianism and lack of democracy and civic liberties. But at least it's one of the more stable states. But even though its stability, it hides a lot of confusion. You know, what is really the primary? the main protagonist of history in Egypt. Is it Egypt itself? Is it Arabs? Is it Islam? It's the questions of identity that, that, again, started really explosively in the Middle East. They are being also globalized. And central to – so I grew up in this confusion in Egypt in the 90s, which also – In the 90s, in Egypt, witnessed the wave of Islamic violence before it's kind of subsided by the late 90s. But central to all of these confusion always, and what brought it all back together to some sort of a cohesive idea of the self was the hatred towards Israel, the hatred towards Zionism, that we, whether you think you're a Muslim, whether you think you're primarily Arab, whether you think you're primarily Egyptian. Ultimately, the rock, the solid rock, is the fact that we are at war with Israel. And this manifested itself pretty much in all forms of cultural production, from music to film, to literature. And I write about this extensively in my substack. And as a child, I was fascinated by this. It's a really large myth that organizes life.

The government invests in it, the opposition movements invest in it, the Islamist movement invest in it. So it has also central political salience within the Egyptian political system itself. And growing up, I just fascinated by this clear centrality, I started to become gradually obsessed with it. And, of course, with all the anti-Semitic atmosphere, a very thick atmosphere around this, I basically dedicated my life to try to understand the evils of Zionism and the evils of Israel. And as I grew up, I started to develop my understanding. I understood that I was inside a myth that is extremely dysfunctional and disastrous. Trying to deal with it with Egypt, it was extremely difficult, had clashes with the government, had to flee in 2012. Since then, I've been in the United States. And since then, given that this is now truly is the formative story of my life, I've just, I've been, I've been investing. Many years in trying to understand why and how come the society that I came from chose to organize itself or the way it thinks morally and politically around this issue specifically. You're right. You said, you're right, I'm an Egyptian. I was raised like every member of my generation in my country to understand the liberation of Palestine as the central political and moral question of my existence. the lens through which every other question about the world was to be focused in the framework within which my own dignity as a person and as a member of my civilization was to be measured. End of quote. And then you go on to talk about how that belief, the centrality of the liberation of Palestine, informs Egyptians' view of agriculture, economic growth, culture, how, in what way? Well, it definitely was like that until I was growing up. I hope it's a little better. I haven't been to Egypt since 2012, and the country has been through a law. You had a Muslim Brotherhood presidency. You had a coup, CC. My feeling that there were some progress, given the fact that there were other real issues in terms of stability, economy, so on. But my feeling is that there has been... a major regression since October 7th for various reasons. But yes, so growing up, you'll find specifically, of course, I deal here, I deal many times with intellectuals and elite culture. So Arab intellectuals who are overwhelming, so either you have two options, either leftist Arab intellectual or an Islamist Arab intellectual. That's the, for for a long time, it was this strict dichotomy. And the secular Arab intellectual was some variation of the left, either has loyalties to some form of the old left, Arab nationalism, Nasser, so on and, you know, so forth.

or the Arab New Left, which is much more centered around Palestine as the single mobilizing issue, but without necessarily any grand vision of political transformation of the region. But all these types of intellectual, whether the leftists or the Islamists, had an extremely uncanny way of... getting every discussing issues and ultimately finding at the root um Israel at at the bottom um for example i do remember specifically with the wove of global, global anti-globalization, which was a major wave of protests and activism in Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East, in the 90s, and the early 2000s, it kind of merged into the anti-war movement. as the war terrorism and where Iraq started. Obviously, it was a moment of much ideological ferment in Arab societies, especially a place like Egypt. That was also the moment of the rise of global jihadism and al-Qaeda as we know it. And even that moment of ferment in Arab society itself, you can draw a direct line to the events of the Arab Spring. But I remember, I was young, but I was very interested in these issues, and they would watch intellectuals for, let's say, on TV. discussing stagnation of Egyptian agriculture and just the fact that Egypt has become the number one wheat importer globally. We can't even feed ourselves and so on and so forth. And then they discuss IMF austerity programs, changes of government policy that led to this. And then they go into a chain of causality. into why this happened. Well, we're in debt. We need to restructure our economy. Part of the restructuring is these kind of tropical cash crops. But ultimately, they think it's bad. We're shipping all of these strawberries in Europe, but our people are hungry, and we have to buy wheat from Russia. Well, why did it have to be end up this way? Well, our political or our economic project failed because... of the, what Sadat did, let's say, at the late 70s in terms of liberalization. Well, why did he do that? Well, he did that because of Camp David. What was Camp David? It was a peace agreement that guarantees the security of Israel. So ultimately, it will calm down why these intellectuals think that the Egyptian economy is suboptimally organized. It would be actually because of Zionism.

And this will go, you can do this pretty much into other issues. The absence of democracy is a big one. I mean, you find intellectuals doing that in the United States. Shadi Hamid, for instance, writes a lot on Arab and Muslim issues in the Washington Post, keeps making this point many times, which is that Israel is central to the absence of democracy and human rights in Arab societies. Because the... The number one objective of US foreign policy in the Middle East is protecting the security of Israel. Well, if you get democracy in a neighboring country, say Jim Jordan and Egypt, in all likelihood, you're going to get an anti-Zionist. someone anti-Zionist in power because that's the populist sentiment. So they have to suppress democracy and human rights, support all of this decrepit autocrats in order to maintain the security of Israel. So if there's an Arab somewhere in Yemen or Algeria who's being tortured in the prisons of the police state in which they live, ultimately through that chain of causality is because of Israel and because of Zionism. And that's quite controversial. I mean, you have large intellectual structures that are built in order to make these large structural analyses that then center on Israel. And you point out, you elaborate on this in the essay, and you use Egypt as an example, you talk about, and we'll talk about it a minute, other nations in the Middle East, but you point out that, you know, on some of these. claims, which seem like fever dreams of blaming the other rather than taking responsibility. There is an element of truth in some of them. Now, how big an element we're not going to go into now, but I don't want to make it clear that we're not saying, I don't think you're saying, that. the Arab world is insanely obsessed with Israel, and it's just, there's no, there's no logic to it. There's an element of truth in some of the claims of sometimes it's small, sometimes it's large. You just gave an example of the chain of the argument that you could make, and it's not, there may be some truth to it, and it could be persuasive to many people, but the key point here, that I want to stick with for a moment, and we'll maybe tell more deeply into some of the side issues and examples, is that it is, it serves the self-interest of many governments to blame their problems on a, to find a scapegoat. Now, this is not a deep insight. This is, sorry, many people have noticed that it's convenient for people to blame the other, whether it's the Jews or some other ethnic minority or racial minority in a country. But you're saying something much more deeply, much deeper, much deeper. You're saying that it doesn't just help, let's say,

an autocratic government, a tyrant, or a thug, or a corrupt thug, to say, well, and things aren't so good for you in the street, but that's all because of Zionism, or that's all because of Israel. That's just one piece of this complex system. And many, many people, I want to try to again, take a little summary here for listeners that don't want to get lost in the weeds. For many, many players in the intellectual marketplace, it's profitable to blame Israel for something. It doesn't have to, in this case, it might be the poverty of the average Egyptian. But for other people, it's about, it might be about the failure of certain intellectual ideologies that should be more successful but aren't and so on and so forth. Is that a fair summary of your claim? It's more than ideological. I think it's directly, is directly political. That is, I think ultimately, these ideas succeed, aside from the, they have their own compelling aesthetic power. I mean, they are aesthetically total, final, they are quite comprehensive in what. in what they can include, but I don't think that this is the reason that they are persistent. I think they are the reason, the reason that they are persistent is actually interest. This serves interest. And as you said, it serves the interest of a lot of, almost everyone that involved in the process of ideological production, including the regimes that tacitly either allowed us or promoted themselves. I mean, the Egyptian regime is... a big example, that its own media constantly promote this point of view. Because it, well, what does the ideology itself achieves? Yeah, right. It blamed, things are not good for you, not because of me, not because of what we're doing, it because of someone else. But it does more than that. It forecloses, it occupies. any place in which real political analysis can emerge. That is, once it becomes established, it becomes total. It becomes so intuitive that even the chain of causality is not really on a, when you go down from the intellectual level to just kind of a mass layman level, they don't even need that. these chains of causality established. It's just, it's direct, you know, a lot of our problems because of Israel and so on. And whether on the intellectual level or the mass level, what you have is you have this cognitive trap in which now you're trapped into this self-reinforcing idea that can reproduce itself and revalidate itself and rejustify itself, that then occupies the cognitive space in which

or through which you should have started to look at your problems objectively. You should have started to produce an actual analysis of why the economy is not functioning well. There is no economic mobility, stagnation, so on and so forth. So obviously, an autocratic regime has a deep interest in promoting this, because once it's there, they actually have to do much less. In terms of speech control, in terms of censorship, in terms of speech policing. And this is actually true for a lot of these Arab regimes that, by the way, they are no near the levels of autocracy. Let's say China or North Korea. And they don't need to be because ultimately this kind of ideological method of control is completely self-enforcing, self-producing. You don't need to... You don't need to police the people speech themselves. But the same regime. Now, here's the problem of Palestine. Now you have the, you must control the flame. That is because of the revolutionary potency of this very word symbol itself, you can't let it get out of control because then that can be weaponized and mobilized against you. And that's what the opposition's movements try to do. So again, Egypt is the example I know best because I grew up there. So the regime would be holding the flame off. liberation of Palestine and the hatred for Israel. And then the Islamic movements primarily will try to even raise the flame up even further as to consume the regime by pointing out, oh, you're right, but you are the one who are guaranteeing the peace of Israel. You're too soft. You're too soft. You're too soft. Yes, you're too soft on Israel. Not just you're too soft. You're a collaborator. You have security arrangements with them. You have security collaboration. So then the opposition tries to raise the flame even further in order for it to start burning the regime itself. And then these Arab regimes then have these multiple thermostats that they have to all the time adjust the heat of this anti-Israel sentiment. It has to be just enough. to keep people from thinking about their political problems and the real nature of the political system in which they are living, but not too high as to start hurting the regime itself. Now, this gets more complex when you know the fact that this same issue is also a regional game. So it's not just that you're playing this game domestically, in your domestic politics, you're playing it against other regimes. So, for example, you have a rival state. Qatar is a chief example. Qatar was the main instigator of a lot of instability during the Arab Spring. Everybody remembers the 217 blockade by a lot of Arab countries against Qatar specifically because of sponsorship of Muslim Brotherhood movements, which are the main threat.

to a lot of these Arab regimes, and Al Jazeera, which is the main ideological media instrument, the largest media instrument in the Middle East, and people know what Al Jazeera does. So you're playing another game against Qatar. Now, Qatar then, can, and often does, and that's the way they do. inflame Palestine among your own population in order to make you unstable. So you're not just, and of course Iran is another big example. I mean, Iran ultimately is trying to outmaneuver all the Arab states by making them the custodian of the word symbol of Palestine. So you're playing this game domestically. You need Palestine, but at the same time you don't need it too much. You need to block the opposition from capitalizing on it. And this is how you see the accusation. counter-accusation of in Arab politics. Oh, you're the one who's a product of Israel. Oh, no, you are the one who's a product of Israel. But at the same times, you're not the only one. This game is actually part of a bigger board in which a lot of other regimes are playing against each other as well. So let me ask about that as someone sitting here in Israel and one challenge to your theory is the Abraham Accords, which is, which looks, and you mentioned this in the essay that it looks like. It's a small group, but a couple of, a handful of countries decide to step out of the game that you're talking about. Recognize Israel, trade with them, invests here, and have Israeli and others invest in their countries. But, you know, it's a dream of a lot of Israelis, including the prime minister, that Saudi Arabia would join the Abraham Accords. And there was a lot, it gets rumored all the time. You hear, oh, Saudi Arabia is actually thinking of joint. There's a big announcement coming soon. I wonder what it is. Maybe it's Saudi Arabia. It turns out it's Kazakhstan joining the Abraham Accords. It's not quite as exciting, but nice, pleasant if you live here. But. You have all these rumors that Saudi Arabia is liberalizing. They're going to cooperate with Israel against Iran. That's why October 7th happened to stop that. But in the meanwhile, you have the United States, which is friends with Saudi Arabia and can use carrots and sticks to advance Saudi Arabia's position on Israel. And you think, well, so now it's time for this liberalization with Saudi Arabia to happen. And then all of a sudden, they crack down. They suddenly, their rhetoric ratches up. Suddenly they're saying that, of course, we can't do have anything to do with Israel. They oppressed the Palestinians, but they did a Gaza was unacceptable, blah, blah, blah. And, you know, we're polite. It feels like a yo-yo or maybe a tennis game. I don't know what the right metaphor is. How do you understand that? in your framework. Let me put another layer of analysis and then so we can have even a bigger picture. So you have the, you're playing the domestic game. So the regime is trying to extract consent and acquiescence from population through the Palestine word symbol. Regionally, regimes try to extract influence from each other through the same word symbol. But then there's also an international layer.

which is a lot of these Arab states extract massive concessions and privileges from Washington through playing the game itself. There are a lot of examples, but let's take Jim Jordan and Egypt. Both of them are largely dependent on US support and USAID, and the US support and the USA's is intrinsically linked, inherently linked to their relationship with Israel. As a matter of fact, so all of the Arab economies, almost all, are various forms of frontier economies. They live by extracting rents from natural resources and so on. Egypt really has two forms of rent extraction. The first one is a Swiss canal, and the second one is their border with Israel and Gaza. That is, it's a major piece of leverage from which... they can extract from Washington a lot of concessions on a lot of aid. As a matter of fact, even in D.C., here in Washington, when you hear people talking about cutting USAID globally, one of the few exceptions they make is Egypt, specifically because of just its centrality to stability of the region through their peace of Israel. The border of Gaza is a major, is one. One big source of extraction. Just very quickly, when the Biden administration came to the White House, obviously they had serious problems with both Mohammed bin Salman and President Cici because of authoritarianism, human rights, and so on and so forth. And President Biden didn't talk to President C.C. at all after he came to office. The first time ever, prison Biden. picked up the phone and called President Sisi was actually in the Gaza, in the Hamas-Israel War of 2021, because then Egypt becomes very important because of their border with Gaza. So you have also this international level. Now, With Saudi Arabia, when you're talking about a state like Saudi Arabia and is in the Arab Gulf, when they are talking about normalization with Israel, they are playing all of these games at once. But usually their most important extraction is from the United States. Saudi Arabia wanted a civil nuclear program. F-35s. F-35s, so on and so forth. So the calculus, especially in there was a moment, sadly this moment, had passed, which is the moment that made the Abraham Accords possible, when it seemed possible to pull out of that game. So what I'm saying, by the way, all Arab statesmen understand fully better than I do, because that's actually their politics. That's the game that they have to play every, the moment that they wake up in the morning. And...

The UAE had an extremely daring vision to really pull out of that game because that game is destructive. It makes regional politics extremely difficult. It militates against states pursuing their interests transparently and honestly. And the UAE obviously has a lot of ambition. It's a small country that's extremely wealthy and extremely successful. So they wanted to pull out of the game, not just pull out of the game would be actually the wrong term. They wanted to turn the game around. So they wanted to turn a different, they basically wanted to turn it a different game in which accepting Israel then becomes the main asset that a lot of the Arab states can have when they are dealing with the West, when they are dealing with each other and so on. It was really a daring vision and it seemed possible for a few years, even Saudi Arabia was going in that direction. What happened is that After October 7th, giving the massive geopolitical shifts that came out of, you know, you had a domino effect. First of all, the gradual weakening of Iran by Israeli military action that ultimately changed the level of the Iranian threat itself. And the Iranian threat was one of the main forces that determined the structure of power in the region, relationships in the region. That is... For a long time, every single relationship in the region had to be triangulated through the Iranian threat and calculated against the Iranian threat. So obviously that changes everything. The global salience of Palestine, I think actually the Saudis and Arab statesmen are actually taking that into consideration. That is, they are actually looking at American domestic politics and wondering about the future of American support of Israel and what does that mean in which? in terms of the asset that Israel represents. And ultimately, I believe the Saudis recalculated that they can actually gain more by pulling back from the path that they were contemplating along with the EUE and actually go playing the old game. And that way, they can have then a comparative advantage over both the Israelis who are now becoming a formidable military power that is threatening to a lot of Arab states and even against the Emirates who are becoming the most successful Arab state and most successful economy. And playing then against them will allow the Saudis to carve a place for their own regional leadership. And I believe that's what the Saudis recalculated. That is, they can win more. by playing the old game back. And as you said, you can see, I mean, I'm writing something about this in which I kind of see in the Saudi official statements that changes, the gradual changes in the language after October 7th, that went through phases. Well, we can't ignore the Palestinians anymore. Well, we need some path. towards a Palestinian state, and then it really hardens in 2025 into a Palestinian state is the only way forward for the region, which is the Saudis are extremely, Saudi statesmen, and I talked to a few of them, are extremely educated and intelligent people. I believe they actually know that this is not a possibility. Like they themselves know that a Palestinian state is not really viable at all, given

the conditions of the Palestinians themselves, whether in the West Bank and in Gaza. And, of course, the problems of internal Israeli politics. I mean, this is almost an impossible ask. So I believe they are demanding the impossible because they are not really, that's not really what they are demanding. It's a component in the new calculation that they are doing in the game that they are playing. So let's talk for a minute about the other players, just to be clear. I mean, this, as I said, It's not so controversial to argue that states that, I'll just call them corrupt thugocracies, states that extract resources from their own people need to keep the people quiet. and comfortable and not looking too carefully at their own feelings as a regime. So they blame somebody. I want to say something also, I forgot to say, that they are also trapped. They themselves, the regime, yes, is using the word symbol, but also is trapped in the game. Like, let's say that I am, I'm an Egyptian autocrat and decides tomorrow, you know, this is a terrible game. I just don't want to play this anymore. Well, you do that at your own pearl. First of all, your opposition is going to play that game. The Qatari's are going to play that game. Recep Tayyip Erdogan is going to play that game. The Saudis are now playing it again. And the Iranians are playing that game. You're going to be out of power probably in no time. So you're experiencing it not just as a mining site in which you're mining whatever resources you get from all the – you're mining – you know – acquiescence and quiet from the population, you're mining aid and privileges from Washington, you're mining other things from the region. You're also experiencing it as an entrapment. You really can't get out of it. You can't afford to. Yeah, I think that's the important thing because I think Westerners in particular, and particularly Americans, have a very, as I suggested at the beginning of the conversation, a morality-based view of foreign policy, which is very romantic, comforting, and is probably misapplied not only to foreign countries, but to their own American administrations, but... At a minimum, you can debate if you're an American, how moral or just American foreign policy is. But the fact that you, and you might need to believe that for your own emotional well-being, that it's not so self-interested. It's not extractive. It's a beacon to a freedom to the rest of the world. So if you believe that, that's, you might be being a little naive, and there may be some truth to it. But you might be being naive, but it's certainly naive to apply it to other regimes that are not democratic and are using rhetoric, the kind of rhetoric we're talking about, to serve themselves. And it just doesn't come naturally, I think.

to even American diplomats without going into names to assume that the other side is self-interest. I just take one example. And I don't, it doesn't matter what this is historically accurate. The story is told all the time that, that I think was Madeline Albright chased Yasser Arafat down the... driveway when they were trying to get to a two-state solution. I think she, in the story, and it's again, I don't know if this is true, she had her, her shoes in her hand so she could run comfortably on the gravel calling to come back. And come on, we're so close when I think just to be. to give Aravat the benefit of the doubt, if he'd agreed to it, he probably would have been killed. And Sadat was killed. He took a chance. You're not guaranteed you're going to be killed. But as you say, if you break the rules of the game and you try to play a different game, step out of the game, it's not just, well, you know, maybe your vote, maybe your seats in parliament will go down. That's not what they're worried about. They're worried about being killed. And it's a whole different, it's hard for, I think, Westerners to understand that calculus and that kind of political system. It just doesn't compute for most of them. Right. I think. There are multiple ironies here. I personally find Westerners more ideological than a lot of politicians in the middle. It's definitely a lot of, than almost every statement in the Middle East, with the exception maybe of Iran, put it aside. But I found both Israelis and Westerners at large, I mean, because they have all these various belief systems, liberalism and international liberalism, conservatism. And this is why particularly... upset at, let's say, the intellectuals of clash of civilization, because you're creating these narratives that really obfuscate the reality at all. Mike Durand from Hudson had that saying that I really liked. He said that the Middle East is a cockpit of power politics. And that's definitely true. The Middle East doesn't have a regional structure, and that's what has been its endemic problem. It doesn't have a regional structure that forces countries. to cooperate, and then that regional structure develops its own story. It actually doesn't have that at all. It's all unilateral, self-interested in non-democratic regimes that are just fighting ruthlessly and selfishly for power amongst themselves. So you're right. That does not come natural to, I think, a lot of Westerners, but I want also to emphasize It's not just a naivete, despite that this is definitely an element. I think it's a difference between Western liberal political structures and that do function many times. I mean, problematically, I have other writings on this issue that I don't like, function as a religion many times. And really, Middle Eastern states that are less ideological and much more self-interested than people think.

But let's move away from the Middle East for a second. And like I said, we've been focusing almost exclusively on the regimes of the Middle East. How do we understand, how does your framework help us understand a local election in London, a local election in New York, a state senator in California? These are people who really don't have access to the levers. of aid, of foreign policy positions, and yet they stake out a view, a political view, and campaign on Palestine. This doesn't really make sense. At least it doesn't seem to. Well, it didn't exist a few decades ago. This is much more difficult to talk about, and then you get a much more globalized view of events for the past few decades that basically resulted in the globalization of this world symbol that now has its own power and its own salience within Western political systems themselves. No, I think it became also like that. It became also this extractive political economic system. or basically an extension of that system that operated in the Middle East for so long into Western politics. And this has to do with various reasons. The decline of... Western institutional health in general that would have helped to protect against this cultural health, so on and so forth. So desperation of various forms of political meaning making. But also you do have issues of migration, the rise of post-coloniality in the university. Then it started really in the universities as an academic, in the new reading technique that then developed its own negative canon that displaced the western canon and gradually took over the humanities out of the literature department took over all the lot of the humanities including things that have nothing to do with um third world or colonialism like women's studies like for example in women's studies now the hierarchy that successfully was established, is that the issues of the third world come first. And you find that even in women's studies department. And this might explain why you should support the Hamas fighter more being angry at the Israeli women who are being raped. This actually follows from a lot of these things that was established in the humanities. Massive expansion of higher education gets you a lot of people exposed to this. Now, You have also the issue of Middle Eastern regimes that are running these extractive systems, specifically the more successful ones. Qatar is a big example. The Turks are another, various other Arab regimes, investing in this in Western societies. And they did this because they know that this amplifies the asset.

of the word symbol that they have in the region. That is, ultimately, it gives them more influence at your own home, at your own region. And this is what they were doing. So you had that element as well of people investing actively in this. I want to interrupt for a sec, because I think this on the surface, this sounds like Looney Tunes. This is just absurd conspiracy theory. But it. If you feel that way, and that's my first thought, your second thought should be, well, why did Qatar invest? tens, hundreds of millions of dollars in American institutions because they care about American education? I mean, what would be the, what's the motive there? There's some motive. It's not just a random event. You can debate what it is, I guess. It doesn't have to be your explanation. But whatever your reaction is to listeners to Hussein's theories about, say, Qatar or Turkey or Saudi Arabia, for that matter. You have to have a theory to explain what they're doing. It's not an easy thing to explain. It's not an easy thing to explain. And ultimately, you're not going to pay billions of dollars. I mean, the Qatar investment specific, Qatar is the most egregious case, $20 billion or something in the American higher education system. You're buying something. You're purchasing something, you're doing, especially these are non-democratic regime. Qatar is a tiny state, has enormous wealth. It has no demographic or military weight at all, yet they are very influential. Look at how much we hear about Qatar. The central to the United States policy in the region, they host our CENTCOM headquarters, they are the main Arab interlocutor with Iran, helped us reach this deal, helped President Trump get the hostages out from Hamas. World Cup games, you find Qatar Airways pretty much in every game, how come a tiny state of 300,000 people managed to gain this level of influence, access to power, access to them? This is exactly what they are buying. And actually, people who don't think that they would do that are the ones who are being irrational. Why wouldn't you do that? If you have this endless stream of cash... Why wouldn't he try to convert that into a form of power that you lack otherwise? You don't have the demographic. For example, patronizing Islamists buys Qatar. Let's think about it as an extension arms, right? They don't have enough people. to send all over as diplomats. They really don't. It's a tiny population. They don't have enough human capital to go represent, send them to represent Qatar and try to push Qatari influences in all the capital is the world. But once gullible Islamists think of Qatar as the holy patron.

of Islamism and the Muslim Brotherhood, they will do that. I mean, you're buying massive influence by doing this. And again, like, Palestine issue doesn't quite explanation why they do this. But they managed, by the end of the day, making this themselves very influential by virtue of these investments. Now, the upshot from this, is that these investments are leaving now effects on your own societies, on your own elite institutions and your own elite education. You see that specifically, for example, in Georgetown. I invite the audience. to go to Georgetown University's website and go to their Arab Studies Department, which is Center, which is the largest in the country. Their Islamic Studies, it's called ACMCU, Islamic Studies Center, which is also one of the largest in the world, and go to their websites and see what their websites are talking about. See the faculty? Find one dissenting voice from a clear academic consensus that what they are doing is about Gaza and about genocide and about Palestine and about Israel. So obviously, this is indeed happening. But again, I don't want to reduce this to ideological reasons, which is a lot of people do. Well, it's because of hate and ideology and their Muslim and classical civilization. No, these people are extremely rational. And they know what they are buying, and they are buying interest and influence. I want to... Let's talk about why it persists. You know, President Trump is, we're doing, recording this in June of 2026. Right. I'm somewhat agnostic about and uncertain about how his recent efforts with Iran and the Middle East are going to turn out, or Gaza for that matter. It's, I think it's complicated. I think it's too soon to come to a judgment. So I'm not going to come to a judgment on that. History will make its own judgment. But when you see it a problem, and let's call the problem, and we haven't talked about Israel enough. We'll come at the end. I want to talk about Israel. We'll do that soon. But would you see a problem? And the problem here in this case is that... Israel, despite its 2 million Arab-Israeli citizens, is also entangled with Gaza and the West Bank in all kinds of ways. We've talked about a number of episodes on the program in the past. But, you know, we wish we were better. If you're an idealistic person, you wish it could lead to self-determination. for the Palestinians, peace for Israel. There are many, many things that could be better about the region and would allow human beings to flourish. Now, hovering behind all that, of course, is there is ideology, there is religion. So I don't want to understate the challenges there. But what your perspective brings is an understanding that, quote, fixing this is not really feasible.

We know there's a longtime quote on the program, no solutions only tradeoffs. And that's not even what we're talking about here. So you write the following. You say the system is irresolvable on three independent grounds. It's too distributed. No single nodes removal collapses it because every loop runs on its own independent logic. You know, it's kind of a redundancy argument. It's going to all these extra parts because that way it'll always, if you take out one, there's still plenty left. There are too many actors extracting too much value. I'm continuing to quote, it's that resolution would. The resolution will require every actor to simultaneously abandon extraction. And since the loops were independent, no single actors withdrawal collapses the system. There's no single king to kill. It has no center, no origin, no base, no starting point. Every participant is extracting from it for their own reasons. And the suffering in victimhood, the captive population is the fungible commodity that makes extraction possible across otherwise. incommensurable domains. And what you're saying there, I want to say I want to read one more piece, but, you know, kind of what you're saying there is that if you have a, an organization that's designed to fight cancer, solving cancer puts them out of business, and that is unattractive. You'd think that would be the goal, but you worry sometimes that that's not the goal because then the participants would pay a price. You close in this section saying every proposed solution is itself an extractive move within the system. The two-state solution is a position from which liberals extract moral prestige. The one-state proposal is a position from which the left extracts radical credibility. Side note, the one-state proposal, meaning Israel should allow Palestinians return to the 700,000 people that were refugees in 1948, who have now become... how many four million, six million, if we allowed them to come back to Israel, destroy the Jewish nature of the state. So that's very appealing to certain groups. I'm continuing to quote now. The rights-based view is a position from which the NGO sector extracts institutional revenue. The security-based framework is a position from which the policy establishment extracts professional standing. The discourse of solution is not an exit from the system. It's one of the system's loops. And so I just want to try to summarize that. You're arguing that pushing your...

agenda for how to fix this from whatever corner of this world you're in, it's just, it's just so much, it's, it's just, it's just, wind addressing. It's not a real solution. It can't actually be imposed. So all it is is a, a banner to wave around that to your, to your base and to your funders, that you're continuing to uphold the right. the good and the beautiful. Yes, but it doesn't necessarily emerge. I want to also be charitable to people. I mean, that would be a really malevolent reading that everybody's coming. No, I think a lot of people come. to this, which now became a huge, there's a huge professional class worldwide that is working at this. I mean, this is a massive, massive economic extractive system. Employment machine, yeah. Employment machine, peace processes, NGOs, think about all the EU aid. I think there, I read some, I remember when I was researching this, just the NGO per capita in the Palestinian territories, right? The aid per capita is just absolutely insane. The amount of Europeans who go, work in Ramallah and so on. And not just them. You have UN mechanisms. You have political machines in various political systems working on this. You have, you know, here in America, you have the Jewish community. There are a lot of people employed this. I mean, arguably, I am making my living from this issue. As you said, it has its own economic interest. Now, it is entirely possible, and not possible, I think this is what happens, that when people come to this and trying to bring in a solution, they are basically, they are genuine. Because they don't see the system. They don't understand the problem. They come bring a solution. But ultimately, what it becomes, it becomes another loop. It joins another loop of system because just it's so resistant to resolution. So ultimately, you're just going to join the ranks of everyone who's extracting value from the system. So I don't want to be malevolent in this. Also, in other words, it's not, it's not, it's not some sinister cynicism at work. It's just that people are naturally benefiting economically from the insolubility of the problem. Right. Yeah. But there is cynicism. I have also a passage in the essay about this. Sinicism goes up as you move up the hierarchy, right? Like cynicism increases. As you move up leadership, for example, you go to political leaderships. including the Islamic Republic, I speculate. You'll find a lot of cynicism about all of this. But there is blindness and all over. Everybody's captive of the system. Everybody's extracting. The reason that...

that I want to ensure that I'm like, yeah, I'm trying to produce a systematic analysis of this really enormous problem that we're having, but I don't want to be kind of a Marxist analysis in which it's organized its need. There's a structure. There's a base. There's some sort of a revolutionary subject that can destroy the system. There is one. There is an origination of it. No, there is actually, there is none of that. You can't actually point at any point and say that this will undo the entire system. Yeah, it's like the universe. Where's the center? What do you mean? How can there be no center? But I do think, and now let me be a little less cynical and a little less about self-interest, financial self-interest. There are a lot of good human beings who care deeply for peace in the Middle East, self-determination, both for the Palestinian people and the persistence of a Jewish state that could live in peace alongside its neighbors. And I think, you know, my community, the Jewish community, either in the United States or Israel, is desperately eager. to find the switch. Where's that switch? Where's that little knob I can turn? Or what can I spend money on? Or what could I invest in? And which cause should I be, what horse should I be backing either politically or policy-wise to make things better? And there is a fatalism about what you wrote that says, This works too well for too many people to get fixed. And again, you could, I think the cancer analogy is kind of, I don't know if it's a good analogy or not, but we don't believe that about cancer, even though we understand that. that there are people who profit from fighting cancer and would lose money if it disappeared. We assume that most of them are decent human beings, if not all of them, who want to solve the problem. And we're making some kind of progress in different ways on this problem. We're not making much progress on the Middle East. I'd say... A little bit. The Abraham Accords are encouraging the military strength of Israel in this moment right today, and the damage it's been able to do to its worst enemies is positive, although many people would say it's not going to last long, and all it means is that the next round is coming whenever it comes. So give me a little cause for optimism, if you can find it.

You're right. The analogy of cancer is not perfect. Especially that cancer ultimately is a physiological. It's a medical problem. Right. This is a massive political problem. There's a lot of power into this. I mean, people kill a large number of people to maintain power. Think about... think about the Arab states and how much they are ready to sacrifice with their own populations or even the Palestinians in order to just get a little bit, just one concession from Washington. Egypt is willing to close the border and shut it and ensure no Gaza passes, no matter what conditions are, just to make sure that they are very important to Washington have a lot of leverage and so on and so. Not just that, but that's one point of it. I think the question is still good in the idea that you said we still fighting. I mean, I'll still do what I'm. You know, if I had a completely fatalist, then writing this essay would have been my very last act rationally if we're engaging with this at all. And then I can just, you know. You know, I'm done, which many times I do feel like it. But I'm still engaging in this because ultimately we're humans and we have a lot of both hubris and faith. And I think the latter is much better than the former. So I do have faith that this is not. This is not going to continue forever. Nothing continues forever. And there's a lot of people who are suffering from this. Ultimately, as you said, and I've started this, I'm Egyptian. I understand the central role that this plays in Egyptian political dysfunction. I'm from the Arab Spring generation. I saw the Arab Spring failed. and become disastrous. And it did start with the very, you know, idealistic hopes of a lot of young people. So ultimately, I'm trying to do my part in order to contribute to understanding of a problem. Hopefully we find a way, we'll find a way to fix. You're right. There's a lot of people in Jewish community who are very sincere about this. And this is the reason that most of my work with the Jewish community, I believe, I have a lot of critiques about. Let me just be clear, I have a lot of critiques about Jews and about Israel. But by the end of the day, first of all, I find them the most... a vulnerable position in this entire system because this system operates on their vilification and on obfuscating itself, the primary mechanism, and this is maybe issue of the second I say in which the critiques that I received, this whole thing operates through concealing itself.

By projecting it all on Israel, Israelis are doing this. And the entire conversation, what really drives me nuts in all the conversations about Israel-Palestine, it's like no one else exists. It's the Israelis and the Palestinians. Not as if the Turks are heavily involved. The Iranians are heavily involved. The Egyptians are heavily involved. So on so on heavily involved. Everybody's playing a role and everybody's getting something out of it. No, no, no. It's the Israelis, which is not true at all. So the system, the primary mechanism. of mystifying itself is making it about Zionism and about Israel and so on and so forth. So I find Jews in, first of all, they are still in a good position. I mean, they are able to protect themselves. That's actually, the system runs because Israel is so resilient. I mean, if Israel collapses tomorrow, this whole thing comes down. So they are protected. They have some amount of power. But at the same time, they are the most vulnerable. And they are the ones who have the most interest in trying to understand it objectively because of just how threatening it is to them. So they have an incentive, I think. In that system, they have a higher incentive to hear a contrary, complex opinion like this than anyone else in the system. And that's why I am where I am. Well, that's why I liked it probably. It's part of the reason. But I just want to be clear. And I don't know if listeners, I don't know if we've done a good job doing justice to the complexity of your essay. It's very long. It's very thoughtful. And we've just done a kind of a thumbnail sketch of it here. But I want to come back and just before I come back to some of the criticism you received. I want to come back and say why I think it's comforting despite its seeming fatalism, right? And I think the reason I like the essay isn't because, oh, now I can wipe my hands and not worry about it anymore. It's because it helps me understand some of the things that happen in this part of the world and in the West. and on college campuses in the West and in Western countries, it helps me see that it's not, it's actually not as dark as it appears. It's actually a little bit brighter. It's not because there's a fundamental injustice, which is what all sides of this side feel, right? Everybody in this. conversation feels whichever side you're on, that there's a terrible injustice being done. And sometimes it's a factual question, but a lot of times it's an emotional question. It's a feeling of, you know, I have, I can defend the existence of the state of Israel. I can defend most, cheerfully, most of what Israel's done since 1948. But I can also understand why people live in Gaza are really angry and hate Israel and hate. Jews and it doesn't, those two are not, those are not in conflict. I understand that. The part that's difficult to understand is the insistent focus on this one issue to the exclusion of so many things that are also horrible feels, quote, unfair.

Just like if you're on the other side, the relentless success of Israel and the failure to advance the Palestinian cause feels like grotesquely unfair. I totally get that. What this essay does is it says it's not really about fair or unfair. It's not about cruel. cruelty versus mercy or justice versus injustice. It's, we're all tangled up in a very complex system of incentives that kind of sustains itself. And that's, that's really what you, what you write about. Might not have been true 30 years ago, 50 years ago. There were options to step out to restructure this, perhaps. Israel made a lot of mistakes and others made mistakes on behalf of the Palestinians. And even the Palestinians made mistakes. And the thing that drives me crazy, you mentioned your thing that drives you crazy. What drives me crazy is the, there's never, the Palestinians have no, no agency ever. And that's, I think, unfair to them, unfair to the human condition. But put that to the side. My point is that. On the one hand, if you do look at the world as a morality play, you can get very upset and very angry and feel that injustice is triumphing, whichever side you're on on this debate. And what your essay says is, you know, it's actually a lot more complicated than that. And, you know, we've emphasized the incentives and the extraction, but it's, when you, when you tangle that up with, weave that in with the religious feelings around the issue on both sides. And you weave it in with the philosophical and ideological feelings that people have. You can see that it's not so straightforward. And to use the watch word phrase of this show, the other watchphrase, it's complicated. And I find some comfort in that. Well, I'm glad. I want to say two things. First of all, about the morality play. The morality play is arguably the primary form of the basic extraction. I mean, yes, I'm trying not to put a center in the system, but there is a basic form of extraction that creates value. I mean, ultimately, okay, if you're talking about extraction, there is value creation. This, this. Arab autocrat or Palestinian movement or intellectual, post-colonial intellectual and some university, when they are operating within the system, mining it, they are extracting value. What is that form of value? And that form of value is ultimately sentiment. It's the moral sentiment and the moral enchantment of as many people as possible with this cause. That's really, really the most fundamental level of extraction that happens. And that's why I have a religious bit at the end that ultimately people have to find...

alternative transcendent sources of meaning, because as long as this is their form of meaning, this is going to be a mining site for politics. The other thing, I want to talk about the Palestinians. Yeah, you're right. The system denies at all that they have agency. I actually have a section that I really like in the essay about the Palestinians, so that the Palestinians also are, of course, part of the system. Now, you can argue that they are in the least privileged position. But they're also, you know, you're going to do the best you can do. Everybody has agency. And they also, you know, have their own extraction. So you have a Palestinian militia that extracts, again, consent or power domestically from people, fight rival groups by claims that it is the most authentic representative of Palestine. But then we'll extract the regional games. for resources. I mean, we've seen this. This has been endemic for the Palestinian movement since it started really after 1967. When you had every Palestinian militia represented was a proxy of some regional power, Ba'athist Syria, Iraq. Egypt, so on and so forth. And it's still the case today. I mean, Hamas is a proxy of Iran, and now the PA is increasingly becoming a proxy of Saudi Arabia, that's the Saudis actually are trying to do. So here you have in extraction also two-way extraction, extraction from the bottom, extraction from the top to get as much as you can. If you're talking about the actual Palestinian layman, the problem is that the system is not just it. exploiting. Ultimately, that's the commodity. It's the, it's the victimhood of that Palestinian. And it doesn't exploit their suffering. It invents it. That is the system now. In order to keep itself, it has to ensure the value keeps coming. So it needs to invent the Palestinian victim constantly and ensure that it's in adequate supply. And that's what UNRWA had become. Obviously, UNRWA when it started, did not really its function. It's the UN Refugeations. Yes. That deals exclusively with the Palestinians. It's a unique institution. It's only one. And it does a unique thing, which is it actually... compounds the number of refugees. It doesn't decrease refugees. It actually increases the number, it makes it a hereditary status. This is basically a perpetuation. It's a structural feature of the system that is responsible for the perpetuation of this statelessness as an identity, because that's ultimately the main currency that allows value extraction. Yeah, but

To push back is, which is, um, I'm an Israeli, but on the other side, people would say, well, come on, they're not manufacturing victim. They don't have to. These people are victims. Israel has mistreats them, abuses them, sometimes kills them, keeps them from getting food, keeps them from getting economic opportunity. There was an article this week in The New Yorker that after October 7th, Palestinians used to work in Israel, having trouble getting work. which is a mind-blowing article to write, at least the headline. I didn't read the article. I don't know what the rest of it was. So one of the critiques you got of this essay was you focused on your home team. They're players of the region. But you kind of, whitewash is too strong, but you didn't spend enough time blaming Israel. And it's... incentives to keep this problem on a low flame, say. I like this metaphor. There's a Goldilocks aspect to it. You know, you want people to be angry about anti-Semitism, excuse me, angry about Zionism, but not too angry. So how does that apply to Israel, which is something you didn't write much? I think he gave a couple paragraphs. So say something about that. And you write about it in the second essay, but say something about it. Well, I already kind of said the main reason. So, yeah, that's the main critique. Okay. Like, they say actually, to my surprise, was one of the most popular things I ever wrote. And a lot of people read it, including pro-Palestinian activists and scholars. And a lot of people had to respond to it because I think it was indeed, a leftist academic should have done what this is what they do, as you know. this kind of structure analysis. Someone should have tried this a long time ago, but because they are part of the system, they refuse to. So I got a lot of pushback that, yeah, exactly what you said. Well, you... You're completely ignored Israel. You're not saying anything about what the Israelis do, how they are extracting value from this. First of all, of course, the Israelis are part of this. Israelis are extracting various forms of values. From this, American Jewish communities are a part of the system. They are also extracting all kinds of value. And it can map it different ways, the left, the right, the right in Israel with its own. extraction of ideological fantasies about ultimately annexation of the and so on and so forth. But the reason that, again, the reason that I completely refuse to do this is because the persistent feature, the reason that no one is able to talk about this, is because

The critique of Israel and Zionism, which obviously comes enhanced with two centuries, a legacy of two centuries of anti-Semitic sentiments and propaganda and so on and so forth, it floods the field of vision with which we can actually see what's going on. So I purposefully did not want to do this in order to exactly make it an issue. Because insisting on Israel the entire time has been the single most destructive element for any understanding or trying to solve this problem. The second... The second, and this misses, I also, so people know, they also have my deep critiques and Jews. This actually mishes very well with, you know, ethno narcissism that the law of Jews have. They like to feel everything's about them. So they also play that game too. When they, when everything made about Jews and Israel, like they respond that it's just, they, so I wanted to get out of that entirely. Yeah, I'm trying not to interrupt. Keep going. There's some amusing examples of that. Keep going. Right. The second thing is, okay, if you think that this is a valuable analysis and you think it didn't apply to Israel, well, why don't you do it to yourself? Here is the methodology. Here is my analysis. The methods are transparent. You can stretch it, and some people did that, actually, and it was quite... It was quite interesting. Some people took it and even put it in an LLM model, and then it asked it like, hey, extend his analysis. Which was... Which it did effortlessly. Which effortlessly, yes. But yeah, so basically, okay, because ultimately what I want to force people to have is not a new information, it's not a new polemic, it's not a new talking point that they can use in our constant debating. I want to give them a way of seeing things and a way of thinking about them. So if you're so passionate about... Israel and what Israel is doing, well, go ahead. And you like my essay, go ahead and try to think about Israel from within that framework. So I'll just add, you know, before we started recording this, I told you, I think we should not talk about a piece of the essay that's actually quite fascinating. I'm just going to let listeners know it's out there on post-Christian... modernity, especially applied to Europe, which is fascinating to me. I've written about how, you know, when you go to Europe, you see this extraordinary cultural heritage of Christianity. The cathedrals, the music, the art, the influence of Christianity on European culture is just, it's mind-blowing.

And yet, there are almost no Christians left in Europe. So when you experience Christian achievements of the past 500 to 1,000 years, they're museum artifacts the same way the Jews are in Europe. The Jews are artifacts in Europe because... of the Holocaust. There aren't many, very many left. There's a few trying to, you know, persist in a few places in Europe. But in Christianity, they're Christian in name, but not in practice in any sense. And it's just a totally, it's a weird thing. It's a similar phenomenon. Religion in Europe is a museum, not a way of life. And we'll see, you know, we'll see where that leads, at least, at least. In Christianity and Judaism, obviously, there's now Muslim populations in Europe that are still quite devoted to their religion. You do actually, we didn't talk about it, and we'll close with this, you do actually have a little tiny element of hope at the end of your essay. And you imagine. You don't tell us how to get there from here, but you imagine a person who's been told that they're a victim to maybe have a different perspective. So why don't you talk about that and we'll close? Well, so there's also I have other parts of writing about this. Generally, it's a larger thesis that I have about the modern world in general that basically, and it's, In summary, that the post-Christianity or a post-Christian condition, having the post-Christian culture is not really a Western or a... Christian civilizational fact. It's actually today is a universal condition of the modern world. Whether you are in the Middle East, whether you are in Asia, whether you are in Europe, it's all post-Christianity. Now, this is obviously very complex for people, and a lot of people find it weird, but I write about it extensively. And this includes a lot of, you know, a lot of Islamic movements, Muslim ideology, and so on and so forth. The The post-question condition, by virtue of being post, abolished structures that meant the need for meaning, but it obviously cannot abolish the need. You do need meaning, especially as you go through life and there is suffering. You can be a pop Nietzsche as much as you want and go lift and just live happy, go lucky, until you made the first. you know, friction in life, the first tragedy, and you're going to have many of those. And then that becomes a real problem, because what does that mean exactly? And that's when you feel the wound that we are lived with, and that requires explanation and requires a meaning and interpretation, redemption.

a story of redemption, ultimately. Now, that demand is bottomless, because the wound itself is bottomless. That is, the appetite for the symbol, in this case, Palestine, is insatiable, is because it's a demand for a lost totality. And I think a lot of people understand this somehow intuitively in a very simplified form. People say Palestine is the Jesus of the modern world. You read the pro-Palestine literature in the West now, and it definitely is a religious devotional literature in which Palestine represents redemption for the planet, redemption for society. Just like climate change did just a few years ago. Just a few years ago. Yeah. But Palestine now absorbed that, right? Yeah. Yeah. It became a queer. It's the future of queerness. It absorbed a lot of these kind of a black hole of modern culture. And the reason that that has to do indeed with the Jewish element or the Jewish presence centered to this, and that's a complex analysis in the issue, but because the Jew and the all these, in all post-Christian ideological system was assigned or held in the position of the unresolved question about the wound itself and about meaning and about the lack of meaning. Now, When it comes to that very fundamental level of, let's say, where I came from, let's go back to where I came from, to Egypt. You are living in a stable but dysfunctional country. You really don't have economic prospects. You're worried about your children. It's really bad. If you're an Egyptian middle class or lower, which is the majority of the country, You have no political power. You see a policeman in a uniform of the street, and it's like, you know, basically a thug or a mafia. You just don't know what they are going to come demand from you, and you have no power to resist. Just not really a good condition. And then you turn on the TV. And you have this crisp image broadcasting from Doha with a very fluent hijab wearing, highly educated woman with very eloquent Arabic, probably has a PhD from Georgetown University and probably even a green card because the American system loves these people. And then she tells you that this political dysfunction in a country like Egypt, the lack of democracy, the lack of rights, the economic prospects, is because of Israel. Israel did this to you. And there are vulgar forms of this that now happens online in the Western space. Like, this is what the Jews took from you. Here you have a bargain. You have the serpent making you a proposition that basically you're going to self-justify. You're going to justify yourself completely and utterly and feel good about yourself as a victim. instead of actually trying to face your own reality. And the problem is that most people say yes to this proposition. And ultimately that what creates that false system of meaning that then becomes politically salient, that very power, that men who are fighting for power can pick up and try to form into the various weapons that they fight each other with. And that's at bottom.

the tragedy and the problem, the problem of this. And, and, I mean, I don't want to sound fatalistic, but it sounds like a big who can deal, like I remember one of the comments on the essay was like, okay, what am I going to do about hundreds of millions of people? Like, this is not anything anyone could do. But it's, which is true. But I believe ultimately, this is the issue. But you imagine at the end of your essay that this person actually makes a different choice. Yes, and that's what a, you know, there is a religious end, now I am spoiling the essay to people. There is obviously a religious end to the essay in which basically that a real conversion is ultimately what is needed, an inner conversion, a chuvra in the Hebrew sense, in which man turns from his own self-justification and just faces his reality with sober eyes. with honestly before god um i do believe that the greatest tragedy of islam in the 20th century again i have a lot of a lot of criticism on the clash of civilization thesis and its intellectuals because multiple things they obfuscated how politics actually work what is actually the geopolitical structure in the middle east um they they led people to think about fairy tales and fantasies that completely mystified the real power politics and the awful, the awfulness of a lot of these powerful men in the Middle East have been doing, but also because it completely has been, has hidden one of the largest tragedies of the world of the 20th century, which is that the religious structure of Islam of pre-modernism, completely collapsed under the pressure of a lot of these modern ideologies and was reconstituted. Muslims tried to reinvent. It's a kind of collapsed civilization that tried to restore itself by trying to assemble its symbolic fragments, try to express it themselves now in all of these new ideologies that they faced from Europe. And that's how he ended up with a weirdly... seemingly a uniform understanding of Islam that's extremely widespread amongst Muslim, that Islam is about liberating Palestine, is about politics, is about civilizational struggle against the West. None of this existed before the 20th century. And it's one of the greatest tragedy that this could happen. And this story, which I tell in many other essay, the reason I tell is not just to... justify or defend or explain actually what I think had happened, but actually to warn that if something at this scale could happen, it could happen to you too. If you're American, if you're a Jew, who you are, your very language, you could completely have this amnesia. Your language completely transforms. Who you are is completely lost by these.

ideologies that completely warp the human mind, and you can become something monstrous and ugly, and you're completely unaware of it, which is sadly beginning, we see some beginnings of this happening in the United States and a lot of American institutions. So even this very large story, I tell now as an American, as a cautionary tale to America, because we are on this path. Palestine now is as much as our cause as it is the Middle East's. Our universities are just as bad as a lot of the universities in Cairo and Lebanon. That's a cheerful note to close on. My guest today has been, I hope you're wrong, but you might not be. Me too. Thank you. My guest. I have children. I hope I'm wrong. Yeah. My guest today has been Hussein Abu Bakr, Mansour, Hussein, thanks for being part of Econ Talk. Thank you, Ross.

This is Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. For more Econ Talk, go to EconTalk.org, where you can also comment on today's podcast and find links and readings related to today's conversation. The sound engineer for Econ Talk is Rich Goyette. I'm your host, Russ John Roberts. Thanks for listening. Talk to you on Monday.