On the Political Economy of a Word-Symbol
Interview with Hussein Aboubakr Mansour about his essay A Metacritique of Palestine: On the Political Economy of a Word-Symbol. Rather than a good guys versus bad guys morality play, frames the Israeli/Palestine conflict as a self-reproducing system of political and economic extraction where Arab regimes, opposition movements, rival states, Western academics, NGOs, and Gulf monarchies like Qatar all convert Palestinian victimhood into their own forms of power, money, and meaning. Discusses his childhood in an Egypt organized around the liberation of Palestine and explores why any exit from the system must run not through policy, but rather through the human need for meaning itself.