A Metacritique of Palestine
On the Political Economy of a Word-Symbol
Note to reader: What follows is long, it is demanding, and it will be unpleasant for every reader regardless of where they stand. I make no pretense of humility about what this essay attempts: I believe it to be the most comprehensive and honest account of this subject yet produced. The essay builds toward its most vital material in the final sections; the reader who stops before the end will have missed the revelatory part. Do not skip the last third. Everything before it is preparation. Everything after the turn is what the preparation was for.
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.
What I will describe below is Palestine, not as a place, nation, idea, or cause, but as one of the world’s largest systems of political and economic extraction. The word system is overworked, and I use it with some reluctance, but no other word in the available vocabulary captures what I mean. I do not mean a conspiracy, because there is actually no one conspiring. I do not mean a structure in the strong Marxist sense, because there is no base from which the rest is derived, and there is no priority or point of origin. I do not mean an institution, because the arrangement crosses every institutional boundary that modern political life recognizes.
I mean an autopoietic system; decentralized, self-generating, and closed. It is a self-reproducing pattern of extraction that operates simultaneously across multiple independent domains—spiritual, ideological, institutional, geopolitical, economic, and local—each running on its own logic and its own incentive structure, none reducible to the others, and all converging to produce a stable aggregate that no participant designed and no participant can dissolve. In the simplest terms, Palestine is a symbolic-convertibility system: a machine that transforms Palestinian suffering, Jewish presence, Arab humiliation, Western guilt, Islamist eschatology, leftist anti-imperialism, liberal humanitarianism, NGO careerism, regime strategy, and personal self-justification into mutually reinforcing forms of value. No other conflict offers such plug-and-play universality.
The pattern that makes up the system, and which is condensed in the Palestinian word-symbol, has no center. It has no origin point. It has no master node whose removal would collapse the whole. It has no class of beneficiaries who could be deprived of their benefits to restore justice, and it has no class of victims who could be liberated to end the system, because in this system every participant is simultaneously a victim and a beneficiary, a captive and an extractor, a sufferer and a profiteer. The fusion is precisely the condition of participation.
Now, Palestine the system is organized around Palestine the word-symbol. By Palestine word-symbol, I mean neither Palestine as territory nor Palestine as people nor Palestine as political cause, but the charged verbal object through which those realities are converted into a portable structure of meaning. It organizes perception, assigns guilt, distributes moral standing, and converts suffering into symbolic value. This aspect, which we discuss at the end of the essay, is the precondition that makes the extractive system possible.
I should say, before going further, who I am and why I am writing this. I am 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, and the framework within which my own dignity as a person and as a member of my civilization was to be measured.
I spent my childhood and adolescence inside the cognitive trap that this essay will describe, and I spent my adulthood, in a process that was neither easy nor complete, climbing out of it. The climb did not end in any promised land. It ended in the ability to see what I had been inside of, which is a small reward for a great labor, and which provides no relief from the recognition that hundreds of millions of people remain inside the trap I have left, and that they cannot be argued out of it because the structure is not an argument, and that I cannot return to it because the return would require an unknowing that no one who has known can perform.
This essay is not a memoir; contemporary memoirs are a moral dead-end of solipsism and narcissism, an endless self-commentary in the tradition of Milton’s Satan, and I live with the regret of having written one. I will say little more about my own case, but the reader should understand that what follows is not the work of an outside observer theorizing about other people’s pathologies. It is the work of someone describing, from a position of partial and painful exit, a system of which he was once supposed to be a reproductive part.
I will proceed somewhat slowly, because the idea is unfamiliar and the reader may resist it at several points where I want him to resist, in order that he may, after resisting, accept what he could not have accepted without resistance. I will not provide an entry point that flatters him. I will not pretend that the system I describe is the doing of any particular party that the reader can comfortably disapprove of. The system runs on the selfishness of every party, including the parties the reader sympathizes with, including the reader himself, and including me. Anyone whose understanding of themselves and the world survives this essay intact has not read it. Anyone who finishes it believing that the diagnosis applies to his enemies and exonerates his friends has read it as a contribution to the very system the essay describes, and has thereby illustrated the central thesis of what follows.
The Currency
Before describing the system, one must describe the currency in which the system trades in order to grasp why the system has the shape it has. The currency of the Palestine system is the suffering of Palestinians indexed to the presence of Jews. This phrase is awkward, and I will refine it as we proceed. The currency is not Palestinian suffering as such, because there have been many Palestinian sufferings—at the hands of other Arabs, other Palestinians, Hamas, etc.—that have generated no markets, no movements, no symbolic capital, no extractive industry. The currency is not Jewish presence as such either, because Jewish populations exist in many places without generating the political-economic-symbolic complex that surrounds Israel. The currency is the conjunction: the suffering of one people at a site where the other people are politically and territorially present. That conjunction, and only that conjunction, produces the symbolic substance that the entire system mines.
What makes this currency unique among the symbolic currencies of modern political life is its convertibility. Most political symbols are legible within one or two ideological frameworks and require translation, often imperfect, to function within others.
The Palestine symbol requires no translation. It functions natively within every modern ideological market simultaneously, and it produces, in each of these markets, a different but equally usable product. The Marxist looks at the site and sees colonialism in its purest form: a European settler population dispossessing an indigenous one, a perfect case study in capitalist expansion and racial hierarchy. The Islamist looks at the site and sees the resurrection of the Crusades, a renewed European Christian assault on the heart of Muslim civilization, masked now in secular language but driven by the same eternal hostility to Islam. The liberal looks at the site and sees a human rights violation with a stronger party imposing on a weaker one, and a duty of intervention falling on the international community. The Arab nationalist looks at the site and sees the wound that Western imperialism inflicted on the Arab body politic to prevent its unification, the festering symbol of a civilization that the West refuses to allow to reconstitute itself. The post-Christian European looks at the site and sees, with an uneasy mixture of relief and pleasure that he cannot admit to himself, the chance to escape the Holocaust by discovering that the victims of European antisemitism have become, in their turn, perpetrators of a comparable crime, thereby relieving Europe of the unique moral burden that the camps had imposed on it. The American conservative looks at the site and sees a frontline state of the West, defending civilization against barbarism. The American progressive looks at the same site and sees a frontline state of empire, defending privilege against justice. Each of these readings is internally coherent. Each is incompatible with the others. Each produces its own literature, its own institutions, its own careers, its own moral economy, and its own political action. And each operates without disturbing the others, because the symbol is not a single object that the readings are competing to describe correctly. The symbol is a generative site that produces a distinct symbolic commodity for each market simultaneously and indefinitely.
It is essential to understand that these competing readings of Palestine, whether postcolonial, Marxist, Islamist, or even clash-of-civilizations, are not, within the structure I am describing, competing explanations of the conflict. They are functional subsystems of the aggregate structure itself. Each reading stabilizes the system by occupying its own domain, generating its own extractive economy, and drawing its own participants into the same overall pattern of extraction without any of them needing to coordinate with the others. A system that depended on a single reading would be vulnerable to the discrediting of that reading. A system that runs on all of them simultaneously is invulnerable, because the discrediting of any one reading leaves every other reading intact and operational.
The historical reasons for this fungibility are complex, and a full account of them would require several essays; the reader can find on TAM extensive treatment of various aspects of what follows. What can be said here is that the Palestine site is the unique location at which the unfinished business of the post-Christian condition has converged on a single figure with maximum density.
The post-Christian condition is the universal condition of the modern world. The classical Islamic world no longer exists. What occupies its territory is a post-Islamic world, which is to say a regional variant of the same post-Christian condition that has overtaken every modern society. The Islamic vocabulary persists, but it is the local idiom in which a universal wound expresses itself. The third-worldist who calls the wound imperialism, the Islamist who calls it civilizational failure, the European philosopher who calls it nihilism, the rootless intellectual who calls it alienation—all of them are speaking the same wound in different vocabularies. The vocabularies carry political consequences and ideological independence, but the underlying condition is one condition, generated by the collapse of the theological worldview that once organized the meaning of life for the populations that inherited them.
The modern engagement with the Jew, wherever it occurs, is therefore not the continuation of any pre-modern engagement. The classical views that once managed the Jew’s position—Christian and Islamic alike— left residues, but they no longer exist. What exists in their place is a single post-Christian pathology, conducted in many local vocabularies, in which the Jew has become the universal symbolic site at which the universal modern wound expresses itself. The Jew is the figure to whom the collapsed meanings had assigned the position that contained their unresolved questions about election, covenant, history, and the meaning of the world. When the meanings collapsed, the questions did not disappear. They migrated into the substitute formations of nationalism, ideology, and grievance, and they continue to operate within them, carrying the same materials in the languages of secular politics.
This is the deepest reason for the convertibility of the currency that the Palestine system trades in. The materials carry, in their very composition, the unresolved business of a civilization that has become the world’s civilization and that now performs its unresolved business in local idiom at the same site against the same people. I do not advance this as a causal claim about the system as a whole. The system runs on interest, not on theology. But the materials it trades in are of theological provenance, and this is why the trade is so rich, so generative, and so impossible to exhaust. No other symbolic site in modern political life carries materials of comparable density, and this is why no other site has generated a system of comparable extractive efficiency.
The Wound
The convertibility of the currency explains why the system can operate across every ideological market simultaneously, but it does not explain why the demand for the currency is so vast, so constant, and so resistant to satisfaction. To understand the demand, one must understand the spiritual condition of the populations that generate it.
Post-Christian modernity, considered as a spiritual event rather than as an economic or political one, is the condition of living after the collapse of the theological frameworks that once made human suffering meaningful, human community intelligible, and human existence bearable within a larger order. The collapse did not abolish the need for meaning. It abolished the structures that had met the need. What remained, across every population that modernity reached, was a wound: the experience of loss, of longing, of an injury whose source could not be clearly identified because the frameworks that would have identified it had themselves been lost. The wound generates a demand—for explanation, for redemption, for the identification of a culprit whose punishment or defeat would restore what has been taken. The demand is spiritual in origin, but it does not present itself as spiritual. It presents itself as political grievance, as historical consciousness, as civilizational critique, as revolutionary aspiration, postcolonial anger, alienation literature, as the hundred secular vocabularies of endless self-commentary in which the world has learned to speak about its own condition without acknowledging what that condition actually is.
The Palestine symbol meets this demand with an efficiency that no other symbol in modern political life can match, because the materials it trades in—materials of theological provenance, organized around the figure of the Jew—are precisely the materials that the wound-narrative requires. The wound demands a culprit, and the Jew, for reasons that the post-Christian genealogy of modernity that I explained elsewhere has made structurally inevitable, is the culprit that every modern vocabulary can identify without translation.
The wound demands redemption, and the liberation of Palestine offers a redemptive project capacious enough to house every modern aspiration simultaneously—national, revolutionary, civilizational, humanitarian, spiritual. The wound demands community, and the cause provides a global community of the aggrieved whose membership is open to anyone willing to adopt the narrative. The demand is bottomless because the wound is bottomless, and the wound is bottomless because of the condition that produced it.
I should note that this genealogy—the tracing of the wound-narrative through its philosophical and theological history, including the transmission of German idealist and post-idealist categories into the intellectual life of the modern Middle East that irreversibly collapsed pre-modern Islam—is work I have conducted extensively elsewhere and will not repeat here.
However, what I always fear when discussing the role of German philosophy in the emergence of modern Islam and Islamism is that the readers or listeners don’t notice that the genealogy is not offered as a total or final causal explanation of the system. The system runs on interest, and interest requires no genealogy to operate. The genealogy is an archaeological investigation of one of the system’s preconditions: the spiritual materials that had to be available, the intellectual formations that had to have been transmitted, the categories that had to have been secularized and disseminated, before the system could take the shape it has taken. The theological and the philosophical are merely the conditions that made victimhood/suffering have the values they do. The mining system that was built to mine the power of victimhood is a different matter. Understanding the geology of the terrain is not the same as explaining why the city was built on it. The city was built by ruthless, individual selfishness. The geology only explains why this particular terrain could bear a city of this particular shape.
Now, I also want to make clear that saying the system is self-sufficient does not mean it has no history. The system is its own cause and telos now. It is autopoietic now. It reproduces itself from its own operations without requiring external input now. But it was not always autopoietic. It had to become what it is. There was a period—roughly the late nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth—in which the various components that now constitute the system were assembling themselves, finding each other, developing the connections that would eventually close the loops. The post-Christian wound-narrative had to develop. The theological materials had to be secularized. The German idealist categories had to be transmitted into the Middle East. The university discourse had to professionalize itself. The regional state system had to take shape after the Ottoman collapse. The Cold War had to create the superpower competition that gave regimes their international extraction axis. The real material conflict between Israelis and Arabs had to happen. UNRWA had to be established. The media economies had to develop. Pan-Arabism had to rise and fail. The Islamist movements had to organize. Each of these was a historical event with historical causes, and the sequence matters, and as I said earlier, my other genealogical work traces parts of that sequence.
But at some point—and identifying precisely when is itself a worthy analytical question—the loops closed. The system became self-sustaining. The historical inputs became background geology. The system no longer needs the German idealists to keep transmitting categories, because the categories now reproduce themselves through the university-mosque loop. The system no longer needs the Cold War to keep generating superpower competition, because regional competition now generates its own extraction dynamics. The system no longer needs the original wound-event of 1948 to keep producing suffering, because the institutional machinery now manufactures the suffering it requires from its own operations.
The distinction is between genesis and operation. The system has a history—a genesis—that can and should be traced. But the system’s current operation is independent of its genesis. It runs on its own logic now. Understanding how it was assembled does not tell you how to disassemble it, because the assembly process is over, and the structure now sustains itself from within. This is actually a common feature of autopoietic systems. A living organism has an evolutionary history that explains how it came to have the structure it has, but the organism’s current metabolism does not depend on the continuation of the evolutionary pressures that produced it. It runs on its own chemistry. The Palestine system has a historical genealogy that explains how it came to have the structure it has, but the system’s current operation does not depend on the continuation of the historical processes that produced it. It runs on its own selfishness.
The Cognitive Trap
What the Palestine word-symbol does to the populations that internalize it is not, in the first instance, a matter of ideology or belief, even though the ideology of anti-Zionism is indeed its only ideological content. But, in the first order, it is a matter of cognitive occupation. The symbol, once installed in the political consciousness of a population, takes over the entire space of political reasoning and renders the actual structures of that population’s political and economic condition unthinkable. The mechanism operates not by suppressing alternative explanations but by occupying, in advance, the cognitive territory in which such explanations would have to be developed. The alternatives do not need to be censored because they are simply completely unavailable, because every available cognitive pathway runs through the symbol, and the symbol terminates every line of inquiry before it can reach any other destination.
Consider the case I know best, which is the case of Egypt. The Egyptian who comes to political consciousness encounters, as the first and most powerful framework available for understanding his own country’s condition, the framework of Palestine.
He learns that his country is poor because the United States supports it only on the condition that it does not threaten Israel, which means that his country can never develop the kind of economic and military power that would allow it real sovereignty, which means that it must accept arrangements that perpetuate its poverty in exchange for the patron’s protection. He learns that his country has no democracy because the regime serves the same patron and would be overthrown by its own population if the population were free to choose its own government, the population being naturally hostile to Israel and to the regime that protects Israel. He learns that his country’s intellectuals are compromised because the regime controls the universities and the press, and the regime, in turn, is the agent of the patron, and the patron, in turn, is the guarantor of Israel. Every domestic question becomes a question about Israel. Every domestic failure becomes evidence of the system that protects Israel. Every act of corruption, every failed institution, every humiliated citizen, every blocked opportunity, every wasted generation is routed, automatically and without conscious effort, through the same explanatory framework of Palestine and anti-Zionism.
What is striking about a lot of this, considered as a description of Egypt, is not that it is entirely false. Some of its elements have a basis in the historical record and political reality. The American relationship with Egypt has indeed been structured in significant part by Israeli security considerations. The Egyptian regime has indeed maintained itself in part through that relationship. What is striking is that the totalism of interpretation, by virtue of being available and authoritative and meaningful, occupies the cognitive space that any honest analysis of Egypt would also have to occupy, and it occupies that space so completely that real understanding cannot be developed in the same minds that hold it.
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