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Most discourses about Israel or Palestine are morality plays of good guys vs bad guys. Egyptian-born Hussein Aboubakr Mansour takes a different approach, seeing the 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. Listen as Mansour speaks with EconTalk’s Russ Roberts about 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.
Resources
Hussein Aboubakr Mansour at The Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA)
The Abrahamic Metacritique, Hussein Aboubakr Mansour’s Substack
A Metacritique of Palestine by Hussein Aboubakr Mansour on The Abrahamic Metacritique
About the Speakers
Hussein Aboubakr Mansour is the director of the Endowment for Middle East Truth’s Program for Emerging Democratic Voices from the Middle East. Hussein was born in Cairo, Egypt, into a family that raised another son to be an imam inspiring young people to become Jihadists. His critical intellect led him to find out more about Israel and Jews and to forge friendships with Israelis. Hussein received political asylum in the United States under President Barack Obama in 2012. In 2020, Hussein published his autobiography, Minority of One: The Unchaining of the Arab Mind.
Russ Roberts is a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and president of Shalem College in Jerusalem. In 2006, he founded the award-winning weekly podcast EconTalk, which has featured guests including Milton Friedman, Martha Nussbaum, Christopher Hitchens, Agnes Callard, Bill James, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Amor Towles, and Emily Oster. All 875+ episodes remain available free of charge at EconTalk.org and reach an audience of more than 125,000 listeners in 200 countries.