We are witnessing an extraordinary eruption of hostility toward Israel—and toward Jews more generally—global in reach, moralistic in intensity, and difficult to compare with anything the Jewish state has previously encountered. Yet for all the explanations offered, no one seems fully to understand why it is happening or why now.

The prominent British physicist David Deutsch, one of the founders of quantum computation, has described this phenomenon as a “worldwide pogrom.  To explain why so much of the world has become hostile to the Jewish state, Deutsch proposed the theory of the “Pattern”—the persistent willingness of societies to regard harming Jews, physically or psychologically, as neither morally repugnant nor forbidden. This pattern has existed for millennia, but we are now living through a period in which it has once again risen to the surface. This is an interesting theory, but it is not very explanatory. In particular, it does not explain where the Pattern comes from or what controls its manifestations.

A number of more specific, mutually complementary ideological approaches have also been proposed. Some point to Soviet-era anti-Zionist propaganda, which recast Jews-as-Zionists as racists, fascists, and colonizers decades before campus activists picked up the same language. Scholar Izabella Tabarovsky has traced this lineage in detail. Others locate the source in the settler-colonialism framework built by anthropologist Patrick Wolfe and applied to Israel by scholars like Rashid Khalidi. A third camp blames Gulf money in Western universities, citing reports like ISGAP’s 2026 findings on Qatari funding. A fourth, developed by writers such as Naya Lekht and Adam Louis-Klein and drawing partly on the work of sociologist David Hirsh, argues that we are witnessing the birth of a genuinely new ideology, which they insist on calling antizionism (without the hyphen), distinct from and no longer reducible to antisemitism. Yet none of these approaches provides satisfactory tools for answering the two central questions: why Palestine, and why now? They identify important components of the phenomenon and place them within their preferred ideological frameworks, but they do not explain why Palestine has acquired such extraordinary moral centrality or why the system surrounding it has become so powerful at this particular historical moment.

A more ambitious answer has recently been proposed by Hussein Aboubakr Mansour, an Egyptian-born social and political theorist. I first encountered Mansour in his Econ Talk conversation with Russ Roberts,  “The Political Economy of Palestine”, which led me to Mansour’s essay, “A Metacritique of Palestine: On the Political Economy of a Word-Symbol”.I had never heard of Mansour before, but his argument was an eye-opener—it exposed the naïveté of my own thinking about Israel and Palestine and immediately struck me as a significant analytical contribution. His account of Palestine’s status as the world’s all-encompassing moral issue is simultaneously cynical, philosophically deep, and remarkably concrete. It is profoundly pessimistic about the possibility of resolving the Palestinian problem anytime soon, yet offers a more sober, and, to my mind, more explanatory, view of reality than any of the alternatives considered above.

Thinking about the world’s attitude toward Israel and Palestine within the framework proposed by Mansour, one finds that although all the explanations discussed above capture something real, they nevertheless miss the central point. Each invokes a different ideological framework to explain what is, at its root, an economic rather than an ideological phenomenon. Here, “economic” refers to an economy of value in the broadest sense, in which value takes the form not only of financial gain but also of political power, institutional influence, professional prestige, moral authority, and spiritual meaning. This is not to say that ideological frameworks do not play a role in the system. They underpin it and organize its different channels of participation, but they are not its system-forming principle. This is why multiple, even competing, ideologies can coexist and cooperate fruitfully, even if unwittingly, in contributing to the system’s reproduction.

The central thesis of Mansour’s approach is that “Palestine,” in the current discourse around the Palestinian problem, is not primarily a place or a political cause. Nor are Palestinians treated as real people with their own needs and........

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