TABLET MAG
Ersatz Israel
Daniel Miller
March 18, 2026

…Lee Smith presciently described the “Global Empire of Palestine” in Tablet. Of course, Palestinians do not control the empire that has been established in their name, much less a state. Yet Smith writes that Palestinians “already have something far greater and much rarer” than a state—namely, a spectacle endorsed by global power brokers. Palestine is therefore both a symbol of and a structure of displacement. It is a projection screen for global fantasies. At the center of this process is not Palestinian activism, which is a symptom and accelerant, but the “Palestinization of Western politics” as a soliloquy of decomposition…Palestine is essentially anti-Israelism inserted into Western political space in the position of Israel so as to conceal its significance. The global appeal of the Palestinian cause has nothing to do with the superior empathy of its supporters…The reality is that nobody in any wider “community” cares about Palestinian Arabs apart from their status as victims of Israel. READ MORE