As the international focus begins to shift from the narrow question of Iran’s nuclear program toward broader questions of regional stability and peace, it is likely that calls for a renewed Israeli–Palestinian process will return to the center of diplomatic conversations. The Abraham Accords showed that Israel can make peace with Arab states even without resolving the Palestinian issue; the harder question is whether the psychological and political infrastructure of the conflict itself is ready for anything that deserves to be called peace.

In nearly four decades of teaching relationship skills, I have sat across from people who could not accept repair — not because the injury was too great, but because the injury had become indispensable. Their identity had been built inside the wound. To release the grievance was to risk losing themselves. The relationship on the other side of healing was less knowable, and therefore more frightening, than the pain they already understood.

I have thought about those people often while reading Hussein Aboubakr Mansour’s remarkable essay, A Metacritique of Palestine. Mansour’s importance lies not only in his conclusions, but in his vantage point: he critiques the symbolic politics of Palestine from within a cultural and intellectual world that shaped him.

This is not a summary of his work, nor a political endorsement of all his conclusions. Mansour writes as an Egyptian-American intellectual who grew up inside the world he analyzes — a man who spent decades immersed in the political and moral assumptions of the Arab world before undertaking the long, disorienting work of stepping outside them. His essay deserves to be read in full. I owe him the acknowledgment that what follows would not have been possible without the framework he constructed. He inspired this essay; I am responsible for what I have done with that inspiration.

What PAIRS Teaches About Wounds

The mission of PAIRS Foundation, since its founding by my mother and stepfather, Dr. Lori Heyman Gordon ז״ל)) and Rabbi Morris Gordon (זצ”ל), in 1983, has been to teach the attitudes, emotional understandings, and behaviors that nurture and sustain healthy relationships. At the center of that work is a distinction that sounds simple but is among the hardest things we teach: the difference between grief and grievance.

Grief moves. It acknowledges loss, processes pain, and — when supported by emotional safety and honest communication — finds its way toward integration, and sometimes reconnection. Grievance does not move. It circles. It returns to the injury not to process it, but to confirm it — to draw from it identity, status, and meaning that cannot easily be found anywhere else. Grievance is grief weaponized: pain converted from a wound that might heal into a wound that must not. As my late mother said, “Healing begins when pain becomes something we feel rather than something we........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)