Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

The Intercept reported on how the American Israel Public Affairs Committee delivered a series of donations worth $95,000 to Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson in the days after he passed $14 billion in military aid for Israel in November. Meanwhile, AIPAC plans to spend upward of $100 million to oust progressive Democratic members of Congress who have dared challenge Israel’s brutal bombardment of Gaza. It’s all part of a yearslong effort to purge any Democrat who dares question Israeli policy from Congress, while elevating the most radical right-wing pro-Israel Republicans. And with 30,000 Palestinians dead and Israel readying a brutal ground assault in Rafah, it’s more important than ever for The Intercept to keep digging to expose AIPAC’s lobbying activity and how the organization leverages its deep pockets to make sure the U.S. continues funding Israel’s brutal war in Gaza. There’s no way to fully understand why the U.S. keeps pouring guns and money into Israel’s barbaric war on

It is as old as Zionism itself

 The Myth of the Israeli Nuclear Deterrent

Warning:  If you read this article, you might wake up tomorrow morning from uneasy dreams and found yourself transformed in your bed into a gigantic anti-Semitic. American mouthpieces for Israeli government had unrivalled access to Obama White House

 Why the Australian state supports Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians

 A glimpse of hope. Columbia students voted to divest from Israel but the president responded dismissively

A rhetoric of "justice" that has never been heard of by an American presidential candidate. However, what strategy does Bernie have to fundamentally change the foreign policies of the strongest imperialist state in the world, and thus to lay down the conditions for a possible "justice" for the Palestinians. Why Arab Americans and Muslims are voting for Bernie 

Raine "never makes clear his explanation for where modern anti-Semitism originates, what structures give rise to it, and therefore – by extension – where one should focus energy to challenge it. The very movement between anti-Semitism and Jewophobia throughout the piece captures something of this lacuna. At times, Raine seems to describe a cultural phenomenon that he feels always already exists, and is not in fact constructed and imposed. As such he describes it variously as an ‘unconscious phobia of Jews’, ‘a structure of thinking’, a form of ‘anti-political pessimism’, and as a ‘discourse’, never rooting these in anything structurally identifiable.  This leaves the reader with the impression that anti-Semitism can be explained by means of mere ideas, or via culture, rather than requiring a material explanation and history." Recentering the state

Good, but I expected more on the geo-political economy. Trump's America, Netanyahu's Israel

"[T]he extraordinary support for Israel among the U.S. political class isn’t all about the Benjamins. If AIPAC and the dozens of political action committees (PACs) whose contributions it coordinates were trying to convince politicians to adopt a policy that did not contribute to maintaining and expanding the American empire in the Middle East and beyond, then we would be hearing comments like Kevin McCarthy’s truly antisemitic tweet quoted above with great regularity from across the political spectrum. It’s the confluence of imperial interests, political money and the popular Jewish and non-Jewish understanding of Israel as the moral legatee of the victims of Nazi mass murder that have combined to shut down debate on US Middle East policy." — Joel Beinin, merip, 18 February 2019

Bernie Sanders throws the Palestinians under the bus