Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Catching and Falling Behind in the Global Economy (open access)

Rashid Khalidi: “What has been done to Gaza is far worse than what was done to any part of Palestine in 1948, and what is being done to Lebanon is far worse than what was done to Lebanon in 1982 or 2006. This is a war of extermination — it’s a genocide. I was reading a play by Marina Carr talking about the razing of Troy after the Trojan War. Quoting Hecuba, she says, ‘This is not war — in war there are rules, laws, codes. This is genocide. They’re wiping us out’.” “ I think there is a threat to the entire international legal order if this is allowed to continue, as it has been by the United States.”  Unfortunately, it seems that Khalidi, like a few other scholars, believe in international law. Unsurprisingly, the concept has been a powerful one and even sections of the left still believes in it. Khalidi: “ I do think that there has been a major, consequential shift in public opinion; I don’t think there are likely to be consequences on the political level in the short term. Whoever’s

When all the women were dead, the jihadists burned their bodies inside the houses. After they had finished with the women, the jihadists went back to …where they had locked the children. ‘They brought out the little kids – two, one and a half, three years old – they took them out holding on to each other. They took the groups and killed them with knife stabs’. The jihadists ripped open the children’s bellies with knives and tore out their intestines… ‘It was possible they killed the children like that so as not to waste their munitions, or perhaps as a game for the jihadists'. "Although the scene above is entirely true and based on eye-witness accounts, one element of it is complete fabrication. The atrocity has nothing to do with jihadists, nor is it set in the Middle East. It took place in Guatemala, in the 1980s. I have merely substituted the real culprits—U.S.-financed counter-insurgency troops—with the word “jihadists” each time. The real passage is taken from a Virginia

I don’t think we can talk about ‘hypocrisy’ anymore. It has been normalised as part of ‘our values’. It is not a negative feature. I don’t agree with the two state solution implied in the article.

Thank you Hatem Bazian for that article

“ Transport Secretary Louise Haigh said this week that she had boycotted P&O Ferries in recent years and would encourage others to do so, after the firm sacked hundreds of workers in 2022 and replaced them with lower-paid agency staff.” "[It] shows that Labour cabinet ministers have never been in business, don’t understand business and don’t know how to talk to business. They just haven’t got a clue,"  Conservative shadow business secretary Kevin Hollinrake said . It means capital accumulation through cheap labour and exploitation. It means ‘our values’ and ‘free market democracy’. 

Nowhere “ explores his turbulent history against a backdrop of seismic world events” Related The West's Favourite Afghan

Bella Ciao

‘ Israel lost its humanity ’. This is a very arguable statement. With the complicity of the majority of Israelis, what humanity has the Israeli state has shown since its establishment? “ Since when is the death of any person, even a bitter and cruel enemy,” asked Gideon Levy, “a reason to party?” It has been a few cases throughout history. ‘Humanity’ is not an abstract concept shrouded in innocence and purity. Humanity exists in contexts and governed by different power relations. 

“The partnership, which focuses on cloud computing, provides services to various branches of the Israeli government, including the defence ministry and the army .” There is nothing wrong with doing business – even when it is with the Devil. Previous genociders did it.

A realistic stance ‘An effective way to protect prosperity’  where the birthrate is among the lowest in Europe.

Was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine motivated almost entirely by Vladimir Putin’s ideological fears and concerns for his regime’s preservation?

A long-term genocide

Answering pressing questions about Palestine

One of India’s most important historians

The constitution of a system of private property requires, as a necessary correlate, the constitution of a system of ‘defence’ or coercive power. . . . The analysis of the very ‘base’ of capitalist society, of its kernel of social  productive relations, requires not simply an ‘economic’ theory but equally a theory of jurisprudence, a theory of politics, and a theory of war. —Colin Barker, 1998

A good piece by Adam Shatz. “Hizbullah will slowly rebuild, and Nasrallah and his cadres will be replaced by a new and no less embittered generation of leaders who will remember the furies unleashed by Israel in Lebanon: the killings, maimings and displacement caused by one of the most intensive bombing campaigns in the 21 st  century. Nasrallah’s death is as humiliating a setback for his movement as Nasser’s defeat in 1967 was for the Arab cause. But nothing feeds resistance like humiliation .”

Cultural dispossession “Virgin  Atlantic caused an outcry in late 2017 with a new inflight menu that included ‘Palestinian couscous salad’. This was in fact maftoul, a popular traditional dish in the Middle East. An indignant passenger posted a photo on Twitter, accusing the airline of being ‘terrorist sympathisers’. Retweeted by pro-Israeli organisations, the image went viral, some furious social media users even claiming it was a ‘Jewish’ or ‘Israeli’ salad. Virgin apologised for causing offence and removed references to Palestine from the menu. Emirati economy airline Flydubai, which launched direct flights to Israel after relations between the countries were normalised in 2020, took care not to make the same mistake. Its online ‘Israel travel guide’   describes hummus, falafel, shakshuka and msabbha as Israeli dishes, though they are traditional in Palestine and across the Levant. Unlike Virgin, Flydubai disregarded the criticism this drew from Palestinians and other Arabs. These a

“ By broadening who and what constitutes a military target, mass killings take place under the guise of legal and strategic necessity. Arguably, the fastest way to turn civilians into combatants and civilian infrastructure, such as bakeries, into military bases on a massive scale is through the use of AI.” “[F]or the first time, the army's AI systems are allowing it to generate new targets faster than it can strike them. He noted that in the 2014 and 2021 wars, the IDF had exhausted its list of targets. Previously, finding and justifying new targets seemed to be a bottleneck in Israeli military operations.” Like competition in the ‘free market’, a capitalist has to tap well for a new niche even when the market is ‘saturated’. “The question is not whether AI is good or bad for war, or whether it could be refined to be fairer. The bias in the ‘target factory’ is a political one, pre-existing the elaboration of its data models: that international law integrates an economy of violence