Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

“The fact that the Western media only uses the register of violence to speak on Palestine feeds on a co lonial, racist, patriarchal, and capitalist discourse that aims to justify the Israeli settler colonial erasure of Palestine. While violence against the Palestinians is specific, it does not occur in isolation from what is happening elsewhere in the world. Black and brown people are racialized everywhere in Europe and North America, and that racialization contributes to the demonization of Palestinian people.” What ‘the West’, and its media, work tirelessly to hide

‘Operation Al Aqsa Flood’ in context

  "A freedom fighter learns the hard way that it is the oppressor who defines the nature of the struggle, and the oppressed is often left no recourse but to use methods that mirror those of the oppressor. At a point, one can only fight fire with fire." –From Nelson Mandela's book, "Long Walk to Freedom"* *Mandela was unfortunately delusional: “ Mister President, we accept this great honor bestowed upon us today as a symbol of how  South Africa  and the  United States ,  Africa  and the West, the developing and the developed world, are reaching out and joining hands as partners in building a world order that equally benefits all the nation sand people of the world. ” ( Mandela speaking at  Harvard  after receiving an honorary doctorate from the university in 1998).   The state of South Africa today proves that delusion. The bankruptcy, sell out and complicity of the Palestinian Authority is a major factor in exacerbating the plight of the Pale...

‘Israel has the right to defend itself against such heinous attacks,’ 

 without paying a cruel price

and Western and Arab regimes complicity with the Israel’s crimes The solution is “dismantling the structure of violence.” Who’s going to do it is the issue. The international situation does not favour the oppressed anywhere. The failure to topple the Arab regimes in 2011 has even made the possibility of a genuine change more remote. The imperialist powers have the upper hand on the means of violence, ‘diplomacy’ bribing, manufacturing public opinion, arm-twisting, domination and subjugation. For the Palestinians, like for the Russians and Ukrainians, there is no solution but a sweeping broom across the board.

“The  written record of Israel’s cut-and-paste  Nakba  policies on the Palestinian people is longer and deeper than the past five days. Operation Al-Aqsa Flood is not a momentary or one-off attack: it is the latest stage of an anti-colonial struggle for self-determination. Expectedly, the immediate reaction to these words from Western academia, human rights groups and funding organizations will be to demand a condemnation of the killing of Israeli civilians, women and children, by Palestinian fighters in the uprising. In our respective spaces, Palestinians, activists, students, scholars, artists and human rights defenders alike, will again be asked to declare their opposition to violent resistance, and the direct targeting of Israeli civilians and civilian institutions. By extension, the friends of Palestinians and voices of solidarity will be asked to tell an occupied people how to resist their oppressors, and dictate acceptable methods for their liberation movement.”

A free ebook by Ilan Pappe

 “The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say, ‘This is mine,’ and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared, had someone pulled up the stakes or filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellowmen, ‘Do not listen to this imposter.” — Jean Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality  (1754)  Constructing partition Related Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Control

“Years of impunity for Israeli crimes against civilians have bred a culture of disregard for international law.” Alice Speri on The Intercept follows the mainstream – delusional belief and misleading – concept of ‘international law’. As a counter-argument I have chosen a selection from Between Equal Rights “The debate between jurists is not whether this or that action is a reprisal and therefore illegal, but whether reprisals as a category are illegal. Here, the importance of ‘authoritative’ decision is key. After all, the majority of writers agree that reprisals are illegal. However, as long as Israel, for example, is able to interpret reprisals as legal, openly to claim its activities as reprisals, and to be a strong enough power (with the US’s support) to defeat or silence any dissenters, then it is nonsensical to claim that reprisals are functionally illegal. The same unresolvably structured arguments – again with the weight of opinion against the US – have been batted back and for...

Against Amnesia The experience of violence by a stronger party has historically turned victims into terrorists. That's what happens to peoples and nations. When they are battered, they hit back. State terror very often breeds collective terror. –Eqbal Ahmed, 1998 [Ahmed though does not explicitly include the state terrorism of Western states. He merely talks about the how US ‘promotes terrorism’, for instance.] From a transcript of a talk by Eqbal Ahmed University of Colorado, Boulder, on 12 October 1998 “By 1942, the Holocaust was occurring, and a certain liberal sympathy with the Jewish people had built up in the Western world. At that point, the terrorists of Palestine, who were Zionists, suddenly started to be described, by 1944-45, as 'freedom fighters.' Then from 1969 to 1990 the PLO, the Palestine Liberation Organization, occupied the center stage as the terrorist organization. Yasir Arafat has been described repeatedly by the great sage of American journalism, Willi...

“The bigger question to be answered is not ‘how on earth can we stop all these bogus asylum-seekers’ but what can be done collectively to ensure that Western economic, monetary and diplomatic initiatives do not destabilise ‘sending’ countries, as well as what can be done to help them achieve development and democratic rights sufficient to encourage their people to stay at home’.”

BBC: Hamas attack on Israel. Middle East Eye: Palestinian attack on Israel. That is expected from the BBC. Watch how little sympathy and concern there will be from the West for the many Palestinian men, women and children who are killed once again by Israel. Their immense suffering will be obscured, and justified, by the term "Israeli retaliation ". —Jonathan Cook Related Blood and Religion - The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State   (Pluto Press 2006). Interview with Jonathan Cook, a former staff journalist of the Guardian and Observer newspapers, from Nazareth, Israel.   >>  Listen to Jonathan Cook . How Israel went from helping create Hamas to bombing it My interview with Khaled Hrub , author of  A Beginner’s Guide to Hamas