Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

The junta belt Image via  Colonel Assima Goita  on X.

تحليل جيد. من يُبْصِر غَزّة؟

A poem by Mahmoud Darwish  (translation) The original version in Arabic A bus station ad purports to show a shrinking 'Palestine' in Vancouver, Canada.  (photo credit: @globalpilgrim via Twitter, via timesofisrael

      Abu Ghraib, Iraq 2004 Gaza, Palestine 2023

The Palestine  Laboratory

Some good arguments. I see the absence of the American political economy in shaping its imperialism. Hinting to China and ‘normalisation’ with Israel does not allow us to delve into the structural, but we remain in the strategical. For example, what is the purpose of the U.S.’s drive to stabilise the region through pushing for ‘normalisation’? After all, ‘stability’ in the Middle East has been a Western aim for decades. The support of authoritarian regimes has been one of the mechanisms used. When one mentions hegemony, what does this hegemony consist of? American military, the wars, the massive sales of weapons, its NATO-led interventions, its ‘culture’ etc. what are they for? The unravelling of the U.S. position in the Middle East Palestinians transport the injured to the Indonesian Hospital in Jabalia, north of the Gaza Strip on October 9, 2023. Via meer.com

Rape and sexual abuse are not just a by-product of war but are used as a deliberate military strategy, says Amnesty. “Women are seen as the reproducers and carers of the community…  Therefore if one group wants to control another they often do it by impregnating women of the other community because they see it as a way of destroying the opposing community." — Gita Sahgal, Amnesty International “Such attacks are an assault on the integrity of individual women as well as their communities. They are a form of public desecration; they are often a deliberate attempt to humiliate enemy men for failing to protect ‘their’ women.”

Succinct. First and foremost is the fact that the Euro-American settler colony of Israel is already practising its version of “from the river to the sea” in Palestine. While the Palestinians “ have turned the armed robbery of their homeland into a motto for their national liberation movement and anti-colonial struggle.” Min annahr ilā albahr Buenos Arires, May 17th, 2021. Photo: Manuel Cortina/NurPhoto via AP via Jewish Currents

A stable new order or a collapse waiting to happen?

“ The paradox of the Egyptian left is not by any means unique. The gradual sidelining of class by identity conflicts in national politics has been part of a global trend, or what I describe in  Classless Politics  as ‘ more identity, less class’.” —Hesham Sallam, 2022 The root of it – although Sallam does not mention this is the theoretical dependence on the Stalinist approach to change and the ‘national bourgeoisie’ – was “ the communists’ capitulation to Abdel-Nasser in 1965.” That “would shape the left’s political fortunes for decades. More immediately, it meant that as the era of  infitah  commenced, the left was in disarray, lacking the leadership to unify the dispersed (albeit troublingly loud) opposition to Sadat’s right-wing administration.” “The legacies of Islamist incorporation (and their role in centering battles over the religious identity of the state) steered many sectors of the left, as epitomized by Al-Tagammu, toward culture wars and away from...

A liberal view that does not question the role of ‘liberal democracy’ in creating the ground for the growth of the far-right. Neither does question the ‘liberal democracy’s’ legacy in the rise of inequality, stagnation, complicity in crime, support of some authoritarians but opposing others, hypocrisy, double standard, racism towards and its war on refugees, the wars that generated refugees, commodification of everything, working people struggling to make ends meet in the heart of Europe, its selective reading of history, the economic diktats imposed on the ‘Global South’. And there is not even a hint to the crisis of capitalism – or the legacy of ‘neoliberalism’– and how like in previous eras has created polarisation, conflicts, fascists, revolution, etc. A moment, a conflict, a war, or a crisis does emerge in a particular context and a particular conjuncture of a dominant socio-economic system and does not come from the outer-space. It grows within the fabric that the political econ...