Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Berlin International Film Festival “ The current German state is gleefully complicit in the atrocities in Gaza .”

A very concise and pertinent summary:  The Palestinians are seen as ‘anachronistic problem that affects regional stability and hampers economic prosperity’. I wish there was more elaboration on that. Maqdisi – a historian – here empties history of political economy and regional sociology . Middle East Eye like most outlets generally encourages the fragmentation of social thought. Yet I recommend Maqdisi’s article The Mythology of the Sectarian Middle East (2017). Related The Oslo illusion A powerful group of Palestinian capitalists are profiting off occupation

“ I have been complicit in the violent domination of the world ,” they said, “and I will never get the blood off my hands.”

“In most Western media coverage, there is a near-pathological tendency to portray him as a marginalized figure whose political resurrection reflects the ‘populist’ appeal of his brash and personalist style. But Prabowo’s ascent to the presidency can only be understood through a properly historicized analysis.” Line of succession

“Far from being caused by personal rivalry, this conflict is rooted in the long history of the region and Sudan’s never-ending economic and social crisis. The conflict between the North and the South claimed between half a million and a million lives from 1955 to 2002. And herein lies the cause of the fighting tearing Sudan apart. To understand it requires going back to 2011. The secession of South Sudan and the rise of guerrilla movements within the North’s Muslim populations had weakened President Omar al-Bashir’s authority. His increasingly unpopular Islamist regime had been in power since the coup of June 1989 and was rotten with corruption. The regime sent the Janjaweed to fight in Yemen on behalf of the Saudis – who paid handsomely – and then tasked them with repressing the northern guerrillas of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North (SPLM-N), first in Darfur and then throughout the country. From the day after the coup, there were obvious tensions between the two forces, e...

The crisis in academia is of course a godsend to the right, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t also real and serious. Indeed, it is much more serious than most people realise. High-profile cancellations are what make the headlines, but they are merely the occasional effect of something deeper: the capture of entire sections of the academic bureaucracy by ideological lobbies, which insist on imposing their beliefs on all and sundry. We have seen this sort of thing before.  “Books, newspapers, official communications and forms issued by administrative departments – all swam in the same brown sauce,” wrote the German philologist Victor Klemperer, referring to the monotony of thought and language in Hitler’s Reich. The sauce is no longer brown, but apart from that, Klemperer could be describing a modern British university.    But if this is the case, why do we not hear more about it from academics themselves? The reasons are complex. Some academics believe in the new ag...

“Four years before [Alexis] de Tocqueville’s  Ancien Regime , Karl Marx famously wrote how human beings make their own history, but they don’t make it as they please. They make it ‘under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past’. In this way, both de Tocqueville and Marx emphasize how human actors emerge from the circumstances around them, and this history conditions and weighs upon them as they seek to remake the world of the present.  What kind of ‘dead weight’ did the Nazi Holocaust cast on Zionism, Jews, and the State of Israel?” Nazis! Liquidating the ghetto of Gaza Related Huwara, February 2023 “I want to restore security for the residents of the State of Israel,” fellow Otzma Yehudit MK  Zvika Fogel said  the morning after the rampage . “How do we do that? We stop using the word ‘proportionality.’ We stop with our objection to collective punishment [just] because it doesn’t fly with all sorts of courts. We take the gloves of...

It is a real political project Related “Settler colonialism includes interlocking forms of oppression, including racism, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and capitalism. This is because settler colonizers are Eurocentric and assume that European values with respect to ethnic, and therefore moral, superiority are inevitable and natural.”  —Alicia Cox,  Settler Colonialism Settler colonialism (wikipedia) Colonising Palestine: The Zionist Left and the Making of the Palestinian Nakba Israel: A Colonial Settler State by Maxime Rodinson with a very good introduction by Peter Buch, 1st ed. 1973 “Rodinson himself calls for a ‘bloodless’ solution and urges the Palestinians to avoid military methods, even though this may mean resigning themselves to their dispossession. But he rises above others who hold this position by insisting that it is up to the wronged party, namely the Arabs, to determine their goals and methods of struggle and that it is certainly impermissible for their op...

The resilience of the Palestinians, tenacious, irrepressible, stubborn always amazes the occupiers and appears shocking in the eyes of many Westerners. As at the time of the first Intifada in 1987, or the second in 2000, at the time of the armed actions on the West Bank or the mobilisation in favour of Jerusalem or the clashes around Gaza, under siege since 2007 and which has suffered six wars in 17 years (400 dead in 2006, 300 in 2008–2009, 160 in 2012, 2,100 in 2014, nearly 300 in 2021 and several dozen in the spring of 2023). The Israeli rulers accuse their enemies of ‘barbarity’, of disrespect for human life, in a word, of ‘terrorism.’ The accusation allows the accusers to wrap themselves in the cloak of righteousness and a clear conscience, camouflaging the apartheid system of an unbelievable brutality which oppresses the Palestinians every single day of their lives. Let me remind readers once again that many ‘terrorist’ organisations, pilloried as such in the course of recent his...