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Showing posts with the label “France

How Europe Covered Up the Assassination of Palestinians on Its Territory

“[A] direct connection to the Munich massacre was no longer needed. Anybody found to be an outspoken supporter of the Palestinian armed struggle or actively involved in the preparation of terrorist events was a potential target of Mossad’s killing team.” Aviva Guttmann,  Operation Wrath of God: The Secret History of European Intelligence and Mossad’s Assassination Campaign,  Cambridge University Press, 2023 “ The book,” writes Alain Gresh, “will disappoint readers who expect revelations. The exchanges mostly confirm that the frame of reference (the “war on terror”) used to analyze the Middle East is utterly useless, that on the contrary it has a blinding effect, making the western services incapable of understanding the nature of Black September, its relationship with Fatah and quite simply the meaning of the Palestinian struggle.  For them “the war on terror” was a “technical” campaign with no political content. The author herself is not immune to this simplistic r...

‘Liberalism’ and ‘Rule of Law’?

“The latest war in Gaza is unlike previous struggles between Israel and Palestinians,” writes Hicham Alaoui. So Israel too has been waging a struggle? What kind of a struggle is it? “The ongoing conflict [?] embodies a dramatic reconfiguration of regional order in the Middle East that no longer abides by old sectarian schisms.” And further down: “No longer does the Sunni-Shi‘a split shape its outlook, as in the past two decades.”  ‘No longer’?    The is a swallowing of the myth of a ‘sectarian’ conflict propagated after the invasion of Iraq the after 2011 uprisings. One can only wonder how come that in very few years sectarianism that had shaped the region’s outlook was ‘no longer’. (see Ussama Makdisi’s paper The Mythology of the Sectarian Middle East , 2017) “So long as Hamas holds power over its fiefdom, its quest to hijack the Palestinian cause will remain intact…” Needs elaboration. Are we saying those who voted for Hamas were victims of a hijacking or they had just ...