Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

From 2019 “It doesn’t take Ariel long to get used to this new world without Palestinians. He and others do feel flashes of regret and fear. A bartender at the nearby Chez George tells Ariel, ‘Maybe the Arabs will crawl out of every corner like zombies and return to exact revenge’. But twenty-four hours after the disappearance, no zombies show up. In fact, ‘They didn’t find a single drop of blood. They were relieved that the army either wasn’t responsible for the disappearance, or it had executed it perfectly’.” The Book of Disappearance Related Dutch-politician calls for ‘transfer’ of Palestinains to Jordan

Some critique of Mann’s concepts and analysis “The extensive mass murders of Communist states are problematic,” argues  scholar Martin Shaw  in his review of Mann’s  The Dark Side of Democracy . “Mann plausibly describes many of them as  classicide , because their targets were social classes, and explains them as ‘mistaken revolutionary projects’ rather than as ethnic conflict. But he also offers the perversion of socialism as a class variant of the more common ethnic perversion of democracy: ‘socialist ideals of democracy also became perverted as the  demos  became entwined with the term  proletariat , the working class, creating pressures to cleanse other classes.’ Along with the perversion of national democracy, this was then a second ‘general way in which democratic ideals were transmuted into murderous cleansing.’ However[,] we may question whether the idea of the proletariat (working class) was really a moving force in the perversion of Soviet de...

Leftist Organicism There was a leftist version, though the inter-war emergence of  organicism was slower and less thorough on the Left. The new USSR  quickly embraced the statism that pre-war socialist and especially  communist movements had denounced. 20 By September 1918, the  independence of the soviets, the unions and the law was almost gone, the Cheka secret police was into its first murders, ‘merciless extermination’ was declared to be the fate of the kulak class enemy, concentration camps were built and the ‘Red Terror’ had been formally inaugurated. Statism was seen more as political necessity than moral principle—unlike extreme rightism. Nonetheless, some Bolshevik language had begun to resemble fascist language. Trotsky made a famous speech with a decidedly fascist title: ‘Work, Discipline and Order Will Save the Soviet Socialist Republic’. He also sometimes praised paramilitary virtues: economic problems, he declared, had to be ‘stormed’ with ‘disciplined...

Armenian Genocide The War also brought full-scale genocide. The mass murders of Armenians by Turks in 1915 should not be thought of being marginal to Europe, committed amid a backward or ‘barbarous’ Islamic civilization. They were committed by a modernizing secular state, still a major player in European power-politics, committed to the most advanced European ideals. Thus I will address it at some length. [My italics N.M.] The death-toll was somewhere over one million, fifty to seventy per cent of all Armenians in the Turkish lands.14 If this was slightly lower than the Jewish loss-rate in the ‘Final Solution’, this was mainly because more Armenians could flee into neutral countries—350,000 of them managing to reach Europe, the biggest group of refugees during the war. The genocidal decision was taken by the Committee of Unity and Progress (CUP), the highest level of the Ittihadist (Young Turk) government. The orders were transmitted through reliable Ittihadist Governors and army grou...

Michael Mann, 1999 The twentieth century’s death-toll through genocide is somewhere over sixty million and still rising. Yet most scholars and laypersons alike have preferred to focus on more salubrious topics. If they think about genocide at all, they view it as an unfortunate interruption of the real structural tendencies of the twentieth century—economic, social and political progress. Murderous ethnic and political cleansing is seen as a regression to the primitive—essentially antimodern—and is committed by backward or marginal groups manipulated by clever and dangerous politicians. Blame the politicians, the sadists, the terrible Serbs (or Croats) or the primitive Hutus (or Tutsis)—for their actions have little to do with us. An alternative view—often derived from a religious perspective—sees the capacity for evil as a universal attribute of human beings, whether ‘civilized’ or not. This is true, yet capacity for evil only becomes actualized in certain circumstances, and, in the c...

“The Israeli authorities’ organized, violent displacement of Palestinians in Gaza, who are members of another ethnic group, is likely planned to be permanent in the buffer zones and security corridors. Such actions of the Israeli authorities amount to ethnic cleansing .”

"Beyond the grandiose tirades and pontificating final statements, each ‘urgent’ meeting ratifies only the league’s inaction. It is too tempting to picture this assembly (excellencies, corpulencies, marshal-presidents, rebels-turned-honourables, men elected in dubious landslides or by the slimmest of margins) at its large round table, conversing with furrowed brows before condemning Israel’s depiction of the war as ‘self-defence’ and demanding, of course, that the country ‘immediately abolish these brutal and inhumane measures’ (11 November 2023). And what else? Threats of a military response? Calls for international sanctions on Israel like those Russia faced after invading Ukraine? A motion supporting South Africa’s case before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to stop Israel’s ethnic cleansing or even genocide in Gaza? A radical re-examination of the normalisation process and – why not? – severing of diplomatic ties? Cutting Gulf sovereign wealth fund investment in the US...

"You can call it ethnic cleansing . I repeat again, the Arabs do not want, normal Arabs do not want to live in Gaza. If you want to call it cleansing, if you want to call it apartheid, you choose your definition. I choose the way to protect the state of Israel." "We must do it. It's part of Israel area," he says. "This is the land that God gave us, and you couldn't go to God and tell him, 'OK you gave me, and I gave to other people.' No. I believe in the end we will go back to Gaza." When God was an estate agent!

LSE aims at educating students From 2004 to the present Morris “claims objectivity , even if a careful reading of almost all of Morris’ writings reveals a very simplistic and one-dimensional view on the Jewish-Arab conflict.  Despite all his “discoveries” about moral wrongs perpetrated by the Israelis, on the bottom line, he always tended to adopt the official Israeli interpretation of the events . Morris devoted a very salient and extensive discussion to the centrality of idea of “transfer” (i.e., ethnic cleansing) in Zionist thought, but concluded that the Palestinians had not been expelled by the Israelis in compliance with a master plan or following a consequential policy. This was not precise. What the new material shows [– says Morris –] is that there were far more Israeli acts of massacre than I had previously thought. To my surprise, there were also many cases of rape…  They are just the tip of the iceberg." So far it is the “old good” and expected Morris. The restless...

“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...

I wish leftists, and a few revolutionary leftists, covered, analysed, and spilled as much ink on the oppression of Palestinians as on the slaughter of Syrians by the Assad regime. Debunking myths and ‘the Western’ media and politicians’s complicity in crime. “Hamas’s attack in southern Israel, however grimly, predictably brutal, was not an ‘ invasion’  as it has widely been reported. During the Great March of Return – 2018-2019 – both  “the BBC and Westminster politicians referred to this as ‘ border   violence’.  So did the international press from the  New York Times  to the  Globe and Mail .” The purpose of asserting that there is a border between Israel and Gaza is to euphemise [sic] Israeli violence, and to represent the aggressor as engaging in self-defence. Gaza is not a nation-state. It is not even an ‘ open-air prison’  as is often said. It is a fortified ghetto controlled by the state of Israel… The occupying power, the aggressor, the pu...