Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

"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 deb

“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 off. “Yesterday, a terrori

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 purveyor of racist  apartheid  – is not m

It’s a good summary. However, I think another dimension should have been added: the political economy and the geostrategic importance/role of Israel as an imperialist state allied with the major Western powers.  “ A whole lexicon of white liberal ideological vocabulary was marshalled over the decades to the task of defending the Zionist regime in its ongoing colonial war against the Palestinian people. White liberal (and conservative) apologists for Israel insist that what exists in Palestine is not a colonial war of conquest and a native anti-colonial liberation struggle, but rather a "conflict", a term which began to be used since the early 1920s at least by the Zionists and later by the British, and appears in earlier Zionist documents, presented as a neutral descriptor.” Why the West supports Israel’s ‘right to defend’ its apartheid regime Related From Balfour to Johnson

A tweet

Rojava’s Suspended Future