Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

When my grandmother arrived here, after the Holocaust, the Jewish Agency promised her a house. She had nothing, her entire family was exterminated. She waited for a long time in a tent, in an extremely precarious situation. They then took her to Ajami, in Jaffa, in a beautiful beach house. She saw that on the table there were still the dishes of the Arabs who lived there and who had been kicked away. So she went back to the agency and said, take me back to the tent, I will never do to anyone else what was done to me. This is my legacy, but not everyone made that choice. How could we have become what we opposed? That's the big question. — Hadar Morag, Israeli filmmaker

“As a historian of the Ottoman Empire with Palestinian and Lebanese roots, I truly believe it is no less than a crime to keep millions of people disconnected from their own recent past , from the stories of their ancestors, villages, town, and cities in the name of protecting an unstable conglomeration of nation-state formations. The people of the region have been uprooted from their historical reality and left vulnerable to the false narratives of politicians and nationalist historians. It is … important to understand why, more than 100 years since the end of the empire, the erasure of the deeply rooted and intimate connections between the Middle East, North Africa, and Southeast Europe continues, and who benefits from this erasure.”

 At least three of his arguments are still relevant today: The portrayal of the Arabs and the Middle Easterners. We have seen that since 2001.  The Palestinian leadership capitulation in the Oslo Accords. We know today that the plight of the Palestinians is worse and the cancer of occupation has spread even further. The almost disappearance of the dissident intellectual. What we have are intellectuals of the status quo.