NM's blog

“[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...

 From Paris to Tehran

“ Tariq, explain to me how the neck negotiates with the sword.”

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...

Against Amnesia The experience of violence by a stronger party has historically turned victims into terrorists. That's what happens to peoples and nations. When they are battered, they hit back. State terror very often breeds collective terror. –Eqbal Ahmed, 1998 [Ahmed though does not explicitly include the state terrorism of Western states. He merely talks about the how US ‘promotes terrorism’, for instance.] From a transcript of a talk by Eqbal Ahmed University of Colorado, Boulder, on 12 October 1998 “By 1942, the Holocaust was occurring, and a certain liberal sympathy with the Jewish people had built up in the Western world. At that point, the terrorists of Palestine, who were Zionists, suddenly started to be described, by 1944-45, as 'freedom fighters.' Then from 1969 to 1990 the PLO, the Palestine Liberation Organization, occupied the center stage as the terrorist organization. Yasir Arafat has been described repeatedly by the great sage of American journalism, Willi...

A rotten history

How Israel Went From Helping Create Hamas to Bombing it Related My interview with Khaled Hrub , author of A Beginner’s Guide to Hamas

 This is a good piece. The Economics of Palestinian Liberation

It’s a good summary. You need a private or institutional subscription to read the whole article. 50 years ago Palestine captured a generation’s dream

UAE-Israel deal: The new hegemons of the Middle East

"The Corbyn incident suggests that to be complicit in the violence of the Israeli occupation – as western governments are – is acceptable, but to show solidarity with the Palestinian cause is to court condemnation." Another exercise in hypocrisy

I think that the article, contrary to its title, it is a more a summary of the main ways the Palestinian have followed in their struggle against a settler colonial state since the first Intifida  than "why Isreal kills". Why Israel kills

Scotland Yard reopen the case of the assassination of Naji al-Ali