NM's blog

The UK is engaged in a war to protect the Saudi oil . Related Britain relies heavily on capital inflows from the Arabian Gulf to manage structural trade deficits, stabilize its currency, and finance vital national infrastructure.  Total investment assets and liabilities between the UK and  Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)  states reached roughly  $643 billion (£485 billion) . This deep financial interdependence stems from the Gulf's massive sovereign wealth funds recycling oil-generated revenues (petrodollars) back into Western economies. Britain runs a persistent and large structural trade deficit. It requires external capital inflows to fill the financial gap and balance its books .  Gulf funds hold multi-billion-pound stakes in essential British transport and infrastructure, including  Heathrow Airport and London's  Thames Gateway Docks . AngloArabia: Why Gulf Wealth Matters to Britain’

Abraham, Szor and their colleagues can do more than hail the 24 Israeli military personnel featured in the film as courageous. They should urge them to come forward publicly from anonymity, which currently gives opponents an easy basis for dismissing the allegations without addressing their substance. Otherwise, NAZA risks becoming a discredited, normalising propaganda tool at the hands of the very forces it set out to hold accountable, and Abraham and Szor may also be swept into the gruesome machinations of Israel's genocide of Palestinian people as mere collateral damage.

A biographer’s affecting account of prominent critics of Zionism, from Hannah Arendt to Nan Goldin

On unbendingly holding the line On November 23, 1964, during a layover on his way back from Africa to the USA, Malcolm X spoke to and took questions from an audience at the Salle de la Mutualité in Paris. Among many other interventions and questions, an audience member presented a challenge to Malcolm: Mr. Malcolm, you want to form a movement which is extremist, and you have said that there must be a movement of Afro-Americans towards Africa—a philosophical, psychological and cultural return—but that struggle must take place in the United States. Consequently, in the event where the Afro-Americans’ demands are not satisfied, what means do they think of using to make an eventual return to Africa? After asking where the audience member was from and determining he was from the Senegal, Malcolm responds: Number one, if we are extremists we’re not ashamed of it. In fact, the conditions that our people suffer are extreme and an extreme illness cannot be cured with moderate medicine. We’re no...

Allow me to provide an example of the psychic inversions many of us have resisted being conscripted into over the course of the Zionist settler state’s genocidal campaign against Palestinians. Take for example the Student Intifada that sprang up across the settler colony of the United States and spread across the world—the one in which my patient at the beginning of this chapter was also engaged. Almost as quickly as the encampments were created the disciplinary machine churned out its construction of the spectre of violence—the psychic inversion—with which we were meant to identify and then introject: the pro-Palestinian students were the violent actors, not the genocidaires they were protesting, not the corrupt and unethical administrators that were inviting militarised law enforcement to beat their students, not the violently fascistic Zionist counter-mobs who were provided cover for their brutality. Encampments were deemed “unethical” and “violent” by CNN anchors,48 while the Anti-...

A good read “In the end, Hughes argues, there can be no end to dirty work. The most urgent task for any society is not its elimination but its containment. Dirty work will continue so long as it remains in its proper place. Not here, but elsewhere; and if not entirely out of sight at least out of mind. It is only when such containment mechanisms fail, says Hughes, that a fanatical inner group threatens to form, that liberalism becomes fascism, and that something like ICE steps out of the shadows. “To be sure, the sociological conceptualisation of dirty work does not perfectly fit Merz’s use of  Drecksarbeit . Both Hughes and Press focus on dirty work as a play of visibility and invisibility that hardly seems applicable to Israel’s spectacular dirty work in Iran, Lebanon, and Gaza: two televised bombing campaigns and a genocide broadcast in real time. And there are other problems. Was Merz trying to say that Israel was acting as the bad agent of Euro-American power? Was he aiming to...

Israel was forged out of ethnic cleansing and apartheid. The Greens have very belatedly recognised what should have been obvious all along.

Zionism is not a redeemable movement gone awry; it did not become an occupying power only in 1967 but is so inherently and inescapably. Its appetite for extreme violence and expansion is insatiable and facilitated without limits or red lines by what Sayegh calls its “vital and continuing association” with imperialism. Netanyahu is not an outlier or unrepresentative of the whole, but in fact the perfect embodiment of the racism, violence and expansionism that [Fayez] Sayegh understood was inherent to Zionism over half a century ago, traits that are supported by the overwhelming majority of the settler population.

The reviewer does not mention the formation of nation states in Europe. Did that have no effect on Zionists? Does the author himself incorporate the nation state in The Foundations of Zionism ?

 Pro-Israeli forces' efforts “ have not been limited to attacking individual activists and groups, universities and media outlets, community organisations and artists, but have also targeted politicians and governments.” Missing from Massad's piece though is Labour Zionism and the earlier evolution of both Zionist socialism and nationalist Zionism.