Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Appearances can be deceiving Related “In the long term, the most debilitating state response to the movement may be neither the imprisonment of leadership or propaganda, but the state’s diversion of attention from social justice to development, that is, from the profound violence of the security state to the easily discussable and putatively separable matter of economic investment.” —Emilio Spadola Justice and/or development

  A liberal approach that ignores class, inequality and uneven capitalist development in the EU and the undemocratic nature of its structure and rule. “ Van Middelaar leaves little doubt of the much lower regard in which he holds the Commission, a useful but humdrum factory of rules, and the Parliament, a windy cavern of words. The Council, by contrast, is the seat of authoritative decisions. The Commission and the Parliament are given to utopian temptations of European federalism, for which he barely hides his scorn… How then does the Council reach its decisions? Behind closed doors, in deliberations of which no minutes are kept, that issue in announcements under the seal of consensus. Van Middelaar supplies a graphic, if tactful, description of the psychological and political mechanisms that generate such consensus. That it is reached far beyond any popular say in the matters so decided, in conclaves where no public gaze is admitted, is not cause for any particular complaint o...

“Hungary is the only EU member state that  hasn’t  called on Israel to halt its planned ground offensive in Rafah. Orbán is one of the only leaders in the EU who has banned all Palestine-related demonstrations in his country since the Hamas attacks. In Hungarian liberal media, censorship regarding any criticism of Israel and its treatment of the Palestinian people is akin to the  silencing of debate in Germany . Orbán’s foreign policy is shaped by his openness to the East — driven not by ideological affinities, or still less human rights issues, but by simple power politics. He is trying to balance positive diplomatic ties with such varied states as Azerbaijan, China, Qatar, Russia, and Turkey. The Hamas attack on October 7 put Orbán in a delicate situation in this sense. Naturally, he expressed his solidarity with the Israeli people and support for Netanyahu, but he has been rather silent ever since.” The “liberal opposition had a historic opportunity to confront the pri...

After reading Serfati’s analysis, I would consider his essay as an introduction to why the French state and its ruling class act the way they do at home and abroad . France has maintained a major role on the international scene, especially militarily, despite experiencing a relative decline in world economic power since the 1990s. In 2011, it ranked fifth in terms of military spending and sixth in terms of arms exports. It is a major zone of capital accumulation in the world economy and is centrally integrated into the global dynamics of economic, political, and military power. The overall closeness of elites in state institutions and large transnational corporations. French TNCs are increasingly dependent on profits earned in emerging or peripheral economies. when analysing the role of France in Africa, one must consider an interrelated set of economic, geopolitical, and domestic socio-political drivers. In 2009, France ranked third as a trading partner with Africa as a continent, beh...

The Palestine  Laboratory

We must never forget. We must never forgive. “There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.”  —American historian Howard Zinn Ethnic Cleansing , Settler Colonialism and Apartheid My interview with Ilan Pappe  (audio) The book is available in English    and in   Arabic 

This is an example of obvious political selectivity: I wonder why David Hearst singles out some ‘dictators’ and ignores others who have much more money and wealth and have been investing and wasting hundreds of billions of dollars in the West.  Since the people who take the route of migration do it because of lack of development and prospects in their native countries, imagine if the petro-gas-dollar money of the last 4/5 decades have been shared and invested in the region. Hearst is short-sighted, for the issue is structural and has roots in the natures of the MENA’s states, the form of ‘development’ pursued and imposed and the dynamic of global capitalism.

It is like that ‘motto’ we heard a few times after 9/11 2001: “We have to fight them there, so they don’t come here.” Paying Africa’s brutal militias to lock up migrants

European Union foreign  policy chief Josep Borrell  declared  last week that "Europe is a garden. We have built a garden…The rest of the world – and you know this very well, Federica [Mogherini] – is not exactly a garden. Most of the rest of the world is a jungle, and the jungle could invade the garden.” Borrell’s ignorance, some called it racism, reveals the state of mind of a unconfident ruling class, fear and uncertainty in time of economic and political crisis, fall in living standards, and war in Europe. Josep Borrell’s garden

What comes next? Related News we don’t want to hear (full article requires subscription)

According to the political economist Ilya Matveev (2021), Russian imperialism transitioned from the economic logic to the territorial logic around the year 2014, when the Russian state resigned from the strategy of expanding private businesses to Ukraine and other post-Soviet republics and started waging political control over these territories even at the expense of the interests of private capital.

Between 1918 and 1998, US administrations restricted trade with sanctioned nations 115 times; 64 of these occasions were during the 1990s, and most of them were unilateral. By 1997, the equivalent of half the world’s population was living under some form of US sanction. Current debates within the EU over what to do about Russia have led to some rhetorical contortions. Commission president Ursula von der Leyen appeared to support the US position that ‘Nord Stream 2 could not be excluded a priori from the list of [preventive] sanctions’, adding, ‘We want to build the world of tomorrow as democracies with like-minded partners.’ But among the energy partners that might replace Russia, Von der Leyen cited an oil monarchy (Qatar), a dictatorship allied with authoritarian Turkey (Azerbaijan) and a country under military rule (Egypt)... Playing the white knight calls for spotlessly clean hands. You might think whistleblower Julian Assange, sought by the US and locked up in London, was a dream ...

In reality, “there is a  striking discrepancy between the lack  of feeling aroused  by the deaths of tens of thousands of human beings—in their majority anonymous, unrecorded by the authorities and denied the dignity of a proper burial—with that excited by, say, the 1,000 lives lost in the crossing from East to West Germany during the Cold War. There is one obvious explanation: an African, an Arab or an Afghani who drowns in the Mediterranean, in flight from war, oppression or extreme poverty, is not seen as a human being in the same way as the Germans who were trying to flee ‘communism’ and were hailed as martyrs for liberty. In that sense, the border regime is an extension of the history of colonialism and domination that Europe and the West have exercised over the rest of the world, and to which ‘the construction  of Europe’ now adds a further chapter in the form of its poisoned fruit, the EU.”  —Stathis Kouvelakis,  Borderland, NLR March-April 2018

On the brink

Note: A British nation has never existed. A sharp critique of David Edgerton’s Britain

“Language is politics and politics is power. This is why the misuse of language is particularly disturbing, especially when the innocent and vulnerable pay the price.“ Europe’s self-serving politics on refugees

The Islamist sector and the humanitarian NGOs

 كيف يمكن لاتفاقية مع الاتحاد الأوروبي تدمير الاقتصاد التونسي؟

Does she believe Europe will want her, I ask, given that she arrived through illegal passage. "Let them say that I came in an illegal way," she replies "but if they ask me and hear my story, they will understand my pain." They will not understand your pain; they will apply “the law” in a hostile climate of a Europe that has seen a rise of the far-right and economic stagnation. They will look at you as the Other, the undesirable, and a threat to their standard of living, and their superior nation-state.  They have already forgotten what the immigrant workers have done during the pandemic.

Reflections on Mass Protests and Uprisings in the “Arab World” A diverse panel. The advantage of a recorded meeting is that you could always select what you want to listen to. Each person spoke for only 10 minutes. Although I listened to all of it, I liked more the approach of the last two speakers: Hanieh and Khalidi.