Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

As a world, you told us to endure the worst terrors and humiliations of the occupation, without turning to violence. You told us to teach our children love and science, even if Israel has bombed every school. You told us to sing and smile and cook through our suffering. You told us not to be beggars, nor to starve in silence. You told us to resist, but without any weapons. To count on your “eyes” to defend us. Chef Mahmoud did all of those things. And was assassinated by drone strike. Are we your perfect victims now?  In memory of  Mahmoud Almadhoun

No news here, but a norm France’s double standard

“The Israeli authorities’ organized, violent displacement of Palestinians in Gaza, who are members of another ethnic group, is likely planned to be permanent in the buffer zones and security corridors. Such actions of the Israeli authorities amount to ethnic cleansing .”

A retired NHS surgeon returns from Gaza with a testimony

“Liberals are losing their minds and blaming Muslim, Arab, and anti-genocide voters for the outcome. They refuse to take the responsibility.” "Liberals jump for 'women's rights' but refuse to listen to the voices of Palestinian women who suffer under the occupation.”  Liberals, and a few conservatives, have waged a jihad ‘to save Muslim women from brown Muslim men’ in Afghanistan and Syria (think Yazidi women, for example), LGBT people in the MENA region, the ban on the headscarf in France, etc. now they can see how Palestinian women have been liberated once and for all: we have less of oppressed Muslim women wearing the headscarf. What the IDF has achieved in a year, Western missionaries and liberal jihadist have been unable to achieve in decades. Expand: liberals and capitalist exploitation, dispossession, racism, etc. Related Martin Kettle on the Guardian  blames the voters “Kettle cannot hold back on his bitterness toward US voters - a very liberal take on the Demo...

Just another news item “ And large areas looked like Stalingrad after the Second World War.” —  Jan Egeland,  the head of aid organisation Norwegian Refugee Council Comparing Gaza destruction to Stalingrad? This a vase for the German regime to protest against the UN? How dare you compare the destruction of Gaza to Stalingrad, especially that we are helping the Israeli army in this destruction? The UK paper The Telegraph, echoing Madeleine Albright, would say that ‘the price is worth it.”

“By reducing the entirety of its brutal history to the singular crime of the Holocaust, Germany has failed to account for its settler-colonial  violence  against other people and, therefore, has not learnt any lesson at all. “The übermenschentum “mentality is still pervasive, though its existence is officially denied, and thus, its roots have gone unexamined. “We see a deeply-rooted settler colonial mindset in Germany's institutions and organisations that have not been confronted in a century.”

Even Le Monde Diplomatique calls the ‘Palestinian question’. 1. “In the past few months, conferences have been held in Israel advocating resettlement (especially of northern Gaza) as soon as the territory is ‘cleaned up.” 2. The ‘Order and Clean-up’ programme “ involves the ‘total defeat’ of Hamas, then a process of ‘deradicalisation’; the idea is that evacuating the 300,000 Palestinians still living north of the Netzarim corridor will enable the IDF to establish an unbreakable siege of Hamas in this area, and orders to this effect were issued on 6 October this year. A second stage will trap Palestinian fighters in ‘closed military zones’, forcing them to surrender or starve to death, without regard for any hostages who might be held there. This strategy is already in place at the Jabaliya camp, which has been under siege since 12 October.” 3. “On 3 July the government approved the seizure of nearly 13 sq km of land in the Jordan valley, the largest confiscation of land in the West Ban...

‘His death will not defeat Hamas’

Rashid Khalidi: “What has been done to Gaza is far worse than what was done to any part of Palestine in 1948, and what is being done to Lebanon is far worse than what was done to Lebanon in 1982 or 2006. This is a war of extermination — it’s a genocide. I was reading a play by Marina Carr talking about the razing of Troy after the Trojan War. Quoting Hecuba, she says, ‘This is not war — in war there are rules, laws, codes. This is genocide. They’re wiping us out’.” “ I think there is a threat to the entire international legal order if this is allowed to continue, as it has been by the United States.”  Unfortunately, it seems that Khalidi, like a few other scholars, believe in international law. Unsurprisingly, the concept has been a powerful one and even sections of the left still believes in it. Khalidi: “ I do think that there has been a major, consequential shift in public opinion; I don’t think there are likely to be consequences on the political level in the short term. Whoeve...

Nowhere “ explores his turbulent history against a backdrop of seismic world events” Related The West's Favourite Afghan

‘ Israel lost its humanity ’. This is a very arguable statement. With the complicity of the majority of Israelis, what humanity has the Israeli state has shown since its establishment? “ Since when is the death of any person, even a bitter and cruel enemy,” asked Gideon Levy, “a reason to party?” It has been a few cases throughout history. ‘Humanity’ is not an abstract concept shrouded in innocence and purity. Humanity exists in contexts and governed by different power relations. 

A long-term genocide

“ By broadening who and what constitutes a military target, mass killings take place under the guise of legal and strategic necessity. Arguably, the fastest way to turn civilians into combatants and civilian infrastructure, such as bakeries, into military bases on a massive scale is through the use of AI.” “[F]or the first time, the army's AI systems are allowing it to generate new targets faster than it can strike them. He noted that in the 2014 and 2021 wars, the IDF had exhausted its list of targets. Previously, finding and justifying new targets seemed to be a bottleneck in Israeli military operations.” Like competition in the ‘free market’, a capitalist has to tap well for a new niche even when the market is ‘saturated’. “The question is not whether AI is good or bad for war, or whether it could be refined to be fairer. The bias in the ‘target factory’ is a political one, pre-existing the elaboration of its data models: that international law integrates an economy of violence ...

La complicité des États occidentaux dans les politiques criminelles et terroristes de l’État d’Israël contre les Palestinien·nes.

to help disguise Israel’s crimes Related Manufacturing public debate

It is a long article. “These students were not necessarily representative of the student body in Israel as a whole. They were activists in extreme rightwing organisations. But in many ways, what they were saying reflected a much more widespread sentiment in the country.” “Unlike the majority of Israelis, these young people had seen the destruction of Gaza with their own eyes. It seemed to me that they had not only internalised a particular view that has become commonplace in Israel – namely, that the destruction of Gaza as such was a legitimate response to 7 October – but had also developed a way of thinking that I had observed many years ago when studying the conduct, worldview and self-perception of German army soldiers in the second world war. Having internalised certain views of the enemy – the Bolsheviks as Untermenschen; Hamas as human animals – and of the wider population as less than human and undeserving of rights, soldiers observing or perpetrating atrocities tend to ascribe ...

 One among the rare ones

“The latest war in Gaza is unlike previous struggles between Israel and Palestinians,” writes Hicham Alaoui. So Israel too has been waging a struggle? What kind of a struggle is it? “The ongoing conflict [?] embodies a dramatic reconfiguration of regional order in the Middle East that no longer abides by old sectarian schisms.” And further down: “No longer does the Sunni-Shi‘a split shape its outlook, as in the past two decades.”  ‘No longer’?    The is a swallowing of the myth of a ‘sectarian’ conflict propagated after the invasion of Iraq the after 2011 uprisings. One can only wonder how come that in very few years sectarianism that had shaped the region’s outlook was ‘no longer’. (see Ussama Makdisi’s paper The Mythology of the Sectarian Middle East , 2017) “So long as Hamas holds power over its fiefdom, its quest to hijack the Palestinian cause will remain intact…” Needs elaboration. Are we saying those who voted for Hamas were victims of a hijacking or they had just ...

“The genocide in Gaza and the repression and criminalization of Palestine solidarity on and off U.S. university campuses and around the world  tell a larger story of global capitalist crisis .  The absolute savagery of the unfolding genocide has touched a raw nerve throughout the world precisely because it brings home the high stakes involved as the dynamics of global crisis play out, from Kenya to Argentina, from France to the United States, from Bangladesh to Nigeria.”