Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

From an article available to subscribers “In  May 1945, soon after Germany surrendered, the French Institute of Public Opinion (IFOP) asked people which country they felt had contributed the most to its defeat. At the time, respondents were highly conscious of the millions of Soviet troops who had died on the eastern front and their decisive role in weakening the Nazi forces, as well as the United States’ late entry into the war: 57% chose the Soviet Union and only 20% the US. When IFOP asked the same question this year, the ratio was inverted: the US scored 60% against 25% for the Soviet Union. “For many years, D-Day was seen as a relatively minor event…  In 1964 De Gaulle himself refused to attend: ‘Why should I go and commemorate their landings when they were a prelude to a second occupation of France? I won’t do it!’ “That all changed in 1984 amid growing US-Soviet tension…  The countries of the ‘free world’ made a show of unity, presenting themselves as defenders of ...

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. —Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852

A very good piece by the historian Vincent Brown

The Zionist claim to return to the pre-diaspora past in the land of Israel was in practice the negation of the actual history of the Jewish people for more than 2,000 years. Zionism, or for that matter any modern nationalism, could not conceivably be a return to a lost past, because the sort of territorial nation-states with the sort of organization it envisaged simply did not exist before the nineteenth century. It had, in fact, to invent the history it claimed to bring to fruition. As Ernest Renan said a century ago: 'Getting history wrong is an essential part of being a nation.' It is the professional business of historians to dismantle such mythologies, unless they are content – and I am afraid national historians have often been – to be the servants of ideologists. —Hobsbawm, On History , 2013 ed., p. 21 and pp. 34-5

LSE aims at educating students From 2004 to the present Morris “claims objectivity , even if a careful reading of almost all of Morris’ writings reveals a very simplistic and one-dimensional view on the Jewish-Arab conflict.  Despite all his “discoveries” about moral wrongs perpetrated by the Israelis, on the bottom line, he always tended to adopt the official Israeli interpretation of the events . Morris devoted a very salient and extensive discussion to the centrality of idea of “transfer” (i.e., ethnic cleansing) in Zionist thought, but concluded that the Palestinians had not been expelled by the Israelis in compliance with a master plan or following a consequential policy. This was not precise. What the new material shows [– says Morris –] is that there were far more Israeli acts of massacre than I had previously thought. To my surprise, there were also many cases of rape…  They are just the tip of the iceberg." So far it is the “old good” and expected Morris. The restless...

A very concise and pertinent summary:  The Palestinians are seen as ‘anachronistic problem that affects regional stability and hampers economic prosperity’. I wish there was more elaboration on that. Maqdisi – a historian – here empties history of political economy and regional sociology . Middle East Eye like most outlets generally encourages the fragmentation of social thought. Yet I recommend Maqdisi’s article The Mythology of the Sectarian Middle East (2017). Related The Oslo illusion A powerful group of Palestinian capitalists are profiting off occupation

“Four years before [Alexis] de Tocqueville’s  Ancien Regime , Karl Marx famously wrote how human beings make their own history, but they don’t make it as they please. They make it ‘under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past’. In this way, both de Tocqueville and Marx emphasize how human actors emerge from the circumstances around them, and this history conditions and weighs upon them as they seek to remake the world of the present.  What kind of ‘dead weight’ did the Nazi Holocaust cast on Zionism, Jews, and the State of Israel?” Nazis! Liquidating the ghetto of Gaza Related Huwara, February 2023 “I want to restore security for the residents of the State of Israel,” fellow Otzma Yehudit MK  Zvika Fogel said  the morning after the rampage . “How do we do that? We stop using the word ‘proportionality.’ We stop with our objection to collective punishment [just] because it doesn’t fly with all sorts of courts. We take the gloves of...

Although I don’t agree with the use of some of the language such as ‘the international community’ by a supposedly a radical leftist magazine, it is a history and context, power struggle and geopolitics, internal dynamic and social forces that help us understand a movement and its actions .   An interview with Yemen scholar Helen Lackner

Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe.  The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.  Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them.  Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”  ― Arundhati Roy ,  War Talk

The Royal College of Nursing is balloting all of its UK members for strike action for the first time in its 106-year history . Let’s hope this goes ahead and be effective. Related Labour leader refuses to back striking workers

An Extinction Rebellion that cannot rebel. A Trade Union Congress that bows in front of class rule. An excellent article by Chris Hedges Related

We have been seduced by Harari because of the power not of his truth or scholarship but of his storytelling. As a scientist, I know how difficult it is to spin complex issues into appealing and accurate storytelling. I also know when science is being sacrificed to sensationalism. Yuval Harari is what I call a “science populist.” (Canadian clinical psychologist and YouTube guru  Jordan Peterson  is another example.) Science populists are gifted storytellers who weave sensationalist yarns around scientific “facts” in simple, emotionally persuasive language. Their narratives are largely scrubbed clean of nuance or doubt, giving them a false air of authority—and making their message even more convincing. Like their political counterparts, science populists are sources of misinformation. They promote false crises, while presenting themselves as having the answers. They understand the seduction of a story well told—relentlessly seeking to expand their audience—never mind that the un...

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The increasingly transparent weaknesses and contradictions in the capitalist system may eventually convince even some of its more uncritical supporters that an alternative needs to be found. But the conviction that there is and can be no alternative is very deeply rooted, especialyl in Western culture. That conviction is supported not only by the more blatant expressions of capitalist ideology but also by some of our most cherished and unques­tioned beliefs about history – not just the history of capitalism but history in general. –Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism , 2002, p. 2

“In the past, identification with the pharaohs – symbols of biblical and Quranic despotism – was always ambivalent. But now under Sisi it has been fully embraced: with armoured chariots, laser beams and fireworks. In the country with arguably the highest number of political prisoners and torture victims in the world, even the dead cannot be left undisturbed.” The Pharaoh is dead! Long live the Pharaoh!

  Why can’t Britain handle the truth about Winston Churchill?

 The life and death of Leon Trotsky

 “ I remember that, when I taught history and institutions of the Islamic world at Urbino university in the late 1990s, sometimes my classes were literally empty. After 9/11 the classes were filled up of students (I was teaching in Milan at that time), but how much was their interest sincere? Actually, popular interest in Islam is strongly conditioned by contingent outward circumstances and today xenophobic  and Islamophobia propaganda does not help to develop the field.  Again: Italy is a parochial country. I believe to be a free-thinker, normally antagonist towards consolidate [sic] and mainstream positions, both in thinking and in politics. I am not comfortable with the Western society I live therein because I believe it is grounded on hypocrisy and false prejudices. The main one is the conviction that we Europeans and Americans (mostly white of course, WASP) are depositary of absolute and universal truths, eternal, out of history – we would be indeed the makers of the...

While reading the features of fascism in the article below, I am tempted to list some of the internal signs that modern “liberal democracies” exhibit, and how it breeds fascism/lays the fertile ground for fascistic tendencies, especially when the economy enters into a crisis:  - the increase in the number of voters supporting Donald Trump in the last American election.   - the European Court of Justice rule in favour of banning the slaughtering of animals according to the Muslim and Jewish way in two regions of Belgium. - conformism: everybody must follow the liberal form in how they dress, for example in France. - redefining ‘freedom of speech’ and ‘secularism’ in order to repress and marginalise minorities, and ultimately to disable resistance. Example: France. - stifling dissent and alternative views and encouraging conformism:  the Department for Education guidance said schools in England “should not use any resources from organisations that had expressed a desire to ...

A new publication The Sultan’s Communists: Moroccan Jews and the Politics of Belonging