Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

This war needs to be understood in a broader perspective, beyond its stated aims of destroying Hamas and/or Hezbollah. Historically, every resistance movement that has emerged—from leftist and nationalist to Islamist and religious—have been labeled as “terrorist organizations” before being targeted by Israeli violence. This war is no exception and can be understood as a deadly turn in a long and violent history of Zionist settler colonialism in the region—this time fully and openly backed, funded, and armed by the United States of America. There is also no doubt that Israel’s technological advancement and supply of the most sophisticated and lethal weaponry (provided by the United States and many European countries) made this war clearly disproportionate in terms of military power. Similarly, the unprecedented open political backing of Israel during its televised genocide by most Western governments and, importantly, by the Arab states that have signed the Abraham Accords, has tilted t...

Europe’s longest-held political prisoner

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...

A good piece by Adam Shatz. “Hizbullah will slowly rebuild, and Nasrallah and his cadres will be replaced by a new and no less embittered generation of leaders who will remember the furies unleashed by Israel in Lebanon: the killings, maimings and displacement caused by one of the most intensive bombing campaigns in the 21 st  century. Nasrallah’s death is as humiliating a setback for his movement as Nasser’s defeat in 1967 was for the Arab cause. But nothing feeds resistance like humiliation .”

This was written before the assassination of Hizbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah. “ [A] terrorist strategy formulated by a terrorist state par excellence … constitutes a stark confirmation that state terrorism is much more dangerous than the terrorism of non-state groups, as it applies the same logic, i.e. the killing of civilians for a political purpose, but with immeasurably greater potential for lethality and destruction.”

to help disguise Israel’s crimes Related Manufacturing public debate

Charbel Nahas Former minister and founder of the Citizens in a State movement says:   There’s no longer a state , so asking the army to replace Hizbullah on the southern border makes no sense. For that, we’d need a census, conscription, weapons.’ He believes what’s required is to put Hizbullah’s military and social achievements under the control of a ‘strong, secular’ regime. But, he warns, the precise aim of the ‘Zionist project’ is to ‘delegitimise states in the region. For Israel, having Arab states and societies fragmented is ideal.’

An interview with Amal Saad by Jeremy Schahill

Although there is some hint to a historical background , role of the structure of the authoritarian regimes and women employment – the latter being probably the lowest in the world in the MENA region – and how they reinforce violence are excluded from the equation.

Asymmetries

The last existential feminist

Excavating Lebanon’s history of violence

Andrew Bacevich is a conservative critical of American ‘foreign policy’/imperialism. Note the absence of the political economic factors of the US involvement in supporting Ukraine. In fact, not a single economic factor is mentioned, which – even when the reader doesn’t believe in “democracy vs. autocracy” or “rules of internal order” rhetoric as Bacevich correctly highlights – is left wondering about the reasons of American involvement in the war.  Furthermore, he is treating the involvement as exclusively directed against Russia, excluding the main threat for Washington’s imperialist hegemony – China . “ In the present moment, however, Russia is anything but America’s principal global adversary,” Bacevich states. It is a narrow way of looking at the global geopolitics. There is no reference either to the domestic social factors in the US in influencing the state’s decisions in going to war. Quoting a critic of Bacevich, there has been a "very powerful, cross-class social constitu...

Archival and ethnographic interventions on Lebanon

Where I reacquired the volumes of a masterpiece that I had been unable to carry with me when I moved country. London’s famed bookshop closes its doors

The Lebanese oligarchy and it’s free market global partners

What a scandal!         Lebanon 2021       UK 2021

From Sykes-Picot to a dysfunctional ‘democtacy’

The focus is on the role of the kafala system in relation to race and domestic labour . However, for a bigger picture that allows us to contextualise all of the above, one should explore  inequality, rentierism and the roots of Lebanon’s 2019 uprising.

The Erasure of Anti-Colonial Resistance and Social Theory