Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Still from The Battle of Algiers - British Film Institute “Everything that is happening now in Israel-Palestine is taking place within the context of colonisation, occupation and apartheid, which according to international law, are illegal. Israel is a colonising power and the Palestinians are the colonised indigenous population. Any reference to international law that does not recall these circumstances is a distortion of the story. The context of colonisation and occupation was brushed to the side with the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, which was presented to the international agreement as a ‘peace agreement’ that put an end to the ‘Palestinian-Israeli conflict’. It, of course, did no such thing. The focus on the humanitarian element perpetuates aid dependency and sidelines demands for accountability and reparations. The laws of war were put together during colonial times to regulate the use of force between sovereign states. The colonies were obviously not considered sovereign

Democracy The idea according to which life in a democracy is fundamentally peaceful, policed, and violence-free (including in the form of war and devastation) does not stand up to the slightest scrutiny.  From their origins, modern democracies have always evinced their tolerance for a certain political violence, including illegal forms of it. They have integrated forms of brutality into their culture, forms borne by a range of private institutions acting on top of the state, whether irregular forces, militias, or other paramilitary or corporatist formations. In eighteenth-century England, plantation owners in the West Indies amassed the money to enable the financing of a nascent culture of taste, art galleries, and cafés—places par excellence of learning civility.  The “civilization of mores” was also made possible thanks to the new forms of wealth accumulation and consumption inaugurated by the colonial adventure... the capacity to create unequal exchange relations became a decisive e

 The Living Mahabharata

This is excellent. Beyond the Plague State