Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Energy and Climate Justice in the Arab Region Related The Arab Uprisings - A Decade of Struggle

Frédéric Lordon : «   Terrorisme   » est un mot impasse. Concéder «   terrorisme   », c’est annuler que ce qui se passe en Israël-Palestine est politique. Au plus haut point. Même si cette politique prend la forme de la guerre, se poursuivant ainsi par d’autres moyens selon le mot de Clausewitz. Le peuple palestinien est en guerre – on ne lui a pas trop laissé le choix. L’acharnement à faire dire «   terrorisme   » ne satisfait que des besoins passionnels – et aucune exigence intellectuelle. «   Terrorisme   » a une irremplaçable vertu : donner une violence pour dépourvue de sens. Et de causes Les tragédies israéliennes sont incarnées en témoignages poignants, les tragédies palestiniennes sont agglomérées en statistiques. Le bloc bourgeois quand il fait bloc derrière Israël à l’extérieur saisit surtout l’occasion de faire bloc contre ses ennemis à l’intérieur. Le bloc bourgeois français est plus israélien que les Israéliens : il refuse q...

A good article by Ussama M aqdisi, the author of  Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World “Philo-Zionism relies on two pillars. These include a generalised western view that Israel’s creation is a just and moral recompense for the history of  European antisemitism  that culminated with the Holocaust; and the consistent racist demonisation of Israel’s opponents as non-western barbarians of a peculiar antisemitic type.  The entire ethical edifice of an inward-looking, Eurocentric, post-war western humanism - its museums of remembrance, its discourse of tolerance and reflection, and its obsessive grappling with its own antisemitic past - is ultimately built on the backs of native Palestinians, who were chased out of their homes and  also out of history .  Palestinian resistance - including “terrorism” - has consistently been decontextualised, and depicted as irrational and immoral by western powers and mainstream m...

An Israeli liberal: Only a few acknowledged that the father’s story of return, redemption and liberation was also a story of conquest, displacement, oppression and death. Yaron Ezrahi ,  Rubber Bullets, Power and Conscience in Modern Israel, 1996 I would say there is probably a mistranslation. Instead of ‘Only a few’ I think the author meant ‘Only few’. Related – from my radio show archive Occupied Minds - A Journey through the Israeli Psyche (Pluto Books, 2006). An interview with Arthur Neslen The impracticality of a two-state solution. Overcoming Zionism: an interview with Joel Kovel The Colonial Drama of Israel-Palestine The Myths of Zionism – an interview with John Rose in 2008

It is true that sections of the Western left either defended/justified/kept silent on the Syrian regime’s crimes. “But to millions who see the war as an intensification of a 75-year dispossession of Palestinians, and the 16-year siege of Gaza, it merely positions the writers as apologists for Israel’s unending war crimes .”

Casting doubt on Gaza’s statistics Related

Note that the Associated Press is aligned with the dominant narrative of Western corporate media and politicians calling the Israeli war on Palestinians ‘an Israeli-Hamas war’.

The unending pain of sewer workers

“I used to want peace. I don’t want peace anymore

“If profitability is threatened, reforms must go.” Roberts should have added: but the state intervenes to maintain stability in society because absence of reforms sharpens class struggle. In orde to save capitalism, the capitalist state initiates reforms even if those reforms are minor or undermined in a later stage. The debate continues …

One cannot fail to see how Hamas has been ‘blitzed’ . All the evidence is in one image. All those destroyed buildings harboured Hamas fighters. Everybody knows that. The strikes were so precise that Hamas now is just a ghost, something of the past. Metro is a free paper owned by the right-wing reactionary Daily Mail. When I looked at the BBC Middle East section yesterday, I could not find anywhere the number of Palestinians killed so far. The hostages stories are more visible though. Compare that with the war in Ukraine and how the BBC counted/estimated the killed. Updated 24 October 15:40 BST: I have finally seen a figure published by the BBC . But the corporation implies that we mustn’t believe the number because it is published by the Hamas-run ministry of health. Thus back to the Metro front page: strikes by the Israeli army have been so precise that any number of victims claimed must be inflated, and we should ignore any historical precedent to prove otherwise. It would be better ...

It says a lot about the priorities of the British state. In the heart of London

A review of  Boycott Theory and the Struggle for Palestine: Universities, Intellectualism and Liberation  by Nick Riemer

It’s an Instagram video. There is what, but no why. A room in London vs. a room in a German prison

I wish leftists, and a few revolutionary leftists, covered, analysed, and spilled as much ink on the oppression of Palestinians as on the slaughter of Syrians by the Assad regime. Debunking myths and ‘the Western’ media and politicians’s complicity in crime. “Hamas’s attack in southern Israel, however grimly, predictably brutal, was not an ‘ invasion’  as it has widely been reported. During the Great March of Return – 2018-2019 – both  “the BBC and Westminster politicians referred to this as ‘ border   violence’.  So did the international press from the  New York Times  to the  Globe and Mail .” The purpose of asserting that there is a border between Israel and Gaza is to euphemise [sic] Israeli violence, and to represent the aggressor as engaging in self-defence. Gaza is not a nation-state. It is not even an ‘ open-air prison’  as is often said. It is a fortified ghetto controlled by the state of Israel… The occupying power, the aggressor, the pu...

“By allowing corporate property rights to supersede local seed management, the protocol is the latest front in a global battle over the future of food. Based on draft laws written more than three decades ago in Geneva by Western seed companies, the new generation of agricultural reforms seeks to institute legal and financial penalties throughout the African Union for farmers who fail to adopt foreign-engineered seeds protected by patents, including genetically modified versions of native seeds. For example, “farmers in northeastern Ghana have been cultivating the cowpea—a protein-rich legume that North Americans know as the black-eyed pea—since the Bronze Age. How was it possible that people continuing to farm in that lineage, some 5,000 years later, could face 15 years in prison for infringing property claims on crop varieties based on the local original?” “We can’t accept this law,” said Faustina Banakwoyem, a 35-year-old soya and pepper farmer and the only woman in the Paga group. ...

Among the 150-plus photographs, images of Latin America, Africa, and the Indian subcontinent appear hardly at all and usually as a foil or kitschy reflection of Euro-American modernity. North Korea, the kitschiest foil of them all, appears as many times as the entire African continent. For all our differences, [the exhibition ] Civilisation seems to preach, we people of the world are essentially the same, and we’re all trying to make the best of life within the inescapable confines of US-exported late capitalism.

“ In the midst of all this politicking, thousands of civilians have lost their lives as the West refuses to address the root cause of this decades-long conflict: the continued oppression and dispossession of the Palestinian people.” Oppression and dispossessions are the key aspects. It is not a ‘conflict’ though. “It is difficult for Western audiences to understand the terror and oppression to which ordinary Palestinians are subjected on a daily basis, because it is simply not reported throughout much of the media.”  As for solidarity and what can be done, I do think that the solution lays in the region, not outside it. Another revolutionary, but radical, upheaval that topples the rotten, complicit regimes in the region could bring justice to the Palestinians by changing the balance of forces. There is no solution that will come from ‘the West’. Palestinian trade unions

James Baldwin   once noted : “Whatever you see in other people is what you see in the mirror … everybody knows, or every writer knows … no matter what I may be describing, I am describing myself.” Israel’s routine depiction of Hamas as barbaric, sadistic torturers brings the searing truth of Baldwin’s words sharply into focus. “Worse than ISIS”