Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

The junta belt Image via  Colonel Assima Goita  on X.

تحليل جيد. من يُبْصِر غَزّة؟

A poem by Mahmoud Darwish  (translation) The original version in Arabic A bus station ad purports to show a shrinking 'Palestine' in Vancouver, Canada.  (photo credit: @globalpilgrim via Twitter, via timesofisrael

      Abu Ghraib, Iraq 2004 Gaza, Palestine 2023

The Palestine  Laboratory

Some good arguments. I see the absence of the American political economy in shaping its imperialism. Hinting to China and ‘normalisation’ with Israel does not allow us to delve into the structural, but we remain in the strategical. For example, what is the purpose of the U.S.’s drive to stabilise the region through pushing for ‘normalisation’? After all, ‘stability’ in the Middle East has been a Western aim for decades. The support of authoritarian regimes has been one of the mechanisms used. When one mentions hegemony, what does this hegemony consist of? American military, the wars, the massive sales of weapons, its NATO-led interventions, its ‘culture’ etc. what are they for? The unravelling of the U.S. position in the Middle East Palestinians transport the injured to the Indonesian Hospital in Jabalia, north of the Gaza Strip on October 9, 2023. Via meer.com

Rape and sexual abuse are not just a by-product of war but are used as a deliberate military strategy, says Amnesty. “Women are seen as the reproducers and carers of the community…  Therefore if one group wants to control another they often do it by impregnating women of the other community because they see it as a way of destroying the opposing community." — Gita Sahgal, Amnesty International “Such attacks are an assault on the integrity of individual women as well as their communities. They are a form of public desecration; they are often a deliberate attempt to humiliate enemy men for failing to protect ‘their’ women.”

Succinct. First and foremost is the fact that the Euro-American settler colony of Israel is already practising its version of “from the river to the sea” in Palestine. While the Palestinians “ have turned the armed robbery of their homeland into a motto for their national liberation movement and anti-colonial struggle.” Min annahr ilā albahr Buenos Arires, May 17th, 2021. Photo: Manuel Cortina/NurPhoto via AP via Jewish Currents

A stable new order or a collapse waiting to happen?

“ The paradox of the Egyptian left is not by any means unique. The gradual sidelining of class by identity conflicts in national politics has been part of a global trend, or what I describe in  Classless Politics  as ‘ more identity, less class’.” —Hesham Sallam, 2022 The root of it – although Sallam does not mention this is the theoretical dependence on the Stalinist approach to change and the ‘national bourgeoisie’ – was “ the communists’ capitulation to Abdel-Nasser in 1965.” That “would shape the left’s political fortunes for decades. More immediately, it meant that as the era of  infitah  commenced, the left was in disarray, lacking the leadership to unify the dispersed (albeit troublingly loud) opposition to Sadat’s right-wing administration.” “The legacies of Islamist incorporation (and their role in centering battles over the religious identity of the state) steered many sectors of the left, as epitomized by Al-Tagammu, toward culture wars and away from...

A liberal view that does not question the role of ‘liberal democracy’ in creating the ground for the growth of the far-right. Neither does question the ‘liberal democracy’s’ legacy in the rise of inequality, stagnation, complicity in crime, support of some authoritarians but opposing others, hypocrisy, double standard, racism towards and its war on refugees, the wars that generated refugees, commodification of everything, working people struggling to make ends meet in the heart of Europe, its selective reading of history, the economic diktats imposed on the ‘Global South’. And there is not even a hint to the crisis of capitalism – or the legacy of ‘neoliberalism’– and how like in previous eras has created polarisation, conflicts, fascists, revolution, etc. A moment, a conflict, a war, or a crisis does emerge in a particular context and a particular conjuncture of a dominant socio-economic system and does not come from the outer-space. It grows within the fabric that the political econ...

We must never forget. We must never forgive. “There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.”  —American historian Howard Zinn Ethnic Cleansing , Settler Colonialism and Apartheid My interview with Ilan Pappe  (audio) The book is available in English    and in   Arabic 

We must not conceal from ourselves that no improvement in the present depressing situation is possible without a severe struggle; for the handful of those who are really determined to do something is minute in comparison with the mass of the lukewarm and the misguided. And those who have an interest in keeping the machinery of war going are a very powerful body; they will stop at nothing to make public opinion subservient to their murderous ends.—attributed to Albert Einstein It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets. — attributed to Voltaire   

Dogs life is long. —a Tunisian proverb “If the American foreign policy establishment is a grand citadel, then Henry Kissinger is the ghoul haunting its hallways. Today, global capitalism and United States hegemony are underwritten by the most powerful military ever devised. Any political vision worth fighting for must promise an end to the cycle of never-ending wars afflicting the world in the twenty-first century. And breaking that cycle means placing the twin evils of capitalism and imperialism in our crosshairs. This newly-released book , published in partnership with  Jacobin , follows Kissinger’s fiery trajectory around the world—not because he was evil incarnate, but because he, more than any other public figure, illustrates the links between capitalism, empire, and the feedback loop of endless war-making that still plagues us today.”

Fall in line, be ‘a liberal free-marketeer’ and open your country to our capital. If we don’t invade you, we make sure we kill you slowly. “Cubans have lived under a US economic embargo since 1962. Now, following a disastrous currency reform, inflation is spiralling, food and medicines are in short supply, and the black market is rampant. Food scarcity drives prices up: queueing for vegetables, Havana, 31 March 2023.  Adalberto Roque · AFP · Getty After a period of relaxation during Barack Obama’s second term (2013-17), Donald Trump brought in 243 new sanctions. In 2019 alone, 54 ship owners and 27 companies were fined for carrying fuel to Cuba.  That same year, the US Treasury Department sanctioned 34 vessels operated by the companies Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), Ballito Bay Shipping (headquartered in Liberia) and Proper In Management (registered in Greece). Trump expanded the embargo, enabling individuals and companies to be prosecuted for investing in former American com...

Ronaldo earns $136 million a year / about 11 million a month. 5,500 years ago: (3600 to 3500 BC): Uruk period in Sumer. First evidence of mummification in Egypt . If the first Mummy had been earning $32,000/month since his/her mummification – without spending a penny – he/she would have to live 4250 years to earn Ronaldo’s annual income. “There is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” —Walter Benjamin

One of the men who has made America great. One of the architects of American imperialist adventures.  A diplomat responsible for millions of deaths Related Does Kissinger require rehabilitation? Henry Kissinger in the Middle East How One Man Laid the Groundwork for Today’s Crisis in the Middle East

My highlights – and my emphasis – from the article : “Hamas’s operation Al-Aqsa Flood of 7 October has given Israel’s far right, which dominates the government Binyamin Netanyahu formed in late 2022, the ideal opportunity to implement their plan for a Greater Israel that includes the West Bank and Gaza, in other words, the whole of British Mandate Palestine .” “ The political-ideological lineage of the Likud party … can be traced back to a fascist-inspired strain of ‘revisionist Zionism’ which emerged in the interwar period.” Annexing the occupied territories after 1967 and granting their inhabitants Israeli citizenship would have endangered Israel’s Jewishness; annexing them  without  granting such a right would have undermined its democracy (an ‘ethnic democracy’, according to Israeli sociologist Sammy Smooha) by formalising apartheid. Likud opposed this plan and kept pushing for the annexation of the two newly occupied territories and their complete colonisation, not limit...

Listening to Losurdo speaking about Saint Domingue, Napoleon Bonaparte and Thomas Jefferson, I can see how what he says applies to the Palestinian struggle today against colonial rule.