Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Jean Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon “Make people ashamed of their existence.” Make them “face the world.” “But to what does this shame amount? What is shame’s sociogenesis, especially in situations of colonial or racial violence? To what extent is the feeling revolutionary? How does it provide the means to solidarity?” Marx : “ Shame is a kind of anger turned in on itself. And if a whole nation were to feel ashamed it would be like a lion recoiling in order to spring.” Mediating the error between class and race

A photo  via The Intercept Jeremy Scahill:  “From the moment President Joe Biden spoke to his ‘great, great friend’ Netanyahu on October 7, in the immediate aftermath of the deadly Hamas-led raids into Israel, the U.S. has not just supplied Israel with additional weapons and intelligence support, it has also offered crucial political cover for the scorched-earth campaign to annihilate Gaza as a Palestinian territory. It is irrelevant what words of concern and caution have flowed from the mouths of administration officials when all of their actions have been aimed at increasing the death and destruction. Everything we know about Biden’s 50-year history of supporting and facilitating Israel’s worst crimes and abuses leads to one conclusion: Biden wants Israel’s destruction of Gaza — with more than 7,000 children dead — to unfold as it has.  Nothing justifies the killing of children on an industrial scale. What the Israeli state is engaged in has far surpassed any basic prin...

Essays for a Free Palestine   (a free e-book) Related Free resources

  غزة في الوثائق البريطانية

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...

“I hope you are doing ok in these tragic times. I wish I could've announced the publication of this book in better times but unfortunately this is the world we live in, a world that we need to transform for the better by our resistance and social and environmental justice struggles, for the sake of humanity and the planet. The book  Dismantling Green Colonialism: Energy and Climate Justice in the Arab Region ,  that I co-edited with my colleague Katie Sandwell has been published with  Pluto Press  in October. It is being sold now at 50% off as part of Pluto's Palestine Liberation reads so hurry and get your copy while the discount is still on.  However, if you prefer to read an online copy, you can find an  open-access   version here .  The book has also been published in Egypt by  Dar Sefsafa  in October 2023 under the title ( تحدّي الرأسمالية الخضراء: العدالة المناخية و الانتقال الطاقي في المنطقة العربية ) and you can also ha...

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.”