Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

The Massacre of innocents  Scène du massacre des Innocents -  Léon Cogniet,  France,1824 In capitalist modernity

 مقتطف لا يزال في الصميم

 But why a British actor as Fanon? Related A review of Concerning Violence

Stand in unwavering solidarity with the workers and trade unions in Myanmar

Why Zionists efforts to suppress Palestine activism will fail

A must read. “The text’s principal argument is that inequalities in most areas of American life, from traffic patterns to the delivery of health care, are an outcome of ‘historic and systemic racism’. The book is organized around four themes:  1) a retelling of the story of race, demonstrating how it emerged as an elite discourse to justify restricting equality and liberty to the few;  2) an exploration of how mass resistance, particularly against slavery, colonialism, and Jim Crow, expanded the ideas of liberty and equality in order to make them truly universal;  3) an examination of the relationship between racial inequality and class inequality, with special attention to how a narrow focus on racial inequality obscures how class exploitation works to produce and reproduce racial inequality;  and 4) how identity politics is a form of class politics that operates with equal perniciousness on the Right and the Left. Malik points out that identitarians on the Right an...

U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, left, and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant give a joint press conference in Tel Aviv on Dec. 18, 2023.   Photo: Alberto Pizzoli/AFP via Getty Images State terrorism and industrial killing won’t defeat the armed insurgency

 انتقالات مجحفة 

“Israel’s war on Gaza has had an immense human cost, with nearly 20,000 Palestinians killed, 70% of them women and children. But it has also destroyed  numerous historic and cultural buildings  such as archaeological sites, museums, cultural centres, markets, ancient churches, and mosques.”

“Nearly  425,000 Cubans have fled for the United States  in fiscal years 2022 and 2023, shattering previous records.  Instead of moving to stem the flow by focusing on root causes in Cuba, the Biden White House has been signalling support in recent days for Republican-backed border policies.” Biden is sticking with Trump’s policy

Compare Mearsheimer position to the likes of Habermas,   Žižek , and Bernie Sanders. “I want to be on record so that when historians look back on this moral calamity, they will see that some Americans were on the right side of history. ” Related Peter Gowan on Mearsheimer

The EU as a vassal of a hegemon. A hegemony that wants to satisfy both Israel’s desires and objectives and the ‘normalisers’ – the reactionary regimes in the region.  The argument ‘ the US’s standing in the Arab world’ is permanently damaged is misplaced. With whom has that decades-long standing taken place? Has it been with the people struggling against authoritarian regimes and the plunder of the resources of the region? Conjuring trick      

The military industrial complex The NGO-industrial complex And now the ‘citizenship industry’ ‘Citizenship provides the foundation of equality on which the structure of inequality can be built’.  —Thomas Humphrey Marshall, 1950

Amit Dave/Reuters via merip.org “ Karim’s experience is the product of an evolving strategic partnership between India and Israel , where an increasingly overt convergence of interests and ideology has led to both states tangibly supporting one another in working towards their respective political and economic ambitions. Through this partnership, state repression in Indian-occupied territories is not an exclusively Indian project. It has become part of a broader network, linking India to the Israeli state and its own colonial project.”

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...