Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

The Intercept reported on how the American Israel Public Affairs Committee delivered a series of donations worth $95,000 to Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson in the days after he passed $14 billion in military aid for Israel in November. Meanwhile, AIPAC plans to spend upward of $100 million to oust progressive Democratic members of Congress who have dared challenge Israel’s brutal bombardment of Gaza. It’s all part of a yearslong effort to purge any Democrat who dares question Israeli policy from Congress, while elevating the most radical right-wing pro-Israel Republicans. And with 30,000 Palestinians dead and Israel readying a brutal ground assault in Rafah, it’s more important than ever for The Intercept to keep digging to expose AIPAC’s lobbying activity and how the organization leverages its deep pockets to make sure the U.S. continues funding Israel’s brutal war in Gaza. There’s no way to fully understand why the U.S. keeps pouring guns and money into Israel’s barbaric war on...

The reality of the Palestinian struggle

A very interesting article.  Some language is very inaccurate though: “Israel-Palestine confrontation.” (?) Available in English, Français and فارسي

Muslims who cannot bring themselves not to legitimise a murderous regime.  If they think they are punishing Biden, they are not.

It is as old as Zionism itself

'I earn £1,600 a month and two-thirds goes on bills' Households earning more than £60,000 on how they are struggling financially

Outside interference, ostensibly on behalf of these 'revolutions', reduced Libya to anarchy and condemned Syria to a devastating proxy war now in its twelfth year. In Egypt, the Free Officers' state was re-booted in its most brutal ever form. The Americans and Europeans did not vainly try to help the Egyptians or anyone else escape from authoritarian rule. Instead, they contrived to seal them up in it. The long oppression of these societies, Kipling’s 'loved Egyptian night', is not going to be ended by the Western powers; these days it is guaranteed by them. Hugh Roberts 's new book political history of the risings in Egypt, Libya and Syria explains how the Western powers manipulated them all .

It is a mistake to talk of Islam as if it were one homogeneous movement or ideology, or as if it could be treated as an autonomous social force. As a religious belief, Islam has some uniform characteristics, but as a political and social movement it is diverse, varying in each country in its social context and political significance. —Fred Halliday, New Left Review, December 1987 There are as many Islams as there are situations that sustain it  [sic]. —Aziz Al-Azmeh, Islams and Modernities

LSE aims at educating students From 2004 to the present Morris “claims objectivity , even if a careful reading of almost all of Morris’ writings reveals a very simplistic and one-dimensional view on the Jewish-Arab conflict.  Despite all his “discoveries” about moral wrongs perpetrated by the Israelis, on the bottom line, he always tended to adopt the official Israeli interpretation of the events . Morris devoted a very salient and extensive discussion to the centrality of idea of “transfer” (i.e., ethnic cleansing) in Zionist thought, but concluded that the Palestinians had not been expelled by the Israelis in compliance with a master plan or following a consequential policy. This was not precise. What the new material shows [– says Morris –] is that there were far more Israeli acts of massacre than I had previously thought. To my surprise, there were also many cases of rape…  They are just the tip of the iceberg." So far it is the “old good” and expected Morris. The restless...

Berlin International Film Festival “ The current German state is gleefully complicit in the atrocities in Gaza .”

A very concise and pertinent summary:  The Palestinians are seen as ‘anachronistic problem that affects regional stability and hampers economic prosperity’. I wish there was more elaboration on that. Maqdisi – a historian – here empties history of political economy and regional sociology . Middle East Eye like most outlets generally encourages the fragmentation of social thought. Yet I recommend Maqdisi’s article The Mythology of the Sectarian Middle East (2017). Related The Oslo illusion A powerful group of Palestinian capitalists are profiting off occupation

“ I have been complicit in the violent domination of the world ,” they said, “and I will never get the blood off my hands.”

“In most Western media coverage, there is a near-pathological tendency to portray him as a marginalized figure whose political resurrection reflects the ‘populist’ appeal of his brash and personalist style. But Prabowo’s ascent to the presidency can only be understood through a properly historicized analysis.” Line of succession

“Far from being caused by personal rivalry, this conflict is rooted in the long history of the region and Sudan’s never-ending economic and social crisis. The conflict between the North and the South claimed between half a million and a million lives from 1955 to 2002. And herein lies the cause of the fighting tearing Sudan apart. To understand it requires going back to 2011. The secession of South Sudan and the rise of guerrilla movements within the North’s Muslim populations had weakened President Omar al-Bashir’s authority. His increasingly unpopular Islamist regime had been in power since the coup of June 1989 and was rotten with corruption. The regime sent the Janjaweed to fight in Yemen on behalf of the Saudis – who paid handsomely – and then tasked them with repressing the northern guerrillas of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North (SPLM-N), first in Darfur and then throughout the country. From the day after the coup, there were obvious tensions between the two forces, e...

The crisis in academia is of course a godsend to the right, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t also real and serious. Indeed, it is much more serious than most people realise. High-profile cancellations are what make the headlines, but they are merely the occasional effect of something deeper: the capture of entire sections of the academic bureaucracy by ideological lobbies, which insist on imposing their beliefs on all and sundry. We have seen this sort of thing before.  “Books, newspapers, official communications and forms issued by administrative departments – all swam in the same brown sauce,” wrote the German philologist Victor Klemperer, referring to the monotony of thought and language in Hitler’s Reich. The sauce is no longer brown, but apart from that, Klemperer could be describing a modern British university.    But if this is the case, why do we not hear more about it from academics themselves? The reasons are complex. Some academics believe in the new ag...

“Four years before [Alexis] de Tocqueville’s  Ancien Regime , Karl Marx famously wrote how human beings make their own history, but they don’t make it as they please. They make it ‘under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past’. In this way, both de Tocqueville and Marx emphasize how human actors emerge from the circumstances around them, and this history conditions and weighs upon them as they seek to remake the world of the present.  What kind of ‘dead weight’ did the Nazi Holocaust cast on Zionism, Jews, and the State of Israel?” Nazis! Liquidating the ghetto of Gaza Related Huwara, February 2023 “I want to restore security for the residents of the State of Israel,” fellow Otzma Yehudit MK  Zvika Fogel said  the morning after the rampage . “How do we do that? We stop using the word ‘proportionality.’ We stop with our objection to collective punishment [just] because it doesn’t fly with all sorts of courts. We take the gloves of...

It is a real political project Related “Settler colonialism includes interlocking forms of oppression, including racism, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and capitalism. This is because settler colonizers are Eurocentric and assume that European values with respect to ethnic, and therefore moral, superiority are inevitable and natural.”  —Alicia Cox,  Settler Colonialism Settler colonialism (wikipedia) Colonising Palestine: The Zionist Left and the Making of the Palestinian Nakba Israel: A Colonial Settler State by Maxime Rodinson with a very good introduction by Peter Buch, 1st ed. 1973 “Rodinson himself calls for a ‘bloodless’ solution and urges the Palestinians to avoid military methods, even though this may mean resigning themselves to their dispossession. But he rises above others who hold this position by insisting that it is up to the wronged party, namely the Arabs, to determine their goals and methods of struggle and that it is certainly impermissible for their op...

The resilience of the Palestinians, tenacious, irrepressible, stubborn always amazes the occupiers and appears shocking in the eyes of many Westerners. As at the time of the first Intifada in 1987, or the second in 2000, at the time of the armed actions on the West Bank or the mobilisation in favour of Jerusalem or the clashes around Gaza, under siege since 2007 and which has suffered six wars in 17 years (400 dead in 2006, 300 in 2008–2009, 160 in 2012, 2,100 in 2014, nearly 300 in 2021 and several dozen in the spring of 2023). The Israeli rulers accuse their enemies of ‘barbarity’, of disrespect for human life, in a word, of ‘terrorism.’ The accusation allows the accusers to wrap themselves in the cloak of righteousness and a clear conscience, camouflaging the apartheid system of an unbelievable brutality which oppresses the Palestinians every single day of their lives. Let me remind readers once again that many ‘terrorist’ organisations, pilloried as such in the course of recent his...

Ever since its founding after World War II the German Federal Republic, to gain acceptance into the family of “western democracies,”  while denouncing Hitler and his most famous henchmen, almost completely restricted condemnation to the horrifying annihilation of the Jewish people while distorting or ignoring the earlier, intense fascist attacks against the Left, especially the Communist left, which so often ended with a noose or a guillotine. Largely forgotten were also Nazi crimes against almost every country in Europe, beginning in Spain in 1936-1939 and climaxing in the killing of an estimated 27 million people of the USSR. In fact, a large number of the perpetrators went unpunished or regained influence and prosperity. Meanwhile, the policy-makers built up connections with any and every Israeli government, including large financial support, often in the form of armaments (like submarines). But since such support served as evidence that Germany had “overcome its past,” tot...

A ‘propaganda system will consistently portray people abused by enemy states as worthy victims , whereas those treated with equal or greater severity by its own government or clients will be unworthy.’ Similarly, think of Palestinians vs. Israelis, black and brown refugees vs. Ukrainian refugees, minorities in Syria vs. Syrians, an Iranian woman killed by the Iranian regime vs. women and children killed by Israel or the US. Julian Assange ‘How can exposing crime and torture be worse than committing them?’