Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

En Français , Arabe and English Good news for many: ‘there is no hope for Arab countries; it is in their culture.’ Full Speed Ahead … to Nowhere

Achieving objectives: Four Israeli lives worth hundreds of Palestinian ones.  Western complicity in crime continues

The West courts Central Asia

“The more precise comparison, Ahmed argued, was to European settler colonialism in the Americas. With both, there were ‘the myths of the empty land, of swamps reclaimed and deserts blooming … messianic complexes of manifest destinies and promised lands … a paranoid strain in the colonising culture, an instrumental attitude towards violence and a tendency to expand.’ He noted that settler colonies of this kind tend to pursue three goals: some level of independence from their western state sponsors; a normalisation of their relations with neighbouring countries; and a solution to what they consider the ‘native problem’, through the elimination, expulsion or containment of the Indigenous populations. The US could claim it had achieved these goals in the nineteenth century, though Indigenous resistance has never ceased. Israel was still pursuing them in the 1980s and continues to do so today.” Out-organise the enemy!

You sanctimonious philistines, who scoff at me! What has your politics fed on since you've been ruling the world? On butchery and murder! —Charles de Coster,  The Legend of Thyl Ulenspiegel and Lamme Goedzak

The Tightly Packed Contradictions of Global Capitalism

https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/a-global-war-regime

Ukraine is mentioned, but Israel and Palestine, according to Katya and the BBC , have no relation to the EU imperialist policies. 

  An account by an observer

“The idea of the book arose from my interest in writing about the body and its relationship to surrounding spaces . It explores the political, intellectual, and organizational state of paralysis that has afflicted Egyptian society due to the oppression of the current regime.”

“It’s no secret that Biden’s push for a Saudi deal is largely about escalating its proxy war against Iran and “great power competition” with China .”

The first time it was reported that our friends were being butchered there was a cry of horror. Then a hundred were butchered. But when a thousand were butchered and there was no end to the butchery, a blanket of silence spread.    When evil-doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out "stop!” When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible. When sufferings become unendurable the cries are no longer heard. The cries, too, fall like rain in summer.   – Bertolt Brecht,  Selected Poems

It is a good summary and a well-researched article . I think it needs more elaboration on Israel’s shift to ‘a neoliberal economy’.  The Israeli’s economy is not just a ‘war economy’. It is 1. a capitalist political economy with its internal dynamics and 2. a global political economy. Class is absent in the analysis as if Israel is a unique case where ‘nationalism’ (and religion or both) decide rather than a ruling class or a coalition that represents different classes. Falling rate of profit or as Nitzan and Bichler put it in a seminal work that serves as a background and a starting point of Israel economy today “the profit margins of dominant capital started to feel the pinch.” This is a major factor in the form of capitalism Israel shifted to in order to maintain or increase the regime of capital accumulation.  Related After the economic crisis that hit a few countries in the 1990s then the 11 of September attacks on the US, the crisis reached Western countries. “The i...

A very good article Capital’s Emirates

 Kill to clear land for eco-city

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. —Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852

The winning side

Note that capitalism is not mentioned even once. The article in the Culture section! Is it not sociology in photography lenses?  ‘Utopia and dystopia’

‘Be honest’, Dimon said, ‘He [Trump] was kind of right about NATO, kind of right on immigration. He grew the economy quite well. Trade. Tax reform worked. He was right about some of China.’ —Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO of JP Morgan In other words, classic liberal-capitalist policies,  à l’américaine . This is why  Trump continues to be a problem and not just a calamity .”

A brief-history of the Arab ballad