Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

“[I]f a tenant is anyone who doesn’t control their own housing, then the tenant movement works to establish collective control. Our aim is not to eliminate tenancy by becoming owners ourselves….Our aim is to eliminate the conditions that bind tenancy to insecurity, impermanence, predation, and price gouging.”  Working-class control over how and where we live is the lodestar shared across the nascent independent tenant union movement.  Control, whose negation defines  tenancy  for this movement, necessarily constitutes its horizon. But the excessive focus on rent, akin perhaps to a trade union fixation on increasing wages, obscures the forest (capitalism becoming a world without rent) for the trees (rent itself). Is rent the crisis?

“At the heart of Peterson’s book is a counterargument to traditional narratives of postwar social reform. The very same rhetoric that justified the construction of a supposed top-down progressive modernity after 1945 was simultaneously used to justify the entrenchment of colonial rule in North Africa .”

Just another news item USAid officials meet Israeli counterparts at Sde Teiman base , where detainees say abuse runs rampant

Catching and Falling Behind in the Global Economy (open access)

Rashid Khalidi: “What has been done to Gaza is far worse than what was done to any part of Palestine in 1948, and what is being done to Lebanon is far worse than what was done to Lebanon in 1982 or 2006. This is a war of extermination — it’s a genocide. I was reading a play by Marina Carr talking about the razing of Troy after the Trojan War. Quoting Hecuba, she says, ‘This is not war — in war there are rules, laws, codes. This is genocide. They’re wiping us out’.” “ I think there is a threat to the entire international legal order if this is allowed to continue, as it has been by the United States.”  Unfortunately, it seems that Khalidi, like a few other scholars, believe in international law. Unsurprisingly, the concept has been a powerful one and even sections of the left still believes in it. Khalidi: “ I do think that there has been a major, consequential shift in public opinion; I don’t think there are likely to be consequences on the political level in the short term. Whoeve...

When all the women were dead, the jihadists burned their bodies inside the houses. After they had finished with the women, the jihadists went back to …where they had locked the children. ‘They brought out the little kids – two, one and a half, three years old – they took them out holding on to each other. They took the groups and killed them with knife stabs’. The jihadists ripped open the children’s bellies with knives and tore out their intestines… ‘It was possible they killed the children like that so as not to waste their munitions, or perhaps as a game for the jihadists'. "Although the scene above is entirely true and based on eye-witness accounts, one element of it is complete fabrication. The atrocity has nothing to do with jihadists, nor is it set in the Middle East. It took place in Guatemala, in the 1980s. I have merely substituted the real culprits—U.S.-financed counter-insurgency troops—with the word “jihadists” each time. The real passage is taken from a Virginia ...

I don’t think we can talk about ‘hypocrisy’ anymore. It has been normalised as part of ‘our values’. It is not a negative feature. I don’t agree with the two state solution implied in the article.

Thank you Hatem Bazian for that article

“ Transport Secretary Louise Haigh said this week that she had boycotted P&O Ferries in recent years and would encourage others to do so, after the firm sacked hundreds of workers in 2022 and replaced them with lower-paid agency staff.” "[It] shows that Labour cabinet ministers have never been in business, don’t understand business and don’t know how to talk to business. They just haven’t got a clue,"  Conservative shadow business secretary Kevin Hollinrake said . It means capital accumulation through cheap labour and exploitation. It means ‘our values’ and ‘free market democracy’. 

Nowhere “ explores his turbulent history against a backdrop of seismic world events” Related The West's Favourite Afghan

Bella Ciao

‘ Israel lost its humanity ’. This is a very arguable statement. With the complicity of the majority of Israelis, what humanity has the Israeli state has shown since its establishment? “ Since when is the death of any person, even a bitter and cruel enemy,” asked Gideon Levy, “a reason to party?” It has been a few cases throughout history. ‘Humanity’ is not an abstract concept shrouded in innocence and purity. Humanity exists in contexts and governed by different power relations. 

“The partnership, which focuses on cloud computing, provides services to various branches of the Israeli government, including the defence ministry and the army .” There is nothing wrong with doing business – even when it is with the Devil. Previous genociders did it.

A realistic stance ‘An effective way to protect prosperity’  where the birthrate is among the lowest in Europe.

Was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine motivated almost entirely by Vladimir Putin’s ideological fears and concerns for his regime’s preservation?

A long-term genocide

Answering pressing questions about Palestine

One of India’s most important historians

The constitution of a system of private property requires, as a necessary correlate, the constitution of a system of ‘defence’ or coercive power. . . . The analysis of the very ‘base’ of capitalist society, of its kernel of social  productive relations, requires not simply an ‘economic’ theory but equally a theory of jurisprudence, a theory of politics, and a theory of war. —Colin Barker, 1998

A good piece by Adam Shatz. “Hizbullah will slowly rebuild, and Nasrallah and his cadres will be replaced by a new and no less embittered generation of leaders who will remember the furies unleashed by Israel in Lebanon: the killings, maimings and displacement caused by one of the most intensive bombing campaigns in the 21 st  century. Nasrallah’s death is as humiliating a setback for his movement as Nasser’s defeat in 1967 was for the Arab cause. But nothing feeds resistance like humiliation .”