Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

 From Paris to Tehran

“[T]he Saudi state has been globally  celebrated , including by international  institutions . And this is no surprise – the gender reforms announced by the state, and formulated with the help of  consultancy firms , largely align with the United Nation’s  women’s empowerment agenda , which adopts a liberal model of gender equality that works to include ambitious women within the existing capitalist order, leaving its structural inequalities intact. What is obvious from these celebratory accounts is that gender reforms in Saudi Arabia are almost always discussed only in relation to  Saudi  women, rendering their implications for non-citizens invisible.” As of 2022 more than  foreign female servants and house cleaners alone numbered more than 1 million . “ This calls for a broader reflection on what emancipatory possibilities are foreclosed by liberal feminist justice frameworks that seek autonomy and equality for some, within unequal structures, rather ...

‘His death will not defeat Hamas’

“Didn’t ‘we’ [Britain] leave them with a viable country, functional state and infrastructure. What more do they want and when will they take responsibility for their own shortcomings?” a British journalist asks on Twitter.  Key points: “ There has been a historical tendency to separate matters of the economy from the political process in analysis and reporting on Sudan (and in Africa more generally).” “[T]he failure of the civilian technocratic government to disband the economic and political project of the Islamist military establishment. “Sudan’s 2018 revolutionary imaginary, fluid and expansive, was brought into being through the uprising’s main slogan: ‘Freedom, Peace and Justice’. In all of their iterations, these three words came to mean different things for different groups subject to violence and marginalization by the state in different ways. “In large part driven by externally supported processes, the importance of labor-based identities in shaping political struggle has ...

A review of Class War: A Literary History

 4 episodes with Antony Loewenstein and his guests

Israel is a unique case in the Middle East; it is financed by imperialism without being economically exploited by it… It is obvious that the readiness of the US government to forward these sums [of money] depends on what it gets in return. In the particular case of Israel this return is not economic profit. —The Class Nature of the Israeli Society by Haim Hanegbi, Moshe Machover and Akiva Orr, NLR Jan/Feb 1971 During the 1990s … there emerged, perhaps for the first time, a major cleavage within the elite. On the one hand, there is the ‘reactionary’ Zionist faction which hopes to freeze the world of yesterday. On the other hand, there is an increasingly powerful, ‘progressive’ faction, which seeks to ‘normalise’ the country, yet whose commitment to such normalisation weakens as its investment outside the country increases. This ruling class conflict doesn’t bode well for most Israelis, and for the Middle East as a whole. — Nitzan and Bichler The Global Political Economy of Israel , 2002...