Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

As a world, you told us to endure the worst terrors and humiliations of the occupation, without turning to violence. You told us to teach our children love and science, even if Israel has bombed every school. You told us to sing and smile and cook through our suffering. You told us not to be beggars, nor to starve in silence. You told us to resist, but without any weapons. To count on your “eyes” to defend us. Chef Mahmoud did all of those things. And was assassinated by drone strike. Are we your perfect victims now?  In memory of  Mahmoud Almadhoun

The umbrella group with close ties to Turkey

Following the trend in Europe “Resentment, not simply personal economic interests, drives people’s votes for these far-right parties .” Related Romania Redivivus

Granting immunity to Netanyahu and co.

In his   Instructions , Lavisse [ Ernest Lavisse 1842-1922]   declared that what secondary-school pupils need to be taught, without their realising it, is that ‘our history begins with the Greeks’. Our [French] history begins with the Greeks, who invented liberty and democracy and who introduced us to ‘the beautiful’ and a taste for ‘the universal’. We are heirs to the only civilisation that has offered the world ‘a perfect and as it were ideal expression of justice and liberty’. That is why our history begins – has to begin – with the Greeks. This belief was then compounded by another every bit as powerful: ‘The Greeks are not like others’. After all, how could they be, given that they were right at the beginning of our history? Those were two propositions that were essential for the creation of a national mythology that was the sole concern of traditional humanists and historians, all obsessed with nationhood. It is commonly believed not only that both the abstract notion of...

Thanks to James Meek for his long report Excerpts The Western companies that make the best prostheses are working flat out. One of them, the German firm Ottobock, is supplying both Russia and Ukraine, a fact Ukrainians blame for the delay in the supply of spare parts, although I wondered if the Palestinians and Sudanese also have a place in the line. despite efforts at reform, the mobilisation system is corrupt, with the rich and influential able to find ways round it; that the army doesn’t value skills, but is only looking for cannon fodder; that if you lose limbs, you can’t count on being looked after. The situation is a miniature of the tridentine internal politics of Ukraine since the Orange Revolution of 2004: the archaic, populist, nationalist-patriotic tendency; the geeky, bourgeois strand, people who aspire to what they see as a liberal European ideal of personal freedom, communal fairness and the rule of law; and the cynical, apolitical, transactional, personal loyalty-based m...

Nathan J. Robinson interviewing Osamah Khalil ,  the author of   A World of Enemies: America’s Wars at Home and Abroad from Kennedy to Biden “ You do something a little unusual in this book, which is hinted at in the subtitle. We are used to thinking about America's wars abroad and America's wars at home separately, in different domains. We talk about the history, from Vietnam to Afghanistan and Iraq, or we might talk about the war on drugs, but you put it all together and see it as one kind of unified history, domestic and foreign. Tell us why you think we need to consider America's wars as one category that includes domestic and foreign .” An interesting book, but it seems there is no grounding of 'domestic and foreign policy' in political economy, not even a section or a question in the long interview. Deindustrialisation and inequality, for instance, are part of the ‘domestic war’. 

'International law' and 'democractic order' ?  A contnious and deliberate denial of history by journalists.

One name, many lives

There have been a few praises and critiques of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. I have recently got across an. interesting one. Piketty, write Gareth Jones, “says relatively little about where capital is located, how capital accumulation in one place relies on activities elsewhere, how capital is urbanized with advanced capitalism and what life is like in spaces without capital.” In reading Capital “ I was struck by the attention to the rich, to those with wealth and their distance from the mean of incomes and wealth/capital, and how little analysis is given to the poor.” A geographical essay   (or through a gmail account ) Related I prefer Lordon’s dissection though. “Thomas Piketty’s thousand-page economics bestseller reduces capital to mere wealth — leaving out its  political impact on social and economic relationships throughout history .”

 ساحة حرب خفية واغتيالات تطال كافة الجهات المنخرطة في الصراع

In Gallup’s latest surveys of Ukraine , conducted in August and October 2024, an average of 52% of Ukrainians would like to see their country negotiate an end to the war as soon as possible.

The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please. —Hannah Arendt, an interview with Roger Errera, 1974

Insufficient housing, an eroded social sector and diminished state support made tens of thousands destitute .

I do not find the article helpful , especially that it is by a self-proclaimed revolution leftist magazine. On one hand it spreads illusion, for we all know that Netanyahu can easily stay in Israel with US protection or seek refuge in the US in the worst case scenario. He is not Milosevic.  That it is not even mentioned in the article. On the other hand, appealing to the British ‘government’ is a passive call. It reinforces the idea that we should have faith in the very same British regime that has helped create the state of Israel, supported it for decades and complicit in wars and invasions, regardless whether Labour or Conservative are in government.

How much of the war in Ukraine or the one on Gaza will be known in the future? Looking at the example of ‘ Algeria in the Archives ’ or the British empire, can inform us that information and records could be buried for decades. What we know now is just some of what is happening. The article is behind a paywall unless one has an institution subscription, for example, with NLR.

No news here, but a norm France’s double standard

 “The western world, structured by centuries of colonisation and the notion of ‘inferior races’, including Arabs and Muslims, was always favourable towards … falsehoods.  “Israel has always been the West’s main proxy to weaken and bully Arab states and populations. It is the West’s primary attack dog in the Middle East.  “Indeed, this horrible massacre of Palestinians is not being accomplished by Israel alone, but by an axis of genocide . Western media have done a good job of concealing the responsibility of western countries in what will probably be the first true enterprise of mass extermination of a people in the 21st century.” Yet Gabon implicitly appeals to the West to use an embargo and other tools to stop Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians instead of appealing to the Arabs who rose up in 2011 and 2019 to topple the rotten regimes that enable Israel and the West to carry on with their crimes.  According to this argument, when states commit mass violence...

A good piece. “Trumpism, despite what its hyperbolic opponents say, is not a subversion of the constitutional order. Like Japanism, it is a continuation of liberalism that uses forms of restorationism to redefine the country’s mission, promising to rebuild collective bonds by reinstating traditional social hierarchies. Unlike Japanism, though, it will struggle to reshape the state in its image or create anything resembling a new national order. Its ideological appeal does not necessarily translate to institutional power.”  Related Tosaka Jun’s book

Just another news item A survey says over 61,000 people are estimated to have died in  Khartoum  state during the first 14 months of  Sudan's war.