Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

My highlights – and my emphasis – from the article : “Hamas’s operation Al-Aqsa Flood of 7 October has given Israel’s far right, which dominates the government Binyamin Netanyahu formed in late 2022, the ideal opportunity to implement their plan for a Greater Israel that includes the West Bank and Gaza, in other words, the whole of British Mandate Palestine .” “ The political-ideological lineage of the Likud party … can be traced back to a fascist-inspired strain of ‘revisionist Zionism’ which emerged in the interwar period.” Annexing the occupied territories after 1967 and granting their inhabitants Israeli citizenship would have endangered Israel’s Jewishness; annexing them  without  granting such a right would have undermined its democracy (an ‘ethnic democracy’, according to Israeli sociologist Sammy Smooha) by formalising apartheid. Likud opposed this plan and kept pushing for the annexation of the two newly occupied territories and their complete colonisation, not limiting thems

Listening to Losurdo speaking about Saint Domingue, Napoleon Bonaparte and Thomas Jefferson, I can see how what he says applies to the Palestinian struggle today against colonial rule.  

“Liberalism’s  dogged insistence on nonviolence  and other manifestations of bourgeois respectability further falsely render antifascist self-defense and anti-colonial rebellion indistinguishable from fascist and imperialist belligerence, implicitly (or explicitly) condoning the state and para-state violence that typifies the latter.”

“What Foucault and many intellectuals  at the time  were struggling against  was not only socialism abroad, but also a certain kind of socialism and its legacy in France. More fundamentally,  after 1968, it is the very notion and entire conceptual structure of revolution  that Foucault would reject.” “In May 1975, Michel Foucault took LSD in the desert in southern California. He described it as the most important event of his life, one which would lead him to completely rework his History of Sexuality. His focus now would not be on power relations but on the experiments of subjectivity and the care of the self” The Last Man Takes LSD Michel Foucault Related Foucault and neoliberalism:  “Do Not Ask me Who I am”

A wide-raging conversation with an esteemed historian Photo illustration: Elise Swain/The Intercept

«Il suffit de décréter qu’un terme employé par celui qu’on a condamné d’avance renvoie à une association d’idée antisémite .»

“It is fair to assume that the different fractions of the ruling class in a country sometimes have diverging, even opposing interests. But if the country is the empire that dominates the world, on one point at least the ruling classes will agree: they do not want to see the basis of their power (i.e., the nation-empire) weakened. Those who have power intend, at a minimum, to maintain it, if not consolidate or expand it. So it is reasonable to infer that the conflicting interests between the various fractions manifest themselves in different strategies for ruling the world, in different conceptions of empire. “ Despite all his bombastic proclamations, Trump has not started any wars. Under Biden we are already on the second.” Elective affinities