Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Succinct. First and foremost is the fact that the Euro-American settler colony of Israel is already practising its version of “from the river to the sea” in Palestine. While the Palestinians “ have turned the armed robbery of their homeland into a motto for their national liberation movement and anti-colonial struggle.” Min annahr ilā albahr Buenos Arires, May 17th, 2021. Photo: Manuel Cortina/NurPhoto via AP via Jewish Currents

A stable new order or a collapse waiting to happen?

“ The paradox of the Egyptian left is not by any means unique. The gradual sidelining of class by identity conflicts in national politics has been part of a global trend, or what I describe in  Classless Politics  as ‘ more identity, less class’.” —Hesham Sallam, 2022 The root of it – although Sallam does not mention this is the theoretical dependence on the Stalinist approach to change and the ‘national bourgeoisie’ – was “ the communists’ capitulation to Abdel-Nasser in 1965.” That “would shape the left’s political fortunes for decades. More immediately, it meant that as the era of  infitah  commenced, the left was in disarray, lacking the leadership to unify the dispersed (albeit troublingly loud) opposition to Sadat’s right-wing administration.” “The legacies of Islamist incorporation (and their role in centering battles over the religious identity of the state) steered many sectors of the left, as epitomized by Al-Tagammu, toward culture wars and away from questions of redistribu

A liberal view that does not question the role of ‘liberal democracy’ in creating the ground for the growth of the far-right. Neither does question the ‘liberal democracy’s’ legacy in the rise of inequality, stagnation, complicity in crime, support of some authoritarians but opposing others, hypocrisy, double standard, racism towards and its war on refugees, the wars that generated refugees, commodification of everything, working people struggling to make ends meet in the heart of Europe, its selective reading of history, the economic diktats imposed on the ‘Global South’. And there is not even a hint to the crisis of capitalism – or the legacy of ‘neoliberalism’– and how like in previous eras has created polarisation, conflicts, fascists, revolution, etc. A moment, a conflict, a war, or a crisis does emerge in a particular context and a particular conjuncture of a dominant socio-economic system and does not come from the outer-space. It grows within the fabric that the political econ

We must never forget. We must never forgive. “There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.”  —American historian Howard Zinn Ethnic Cleansing , Settler Colonialism and Apartheid My interview with Ilan Pappe  (audio) The book is available in English    and in   Arabic 

We must not conceal from ourselves that no improvement in the present depressing situation is possible without a severe struggle; for the handful of those who are really determined to do something is minute in comparison with the mass of the lukewarm and the misguided. And those who have an interest in keeping the machinery of war going are a very powerful body; they will stop at nothing to make public opinion subservient to their murderous ends.—attributed to Albert Einstein It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets. — attributed to Voltaire   

Dogs life is long. —a Tunisian proverb “If the American foreign policy establishment is a grand citadel, then Henry Kissinger is the ghoul haunting its hallways. Today, global capitalism and United States hegemony are underwritten by the most powerful military ever devised. Any political vision worth fighting for must promise an end to the cycle of never-ending wars afflicting the world in the twenty-first century. And breaking that cycle means placing the twin evils of capitalism and imperialism in our crosshairs. This newly-released book , published in partnership with  Jacobin , follows Kissinger’s fiery trajectory around the world—not because he was evil incarnate, but because he, more than any other public figure, illustrates the links between capitalism, empire, and the feedback loop of endless war-making that still plagues us today.”