Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

The Zionist claim to return to the pre-diaspora past in the land of Israel was in practice the negation of the actual history of the Jewish people for more than 2,000 years. Zionism, or for that matter any modern nationalism, could not conceivably be a return to a lost past, because the sort of territorial nation-states with the sort of organization it envisaged simply did not exist before the nineteenth century. It had, in fact, to invent the history it claimed to bring to fruition. As Ernest Renan said a century ago: 'Getting history wrong is an essential part of being a nation.' It is the professional business of historians to dismantle such mythologies, unless they are content – and I am afraid national historians have often been – to be the servants of ideologists. —Hobsbawm, On History , 2013 ed., p. 21 and pp. 34-5

It is as old as Zionism itself

But did we really have to wait for an event like the war on Gaza to realise that ‘European philosophy has been ethically bankrupt’? “Those of us outside the European sphere of moral imagination do not exist in their philosophical universe. Arabs, Iranians and Muslims; or people in Asia, Africa and Latin America - we do not have any ontological reality for European philosophers , except as a metaphysical menace that must be conquered and quieted.  Beginning with Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and continuing with Emmanuel Levinas and Slavoj Zizek, we are oddities, things, knowable objects that Orientalists were tasked with deciphering. As such, the murder of tens of thousands of us by Israel, or the US and its European allies, does not cause the slightest pause in the minds of European philosophers.” The unfinished project of Enlightenment

Vladimir Jabotinsky, the erudite and much misunderstood Zionist leader who posthumously became the founding father of the Israeli right (one of his closest aides, Benzion Netanyahu, was the father of the current prime minister) in his famous 1923 essay : My readers have a general idea of the history of colonization in other countries. I suggest that they consider all the precedents with which they are acquainted, and see whether there is one solitary instance of any colonization being carried on with the consent of the native population. There is no such precedent. The native populations, civilized or uncivilized, have always stubbornly resisted the colonists, irrespective of whether they were civilized or savage. And it made no difference whatever whether the colonists behaved decently or not. The companions of Cortez and Pizzaro or (as some people will remind us) our own ancestors under Joshua Ben Nun, behaved like brigands; but the Pilgrim Fathers, the first real pioneers of North A

He is a bourgeois businessman and hypocrite, complicit in crimes against Kurdish, Palestinians and others. “Erdoğan is the quintessential demagogue — he issues challenging statements to the established order while maintaining the status quo. Erdoğan’s denouncements of Israel tend to coincide with periods of heightened violence. But once public outrage declines, it’s back to business as usual .”

A review of Helen Thompson’s Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century

The figure of the half a million Iraqi children killed by the sanctions, and which goes back to a 1995 study carried out under Saddam Hussein regime, is an arguable figure. Massad and a few others still repeat it without backing it with recent studies and sources.  A game of capitalist greed

Palestine today is perhaps the single most important spot on earth where the fictional battle between “Islam” and “the West” is waged. Palestine has always been home to Jews, and should always remain home to Palestinian Jews, in the company of their Christian and Muslim neighbors, in the framework of a free, equal, and democratic state. What has that simple fact to do with a colonial project of European settlers that has called itself “Zionism” and catapulted its colonial conquest of Palestine into the false binary of “Islam and the West”? Palestine has always belonged to Palestinians: Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike. Zionism was always a colonial sideshow distracting from this simple fact. In this context, singling out Hamas [or Palestinian Islamic Jihad] to define Palestinian resistance to occupation of their homelands is a deliberately false and falsifying synecdoche—making one militant group stand for the entirety of the Palestinian national liberation movement—a cause that has

Since the 2000s, there has been a shift in France’s media and among its politicians. While the media landscape had evolved in the 1970s and ’80s, with many supporting the Palestinian right to self-determination and the need to negotiate with the Palestine Liberation Organisation (which Israel and the US denounced as a terrorist group), the consensus position has since shifted dramatically. Some now see Palestine through the lens of the “war on terror” and the “Islamist menace”. Any condemnation of Zionism is presented as a form of antisemitism. This reflects the position of European governments, especially France, which have aligned themselves with Israel and adopted - what many consider to be - Islamophobic positions in recent years. “How French media censored my views”

“The last Muslim intellectual”

It was the very same Zelensky who   withdrew  U kraine's membership from the UN Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People in 2020. As Israel was killing and bombing Palestinians in May 2021, Zelensky   depicted  it as the victim of the Palestinians and not as a predatory settler-colonial state which Ukrainian Jews helped establish. Ironically, that Zelensky thinks Israel’s neighbours "want to see us dead" may be no more than a psychological projection of what he and the Israelis want to see happen to Palestinians, not the other way around.  The Ukrainian Jewish role in the dispossession of Palestine

Ideological, financial, physical and military contributions to colonisation

How the Jewish state’s founding ideology shapes it to this day Related Even the liberal Ban Ki-moon is better than the ‘liberals’ in power: “The starting point of a new approach must be to recognise the fundamental asymmetry between the parties. This is not a conflict between equals that can be resolved through bilateral negotiations, confidence-building measures or mutual sequencing of steps — the traditional conflict-resolution tools.  The reality is very different: a powerful state is controlling another people through an open-ended occupation, settling its own people on the land in violation of international law and enforcing a legal regime of institutionalised discrimination. Calls for a return to unconditional bilateral talks every time there is a fresh flare-up in fighting will only serve to perpetuate the status quo if these root causes are not addressed.  What has become increasingly clear in recent years is Israel’s intent to maintain its structural domination and oppression

Another excellent article by Joseph Massad. Admitting it now is too little, too late Related A liberal argument. The United States Ignoring Israel’s Violence Against Palestinians

The rise and fall of a sex cult leader

 Biden’s love affair with Israel will pick up where it left off

 Weaponisation of Labour Anti-Semitism

A new publication The Sultan’s Communists: Moroccan Jews and the Politics of Belonging

Good, but I expected more on the geo-political economy. Trump's America, Netanyahu's Israel

How the charge of antisemitism has been deployed in Great Britain and against grassroots social justice activism to silence Israel's critics. Israel and the Antisemitism Playbook in Great Britain and Grassroots