A lot of Arabs predicted this of course--and ended up dead and/or in jail for their trouble.

The Faustian bargain embodied in the Abraham Accords but stretching back to Camp David and Wadi Arabia was that the Arabs could trade complicity and authoritarianism (with the endemic repression and corruption entailed) for quiet and development. There's a good chance they'll end up getting neither.

France has always peddled its histrionics towards Lebanon, rooted in Catholic nationalism. I've always found it odd how so many Mashriqi Arabs have eaten it up, ignoring that France has been just as abusive towards the Arabs of North Africa as Israel has been against the Arabs of the Mashriq.

I feel it is important to also note that it didn't need to be this way, Iran need not have been the only country which is willing to escalate on the issue of Beirut or Lebanon. Europe and especially France make a big show of being Lebanon's sister but have done nothing, less than zero, for it.

Israel views Lebanon, as it does Gaza and the West Bank, as a domestic Israeli issue. It insists on being able to bomb and abuse Lebanon as it sees fit, and anyone saying otherwise is "violating Israeli sovereignty."

Americans perplexed as to why Iran would insist on the Lebanon portfolio as a precondition to ending the war and the closure of the Strait are now experiencing 1/100th of what it is like for the Mideast to watch the US condition any bilateral agreement on a country's friendliness toward Israel

It is worth reading the boring memoirs of American high ranking politicians, especially the foreign policy ones because it gives insight into their thinking and strategy. Surprisingly much of it is still just racism from the Cold War

Graham Platner is so obviously not America's answer to Olaf Palme, and American leftist should stop pretending he is.

It is part of a broader American obsession with manipulating Arab opinion. Basically an extension of the American "War of Ideas." The logic goes if Arabs will put aside their atavistic antisemitism and interact with Israelis, they'll love them as much as American policymakers.

Iraqi suffering is so often overlooked. From the sanctions to the post-2003 wars. The description of Joy Gordon's book Invisble War: The United States and The Iraq Sanctions.

It is also tacit a admission that countries like Iraq are broken and ultimately that's fine. So no need to worry anymore. It is a macabre idea that mass death and destruction in the Middle East is fine as long as it leads to a healthier American political culture.

Two of the most unique books on the occupation of the West Bank are by anthropologists Lotte Buch Segal and Julie Peteet. Their two books No Place For Grief and Space and Mobility in Palestine.

“Resurgency is one of the best books I've read about Middle East politics in the last few years… it presents a dramatically original reinterpretation of the nature of war and its longterm legacies – and a searing indictment of what America did to Iraq.” abuaardvarkghost.ghost.io/resurgency-a...

This is not really brought up, but the region, from Libya to Sudan to Yemen to Syria to Lebanon to Gaza will need many hundreds of billions of dollars to rebuild. Likely over a trillion dollars in total. It is impossible to see the Gulf or America contributing that money.

The Persian Gulf should be renamed the American Gulf. The Red Sea should be renamed The Red, White, and Blue Sea. The Gulf of Oman could be renamed the Gulf of Ohio.

Outside of some Arabic-language media and francophone media, there is little discussion of French colonialism in the region. There is so much rich literature on it, and it mostly ignored for shallow analysis on it.

These "ceasefires" are just a repeat of prior deals. They become increasingly narrow, and I think the Israelis as they always do are trying to legalize their presence in Lebanon, or fight against Hezbollah.

Good coverage of Massad Boulos' misadventures in Libya, where his plans for a deal between the two ruling families have stoked intra-familial rivalries among the Haftars and Dabeibas. As I tell Il Foglio, he's mediating in African conflicts like someone going around a used car lot kicking tyres.

As Iran’s blockade of the Hormuz Strait has shown, Arab states had the capacity to force America to restrain Israel years ago. They just chose not to. These are the most corrupt, moldable regimes on earth. They are pathologically risk-averse and have a semi-divine belief in American power.

I doubt this reckoning will happen, but for the last 30 years or so, mediocre mercenary think tank analysts from the Middle East have lended credibility to American warmongering in the region. They have been disgraced repeatedly and shown to be know-nothings, yet they'll continue to enjoy respect.

We've had a new centre left government in Denmark for a day, and we already have concrete promises and plans for universal free dental care, free public transit for people 22 and younger, and a huge spending package for affordable housing. Speaks to how productive a government can be when it —

I just finished America's Middle East by Marc Lynch. It was not only insightful and well-argued, but also maybe the best introductory read you can read on the region.

The amount of market destruction caused by the war to the oil market will he immense. Consumption is also more efficient in places like China now. American oil companies will probably want the Gulf permanently exporting at lower rates now to stay profitable themselves. Trump has royally screwed —

The agency discourse has almost exclusively been twisted into why a certain group of people deserve to be bombed, massacred, and displaced.

It is also showing far we've moved away a once far more diverse media landscape. There used to be far more foreign desks. With financialization and conglomerization we're stuck in this almost gig economy style media landscape

Arab regimes in the Gulf could not even threaten to pause investment in the U.S. worth hundreds of billions over the genocide in Gaza. Let alone threaten to liquidate their trillion-dollar tech investments.

Devastating essay on Palestinian mass graves produced by Israel: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Intense displacement movement from Beirut's southern suburbs. People are fleeing Dahiyeh, yet, again. 🇱🇧

American insistence on Israeli impunity on every subject has not only radicalized Israelis, but also American policymakers. The current batch of Americans are outright celebrating Israeli conquest and violence.

An important factor in the profound dehumanization of Arabs and Iranians by American policymakers is how war and poverty caused by the U.S. and Israel in the region is not cause for self-reflection, but propaganda to be confronted.

The books I read about were Abdelmajid Hannoum's The Invention of The Maghreb, Todd Shepard's The Invention of Decolonization, Todd Shepard's Sex, France and Arab Men, Patricia Lorcin's Imperial Identities, and Tod Shepard's and Patricia Lorcin's French Mediterreneans.

Denmark is likely going to have a centre left government. The whole talk of the last year has been about cutting foreign aid and implementing even more racist immigration policies, but this likely government will do neither and has been explicit about it.

Every regime in the region almost is dependent on the U.S. Their lobbying efforts is just an acknowledgement of American power. Their first and foremost effort for regional disputes is to lobby DC in wats not too dissimilar to how American states lobby DC.

America paying reparations to the victims of its terrorism and Imperialism is perhaps the single most moral use of that wealth. Trillions more should be allocated to Iraq, Gaza, Cuba, and many other countries.

I'm seeing American influencers praise Haftar in TikTok. It was bound to happen with all he is spending on self-promotion

King Abdullah is not going to war with Israel over Al Aqsa

My review of Counterrevolution in Egypt by Hossam al-Hamalawy open.substack.com/pub/fathel/p...

Besides rare European leaders like Pedro Sanchez, most prominent European leaders are fine with Trump pushing them around as long as he allows them to feel part of some broader white supremacist nominal partnership that allows them to keep lecturing non-white people.

Israeli naming of military operations are truly ridiculous. Operation Roaring Lion, Operation Eternal Darkness, etc. American naming is also ridiculous, but with Israeli naming you have these weird biblical call-backs.

None of this would be possible without the unconditional outsized support of the U.S. You can't describe this as anything but a American-Israeli war on Lebanon.

Like Iraq, Libya is being talked about. Because doing so would mean acknowledging American failure. The consensus is that Iraq and Libya are broken states and that's how it is and we should stop caring about it.

People like to compare Sisi to the Shah, and it is hard not to with this

I'm doing a lot of reading about the Egyptian revolution and it is clear how much healthier Egyptian civil society (in the Gramscian sense) was in the 2000s because it was no supported by the U.S. U.S. support for civil society and opposition movements has a deeply toxic effect on them.

Some right-wing figures in Denmark want to ban the hiring of "non-Western" academics in Danish universities. The reason why Danish higher education punches above its weight is because of the historically large funding and ease of hiring foreign academics. A lot of Iraqi academics teach in Denmark.

The Gulf monarchy position of supporting to the hilt unrivaled American primacy in the region concluding in the American president threatening to physical destroy one of them was certainly not expected.

The reason why it took Israel until 1952 to issue citizenships to its population was because they were trying to figure out ways to join the U.N. while also disenfranchising Palestinians who were not ethnically cleansed during the Nakba.

Arab leaders are still desperately trying to cater to the U.S., even if it means sacrificing their vital national interests because they expect to be flooded with aid and security at some undefined date. Their believe in America can only be described as a blind religious leap of faith.

Recommended reading.

These numbers are comparable to the most brutal regimes in the region.

New @hrw.org report exhaustively details how an Emirati private security company with close ties to the highest levels of the UAE government recruited Colombian mercenaries, trained them at a UAE military base, and deployed them for the siege and capture of El Fasher, Sudan.