20 Feb 2026 — Staying late reading a history book about prophet Mohammad and listening to early 20th century songs of Umm Kalthoum while waiting for the US to tell us that they have started bombing Iran again (or not).
23 Jan 2026 – “When I saw you in Egypt last August, you looked very much like a Bangladeshi skinny boy waiting for the flood to relief his pains. Get on your feet man, get on your feet and take command of your life. Nobody will be there for you when you are 60 and living on your monthly Sadat 10 L.E check. Sorry if I am getting so hard on you, but this is what I wanted to tell you long time ago. Write soon.” (Excerpt from a friend’s letter from Saudi Arabia dated 9th of October 1991)
I will be 60 this year and I think the Sadat pension has long been discontinued. I survived many floods and I wish I were still skinny.
How harsh can we be on each other when we are young and foolish, how candid too, but who said that all candour is truthful let alone helpful.
Note: I am currently reading letters from friends (from before the email era) while working on a book about my mother and myself. The letters are all from the 1980s and 1990s, before email dominated communication.
20 Jan 2026 – The Israeli government does what it does best, denying the Palestinian people their rights and strangulating international aid to them. Today Israeli bulldozers and officials started demolishing the UNRWA offices in Jerusalem and seizing the land.
UNRWA, that extends health, educational and other humanitarian help to millions of Palestinians, has been targeted by the Israeli government for long. Today these occupation authorities (occupation since East Jerusalem was occupied by force in 1967) have started destroying these buildings, decades after this UN organization started working from there and almost a year after the Israeli government seized the building as part of its lawfare against institutions that may raise issues related to the rights of Palestinians, especially Palestinian refugees, 750,000 of them were forced out of their homes in mandate Palestine in the 1948 Nakba when Israel was established.
Israeli radical right wing (not a fringe now) knows that such heinous acts cannot annihilate the Palestinians — only genocidal acts like what has been happening in Gaza for two years or massive expulsion can bring the ultimate extreme zionist dream to completion.
Without this, and between the river and the sea under the full control of the apartheid Israeli policies about seven million Palestinians and seven million Jews.
Current Israeli policies will squeeze them more and more and maybe hundreds of thousands of them will leave over time as they see what is happening to their people. Already over 71,000 Palestinians in Gaza and nearly 1,000 more in the West bank have been killed and many more injured since the Israeli right wing put its genocidal retaliation on steroids after the Hamas armed attack in October 2023 that killed about 1150 Israelis.
There will come one day, hopefully not in decades, where many countries and people will say they had been against this all along, but their silence now amounts to being complicit.
The eyes of the world (read western world and global elites) are all on #davos where European leaders are trying to appease Trump who has been wrecking the already fatigued and crumbling global world order from the UN to Nato, from trade rules to armed intervention, and from Venezuela to Greenland to Gaza. The region itself, from Turkey, to Iran, to Saudi Arabia and teh UAE are busy with their own national security and how they can fit their regional needs/prerogatives with the US’s, and not to antagonize Israel (for one of them how to actually align with Israel).
This all leaves the Palestinians squeezed into a corner of bad choices not to mention their sclerotic and bankrupt leadership. But again short of massive expulsion of Palestinians with its gigantic moral, legal and geopolitical ramifications, Israel has no options but to deepen its apartheid policies and continue low gear genocide in Gaza and increase the pressure in the West Bank. What they did to UNRWA today is part of this strategy.
16 Jan 2026 – For those who want to understand the predicament of the Palestinians, please watch “All that is left of you” اللي باقي منك in Arabic, a great movie by Cherine Dabis شيرين دعيبس – spanning three generations from 1948 to 2022. It shows the depth of loss, anger, and very tentatively opens a way for a difficult but possible reconciliation though the same door could also suggest that one side, the dominant occupier, could still just continue its slow annihilation of the Palestinians and even sometimes literarily living off the remains as the film metaphorically shows.
the past few years have brought to us a ton of Palestinian works of art, especially movies that should explain beyond the numbing testimonies and media articles the untold depths of suffering, loss and deprivation that the Palestinians continue to suffer from. Maybe this understanding can create an empathy that have been long lost on the other side and in the rest of the world, pushing the Palestinians into a corner with only bad choices. Not that the Palestinians do not have their own agency that brought them to bad choices, but such agency is really squeezed into such a tight place where most choices are bad. This is probably the definition of a tragedy.
15 Jan 2026- “Time buries time …” one of the many small gems in a treasure that Omar El Akkad sprinkles throughout his beautiful – if bleak – novel, “American War”, presenting us a post war United States that is no longer united and as seen from the eyes and archive of a narrator in 2094 —- a war whose seeds we might be watching their sowing now at the hands of a bankrupt ruling elite and a foundering political and economic system that is wreaking havoc at home and all-over the world.
Watch the movie and if you have time also watch “No Other Land”, “The Upshot”, “Farha”, and “Palestine 36”.
What a searing beauty and a masterly narration with lots of imagination and a sense of the humane as it should and how it was mutilated and lost for many.
12 Jan 2026 –The deserted Soledere area in Beirut.
14 Dec 2025 – Ahmad AlAhmad is a brave honourable man who put his life in grave danger to stop the Sydney massacre. He only knew that an armed man is shooting at people indiscriminately and could not stand by idly. The hero is an individual brave man; the murderer is an individual coward man. The victims were innocent people, mostly jews reportedly celebrating Hanukah.
The blood has not dried up yet when politicians descended like vultures to benefit from this tragedy (exactly like every shooting in America for example).
May people like Ahmad increase in numbers and people like the murderous killer vanish completely and may most politicians who peddle in fear mongering and narrow security analyses and the counterterrorism ideology take their responsibilities seriously, stop playing PR with blood l, and drop policies and rhetoric that fuel anti-immigration, anti-foreigners, anti-poor, anti-Muslims and antisemitism.
19 Nov 2025 – They say you are not a technologist and do not understand how algorithms work whenever I call for good regulations for the AI juggernaut. These people are not difference from those who berated us in the 2000s demanding that we do not criticise derivatives because we were not financial mathematicians nor liberal economists.
We ended with a huge global financial crisis in 2008 and one the main defender of derivatives was Larry Summers, who today moved from being the huge know-it-all bully to an alleged sexual predator who received advice from Epstein on women and relationships.
Can we now talk about the need of AI for good regulations, or we must wait until the crisis hits?
16 Sept 2025 — I guess I now know how many people might have felt as they went on with their lives while thousands upon thousands were being murdered in concentration camps or pogroms or large-scale massacres.
Unlike WWII and the holocaust, unlike the Rwandan and Bosnian massacres, the genocidal killing and destruction of the Palestinian lives and livelihoods in Gaza is live on our screens 24/7 … AND we still carry on wallowing in our impotence while the main US envoy for the middle east (and his son) celebrate a multibillion dollar deal with the Emiratis on AI and crypto, while the US secretary of state confirms support to Israel’s genocidal campaign packaged as ‘self-defence’ from Jerusalem where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have no citizenship rights and most of them live a proscribed life or are tormented (and killed) by armed Zionist settlers protected by the Israeli army.
There will indeed come a day when all those who are silent would claim they were against it all along, but for now the Israeli death machine continues to mow Palestinians and flatten Gaza and hover over the west bank.
I am sure European businessmen and western diplomats dealt with the regimes in Rome and Berlin during WWII but they could have claimed ignorance afterwards. Now they will just blame the victims and recycle tired propaganda.
