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9 September 2026 — I admire how beautiful the black dress looks on her, she gives me on of these looks. I know immediately she has had this dress for a long time and probably I had praised it before and that I had forgotten all about it (as usual) since I am an absent-minded guy. I think it is nice that I can admire things anew, but she probably and rightly believes that an unobservant, forgetful guy, is no fun to be with.
27 August 2026 — So the organizers of a sports photo festival in France removed this photo from Gaza where Palestinians are playing against a backdrop of utter destruction inflicted by Israel utterly unchecked bombing of this enclave which Israel has effectively controlled since it occupied it in 1967.
Oh, the oganizers did not want to offend anyone after they were asked to remove the photo. We do not need to guess much to think who would not see this utter senseless destruction seen by sports fans.
23 August 2026 — Many years ago, and maybe in 2005, when we were bruised in the United Nations and still recovering the little left of our impact and claims to relevance — following two US imperial wars of revenge and hubris (Afghanistan and Iraq) — the staff (mostly men as you can sadly see) working at the UN HQ and those in the Middle East had this photo with the most soft spoken, pragmatic but principled and strong Secretary General Kofi Annan. We nursed some injuries but also hopes and dreams, all of which have either healed or got shattered as the juggernaut of the global world disorder has been turning this body into a mainly emergency and humanitarian aid effort (somewhat crippled by lack of funding and eroding political support) while decimating its political and peace keeping role to a subservient one to the powers that be or just ignored.
I left the UN in 2013. Annan died in 2018. I am happy to still be friends with some of those in the photo.
(Hiding in the second row behind a colleague on the left you can see my then hopeful smile within the circle — it has long been replaced by a cynical one that suits the much less hair that remains).
22 June 2026 — The World Food Programme, an organization I worked for for several years, has worked closely with Palantir Technologies, an organization deeply involved in war and surveillance technologies that reportedly violate human rights and could have led to the murder of many. This relationship must be investigated and brought to an end, especially as it comes on the heels of a massive information leak from WFP Gaza data bases of people who receive aid from this organization. Tech for Bad has just issued a damning report on this collaboration. Read on here.
5 June 2026 — And I still pick the phone up and call her number and wait for eternity for her to answer. She does not, the line goes silent and then I remember she can no longer answer and that I can only talk to what she left of herself inside of me. Goodnight Mama
31 May 2026 — A friend in Lebanon told me about an Israeli missile (or Drone?) attack near where he stayed. “The one guy they targeted was killed,” he said alluding as it is commonly understood to individuals whom Israeli claims are close to or members of Hizbolllah, the political/armed Shiite Lebanese organization. Since Israel dramatically broadened its preemptive, retaliatory and offensive attacks on Lebanon since early March this year, over 3000 Lebanese have been killed while the death toll on the Israeli side is a bit over 40.
Let us go back to my friend. I ask him: “He was killed alone?”. He answers: “No, No, No, of course there were others, like family members and neighbours, about 22, we hear.”
So as usual we are presented with AI-augmented systems that allegedly focus the bombing on what Israel claims to be legitimate targets without evidence or with flimsy evidence or when these so-called targets are not engaged in violent illegal actions (remember, remember that even wars have laws). the fact that Hizbollah violates the laws of war with far far less casualties inflicted on the Israeli side should not allow Israel to exact 100 eyes for an eye in the same illegitimate manner, nor to flatten residential areas and destroy civilian infrastructure. This is not only illegal, but will backfire in years and decades to come.
Back to AI: the Israeli army argues these AI systems “enhance precision”, but a “growing body of evidence suggests a more troubling reality: the acceleration of warfare has also meant the acceleration of civilian deaths.” This is a quote from a good survey essay by the Arab Reform Initiative – مبادرة الإصلاح العربي. Read on here.
“The use of AI is not the sole cause of this outcome, rather, as Israeli investigative journalist Yuval Abraham described: What AI did was allow Israel to achieve the effective results of carpet bombing without losing the legitimacy of a data-driven assault with targets and objectives.”
This ARI essay “examines how AI decision support systems have interacted with existing military doctrines, operational practices, and international humanitarian law to produce a civilian death toll that has outpaced other contemporary conflicts. The argument is not that AI caused this outcome, but that it has amplified existing failures, and in the process amplified the speed at which those failures translate into civilian deaths, and the obscuring of accountability behind the veneer of data-driven precision.”
Yes, Israeli drones and missiles are part of surgical attacks but the target is often not legitimate and those who die in the surgery room and around it are so so many that the whole metaphor of being surgical becomes just a blatant lie or part of the PR campaign.
11 May 2026 — This week marks the 78th anniversary of Nakba, the Catastrophe, which befell the Palestinians when about 750,000 of them were forced to leave or they fled in fear as Zionist militias carried out military operations against them with implicit orders to expel “the Arabs”. These likely unwritten orders embodied what Israeli historian Tom Segev called the spirit of the commander or what militia commanders believed to be their mission.
These 750,000 displaced Palestinians from Jaffa, from Haifa, and from hundreds of villages and towns are the ancestors of several million Palestinians who live in the diaspora many of them as refugees. Many of these live in Gaza to where the grandparents fled and where they have been subjected to a genocidal war by Israel since October 2023. Many also live in the West Bank where they are subject to state-condoned rising waves of violence by jewish supremacist settlers. Then two million Palestinians are citizens of Israel while other millions live in diaspora countries either as refugees or as citizens.
Segev is amazed at how the debate is centred on how many Palestinians left in 1948 and why they fled (Israel’s official version is that they fled voluntarily after calls by Arab countries, while the more factual version shows that most of them fled under Zionist pressures and also the normal fear among civilians to avoid battle fields). Regardless of how many left and why, they should have the RIGHT of RETURN to their homeland. Segev is surprised that this issue is not the centre of discussion. After all, Jews claim such a right relying on the fact that most jews lived in Palestine 3000 years ago. We are talking about Palestinians who lived there 78 years ago!!
Since 1948, the Palestinians have tried violence, politics, assimilation, negotiations and they have mostly failed, overpowered by the versatile and a powerful state of Israel and misled or very badly led by their leadership. The Palestinians are now cornered with largely bad options, some of them of their own doing and some the result of ideologically blinded or corrupt leadership.
Still between the River and the Sea where Israel exercises control as a state or as an occupying power, there are seven million Palestinians, probably equal to the number of jews in the same area. Short of finishing the Nakba incomplete work as Benny Morris, another Israeli historian alluded to (by expelling or ethnic cleansing the Palestinians who are non-citizens — about five million of them), Israel has no other option but to deepen a draconian apartheid-like system and hoping it will force Palestinians to leave “voluntarily” and slowly and to continue ignoring under smoke screens the legitimate discussion about the right of return for the Palestinians.
(photo below of a Palestinian family in Gaza sitting on the rubble of their home destroyed by Israeli bombing in 2024)
10 May 2026 — The statements and behaviour of certain white politicians reminds one strongly of what Winston Churchill said in 1937, in response to a question by Lord Peel on the rights of Jews to an area where Palestinians have lived for centuries:
“I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to those people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, or, at any rate, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place. I do not admit it. I do not think the Red Indians had any right to say, The American Continent belongs to us and we are not going to have any of these European settlers coming in here. They had not the right, nor had they the power.”
When the British Balfour declaration to give Jews a homeland in Palestine was issued, only 10% of the inhabitants of mandated Palestine were Jews most of whom had been for long time while Palestinians were about 90% . Still this majority was simply seen as dogs in a manger. Now when they are 50% of the inhabitants of this area between the river and the sea – all under effective Israeli control or occupation – they are probably and largely still treated like dogs in a manger.
