Gaza blog in bio

I'm following around a group of doctors back from Gaza as they meet with (typically indifferent) Senate offices. Sarah, a pediatrician: >"Is this a patient you treated?" >"Yes she was shot in the head." Editors interested in this story, reach out to me: gazablog2@gmail.com

Done w/ my 60p thesis, “Nationalism & the Palestinian Medical Profession Under the Mandate.” I tried to “restore to the study of Pal. med. history the centrality of politics,” esp bc this was marginalized by only book in Eng on Pal. doctors (by Isr. scholars). Reply & I’ll send

"Nothing will get better until Zionism is defeated—not until there’s a Palestinian state, until Zionism, as the ideological machine that produces Israel, that produces these policies of murder and genocide and destruction, is defeated" - @GhassanAbuSitt1

I spoke with @GhassanAbuSitt1 about health sovereignty and Palestine, for @proteanmag proteanmag.com/2026/04/02/hea…

Now up in @proteanmag: honored to publish Mary Turfah (@maryturfah) in conversation with Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah (@GhassanAbuSitt1) about Palestinian health sovereignty, the colonial hubris of Western "humanitarianism," and so much more. proteanmag.com/2026/04/02/hea…

New article: we traced functionality of all hospitals in the Gaza Strip from 7 Oct 2023 -- 31 Oct 2024. No hospitals had full functionality after 18 Oct 2023. At one point, close to 75% of the hospital system was nonfunctional. To read (no paywall): link.springer.com/article/10.118…

That moment when a British surgeon was giving testimony to the UK Parliament. He describes how IDF drones arrive right after airstrikes in Gaza, targeting and shooting the injured, including children,right on the spot.....

@brunellaism What’s the word limit over there?

my thesis is due next monday

I need to get in touch with Dr. John Mearsheimer. Who can help?

1) SAPs were NOT genuine liberalization You cite Billmeier & Nannicini (2013) claiming "liberalization boosted growth." But SAPs in Africa were asymmetric: they dismantled public institutions (marketing boards, development banks) WITHOUT creating functioning markets. Mkandawire & Soludo (Our Continent, Our Future, 1999) document SAPs prohibited industrial policy tools ALL developed countries used. This isn't "liberalization"; it's institutional demolition. The World Bank's own Adjustment in Africa (1994) admitted manufacturing declined. You can't claim success while prohibiting policies that built every rich country (Chang, Kicking Away the Ladder, 2002). 2) SAPs promoted authoritarianism while preaching "good governance" You blame "authoritarian regimes" for failed reforms. But SAPs actively weakened democratic capacity: civil service recruitment freezes and wage compression destroyed state capability - the foundation of good governance (Fukuyama, 2004). IMF/World Bank demanded these cuts as conditionality. Evans (Embedded Autonomy, 1995) showed state capacity requires skilled bureaucrats, exactly what SAPs eliminated. External actors demanded "good governance" while enforcing policies that destroyed human resources required. 3) African GDP data contradicts your narrative You claim "16% more income" from reform. But ACET and Monga (2023) show DRC's GDP per capita fell by HALF over 60 years; Nigeria barely grew; Côte d'Ivoire and Cameroon stagnated, all under SAPs. UNECA's African Alternative Framework (1989) predicted this. Manufacturing fell in Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania (Riddell, 1990). Your "success" stories (Barbados, Latin America) are NOT African cases. 40 years of stagnation across a continent means the model failed. CCL: your "evidence" comes from non-African cases and ignores institutional destruction. Real liberalization builds markets and the hard factual truth is that SAPs dismantled states.

Also, both the World Bank and the UN system need a serious decolonial reform and retraining. It is always striking to watch them keep prescribing from a posture of authority even when their own frameworks keep failing in practice. Decolonising development economics, and decolonising how it is actually practised, should be a core part of every development economics curriculum.

Exactly. A lot of Western “development economics” was never serious science in Africa; it was pretty much policy propaganda dressed up as expertise. For decades, Bretton Woods institutions financed and rewarded a class of economists whose real function was to rationalise deindustrialisation, fiscal retreat, trade dependency, and the preservation of Africa’s colonial place in the world economy: exporter of raw materials, importer of finished goods, permanently indebted, permanently lectured. That is why they pushed Structural Adjustment Programmes, and when that wreckage became impossible to defend, they rebranded the same anti-transformation logic through the SDGs: poverty management instead of structural change, indicators instead of industry, compassion theatre instead of power, production, and sovereignty. They are angry not because the critique is wrong, but because their intellectual bankruptcy is finally obvious.

sourced from the most rare and intimate moments that i will cherish forever. but to then see my family archive used as a prop in an israeli publication without the courtesy of a request from the author or the editors before its sudden publication was a shock. and then again,

@RashmanTheHorse I really expected to be blown away by Orientalism when I read it this summer. I wasn’t. Then I read “can the subaltern speak” last semester in a philosophy of history class and it was terrible.

Growing up is realizing that "Orientalists" were largely good and better than most of their postcolonial critics. Hoping Orientalism makes a big comeback.

There’s something really, really uncanny about being in a laundromat with the local news on in the background and hearing Trump say “We’re beating the shit out of Iran” —with the bleep, of course.

"I don't know what to tell you son. They are not human, they are monsters." It's been two days since I finished this book. Two days in which I've struggled to sleep, eat and simply think straight. How could we allow a genocide to be carried out in this day and age? Two and a half years of pure destruction, annihilation, humiliation, de-humanisation, hunger and death. I am so ashamed of living in this illusion of a "free world" when our brothers and sisters are suffering simply by being born in the place they were born. I wish things were in my control instead. I will be telling about the live testimonies of the genocide carried out to you and the people of Gaza, as I watched from behind my screen. Thank you @wasimsaidharbid for sharing the countless untold stories and I sincerely hope justice will prevail. The monsters attempted in dehumanising you but brought you more closer to our hearts than you'll ever know.

This excerpt from a 1982 interview with Jean Genet still rings true today

Nakba: Catastrophic Ideation and the Meanings of Disaster (1895–1948) —Adrien Zakar academic.oup.com/ahr/article/13… an important, indispensable, article. read it now it's open access.

Proud to plug preorders for @AkbarSAhmed’s book on Biden in Gaza. An excellent 1st draft of history ... but more importantly a comprehensive field guide to the ex-officials who should never be let near government ever again. barnesandnoble.com/w/crossing-the…

Bear with me for a personal story that sheds light on this 'antisemitic hate crime' issue. Last year I was invited to deliver a lecture on state violence to a conference. I used Gaza as the main example. A Jewish woman confonted me in the refreshments queue. She accused me of selecting an inappropriate example. I replied that I'm against Netanyahu's regime and I hope you are too. She said nothing and returned to her seat. That was it. Nothing more. The following morning, the conference organiser rang to inform me that I had been reported to the regional police service as the perpetrator of an antisemitic hate crime. NFA, of course, but the incident has still been registered and the university informed. So it's on the statistics. How often is this happening? Genuine question, because I really don't know.

Asked about dead Palestinian kids, Antony Blinken says Israel had trauma too. So much so, he says, that while the US could've cut aid to Israel, that apparently wouldn't have changed its behavior. He says cutting aid could've led to a broader war in the Middle East (unlike now).