When you google Shai Davidai's name in Hebrew, the first article has all sorts of fascinating things: newmedia.calcalist.co.il/magazine-03-08… His parents are billionaires; and his grandfather was invlved in the Entebbe operation led by Netanyahu's brother.

Just watched the film on a flight and was blown away. I think Blanchett is right yhat the film is a rorschach test.

https://twitter.com/cakeblanchett_/status/1652282239433191426

I have to admit that I always mix up Blanchett with Tilda Swinton, because frankly they are both so divine.

A man in a hot air balloon realized he was lost. He reduced altitude and spotted a man below. He descended a bit more and shouted: "'Excuse me, can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago but I don't know where I am". The man below replied "You're in a hot air balloon hovering approximately 30 feet above the ground. You're between 40 and 41 degrees north latitude and between 59 and 60 degrees west longitude".

Reading this glorious book this afternoon... So much research worn so lightly and so intimately. And the connections made betwwen country and city, England and empire, industry and agriculture. So beautifully written too. I know the way i am putting the book face down with a cracked spine is chaotic evil and will stress bibliophiles out. Sorry.

The first name on this list is Oleg Deripaska, on whose yacht Peter Mandelson partied and on whose behalf Tories lobbied the US to remove THEIR sanctions on him.

bbc.co.uk/news/60524666 "The British emissary for Deripaska’s companies [is] Lord Barker of Battle, a protégé of David Cameron, the former prime minister of Britain. Also involved are lobbyists, law firms, public relations experts, a former US senator" etc

nytimes.com/2018/11/04/wor…

This beautiful garden was nurtured by Mahmoud Salhiyeh, whose house in Shaykh Jarrah neighbourhood of Jerusalem was destroyed by the Israeli government. This is of course a war crime, given that East Jerusalem is occupied territory. As @Mandymaryturner writers, "Mahmoud was a master gardener, designing and tending to gardens in Jerusalem and further afield, as well as growing plants in his centre that people came from all around to buy."

When Palestinians talked about their memories of the 1948 Tantoura massacre, their oral history was dismissed as unreliable (by no less than Benny Morris). But now that Israeli veterans confess, we can all believe it.

https://twitter.com/Akevot/status/1484251052748808194

Can i just put in a word for two extraordinary oral histories of the Nakba that predated the New Historians: Nafiz Nazzal's groundbreaking 1970s account: palestine-studies.org/en/node/1649387

So many things are so FUCKED up about this OfS proposals: A) success in education is measured by producing a bunch of worker bees; B) this process does not take account of the students' social background or which part of the country they live/work... 1/

https://twitter.com/timeshighered/status/1484061886161342468

C) No understanding of how university courses work AT ALL (this country has so much standards-monitoring we are all drowning in oceans of red tape); D) NO UNDERSTANDING WHATSOEVER of how business cycles or labour markets work which is perfect for a Tory government... 2/

I lived in the city of Mashhad in December 1979. The revolution had only just triumphed. Many of our friends were leaving Iran. Then we heard about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Even with the monumental transformation of the revolution, we knew that the Soviet invasion 1/ ... was significant. I remember two things very vividly from that moment: first that the April 1980 US hostage rescue attempt (which ended up in a catastrophe in Tabas, 350 miles away from Mashhad)... 2/

I've been thinking about the Israeli Foreign Ministry calling the continuing Nakba in Shaikh Jarrah "a real estate dispute". Setting aside its derisive attempt at diminishing the violence of Israeli security apparatuses (including settlers) & belittling Palestinian resistance 1/ the moniker is revealing. This is what settler colonialism does: it turns land, a place of living and loving, a sacred milieu, one to which the indigenous inhabitants have an intimate connection into *property*. 2/

This is an incredible piece of investigative journalism. Some choice stuff. Kurdish special operations forces who are very close to US special operations forces were involved in the assassination: news.yahoo.com/conspiracy-is-… Israelis were involved in tracking Soleimani's telecommunications even as he changed phones three times (sounds to me like not just electronic intel gathering, but also human involvement)

Just been reading elements of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill and the bits that jump out of the House of Commons summary are horrifically authoritarian: 1/ It allows for bolstering of the police federation by allowing volunteer police to join the Federation. We know what this has meant in the context of the US: super-right-wing organisations that are accountable to no one. 2/

When the FinCel leaks of financial papers happened, it became clear that the UK corporate registration and regulation structures are not fit for purpose. The papers showed that the US treasury was as concerned about companies registered with Companies House as any other. 1/ Interestingly, in that MASSIVE defence bill that was passed just before Christmas, the US passed a provision than bans anonymous shell companies from registration in the US. 2/ washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2020…

A lot of questions about abandoned ships. The ILO maintains a database. The reason they do is because abandoned ships are often abandoned because unscrupulous owners don't want to pay the wages of the crew: ilo.org/dyn/seafarers/… In so many cases, the crew remain on the ship for months after abandonment, at the mercy of humanitarian organisations (often the Mission to Seafarers), because if they leave the ship, they forfeit their wages.

I've been reading all the stuff about how US/Israeli "restraining" methods diffused (which caused the downfall of RLB). It'ss important to recognise that there is never one direction of travel in these processes of diffusing counterinsurgency/pacification/'restraining' methods.1/ These trainings and knowledge exchange processes are circular. Israeli security forces learned everything they did from the British (mostly); and then trained everyone else but a bit more ramped up (e.g. Iran's SAVAK). 2/

Where are the hard-hitting analyses that interrogate the fundaments of university financing/budgets the way they have the ridiculous negative pricing of oil (as a mixture of material failure & fantastical financialisation)? When a uni says they have no money what do they mean? if we understand the way past expenditures are amortised and future expenditures/costs/profits are accounted for, how do we trust unis saying "we don't have money" as anything other than offering speculative numbers which a bunch of uni officials have reported just because.

Interesting analysis about the elections. "There was no real groundswell of support for Boris Johnson [and Tories]. They improved their share of the vote by less than 2% overall, losing over a million Remainers but gaining more Leave voters. " 1/ dataprax.is/tory-landslide… The Tories did well by taking votes from the Brexit party. So that means that Farage (i.e. a right-wing xenophobe and fraudster who shorted the market on the EU Ref) was the kingmaker 2/

Pretty harrowing piece about how micro-loans conveniently available via mobile apps (lauded as the second coming of progress by some people) are actually drowning Kenyans in debt. 1/
bostonreview.net/class-inequali… For some, these mobile apps are supposed to take the place of real infrastructures. Well they don't. They are a one-way route to accumulating debt. 2/

Israel was from the start a settler colonial project and like all settler colonial projects it was predicated on racist hierarchies, acting like a "a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism" (Herzl)... 1/ at the same time that many of the early settlers of the Yishuv had escaped pogroms in Eastern Europe. 2/