Meriem Vergès

Politics & The Humanities

[Meriem Vergès @VergesMeriem]

When an alliance can only be sustained by keeping the public completely ignorant of its reality, it isn’t a strategic partnership—it is a cover-up.
The fact that seeing the ground conditions is enough to shatter a politician's worldview proves that the bipartisan consensus relies entirely on a multi-billion-dollar manufactured blindness.

[Meriem Vergès @VergesMeriem]

The admission that "no American would support this if they knew the details" is the ultimate indictment of Washington's political machine.
It exposes why billions of dollars are spent keeping the American public in the dark: because the reality of apartheid cannot survive the light of day.
When a sitting U.S. Congressman acknowledges that seeing the ground reality completely shatters the bipartisan consensus, he isn't just critiquing a foreign regime. He is admitting that the entire foreign policy establishment relies on a carefully manufactured, multi-billion-dollar lie to sustain itself.

[Trita Parsi @tparsi]

MUST READ!

Congressman @RoKhanna after visiting Israel and Palestine:

“In Palestine, I felt first as someone who was brown,” he said. “We really saw the apartheidlike conditions, the inequality.”

He added: “No American would support this if they knew the details of what was going on here.”

https://t.co/PRor7hF8ux

[Kegham Balian @kbalian90]

BREAKING: U.S Democratic Representative Ro Khanna has become the first American congressman in history to be detained by Israeli settlers while on a visit to the West Bank.

[Ro Khanna @RoKhanna]

Israeli settlers, brandishing American made M4s, detained me & other Americans on my trip to Palestine.

When the IDF arrived, they sided with the settlers & continued our detention.

They made a huge mistake.

You will be hearing more soon. https://t.co/rZw8bRAn64

[Al Mayadeen English @MayadeenEnglish]

US Representative Ro Khanna stated that he was held by armed Israeli settlers carrying US-made rifles during a trip to the West Bank during the past week.

In a Thursday interview with Reuters, Khanna recounted an incident from the previous day in the southern West Bank, a region plagued by Israeli settler violence. He explained that a group of settlers carrying M4 rifles surrounded his delegation's vehicle.

"We were at a village that Israeli settlers had destroyed, they had destroyed the school, they had destroyed that village, and we were just looking at it," Khanna noted.

"And these hoodlums come in with machine guns, M4, an American-made machine gun, and they detain us. They block off the road. And then they call the IDF and the IDF is on their side, not on the side of the Americans," the lawmaker added, speaking on the role of the Israeli military.

According to delegation member and congressional aide Cameron Kasky, the group was held for over an hour, prompting them to contact the US Embassy in al-Quds for emergency assistance. Kasky added that the situation was eventually resolved when a contingent of officers, appearing to be police, stepped in and secured their release.

#Palestine #WestBank #UnitedStates #RoKhanna #AlMayadeen

[Chris Hedges @ChrisLynnHedges]

Beyond revealing the depravity of the ruling class, the genocide in Gaza has unveiled the true inner workings of the global financial order — as regular people continue to struggle, war concentrates wealth into the hands of the transnational oligarchs running the world, providing them pretexts to develop technology that increases their capacity to control disobedient populations and secure their own class interests.

Watch my full interview with @FranceskAlbs at the link below.

[Meriem Vergès @VergesMeriem]

The systematic leveling of civilian homes isn't collateral damage—it is the deliberate engineering of an unlivable reality.
When over 65 towns are subjected to calculated, remote demolition to ensure a population can never return, it moves past standard warfare. This is the permanent liquidation of a geography, designed to delete a society from its own soil.

[Meriem Vergès @VergesMeriem]

The definition of genocide isn’t an academic abstraction—it is a diagnostic tool for exactly what we are witnessing in Khiam and Debbine.
When over 65 towns are systematically leveled, the military objective isn’t the elimination of a militant threat; it is the permanent liquidation of a geography. This is the calculated engineering of an unlivable reality, designed explicitly to ensure an indigenous population can never return to their ancestral soil.
You don't detonate thousands of civilian homes and critical infrastructure to win a war. You do it to delete a society from history.

[courtneybonneauimages @cbonneauimages]

Genocide is defined under Article II of the 1948 UN Genocide Convention as any act committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group. One of the five acts is “deliberately imposing destructive life conditions.”

Look at these photos of what is left of Khiam and Debbine. Remember that more than 65 towns and villages in Lebanon are still under Israeli occupation and are still undergoing daily illegal civilian home and infrastructure demolition.

These are acts of genocide.

[The Resonance @Partisan_12]

Professor Norman Finkelstein exposes Israel's dark reality:

“The problem is not only that Netanyahu is a homicidal maniac, it's a nation of homicidal maniacs.”

He cites a typical liberal israeli elite Benny Morris repeatedly urging nuclear strikes on Iran if America won't act.

[מסתכלים לכיבוש בעיניים @Mistaclim]

Another terrorist attack. An armed terrorist militia invaded a Palestinian home in Beitillu, Wadi al-Zarqa, and threatened the residents with weapons. The stated goal is expulsion and takeover. The weapons are a donation from the state. The military's response to the incident is
(as usual) imposing a curfew on the village and arresting the Palestinians.
The terrorists are rewarded, the victims are punished. That's how it is in the apartheid state.

[Jalal 𓂆 @JalalAK_jojo]

Breaking: Ongoing Jewish Terror in Al-Mughayyer: Israeli Occupation Forces are trying to force open the gate of Abu Atta's house to allow Jewish Settlers to go inside and possibly burn and attack residents. There are elderly and infants in the house.

[sarah @sahouraxo]

Israel executed Ahmad in Gaza today.

A single bullet to the head.

He wasn’t a combatant.
He was a World Central Kitchen worker — carrying humanitarian aid.

A father of two.
His youngest child is just one month old.

[Meriem Vergès @VergesMeriem]

Transnational plunder dressed up as "luxury development."
Carving up a protected ecosystem using fraudulent titles and frozen drug money isn't progress—it's colonization. This is precisely why the Flamingo Revolution is taking over Tirana. The billionaires get a pristine playground; the locals get their heritage erased.

[Meriem Vergès @VergesMeriem]

This isn't just a luxury venture; it’s transnational plunder.
The anti-corruption prosecution service investigating "forged deeds" on a protected coastline exposes the absolute rot. Jared Kushner’s oasis is being built on stolen ancestral land and the millions of a drug laundering probe.
Tirana's "Flamingo Revolution" isn't just about wetlands—it's a rebellion against global elites who treat sovereignty as a clearance sale. When the state protects oligarchs over its people, the resort isn't a paradise, but a monument to corruption.

[Al Jazeera English @AJEnglish]

Albania’s anticorruption prosecution service is investigating whether the deeds to a stretch of protected coastline earmarked for a Jared Kushner-backed resort were forged, according to case files reviewed by the Reuters news agency https://t.co/PPmW9WiZD9

[Thomas Massie @RepThomasMassie]

Believe the survivors of USS Liberty.

Our own government, on orders from President Johnson and Sec Def McNamara, left them for over half a day to sink into the briny deep after Israel rocketed, machine gunned, napalmed, and torpedoed the clearly marked American ship.

[Rep. Summer Lee @RepSummerLee]

Somehow there's always money to expand the Pentagon and bankroll Israel's assault on Gaza. But when it comes to healthcare, education, or helping working people, we're told there's nothing left.

America's priorities are failing people here and abroad.

[Marco Foster @MarcoFoster_]

Claire Valdez: “We have to end all aid to Isarel. Israel is clearly and openly violating international law, has been committing a genocide now for almost three years. Our tax dollars should not be going to uphold genocide, apartheid, occupation. Point blank. I don’t see a difference between offensive and defensive weaponry. All of that money is going toward enabling a state that is committing genocide”

[Meriem Vergès @VergesMeriem]

This isn't just a crime; it’s regime-sanctioned degradation. By binding an elderly man on his own soil, the perpetrator attempts a total theft of human dignity—an act of psychological warfare meant to signal that no Palestinian is safe.

But the true rot lies in the background. Uniformed soldiers standing guard is the system functioning exactly as intended. Their passive observation serves as a violent guarantee: it ensures the victim cannot resist, legalizes the sadism, and proves that when authority protects the abuser, the law itself becomes the weapon.

[Meriem Vergès @VergesMeriem]

This isn't just a crime; it’s regime-sanctioned degradation. By binding an elderly man on his own soil, the perpetrator attempts a total theft of human dignity—an act of psychological warfare meant to signal that no Palestinian is safe.

But the true rot lies in the background. Uniformed soldiers standing guard is the system functioning exactly as intended. Their passive observation serves as a violent guarantee: it ensures the victim cannot resist, legalizes the sadism, and proves that when authority protects the abuser, the law itself becomes the weapon.

[MUSAFIR @MusafirNafar]

WHAT THE ACTUAL HELL?

A Palestinian farmer tending his land in the occupied West Bank refused to leave for an armed Israeli settler.

So the settler took him hostage, blindfolded and humiliated him while IDF soldiers stood by, guarding and protecting the abuser.

[Meriem Vergès @VergesMeriem]

This is one of the most profoundly devastating things I have ever read. You have not lost your humanity—the very fact that your heart is in pieces, that you refuse to become numb, is proof that your humanity is entirely intact.

You have stood on the front lines of hell to ensure the world cannot claim ignorance. Thank you for witnessing. Thank you for refusing to look away.

Stepping away to mourn isn't a retreat; it is a sacred necessity. Take all the time you need to tend to the ruins. You have carried so much for the world; let us hold this devastating weight for you now.

[courtneybonneauimages @cbonneauimages]

My out of office message:

The past two years have been marked by an accumulation of losses. Loved ones. Colleagues. Friends. People deliberately targeted and killed by the Israeli army. I learned that grief does not arrive as a sequence of discrete events; it accrues. It settles into my body until I start to wonder not only what has been lost, but what remains.

There are moments when I suspect I have lost some part of my own humanity simply by witnessing so much death. I have watched people die in front of me in ways that resist description. I have lived inside a genocide as it unfolded, and I have watched another continue in Gaza, mediated through the relentless images on a tiny screen in my pocket that refuses to yield. The 24 hour image has dissolved the boundary between proximity and spectatorship. We can leave the scene, but the scene does not leave us.

Some images insist on permanence. On more than one occasion, I have watched paramedics carry bags containing the dismembered remains of children. There are sights that do not become memories because they never cease to be present. They have reorganized my inner life.

How much grief can a human being contain before it alters the architecture of the self?

I have been chased by a Merkava tank. A grenade has been thrown at me. Israeli quadcopters have circled overhead as instruments of intimidation. Sound bombs have become part of the atmosphere. Israeli snipers have opened fire on me eight times, most recently last Monday, while a group of us filmed the demolition of homes in Haddatha. Survival, repeated often enough stops feeling like triumph and just, almost mundanely, becomes another condition of witnessing.

This week brought another loss, one I had neither anticipated nor prepared myself to absorb. Its force has surprised me. Maybe grief does not become easier through repetition. Maybe each loss discovers a new vulnerability. For the next few days, I will step away from the field. Not because the work has become less necessary, but because mourning, too, demands its own uncompromising attention. My heart is in pieces.

آخر سنتين من حياتي كانوا تراكم مستمر للخسارات. أحبّة. زملاء. أصحاب. ناس انقصفوا وانقتلوا عن قصد على إيد الجيش الإسرائيلي. تعلّمت إنو الحزن ما بيجي كحادثة وحدة بتنتهي. بيتراكم. بيسكن بالجسد، لدرجة إنك بتبلّش تتساءل مش بس شو اللي خسرته، بل شو اللي بعده باقي منك.

في لحظات بحسّ إنّي خسرت جزء من إنسانيتي، بس لأنّي شهدت كل هالقدر من الموت. شفت ناس يموتوا قدّامي بطرق ما بتوصفها الكلمات. عشت على مقربة من إبادة جماعية وهي عم تصير، وشفت إبادة تانية مستمرّة بغزة، منقولة إليّ عبر شاشة ما بتطفي، شاشة ما بتترك مجال لوهم إنو في مسافة بتحميك. الصورة المستمرة على مدار أربع وعشرين ساعة ألغت الفرق بين إنك تكون قريب من الحدث أو مجرد متفرّج عليه. فيك تترك المكان، بس المكان ما بيتركك.

في صور بتفرض حالها إلى الأبد. أكتر من مرة شفت مسعفين حاملين أكياس فيها أشلاء أطفال. في مشاهد ما بتتحوّل إلى ذكريات، لأنّها ما بتغيب أصلًا. بتضلّ حاضرة، وبتعيد ترتيب العالم اللي جوّاتك.

قدّيش في إنسان يتحمّل حزن قبل ما يغيّر الحزن شكل روحه؟

ركضت قدّام دبابة ميركافا وهي عم تلاحقني. انرمت عليّ قنبلة. طائرات الكوادكوبتر الإسرائيلية ظلّت تحوم فوق راسي كوسيلة ترهيب. القنابل الصوتية صارت جزء من الهواء اللي منتنفّسه. والقنّاصة الإسرائيليون أطلقوا النار عليّ ثماني مرات، آخرها الاثنين الماضي، بينما كنّا مجموعة منّا عم نصوّر هدم البيوت بحَدّاثا. لما البقاء على قيد الحياة بيتكرّر مرارًا، ما بعود يُشبه الانتصار. بيصير مجرد شرط إضافي من شروط الشهادة على ما يجري.

وهالأسبوع حمل خسارة جديدة، خسارة ما كنت متوقّعها، ولا كنت مهيّأ استوعبها. وقعها عليّ كان أقسى ممّا تصوّرت. يمكن الحزن ما بيصير أخفّ مع التكرار. ويمكن كل خسارة بتكتشف نقطة ضعف جديدة فينا. لهيك رح ابتعد عن الميدان كم يوم، مش لأنّ الشغل صار أقلّ ضرورة، بل لأنّ الحداد، هو كمان، بيطالب بحقه الكامل، ومن دون أي مساومة.