"There is something historically inevitable in this. Immigration from countries and backgrounds against which the US has waged military and ideological war eventually yields not a cowed assimilation, but a sort of political cosmopolitanism – kryptonite for American exceptionalism."

Zohran Mamdani after the ceremony to mark the 25th anniversary of the September 11 2001 attacks in New York, 11 September 2026. Photograph: Adam Gray/Reuters

 

The US right still paints Muslims as the ‘enemy’. But they are fighting for a brighter future for Americans

Progressive politicians such as Zohran Mamdani offer answers to the bitter post-9/11 legacy of failures at home and abroad 

Nesrine Malik

Mon 14 Sep 2026

Twenty-five years after 9/11, two pieces of journalism, describing two different phenomena in contemporary New York, tell us a great deal about a city, and indeed a world, caught between two eras. In one, New York Magazine dives into “Habibi City”, a New York where a “cultural shift is underway, led by a generation of New Yorkers coming into its own”. This new generation is labelled as originating in “SWANA” – south-west Asia and north Africa, a region that “includes countries from Palestine to Iran to Sudan”. In the other, Vanity Fair describes calls for Zohran Mamdani to not attend the 9/11 memorial ceremony as partly founded in “inchoate, emotional” impulses, that see “the city’s first Muslim mayor as a stand-in for the 19 Muslims who hijacked four planes and turned them into deadly weapons, part of the ‘them’ who attacked ‘us’.”

Together they capture what has changed over a generation, and what remains stubbornly the same. Members of a diaspora of Muslim background are indeed breaking through and accumulating, as New York Magazine says, “clout”. They are no longer simply a fixture of bodegas and halal carts, but of Saturday Night Live, upmarket dining, entertainment and politics too. Mamdani is both the expression of that cohort and the catalyst of its recognition as an emerging force. They care deeply for their local communities but also for those in Gaza and beyond.

I use the descriptor “of Muslim background” rather than “Muslim” because this diasporic identity is a diverse one that is rooted in a religion but expands to encompass everyone from the practising to those for whom Islam is a cultural totem.The capaciousness of this heritage is demonstrable in its integration – without compromise – into mainstream American society. Mamdani and the Democratic Senate nominee for Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, recuse themselves from the rote fealty to American glory and dare to point out both US support for Israel and the calamitous outcomes of the “war on terror” in the Middle East.

This is the result of this new generation of Americans coming from an immigrant background that has cultivated a less parochial and supremacist view of the US. There is something historically inevitable in this. Immigration from countries and backgrounds against which the US has waged military and ideological war eventually yields not a cowed assimilation, but a sort of political cosmopolitanism – kryptonite for American exceptionalism.... READ MORE   https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/sep/14/9-11-anniversary-islamophobia-us-politics-zohran-mamdani

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Israeli ministers keep telling everyone their brutal plans – so why doesn’t the world take them seriously? Schemes to forcibly remove Palestinians from Gaza are not being promoted by fringe voices. But the international community continues to avert its eyes

Nesrine Malik in The Guardian 

The gap between what is being inflicted on Palestinians and the appropriate reaction on the part of the international community has always been vast. But now it yawns so wide that it swallows reality itself. As arms export licences for Israel from states such as Germany surge, talk of harsher measures and sanctions on the part of other European countries remains talk. People continue to be killed in Gaza, Palestinian families remain besieged in the West Bank, and the Israeli political right has been removing all doubt that these violations are intentional, by telling the world of its hopes and plans.

A sample from only the past few days. On Thursday, Israel’s far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, detailed a scheme for the illegal ethnic cleansing of all Palestinians from the Gaza Strip. He also posted an AI-generated video, now deleted, of Palestinian men entering a conveyor belt into detention, emerging emaciated and tearful. Also a few days ago, the defence minister, Israel Katz, stated that the country was “organised and prepared” to expel Palestinians from Gaza “by every way possible”.

This macabre theatre continues to unfold, its performances less plausible by the day. The Board of Peace promises Gaza will be “redeveloped for the benefit” of its people, while the notion that those same Palestinians in Gaza cannot be allowed to thrive is expressed by Israeli politicians with consistency and a frequency that makes a mockery of the declarations. Last month, the former head of Israel’s national security council, Giora Eiland, pointed out the fact that Israel’s acceptance of Donald Trump’s 15-point plan was a matter of temporary military tactics, rather than long-term peace. “Israel has no interest in Gaza being rebuilt, it’s better for us that it be destroyed for generations to come,” he said... READ MORE https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/sep/07/israeli-ministers-brutal-plans-palestinians-gaza

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In Israel’s prisons, torture and death have become a norm that it barely tries to hide: The suffering of Dr Hussam Abu Safiya is no isolated case. The abuse of Palestinian detainees is happening in plain sight, yet nothing changes

A rally in Tel Aviv calling for the release of detained Palestinian doctor Hussam Abu Safiya, 6 July 2026. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images

Nesrine Malik in The Guardian  

Mon 13 Jul 2026 01.00 EDT

“This is the end. I don’t see myself surviving. They brought me here to kill me.” These were the words of Dr Hussam Abu Safiya to his lawyer earlier this month. Abu Safiya was the director of the Kamal Adwan hospital in northern Gaza. Eighteen months ago he was seized by Israeli forces and has since been held without charge or trial. He reports being struck with hammers and batons, daily beatings and loss of consciousness. The latest images of him show a much gaunter man than the one who had been the voice of besieged healthcare workers in Gaza, doing their jobs in impossible circumstances.

In June, Abu Safiya was transferred to Rakefet prison, an underground facility first built to hold senior organised crime figures, then closed on the grounds that it was inhumane. It was reopened in late 2023 by the far-right national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. Abu Safiya and the other Palestinian prisoners there never see daylight, a violation of the Geneva conventions. Across the Palestinian territories and Israel, about 3,500 prisoners like him are held under “administrative detention” that can be renewed every six months, indefinitely. Nearly 200 of them are children. Once a Palestinian is detained under these rules, they are essentially abducted by the state.

“Real hell” is what is experienced once detained. Ali al-Samoudi, a Palestinian journalist, was released earlier this year, unrecognisable. He had lost 60kg, about half of his body weight. “Prison today is hell in every sense of the word,” he told CNN. “Everything they practised with us was punishment and revenge.”

The scale of abuse, torture and death in Israeli prisons is well documented... READ MORE https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jul/13/israel-prison-torture-death-hussam-abu-safiya-palestine

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"For ease and speed, we are degrading our ability to connect and to organise our societies. We must assert our trust in humans over machines" Nesrine Malik

 OpinionAI (artificial intelligence)

AI is devoid of meaning and humanity. That’s why its vapid voice suits this political moment

Nesrine Malik

 

Mon 1 Jun 2026 01.00 EDT

Here is a nightmare scenario for you. You are writing a book about how AI reshapes reality. You start using it as a research partner, confident that you are applying the right hygiene by not letting it actually write a sentence of the book. You think you’ll be careful, you will double check everything. And then your book comes out and it appears that it includes more than a half dozen misattributed or fake quotes. Steven Rosenbaum, the unfortunate writer, acknowledged that sometimes the output of AI was “staggeringly wrong”, but still, errors crept in.

There are others. A Commonwealth prize-winning short story became engulfed in claims that it carried the hallmarks of AI. And every time I see a story of a journalist caught out by fake AI quotes during research, I cross myself – there but for the grace of God go I. But to make sure it is not left up to grace alone, I never touch the thing. When AI results pop up as the default in a search engine, I reject them, rebuke them, as if they contained a dark sorcery that would through mere engagement creep into my synapses and take control.

This monastic, almost paranoid approach is not only because AI is a risky and unreliable research tool. It is a voice, a tone, a frequency. AI language haunts me in a million similar tinny chants from customer care to social media posts to press releases. I worry even as I write this column that it might sound like AI. That I have somehow through relentless exposure assimilated its blandness and excess. Its short declarative sentences. Its advertorial narration. Its informal mimicry of personhood. Hi there! Hope all is well. I thought you might be interested in a column about AI, an issue that is increasingly occupying thought leaders and writers. Would you like to learn more?

What are we losing in this fire? Writing is not just about rendering thoughts through words in a certain style: analysis, literary fiction, storytelling. It is about the particular alchemy of a single individual drawing on their own unique profile to construct an idea. It is about the way their brain works, the quirks they have picked up along the way, their politics, their history, their relationships, the very way they see the world. You can produce a thousand Dickenses and Rumis through AI, but you can’t create a new iconic writer. You can only draw on the chorus of styles that already exist. You can only derive, never create.

And then there is the atrophy. The loss of the ability to struggle for a word, to craft a verbal image. I could save precious minutes as a deadline approaches and ask AI to cook me up a nice line, or I could linger and conceptualise that resisting AI writing feels like trying not to inhale an airborne virus. It might not be a great simile, but it’s mine goddamit. And it helps me, in writing, to consolidate what I am thinking. Whether it’s a political text or an email, leaning on AI for everything from research to writing severs the connection between feeling and expression. It drains the colour from everything and suffocates one’s ability to channel and meet and be surprised by what is knocking about in your head. When tech becomes about reducing labour in every way, it ends up becoming an inhibitor of actual consciousness. Entirely unsurprising research shows that leaning on LLMs may reduce brain engagement.

Even more depressing is how well suited this cauterisation of the self is to the political moment, one of a glut of content and bad information. AI is rampant on social media, where accounts authoritatively post long texts on everything from the wars in the Middle East to dramatic personal experiences that didn’t happen in a sort of reality fan-fiction. And in politics, where... READ MORE  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jun/01/ai-meaning-humanity-political-moment-trust-humans-over-machines

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"The first time I heard a song by Saint Levant, only three years ago, was in a world that does not exist any more. Gaza’s buildings were intact, as were its schools and roads and markets and mosques. My home city of Khartoum in Sudan was standing, as it had for centuries. Back then, I could scroll for fun, not in dread. I could stumble, say, in late 2022, upon an arresting clip on TikTok of a song by an Arab artist with a pun for a name..." Nesrine Malik

Palestinian musician Saint Levant performing at Les Francofolies, Paris, July 2025.

Photograph: Sadaka Edmond/SIPA/Shutterstock

Saint Levant: the pop star from Gaza caught between passionate fandom and bitter disapproval

His detractors say he shouldn’t be making pop music in times of war and destruction. His millions of fans say he has given them permission to celebrate their culture and their cause

By Nesrine Malik

Tue 26 May 2026 00.00 EDT

The first time I heard a song by Saint Levant, only three years ago, was in a world that does not exist any more. Gaza’s buildings were intact, as were its schools and roads and markets and mosques. My home city of Khartoum in Sudan was standing, as it had for centuries. Back then, I could scroll for fun, not in dread. I could stumble, say, in late 2022, upon an arresting clip on TikTok of a song by an Arab artist with a pun for a name; Saint Levant, a play on Saint Laurent – the icon of western style had been Arabised in homage to the Middle East’s Levant region.

I began to see the same song all over my social media. In the video, Saint Levant, then 22, is in a white vest and brown trousers. A gold pendant chain dangles on his chest, a tattoo encircles his left arm. He starts by rapping in English, telling the woman he is wooing that “he’s not toxic, he’s broken baby”. And then, the twist, as he switches to Arabic, then French, then English again. Like a wholesome boy next door, he tells her to send his regards to her grandmother and her brother. Then says that he wants to make her forget about her ex, he wants her overthinking all her texts... READ MORE  https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/may/26/saint-levant-the-pop-star-from-gaza-caught-between-passionate-fandom-and-bitter-disapproval

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"It’s not just Gaza. From the West Bank to Syria and Lebanon, Israel’s onslaught continues- Broken ceasefires, bombing, ground incursions and mounting deaths: Israeli imperialism is now expanding across the region" Nesrine Malik

It is clear now that the ceasefire in Gaza is only a “reducefire”. The onslaught continues. There are near-daily attacks on the territory. On a single day at the end of October, almost 100 Palestinians were killed. On 19 November, 32 were killed. On 23 November, 21. And on it goes. Since the ceasefire, more than 300 have been killed and almost 1,000 injured. Those numbers will rise. The real shift is that the ceasefire has reduced global attention and scrutiny. Meanwhile, Israel’s emerging blueprint becomes clearer: bloody domination not only in Gaza, but across Palestine and the wider region.

A “dangerous illusion that life in Gaza is returning to normal”, is how Amnesty International’s secretary general, Agnès Callamard, described this post-ceasefire period. Israeli authorities have reduced attacks and allowed some aid into Gaza, she said, but “the world must not be fooled. Israel’s genocide is not over.” Not a single hospital in Gaza has returned to being fully operational. The onset of rain and cooling weather has left thousands exposed in dilapidated tents. Since the ceasefire on 10 October, almost 6,500 tonnes of UN-coordinated relief materials have been denied entry into Gaza by Israeli authorities. According to Oxfam, in the two weeks after the ceasefire alone, shipments of water, food, tents and medical supplies from 17 international NGOs were denied.

The result is that a population whose homes, livelihoods and stable shelter have been eliminated still are not allowed to secure safer tents or adequate food. Israeli authorities hold people in Gaza in a painful purgatory, continuing collective punishment, preventing the conditions for a normal life from emerging and establishing Israel as sole unaccountable overlord, with unlimited power over the people of the territory.

Gaza is at the sharp end of an expansion of Israeli imperialism, one that stretches to the West Bank and beyond.... READ MORE  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/dec/01/gaza-west-bank-syria-lebanon-israel-ceasefire

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Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist and the author of We Need New Stories: Challenging the Toxic Myths Behind Our Age of Discontent

Gaza’s journalists are talented, professional and dignified. That’s why Israel targets them- Nesrine Malik in The Guardian

A marcher holds a photo of slain Al Jazeera journalist Anas al-Sharif, as pro-Palestinian protesters in New York City condemn the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, 16 August 2025. Photograph: Stephanie Keith/Getty Images

Recent killings have dazed the world and provoked condemnation. But little is said about the calibre of Palestinian journalism

Nesrine Malik

Mon 18 Aug 2025 02.00 EDT

Last modified on Mon 18 Aug 2025 03.08 EDT

The first time I met Al Jazeera’s Gaza team lead, Tamer Almisshal, was in July last year. His team had already buried two journalists, Hamza al-Dahdouh and Samer Abu Daqqa. The rest, he told me, were hungry. They were also dealing with trying to get hold of protective gear, threats from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the killing of family members. Ismail al-Ghoul hadn’t seen his wife and child in months and was missing them intensely. Hossam Shabat, Mohammed Qraiqea and Anas al-Sharif were asking for time to secure food in the morning before they could start reporting. Today, they are all dead.

I spoke with various members of the Gaza team while writing a profile of Gaza’s veteran reporter Wael al-Dahdouh, who lost his wife, three of his children and grandson. All spoke of their work as a duty that needed to be carried out despite the risks. Three members of that team have since been killed in a chain of assassinations. Each time I sent condolences, the response was always that the coverage would not cease. “We are continuing,” the Gaza editor told me last week, after he lost his entire Gaza City team in the targeted strike that claimed the lives of Sharif, Mohammed Nofal, Ibrahim Thaher and Qraiqea. “We will not betray their message, or their last wishes.”

As these killings dazed the world – and the response to them became mired in unproven and in some cases risibly implausible claims that some of these journalists were militants – little has been said about the calibre of journalism in Gaza. How fluent, articulate and poised its journalists are under impossible circumstances. How much they manage to capture horrific events and pain on a daily basis, in a journalistic Arabic that they have perfected to an art, while maintaining a professional, collected presence on camera. How much they manage to keep their cool. I struggled often to translate their words into English, so rich and expansive is their expression. Even Sharif’s final message, a text for the ages, loses some of its power in translation. In it, he addresses those who “choked” our breath, but the word he uses is closer to “besieged” – evoking not just physical asphyxiation but the silencing of a surveilled people’s voice.

What strikes me when I speak with journalists in and from Gaza is how evangelical and heartbreakingly idealistic they are; how much journalism to them was a duty even if it meant certain death. All who have been killed had a choice... READ MORE https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/aug/18/israel-gaza-war-journalist-killed-safety-al-jazeera

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