In seeking to clamp down on its own armed forces, Israel have accidentally exposed far more to the world than they ever intended! Right, so Israel keeps telling us it has the most moral army on Earth, and yet here we are: the government has had to build an AI censor just to stop that same army posting what it actually does. If your troops are as saintly as you claim, you don’t need a machine scanning their TikToks in real time. But soldiers have been filming everything — raids, smashed homes, detainees, the lot — and instead of asking why the footage looks like this, Israel’s answer has been to deploy Morpheus, an algorithm already watching more than forty thousand soldiers, with plans to cover the entire force. You don’t gag your own troops because they’re too moral. You gag them because the record they’ve created is a threat — and the state knows it. Right, so after months of soldiers filming themselves in Gaza, filming detainees, filming destruction, filming taunts, filming things no state comfortable in its own narrative would ever want surfaced if we’re honest, we’ve all seen the footage I’m sure, Israel has decided the only way to survive the truth is to erase the evidence record it’s own forces keep adding to. It has built an AI machine called Morpheus, very much blue pill or red pill territory and the purpose of that system is not to fight an enemy or defend a population. It is to track what Israeli soldiers say and show online and stop the world from seeing what they have already lived. If the state believed its own rhetoric about discipline, morality and restraint, it would not need Morpheus. It would welcome the footage. It would point to it as proof of everything it claims. The fact that Israel has built a tool to monitor tens of thousands of soldiers in real time tells you immediately that the government knows exactly what those cameras have captured, and it knows those images cannot be reconciled with the message it is selling abroad. You do not create a machine to erase the record unless the record is dangerous. And Israel has decided the most dangerous thing in this entire war is not Hamas, not Hezbollah, not Iran, but its own army and what they are sharing via their own smartphones. The sequence that brought Israel to this point makes the pattern unavoidable. The government thought it could manage the war’s image the old way: keep journalists out, impose tight military censorship, refuse foreign media access to Gaza, and rely on controlled briefings. But the state misread the era it is operating in.

The Jersey based Palestine activist Natalie Strecker has been acquitted over terror support and it's exposed Starmer's lawfare like never before! Right, so you can tell when a government has run out of arguments to defend Israel, because that’s when it starts inventing terror threats out of thin air, and the Starmer crew just tried exactly that with Jersey based activist Natalie Strecker. They scraped four social media posts out of tens of thousands, mangled the digital evidence with a software bug, shipped in outside “help” to steer a prosecution Jersey didn’t need steering, and still couldn’t convince a court that a pacifist was secretly running a pro-Hamas fan club. It’s pathetic, but it’s also the clearest look yet at how desperate this government has become to make pro-Palestine voices disappear. They wanted a scalp. They got an acquittal. And in the process they’ve shown everyone that their big law-and-order posture, their lawfare against protesters and activists and pro Palestine voices is just political cowardice dressed up as national security. Right, so it is hardly news to many of you I’m sure that something has gone very wrong inside a political system when a government tries to turn a human-rights activist into a t*rrorism suspect and ends up being exposed for how flimsy the whole operation is, and that’s the thing about this case that has just ended in acquittal in Jersey, the Natalie Strecker case, because once you strip out the courtroom formality, the titles, the press releases and the drama that comes of state authority, what you’re left with is a prosecution that never had the weight to carry the political purpose built into it, and that’s why it fell apart, because it wasn’t designed for scrutiny, it was designed for fear, and fear only works when nobody looks at it too closely. This is what lawfare looks like when the government overreaches, when the evidence isn’t strong enough to survive daylight, and when a court decides it isn’t going to sign off on a political message disguised as a security concern. And if you want to understand why this matters, you start with the basic truth that this case should never have existed in the first place. Because the charge was t*rrorism, the label was t*rrorism, the framework was t*rrorism, and the punishment would have carried all the weight of that word even though the prosecution knew she hadn’t committed, planned or facilitated anything remotely connected to t*rrorism.

So Benjamin Netanyahu has decided he wants a pardon, but still won't admit guilt and as a result is turning into his biggest self own to date. Right, so you always know a government has gone past the point of embarrassment and into full-blown panic when the man running it tries to escape his own trial while still standing in the dock, and that’s exactly what Benjamin Netanyahu has just done. A sitting prime minister, still facing three corruption cases, still denying every charge, still telling the country the courts will vindicate him, suddenly decides the safest place to be is nowhere near a verdict and asks the president to make the whole thing disappear. And you don’t get clearer than that do you? People confident in acquittal don’t beg for pardons. People who trust the process don’t try to dodge it and protests outside the president’s house before breakfast tell you everything you need to know. If Netanyahu thought this was the way out at this point, he’s got it catastrophically wrong. Right, so you always know a political era is creaking when the people running it start trying to escape the very systems they’ve spent years insisting still work, and that’s exactly what has happened with Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to request a presidential pardon while still on trial, because this isn’t a routine legal step or some procedural tidying-up, it’s a sitting prime minister trying to end his own corruption trial before the court has finished hearing it, still without admitting guilt, without accepting responsibility, and without even pretending the process has reached a point where clemency would normally be considered. It lands as a moment where the system feels it twitch, because a move like this tells you he no longer trusts the process to deliver the outcome he has spent five years telling his supporters is inevitable, and that’s the point where you can see the politics through the legal paperwork, because nobody confident of acquittal asks for the trial to suddenly disappear.

An independent media outlet just sent an Israeli arms firm fleeing from Britain, because that's the power of real journalism. Right, so you can always tell when a political access operation has gone wrong, because everyone involved suddenly pretends it was never happening, and that’s exactly what we’ve just seen with Rafael’s little UK adventure. A state-owned Israeli weapons manufacturer turns up calling itself a British company, slides £1,499 into a parliamentary group that’s not allowed to take foreign-government money, gets cosy access to MPs under the banner of “defence technology”, and nobody inside Westminster notices a thing until an independent newsroom actually checks the filings. And the moment the disguise drops, the whole thing folds in on itself. The APPG dissolves. The Standards Commissioner steps in. Rafael files to shut down its UK arm without so much as a protest, which is what it looks like when a company operating in the political space becomes unviable under scrutiny. And Independent media very much scrutinised it – into running away. Right, so it’s so often in the smallest stories that you see how power really works, because power rarely announces itself, and it rarely leaves fingerprints where people are actually looking, and that’s why this Rafael saga tells you far more about Britain’s political system than most scandals ten times the size. Because on paper this is minor — a company most people have never heard of, a payment so small it could barely cover a London dinner bill, an APPG nobody outside Westminster cares about — but the scale of the incident isn’t the number on the cheque, it’s the structure that cheque unlocked, the access it bought, the loophole it exposed, and the retreat it triggered, because you don’t get a state-owned weapons manufacturer dissolving its entire UK operation unless something has gone very wrong in the place they were trying to operate. And when you trace the sequence cleanly, without Westminster’s instinct to minimise everything that isn’t convenient, you can see what really happened here: an Israeli arms firm tried to position itself inside Parliament, Declassified UK exposed the method, and the whole operation collapsed before MPs had even finished pretending they were surprised. The remarkable thing isn’t that Rafael tried to do this. The defence industry has been treating APPGs, conferences, trade delegations, committee events, sponsored trips and “policy roundtables” as an extension of their sales funnel for years, because that’s how lobbying works in a system where ministers tell you the country is broke while handing out defence contracts like they’re raffle prizes. What’s remarkable is that someone saw it happening in real time. Because when you go through Rafael’s UK footprint, the absurdity becomes obvious straight away.

Donald Trump's Gaza takeover plan has fallen at the first hurdle, but then it was always going to when peace meant jumping to Israel's tune. Right, so here’s the thing about Trump’s grand Gaza plan: it’s only “historic” if you judge history by how fast a policy collapses under the weight of its own nonsense. The United States marched into the UN Security Council with a straight face and sold a blueprint that puts Trump in charge of Gaza’s transition, hands sweeping authority to a Board of Peace that still hasn’t been staffed, and demands an International Stabilisation Force that nobody is actually willing to send. And of course they told the world this was the path to order, because Washington always does, even when the plan depends on foreign soldiers enforcing a demilitarisation mandate that no Palestinian faction has agreed to and no contributing country is prepared to take on. So you look at the resolution, you look at the silence that followed, and you realise the truth: the takeover isn’t stuck, it never changed. Right, so Trump’s Gaza plan has already hit the point where the only way you can describe it honestly is to say that the packaging looked impressive, the machinery looked complicated, the Council vote looked decisive, and none of it has changed the basic fact that you cannot impose a new order on Gaza if the countries you need to carry it don’t believe the mandate is workable, legitimate, or safe. The United States pushed through a resolution that creates a governing body chaired by Trump, installs a transitional administration with sweeping authority, and orders the formation of a multinational force to stabilise Gaza and begin demilitarising the territory. On paper this is a takeover. In the real world it is a blueprint that has been collapsing the moment anyone outside Washington tries to translate it into actual troop numbers, legal responsibilities or political realities. The core of the plan is simple enough when you strip away the choreography. The Board of Peace is written in as the transitional authority over Gaza. It has the power to oversee reconstruction, manage borders in cooperation with neighbours, supervise the training of a new Palestinian police force and certify when Israel’s security thresholds are met.

Christian pilgrims have returned to the Holy Land, but have faced torrents of abuse from Israelis - you'd think they'd welcome the tourism! Right, so you can always tell when Israel’s spin machine is wobbling, because something leaks out through a source that normally acts like a government loudhailer. And that’s exactly what’s happened here: Christian tourists finally start trickling back into Jerusalem after a year of war and a ninety-per-cent tourism collapse, and what do they find? Not welcome, not safety, not the “shared civilisation” nonsense Western governments like to parrot — they find ultra-Orthodox men spitting at them, boys kicking them off bicycles, crosses being hidden because the police can’t be relied on. And when even a right-wing paper admits it, you know the problem isn’t isolated, it’s structural. Because this isn’t about one incident on the Via Dolorosa. It’s about what happens when a state that plays the eternal victim starts behaving like the unchallenged landlord of everyone else’s holy sites. Right, so you can always tell when a state is losing control of its own story, because the mask slips in a place where it never meant to. That’s what’s just happened in Jerusalem. Christian tourists, the very people Israel claims as cultural allies, the very people Western governments tell themselves they are protecting when they defend Israel on the world stage, are being spat on, kicked, threatened and harassed as they return to the Old City.

Israel has thrown its own tech industry under a bus again with a pathetic stunt in Gaza, but its backfired deservedly. Right, so you can always tell when a state stops pretending it cares about civilian life, because it starts doing things even its own lies can’t cover, and Israel has been doing that again in Gaza, blocking antibiotics and dialysis supplies while somehow letting gold-plated iPhones glide straight through the crossing. You don’t need a grand theory to see what’s going on there; you just need the memory of Lebanon, where pagers packed with explosives maimed thousands of people and Israel admitted it later, and the warnings from digital-rights groups about Israeli-authored software buried inside mass-market Samsung phones across the region. So when Gaza gets flooded with smartphones in the middle of a medical blockade, of course people think something’s off. That’s not paranoia. That’s what happens when a state burns its own credibility and keeps lighting matches. Right, so you can always tell what a state really cares about by what it lets into a besieged territory and what it keeps out, because a blockade is not an accident, it’s a policy written in lorries and cargo lists, and Israel has made that brutally clear over Gaza again. Essential medicines, IV fluids, antibiotics, dialysis consumables, surgical kit, the things that actually keep people alive, not to mention other basics from food to hygiene products, are still being blocked or throttled at the crossings, while, at the same time, luxury foodstuffs and high-end consumer electronics are getting in, including gold-plated iPhones and whole consignments of new smartphones that nobody under bombardment and famine conditions has asked for.

Israel's plans for further war in Lebanon have hit a major snag - Saudi Arabia don't want to pay for it if they get no say in the matter! Right, so Israel has reached the point where it thinks it can dictate the terms of Lebanon’s survival, and it’s doing it openly now, without even pretending the threat is conditional. Extremist defence minister Israel Katz stands in the Knesset and says Hezbollah must disarm by the end of the year or Israel will “work forcefully again in Lebanon,” and he ties that threat to the assassination they’ve just carried out in Beirut’s southern suburb as if that ki*ling is an argument rather than a violation. Then Egypt arrives in Beirut using a tone Lebanese officials describe as threatening, warning that a massive b*mbing campaign and a ground invasion may be imminent unless Lebanon complies. And in the middle of that pressure, Lebanon’s own prime minister turns his criticism not on Israel over this, but on Hezbollah for failing to disarm having failed to be a deterrent! If Lebanon’s own leadership is determined to punch inwards therefore, who can possibly come to Lebanon’s rescue? Well as it happens there is a twist in this tale because Saudi Arabia — the financier Israel is banking on to pay for all of this while Israel and the US call all of the shots — has quietly signalled it has no intention of paying for a political order built without it. Perhaps saviour is too strong a word for them therefore, but if the outcome is the same, does it matter? Right, so let’s walk through this properly because the stories coming out of Lebanon, Israel, and the Gulf aren’t separate threads; they’re the same crisis seen from different angles, and the thing you realise once you put them next to each other is that the region’s centre of gravity is shifting underneath Israel right as it tries to force a deadline on Lebanon. And Israel knows exactly what it’s doing with that deadline, because you don’t stand up in your parliament, point at an assassination you’ve just carried out in the capital city of a neighbouring country, call it “proof” of your intent, and then stick a date on the table unless you’re preparing the ground for escalation. That’s the point. Israel Katz isn’t improvising. He’s announcing a timetable and pretending it’s a condition. He’s saying Hezbollah must disarm by the end of 2025, and he’s saying it in the tone of someone who believes he’s setting the pace, and he’s using the k*lling of a Hezbollah official in Beirut’s southern suburb as if that assassination is some form of political leverage, which it is, because it’s not a secret strike anymore; it’s a political message dressed up as enforcement.

Labour's attempts to tie the IHRA definition of antisemitism to NHS employment agreements is getting a deserved pasting! Right, so you look at what the government’s doing to the NHS and you have to laugh, because if they were trying any harder to prove the Forde Report right they’d invoice themselves for the labour. They’ve decided the health service isn’t creaking because of understaffing or collapsing infrastructure — oh no, the real emergency is that too many nurses have opinions the government doesn’t approve of. So now the Department for Health and Social Care is rolling out a racism policy that somehow manages to mention antisemitism 28 times and Palestinians not once, while turning mandatory training into a political obedience test. Doctors in Unite have called it exactly what it is: a top-down attempt to hard-wire a hierarchy of racism into the NHS to silence Palestine solidarity. And once you see it, you realise the repression isn’t accidental — Labour have literally made it policy. Right, so Labour are taking a system that’s already buckling under pressure, a workforce that’s been brutalised for years, and instead of fixing anything, instead of dealing with pay, safety, retention or the collapsing estate, putting patients first like the staff in the NHS do, they’ve decided the real priority is to criminalise a colour scheme and turn a workplace code of conduct into a foreign-policy enforcement mechanism. And it only makes sense once you accept the central fact that Doctors in Unite are laying out in painful detail: that this isn’t about antisemitism in the NHS, it’s about shutting down Palestine solidarity among the one group of workers whose voices the government cannot afford to let the public hear. Because health workers describing what’s happening to hospitals in Gaza is one of the few things that cuts through the noise, and the government knows it.

Israel is facing an absolute existential crisis as tens of thousands of key role workers emigrate, with far fewer choosing to move there in return. Right, so Israel keeps telling the world it’s winning, it’s strong, it’s stable, it’s unbreakable — and meanwhile more than a quarter of its own population is quietly checking flight prices and Googling residency visas. When seventy-nine thousand people leave in a single year and the state can only tempt forty-six thousand back, you don’t need a demographer to tell you what direction the country is heading in. You just need a calendar and a passport. Because this isn’t the fringe doing the running. It’s the secular core — the engineers, the doctors, the teachers, the people who keep the lights on — deciding they’d rather build a life somewhere that isn’t permanently braced for its next catastrophe. And when the stabilisers are the first ones out the door, the wobble that follows isn’t a surprise. It’s the bill coming due when all you’re left with are the extremists. Right, so Israel is watching the people it relies on most quietly make plans to leave, and the state has created every condition pushing them out. You don’t get twenty-seven per cent of a population telling pollsters they’re considering emigration unless something has shifted at the level where people decide whether the place they live is still capable of giving them a future. I suppose it’s at least good to know that for many of them, that they can always go back to where they actually came from though. You don’t get a year where seventy-nine thousand depart to never return and only forty-six thousand arrive unless the internal story people tell themselves about their country has broken down. A country can survive many things, but it cannot survive losing the population that believes its tomorrow is worth staying for. What makes this more than another political argument is the composition of the people thinking of leaving. It isn’t a fringe. It isn’t a marginal bloc. It is the secular heart of the country, the high-tech engineers, the researchers, the medical staff, the academics, the younger families, the global middle class that pays the taxes, keeps the institutions functioning, and carries the cultural and professional bandwidth that makes a state feel like a state. When that group begins to drift, the consequences run deeper than numbers on a graph. It affects every institution, every election, every sector that depends on continuity, and every attempt to steer the country away from the extremes. And people always ask why. Why now, why this scale, why this kind of demographic? It is because the pressures that once felt temporary have turned into the norm. The wars and genocide in Gaza have ceased to be episodes and become the default setting now.