Kernow Damo

Right, so Benjamin Netanyahu thought he had found himself a loophole.

A nice little Lebanon-shaped loophole.

Trump’s deal, his Memorandum of Understanding with the Iranians could say what it liked. Trump could puff himself up at the podium like big orange balloon until he exploded. The diplomats could put on their grave and serious faces, shuffle some paperwork around like a BBC newsreader feigning interest in whatever drivel they’ve just spouted and pretend the region was being folded into Israel’s preferred order like some complex piece of genocidal origami.

Netanyahu had other ideas, because of course he did.

Lebanon was going to be the exception, the bit where he could carry on warmongering his weaselly black guts out. Nobody was going to stop him, or so he thought.

And then the incident Kfar Tebnit this happened.

Southern Lebanon. The front Netanyahu wanted to keep outside of the rules, outside of the deal, he needs war somewhere to keep himself in post. This was the security zone, the bit nobody else could have and it just blew up in his face and then some.

Four Israeli soldiers killed. A battalion commander lost.

Troops eliminated because a government decided this strip of Lebanon had to stay under Israel's boot.

Right, so Andy Burnham has won a landslide in Makerfield, completely contrary to a typical Starmer Labour by election result because usually Starmer has all the appeal to voters of a wasp at a picnic on a summers day, so the fact Burnham has a majority now north of 9,000 votes still comes with a big caveat attached to it: Makerfield did not fall in love with Andy Burnham. Makerfield rejected Keir Starmer. Burnham won because he promised a leadership challenge, he really didn’t have much else to offer. This is definitely not a Labour resurgence bedtime story here.

This is not Brave Andy riding back from Greater Manchester. Reform beaten. Hope restored. The grown-ups are back in charge. The band plays Things Can Only Get Better and everyone pretends the last few years were just a very expensive misunderstanding.

No. This was not a love letter to Burnham.

This was a warning shot through Starmer’s front window.

Burnham won the seat. Reform were beaten. Starmer took the damage. But Labour’s great act of renewal, as this is being touted, is now a man who has spent years orbiting the same old party machine, walking back into Westminster and saying the word “change” with a bit more warmth than the bloke currently sucking all the oxygen out of Downing Street.

Right, so the Iran deal has landed as it is being broadcast, such as it is, a Memorandum of Understanding is just a diplomatic nod with nothing yet formally agreed to at all, but for all the pomp and ceremony going on ad nauseum, all gleefully and unquestioningly broadcast by the mainstream media, for once the story is not that Donald Trump has wandered up to a microphone, powdered himself in bronzer, declared himself the saviour of civilisation and is now eagerly awaiting the arrival of the Nobel committee on horseback. They’re sure to come this time aren’t they?

Trump is in the story, obviously. That is the obvious bit. It is his deal. His signature. His announcement. His great big diplomatic peacock routine.

So he is not the problem in this story.

The problem is Benjamin Netanyahu.

Because this deal does everything Netanyahu didn’t want and backs him into a corner he can’t get out of either. It takes Lebanon - the bit Israel wanted to treat like an open-ended military playground - and drags him out of it while at the same time he has the likes of Itamar ben Gvir screaming that Israel will not withdraw. Trump is desperate for this deal and it’s put him at loggerheads with Israel over it all while Netanyahu’s administration starts to eat itself over it. And the conflict here is clear to see. Lebanon is an Iranian red line, Trump has been forced to concede the point, such is his desperation and yet all of us can still point and say: hang on, if this war is winding down, why are Israeli troops still sitting in southern Lebanon?

Right, so Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s far-right minister for making every situation somehow more grotesque than it already was, had a big brave message for the United States.

Israel is not subject to America, apparently.

Trump’s deal does not bind us, apparently.

Israel is sovereign, independent, answerable to nobody, all very stirring stuff if you like your diplomacy delivered in the tone of a man shouting at a traffic warden.

Lovely.

Except there is one tiny little bit of American power Ben-Gvir does still appear to be subject to.

Not the President. Not the State Department. Not Congress.

No appropriate sanction regime he’s well overdue for inflicted by people who appear to have suddenly discovered the concept of principles.

No, no.

It was a visa desk.

It was a form.

It was a request to put his fingerprints on file. Now what could possibly be so scary about that?

Right, so that did not take long, did it?

Starmer’s government gets the Palestine Action ban kept in place, the Home Office gets the legal result it wanted, and almost immediately one of its own ministers decides the best use of anti-terror law is apparently to turn Twitter into a Home Office loyalty checkpoint.

This is more than a normal “minister said something stupid on X” story. The story is that Starmer’s government fought to keep the Palestine Action ban, won the legal result it wanted, and then one of its own Home Office ministers, Mike Tapp, publicly used that ban like a political trap against Zack Polanski. All very Joseph McCarthy. And when amongst a large number of people on X called this out, including journalist Owen Jones, calling out the danger of Tapp’s tapped tweet, Tapp did not back down; he dug deeper. He answered with innuendo, and then like a good little Labour Friend of Israel, reached for the antisemitism card.

Trying to get another politician to say something that would incriminate them, resorting to slurs when called out over that and weaponising antisemitism as the cherry on top, Tapp went for the triple. But this guy is weaponizing the Minister for Migration and Citizenship, sitting inside the Home Office, publicly treating terror law like a toy for winning arguments online.

Right, so every launch, every flash, every flaming rocket put out in news clips or by the Pentagon or US Central Command is very deliberately put out there into the public sphere. It looks impressive, it promotes a sense of power, it lets you know who’s in charge when the good ol’ US of A is the one doing the shooting, all very flashy. Very presidential. Very “don’t mess with America.”

For as much as such imagery makes for handy propaganda though, these missiles are not exactly infinite and the tangerine toddler has been spending them like water. They don’t just automatically replenish themselves because Trump snaps his fingers and bellows into a microphone for the hard of thinking MAGA crowd or if Pete Hegseth fixes his stares at a camera like he’s trying to intimidate a parking meter.

Every one of these things gets counted somewhere afterwards where there is no TV and no cameras and no adulation.

Inventory. Replacement. Production. Cost.

And that is where Trump’s stupid, unnecessary Iran war starts turning into something rather awkward for the people who sold it to the American people as an act of US self defence, because America’s defences are now significantly weaker than they were before.

Where the clips are theatrics, the inventory has to be replaced and that isn’t immediate, but it is very expensive. $2.5Billion expensive, but to listen to the bungler in chief who has blown the arsenal, you’d think the end of this story was a foregone conclusion.

So there it is. “The deal’s all signed.” The Strait is opening. Everything is moving. The great man has solved it. Everyone may now clap like trained seals for the greatest dealmaker that there ever was. Except it isn’t a deal and there’s nothing great about the orange bungler orchestrating this farce. A Memorandum of Understanding is just an acceptance of what the other side wants, not a deal that actually gets it.

Right, so Israeli arms firms have turned up in France to flog their genocidal wares and had a bit of a rude shock when they got there. The supposedly respectable end of their warmongering hit one of those arms’ fair events, Eurosatory 2026 as is the case here, what they bring to present as defence solutions of course being the very same things they’ve been using to vaporise neighbourhoods from Gaza to Southern Lebanon.

But when they got to this latest arms bazaar catwalk, they didn’t exactly get the Victoria’s Secret treatment. Where they expected the usual routine of stands, buyers, handshakes and brochures amidst all of the military hardware parked under the exhibition lights, they found instead, walls, partitions and curtains cordoning all of their displays off. It was like somebody had shoved Israel’s arms industry into the naughty corner and told it to think very carefully about what it had done.

At a weapons fair, the stand is the sales pitch. The whole point is to be seen. You do not spend all that money dragging your lovely battlefield-tested death catalogue to France so the best image of your company is a curtain. But that is what they got.

Israel came looking for weapons buyers, France stuffed all of their wares behind barriers.

Right, so Donald Trump has got himself an Iran deal.

A peace deal. A beautiful deal. A long and beautiful peace, he says, because of course he does, because if there is one thing the tangerine tyrant loves more than threatening to blow something up is announcing that he invented peace some 5 minutes later.

Lebanon can’t have got the memo they were included in this memorandum of understanding Trump is crowing about as if it’s a done and dusted deal – a memorandum of understanding is not a deal no matter how many media outlets present it as such, it is simply an acknowledgement by both sides over what the other side actually wants, not that there is necessarily an agreement there.

Smoke is still rising over Dahiyeh and Ghobeiry as Israel hasn’t let up one iota. Buildings are still being hit, streets strewn with fresh rubble, people fleeing, responders trying their best and that is of course the catch in Trump’s deal isn’t it?

And that is of course the catch in Trump’s deal and it was always going to be when he deigned to go over his boss Netanyahu’s head and do a ‘deal’ with Iran without him, such as that is.

It’s certainly not the headline he wants, he wants to tell the world he’s stopped another war even though he started it. He wants to talk about oil, about the markets, about Hormuz opening toll free, how he has saved the whole of civilisation via another all caps message on Truth Social.

Right, so property for sale in illegally occupied Palestinian territory, but this isn’t the West Bank, this isn’t a settler with a map declaring this property is his because God promised it to him 3,000 years, because apparently God does conveyancing now ago. This was London.

This is the Great Israeli Real Estate Event, taking place inside Edgware Road synagogue.

Protesters outside saying Palestinian land was being sold. Police in the middle, because of course they were. Counter-protesters waving Israeli flags. Palestine supporters shoved, grabbed, dragged and arrested.

The British state stands there in high-vis and body armour pretending it is just managing “tensions” instead of making excuses for the inexcusable.

And then, because one serving of pro-Israel state-backed rancidiness was not enough, the Court of Appeal turned up this morning with pudding.

The Starmer regime got its Palestine Action ban finally backed by a Court of Law. The terror-law designation stays in place, at least for now because the fight is not over yet.

But the message from the British state could hardly be clearer if they printed it on a Union Jack and stapled it to Itamar Ben-Gvir’s forehead:

Israel gets protection. Palestine protest gets the police.

Right, so Benjamin Netanyahu’s Lebanon invasion story has come a cropper once again, as the IDF’s drone problems there just ratcheted up another notch.

A Hezbollah drone has now struck an Israeli base, another of their cheap little off the shelf FPV’s has just taken down for the very first time an Israeli Heron 1 surveillance drone worth in the region of $10M and in fact so numerous have these successful drone strikes been, that they have now released a whole montage of successful strikes on Israeli vehicles, positions, machinery and movement, all being watched from above like the IDF has accidentally wandered into somebody else’s nature documentary, except the narrator is armed and the birds have bombs.

This ongoing, increasing drone problem for Netanyahu has crossed from military issue to outright embarrassment and screaming at more towns to evacuate before he commands the world’s most amoral army to level them won’t cut it either.

And the mainstream media call this situation “tense.” Spare me. A guitar string is tense. Lebanon is being bombed, threatened, carved into warning zones and yet the pushback, the constant stream of video footage getting released keeps coming back on supposed Israeli advancement and control and then looks like anything but. It does not look like deterrence; it’s certainly not look like the wanton destruction of Lebanese livelihoods and evacuation orders are achieving anything except turning the worlds stomach as we see Gaza play out all over again. It does not look like the IDF imposing the control on the northern front they want all.