Kernow Damo

Right, so Britain has just jailed Palestine Action activists after Judge Jeremy Johnson slapped on terror sentencing to essentially double the jail time, all seen as the British state doing Israel favours since the target of these young people was a weapons factory because said weapons are genociding people across Gaza, invading Southern Lebanon and Syria and more besides. God forbid somebody stop that, God forbid an example doesn’t get made by tacking on a sentence that was never proven or charged in court. This was not just a punishment. This was a label. A warning. A great big legal cattle prod aimed at everyone else watching.

But the trouble with getting away with something like that, assuming they do that is, I don’t imagine this is the end of the Filton story yet, is that it inspires others and Germany has taken a look at what the Starmer regime has presided over here in the apparent name of justice and thought, wow, we’d quite like a slice of that in the name of the Israeli state too. Germany has looked across the Channel, apparently learned absolutely nothing decent, and decided its contribution to European justice should be to put its own anti-Elbit defendants in the dock, behind glass, parade them in handcuffs, stick them in a high-security courtroom, really lay on the aren’t these protesters dangerous imagery on thick.

A few activists behind glass like the court is hosting a particularly dangerous zoo exhibit, when all it really is, is defendants being deliberately being separated from their lawyers.

So what we have now is two countries. Two cases. One pattern of repression.

Right, so Israel has managed to create another big fat problem for itself in Lebanon you will be broken hearted I’m sure to hear.

Not because they’ve stopped bombing, because of course they haven’t, ceasefires are for mere mortals and not for them. Not because the displacement is subtle either, people are being driven from their homes and entire villages detonated because all of it is Hezbollah, it’s that old chestnut again. And it’s not because anyone needs a GCSE explainer on what a bloody buffer zone is, because we all know what Israel means by that by now I should hope. Their state security depends on the security and safety and daily lives of all others to be flattened, though to listen to them it sounds much more like “we are only targeting Hezbollah, please ignore the civilians packing their lives into cars and fleeing for their lives.”

But they just went that bit overzealous with it all, a bit too blatant, a bit too obvious, they do have that chronic tendency to punch themselves in the face by saying the truth a bit too loudly.

Twenty Lebanese towns and villages ordered out all in one go. Explain away that one. You told us all you’d virtually pagered Hezbollah out of existence not so long ago and now we’re supposed to believe some 20 villages are all Hezbollah, on top of everything else you’ve razed? We’ve seen this play too many times before.

And that is the problem for the likes of Benjamin Netanyahu and his deranged Defence Minister Israel Katz. That is the bit their spokespeople now have to drag around like a corpse in a suitcase while still insisting this is all terribly precise and defensive, the Lebanese will thank us later and nothing at all to do with Lebanese civilians.

But then why are Lebanese towns the ones being emptied?

Right, so these four young people were not convicted of terrorism.

But that is the bit the state would quite like you to overlook, along with pliant state media.

Just hop past it. Don’t linger. Don’t ask awkward little questions like, “Hang on, if they were not convicted of terrorism, why the hell are they being sentenced as such then?”

Because when you ask yourself that, you realise just how much this stinks don’t you?

Four Palestine Action activists were convicted over action at an Elbit Systems site, an Israeli weapons factory. Serious convictions, yes. Criminal damage, yes. In one case, GBH without intent, yes. Nobody needs to pretend those are not real charges.

But terrorism?

That was not the jury’s verdict. They didn’t even know such a sentence in connection with their verdict was even on the table, they weren’t told that, so how can this possibly be regarded as justice?

It’s a very British way of doing authoritarianism, isn’t it?

No jackboots needed. No roaring dictator on a balcony. Just a man in robes, adding on a terror element at sentencing in a first of its kind slide into fascism, and for what? To protect Israel. A state committing genocide, an apartheid state, a state which clearly has far too much influence in ours.

Right, so Benjamin Netanyahu has apparently built himself another master plan.

A clever plan. A hard plan. A very serious security plan, obviously. The sort of plan that gets sold to the Israeli public as, deterrence, freedom of action, deepening the grip, securing the north, all the usual blood-soaked management-consultant language they wheel out whenever they have decided that somebody else’s country needs to be rearranged by airstrike.

And Lebanon was supposed to be the trap.

At least that was the idea. Hezbollah would make the mistake. Hezbollah would get squeezed. Hezbollah would be forced back. Israel would deepen its grip in the south, take the strategic ground, parade around the castle they captured the other day, redraw the buffer zone, and Netanyahu would stand there looking like the great wartime genius who had finally made northern Israel safe by doing what he always does: more bombing, more occupation, more displacement, more speeches about security while other people bury the consequences.

Except it’s all come back and punched him in the face you’ll be broken hearted to hear, because of course both sides in this conflict have teeth.

Right, so the Cheeto-dusted Commander-in-Chief Donald Trump has declared there is a deal with Iran.

A peace deal. A great deal. The best deal there ever was, obviously. All while, supposedly, he was about to attack Kharg Island, because nothing says calm diplomatic breakthrough quite like threatening to seize the other country’s oil hub before teatime. Pistol Pete Hegseth must be sobbing in a corner over it.

But is this really a deal, or did he just TACO again?

And does it even matter, because we have been here before, haven’t we? Trump says the deal is close. Trump says the documents are nearly ready. Trump says everyone is happy. Trump says the markets are cheering. Trump says the Strait will open once the paper is signed. Trump says a lot of things.

But this time, we are meant to believe it was done enough to stave off another bombing run. Done enough to send oil and markets moving. Done enough for him to sit in the Oval Office and pontificate like the war had just been wrapped up by the sheer force of his own orange magnificence.

The trouble is, there is a gaping great black hole at the centre of Trump’s Iran deal.

And it is not a small technicality either. It is not some minor diplomatic omission, it is actually kind of big. It is the one thing he rather needs if he is going to claim you have an Iran deal.

Though you would not know there was a problem from the way Trump was talking.

Right, so the bloviating orange oaf Donald Trump’s sales pitch in recent days was that Iran was going to pay, but the trouble with warfare is that they guy who signs off on it, doesn’t necessarily get to choose where everything ends up landing and this one did not stay where Little Donnie wanted it.

It has now moved from Washington’s war room to a tanker off Oman, It has moved onto Indian sailors, It has moved from sea to drinking war infrastructure, it has moved across the entire US regional base map and most awkwardly for Trump straight back into his own politics. So let’s start with Trump, because he’s the idiot trying to convince us all that this mess is a sign of control

Iran will have to make a deal, they’re taking too long to get there, so now they have to pay a price? Getting impatient isn’t an excuse to get your bombs out again Donnie, but his other justification is in regards to the Apache helicopter crash which the US is claiming Iran did, claiming Iran has admitted to, yet even a pro Israel outlet like Axios has carried the crucial caveat that the incident is under investigation.

Right, so this is Belfast, this is where the far right is attacking homes, looking for black and brown people, homes getting torched, cars getting burned out, families looking at the remains of homes they had nothing to do with losing. A pogrom triggered off the back of a serious attack, a knife attack, with the suspect having been charged and remanded in custody, all now being weaponised by this bunch of absolute lunatics as an excuse to go after anyone who looks the same in their fevered minds. They don’t care about the facts being settled, they don’t care if kids are scared by bricks going through windows, they don’t give a stuff about evidence, or courts, or charges or due process, they don’t care about a conviction, all these rancid creatures care about is using a horrific incident as licence to commit atrocity in the name of keeping their area safe. A burning building, a burning bus, safe is it? At least that is what these knuckle-dragging racists will claim. They don’t care about facts, they don’t care about the family affected, they just want another suspect, just coming from the same background will do. In point of fact, they don’t even actually care if they get it right.

Right, so Israel built itself a buffer zone in Lebanon to tell the north that the danger had been pushed away, and then the Israeli army had to announce that one armed man crossed from Lebanon near Ramim Ridge and breached the border. That's the event with the military varnish scraped off. One man. Israel called him a terrorist, public reporting says it was unclear whether he was even affiliated with Hezbollah, though there are reports he was dressed in a Hezbollah gear so caveats there and the same reporting says this was the first crossing of its kind from Lebanon in this round of fighting. The IDF border gets beaten by one man and that’s the real embarrassment here isn't it? [CLIP]

Israel built a security line, sold it as protection, occupied ground in southern Lebanon to make it real, and the thing now sitting in front of it is one armed man getting through the very line that existed to keep exactly that image off Israeli screens. Regional reporting has also alleged that Israeli military media treated the incident as an operational failure, which is something of an understatement if one guy can breach your perimeter – imagine what two could do? And that nearby northern communities were told to stay indoors while the searches went on, lockdowns as that footage there made clear.

The Israel Defence Forces, or Israeli Occupation Forces if you prefer, many do, the name doesn’t matter to me, it’s the most amoral army in the world and in my view that’s all they deserve to be called, has spent months trying to turn southern Lebanon into a controlled space, the Gazafication of Lebanon and Israel's government calls that control security, because they always call it that don’t they? Anything but occupation, especially when that occupation is being sold to their own population as protection rather than to the people living under it as force. Taken a knock now though hasn’t it? Israel's deranged Defence Minister Israel Katz has spoken of retaining a security zone in southern Lebanon until Hezbollah is removed as a threat, but given Israel were already there before, firing on Lebanon through a ceasefire and all whilst Hezbollah spent more than a year giving their government a chance to fix this, it’s a hard pill for any observer to swallow that that is remotely true. Hezbollah sits at the centre of a very simple sales pitch to northern Israeli communities: the army goes forward, the danger moves back, and you can breathe again. That's the bargain Netanyahu's government has been offering. Benjamin Netanyahu gets to present force inside Lebanon as a shield for the north, Katz gets to dress the occupation up as a security necessity, and the Israeli military gets to play line manager here. But the trouble with building your politics around a line, though, is that the line becomes a test. Every breach after that belongs to the people who swore the line was enough and when just one man showed he was capable of doing just that, it hits that much harder.

Right, so the tangerine toddler Donald Trump has managed the rather impressive feat of taking a helicopter incident near the Strait of Hormuz, using it as his excuse to hit Iran again, so much for claiming he wanted out of this mess, and then watching US-linked bases across Bahrain, Kuwait and Jordan come under fire. Trump wanted a strong response, Trump ordered strikes on Iran, and Iran answered by pushing America's regional military network straight into the firing line.

Bahrain and Kuwait reported air defences active, Jordan got pulled into the same story, and the immediate official line from those states was that attacks had been intercepted or repelled, with no immediate confirmed casualties or damage. So let's get the first thing straight before anything else, because the headline is not that Trump looked tough as he would love it be. The headline is that Trump's show of strength left US positions having to defend themselves, and that's a rather different story, isn't it?

Now, the Apache helicopter story. I touched on this yesterday, it was unclear why it came down at the time, but now it's the route Trump took into this latest mess, so let's deal with it properly. A US Army Apache went down near Hormuz, the two crew members were rescued, and Trump has now said Iran had shot it down. That claim is the bit he used to justify what came next, but the incident itself was nowhere near a neat, closed, settled fact when the response was being sold to everyone. The crash was under investigation, the cause was not immediately reported and if Iran had shot it down, you’d think there would have been hell up a lot sooner. Reporting around it included the possibility of a collision with an Iranian drone, with intent not cleanly established in the way Trump needed it to be for his simple war-president pose now, emphasis on the simple. He played it down at first, because of course he did, saying the pilots were fine and treating the whole thing as something short of a catastrophe, he had the Strait under control according to him didn’t he? Perhaps it was decided it was too embarrassing to blame Iran at first, but then the machinery around him turned it into a reason for strikes. So what changed? Another phone call with his boss Netanyahu maybe? We don’t know. But it’s quite the journey, that, going from not a big deal to bombing Iran on the back of an incident nobody had actually settled. There's your first problem, and it sits squarely with the man who decided uncertainty was good enough for escalation.

Right, so Israel hit Beirut, Iran answered having warned them against doing just that, and now the Houthis are back on the scene. The Yemeni Armed Forces have claimed missile strikes toward Jaffa and then declared Israeli maritime navigation in the Red Sea banned, with Israeli-linked movement treated as a military target. So not only is the Strait of Hormuz now shut, so is the Bab el Mandeb Strait it seems! [CLIP]

That is the cost Netanyahu now has to carry, because the war he has been widening through Lebanon, Iran and Gaza has pulled Yemen’s Ansar Allah movement, the Houthis back into the fight, and the price is ships. Israeli-linked ships. Red Sea movement. A route Israel needs to look boring, safe, insured, manageable and open. Yemen has now said that route is tied to the war, tied to Israeli action elsewhere, and no longer something Israel gets to treat as separate from the fire it keeps spreading. So the question is not whether the Houthis have issued another angry statement. The question is why ships are being targeted now, and why Netanyahu’s own escalation has handed Israel one more route it cannot simply assume will stay quiet.