Kernow Damo

Israel sent its navy 600 nautical miles after aid boats and somehow thought that would make the starvation blockade look less guilty. Right, so Israel has just turned a Gaza aid flotilla into evidence against itself once again. Israeli forces have intercepted, boarded and seized vessels from the Global Sumud Flotilla in international waters near Greece, way out in international waters, with the organisers saying twenty-one boats were taken and seventeen managed to escape into Greek waters, while Israel’s own foreign ministry has put the number of detained activists at around one hundred and seventy-five from more than twenty boats. This was not some skirmish at the Gaza shoreline was it? Crew reports from the support ship Arctic Sunrise put the intervention forty-five nautical miles west of Kythira and six hundred nautical miles from Gaza, which means Israel did not merely defend a coastal line, it dragged the Gaza blockade halfway across the Mediterranean and expected everyone else to nod along like this is normal. Food, medicine, doctors, volunteers, cameras and witnesses apparently now require a navy to deal with. Very brave. The physical boats have been stopped, but the image Israel has created is a state so scared, so utterly terrified of civilian aid that it has to chase it near Greece before it gets anywhere near Gaza, and of course with detained civilians now heading towards Israeli custody.

Trump thought he had Iran cornered, but others are now showing who really has to be dealt with before the Strait of Hormuz moves. Right, so Trump and Israel wanted Iran cornered, and instead ships going through the Strait of Hormuz are now being told to deal with Iran before they move and that isn’t coming from Iran either, so that is the humiliation here. Iran has not had to give Donald Trump the big clean retaliation picture he very badly wants, no dramatic missile launch into a tanker, no propaganda clips for the White House, no neat “look what Tehran did” moment for the usual parade of grave-faced officials and very serious people paid to pretend American escalation is remotely akin to adult supervision. With Trump in charge its more like a nursery after the teacher has locked herself in a cupboard with a packet of cigarettes. So what is the craic then Damo? Well, in a massive embarrassment to Trump certainly and Israel by association, Global maritime insurers are now adding clauses requiring shipowners to contact Iranian authorities prior to attempting safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz. Ibn other words, insurers are making contact with Iranian authorities contingent upon and vessel attempting to pass through the Strait and that really does say everything about who is really in control. Iran has won the battle of the blockade without firing a shot. Dylan Mortimer, the UK marine war leader at Marsh, one of the biggest insurers brokers in the world has put all this in the bluntest possible terms. America can shout about control, Israel can demand pressure, Trump can do his usual frothing-mouthed chest-beating routine like a man trying to intimidate a cash machine, but the ships still need cover, the cover still needs confidence, and the confidence now has Iran written into the insurance policies covering that route.

Israel’s war has not just hit Iran; it has put a surcharge on the boards, chips and gadgets its own tech economy needs as well as everyone else. Right, so Iran hit Saudi Arabia’s Jubail petrochemical complex on 7 April, after Iran’s own petrochemical plants at Asaluyeh, tied to the South Pars gas field, had already been hit in strikes from Israel. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards described Jubail as retaliation, so this was not Iran randomly waking up one morning and deciding to make laptops and the like more expensive for a laugh, though I’ll get onto that point in a moment. Jubail is part of the Gulf’s industrial plumbing, where Saudi petrochemicals, Western-linked supply chains, energy infrastructure and global manufacturing all meet, and that is why the consequences, the knock on effects of that strike has taken a few weeks to become clear. Production of a specialist resin used in printed circuit board laminates, PCB’s, has been disrupted, SABIC’s Jubail-linked supply has been put under pressure, and the price of those boards has jumped by as much as 40 per cent in a single month. So Israel’s war is no longer sitting neatly inside the nice little box marked missiles, oil tankers and military briefings. It has started crawling into the stuff under modern technology. Phones, laptops, servers, cars, consoles, routers, drones and medical devices still need circuit boards to work. Those boards need laminates. Those laminates need high-purity polyphenylene ether resin, which I know sounds like the sort of phrase designed to make normal people glaze over and go and do something healthier with their lives, but it matters because SABIC, the Saudi Basic Industries Corporation, operating at Jubail, is at the centre of a PCB supply chain reportedly accounting for around 70 per cent of global high-purity PPE supply used to make PCBs.

Labour thought East London was its property; but a sneer from Wes Streeting has triggerd an hilarious response message to voters. Right, so shiny faced recipient of private health donations, the health secretary Wes Streeting has picked a fight in Redbridge, his home patch, though hopefully not for a great deal longer if polling counts for anything and Labour is the one now taking the hit, because instead of putting out a slick little campaign video bigging up his party in the run up to local elections, he put out a warning shot against Redbridge Independents, called them divisive, tried to turn Jeremy Corbyn, who has publicly backed them into a warning label, tried to make campaigning on issues such as Palestine, Kashmir and Sudan, places of war and genocide sound like embarrassing distractions from proper council business, and then pointed at the Aspire run Tower Hamlets as a basket case, as if Labour’s own local record before them was something anyone sensible would laminate and frame, instead of being the reason people dumped Labour there and basically went independent too. Nice try, but no. Redbridge decided to reply to Wesly with a video of their own, now much more widely doing the rounds because it is so much better, hammering all the things Labour hates most, and answering Streeting’s sneer with plenty of receipts.

Netanyahu can still shout innocence, but the untouchable act now needs a pardon and now he's been told he's not getting it. Right, so as we know Benjamin Netanyahu had, at the urging of Doanld Trump and on top of Trump himself laying it on thick, asked Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog for a pardon while Netanyahu is very much still on trial over those corruption charges, and after a not insignificant amount of hand wringing it would seem, goodness what other reason there is for Herzog to have taken so long, Herzog has not given in and given Netanyahu a way out. Oh dear, how sad, never mind. Herzog has not lifted the trial off him, has not handed him a nice little escape route. Herzog has said all parties involved should first try to reach an agreement outside the courtroom. In other words meaning plea-deal territory, meaning prosecutors, conditions, admission, guilt, and the bit Netanyahu was clearly trying to keep away from at all costs – a confession. Netanyahu wanted mercy without saying why mercy was needed. He who is without mercy for others is what sprang to my mind. He wanted this pardon to float above his trial as if it was a national necessity, and Herzog has not saved him; has instead dragged it back down into a place where the charges sit, where lawyers negotiate, and defendants have to decide what exactly they are prepared to admit to.

Westminster’s club culture just hit someone from normal working life, and she refused to pretend MPs drinking between votes was fine. Right, so Nigel Farage, amongst others has tried to make Hannah Spencer look ridiculous over Parliament’s drinking culture, and have managed to make themselves look like defenders of booze before votes because it seems seeing the word Green ahead of upcoming local elections saw them grasping for the nearest culture war opportunity available. Spencer is of course the still quite new Green MP for Gorton and Denton and being rather new, the drinking culture in Westminster came as a bit of a shock to her. Drinking not after work. Not in a pub on their own time. But between votes, while Parliament is still sitting, while MPs are still doing the job of voting on laws. Farage then posted that the Greens are happy to legalise heroin and crack, but think an afternoon pint is a step too far, and invited everyone to make it make sense. Well fine Nige. If you insist. Let’s make it make sense. Drug policy is about criminal markets, addiction, public health, regulation and harm reduction. Drinking alcohol while still at work is about whether lawmakers should be sober when they are making decisions that affect all of us. Farage is trying to turn a workplace standards issue into a drugs scare, and all he did was put himself in the doorway of Westminster’s bar with a sign around his neck saying please don’t apply normal rules to us.

Trump’s lawyers did not expose him on purpose; they exposed him because defending the Iran war meant writing Israel’s request into their excuses. Right, so Donald Trump’s Iran story has cracked because his own State Department legal adviser has put the damaging bit in writing. Reed Rubinstein has issued the legal defence of Operation Epic Fury, the American war against Iran, and right there in the official argument is the line that the United States is engaged in the conflict at the request of Israel and in the collective self-defence of Israel, as well as claiming American self-defence. That is the memo. That is the receipt. Trump has been saying Israel never talked him into the war with Iran, and now his own administration has taken the thing he was trying to deny and very inconsiderately he might say, put it right there in the paperwork, like some overpaid legal genius trying to hide the body and filing the burial location under “attachments.” America was told this was America defending itself, but the legal defence now names Israel’s request as part of the reason American force has been used. So Trump does not get to sell that story anymore as clean story of US self-defence, nonsense as it always was with Iran sitting on the other side of the world.

Labour thought Putin would save them from Zack Polanski; instead it made itself look more terrified of the Greens...and teenagers too apparently! Right, so Labour thought Putin would do the job for them. That is the blunt shape of this latest little stunt, because Labour’s official account has taken a comment by zack Polanski, stuck it on a poster with bombed out images of Mariupol in Ukraine behind it, and tried to turn a Green leader who called Putin horrendous into somebody supposedly soft on Russia. Here is the poster itself. The quote they used does not even hide the problem for them, because the words “as horrendous as Putin is” are sitting there in the attack itself, doing the work Labour’s smear needs the viewer not to notice. This poster is not some random crank with a flag emoji having a tantrum in the replies. It is the party machine choosing to spend its time making a Green opponent look contaminated by Putin, while the Greens are rising, young voters are drifting, and speaking of, Labour MPs are now reportedly getting very nervous about giving sixteen and seventeen year olds the vote before the next general election. And that is the whole thing sitting there in a single campaign object, Mariupol used as backdrop, Polanski used as target, and Labour’s Green problem is what actually gets left on the poster. Zack Polanski’s actual answer came after he was pressed on Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, and the bit Labour wants to turn into a scandal is not a defence of Putin.

Green suspensions have put Palestine politics under pressure inside the party - members stop anti-Zionism being turned into a disciplinary risk. Right, so another Green Party suspension has now put the party’s pro Palestine politics under even more pressure now, as it starts to look like a deliberate targeting of anti-Zionists is being borne out. Tony Greenstein, a Jewish anti-Zionist and long-standing Palestine campaigner, has been suspended and now so has Mark Adderley, a filmmaker, anti-genocide campaigner and Green Party candidate for Crystal Palace and Upper Norwood in Croydon. Adderley has not shuffled off into the corner and apologised for existing over this either. He has said he is disgusted, he has accused Labour minister Steve Reed and others of defamatory smears, he has blasted the Green Party administration for folding to weaponised antisemitism claims, and he has said he will seek legal advice. Labour figures and pro-Israel media have been pushing the familiar line that a party attracting Palestine supporters must have an antisemitism problem, because apparently British politics is now just one long complaints form with Steve Reed holding the pen apparently. The damage is not yet landing on the people driving that pressure. It is landing on the Greens, and the question now is whether members force the party to resist it or watch them get trapped in the same position Jeremy Corbyn did with everything that then followed. The smear was meant to isolate anti-Zionists inside the Greens, but for as much as two suspensions on this front are alarming, it has also put the whole complaints machine under public scrutiny before the trap has settled into party habit. Zack Polanski of course ends up sitting in the middle of this because he leads the Green Party of England and Wales, not because he personally has to have pressed the suspension button. The official Green Party complaints structure has specific routes through complaints, referral and disciplinary machinery.

Israel went looking for a Red Sea foothold in Somaliland and handed Somalia a sovereignty grievance, Yemen a target warning and Iran all new leverage. Right, so Benjamin Netanyahu’s Red Sea problem has just got nastier, because Israel has recognised Somaliland, breakaway state of Somalia that only Israel recognises and as a result of that Somalia has chosen now, with all the Strait of Hormuz access problems Israel is faced with, to put access to the Bab el-Mandeb Strait on the table, and Iran has been handed another leverage advantage it didn’t even need to build for itself. But like Iran, Somalia has not suddenly become a naval superpower, it’s another case of geography giving them a big advantage. Mogadishu has not parked a fleet across one of the world’s most important sea lanes and frankly if anyone would do that, we’d have expected more of a military response from the likes of Ansarallah, the Houthis, but they aren’t alone in flexing here, its not just them with that advantage, because Somalia, sitting on the Horn of Africa as it does, can cause problems for shipping long before they ever reach Bab-El Mandeb if coming from Asia, and making shipping potentially think twice if coming from the direction of the Suez Canal. So this is very much a self inflicted hen coming home to roost for Israel, because something they cooked up a while ago is suddenly punching them in the face right when they are logistically kiboshed elsewhere.