Kernow Damo

Israel has legalised hanging for Palestinians and while the Greens have said that should carry a price, the rest of Westminster is still staring at the carpet. Right, so Israel is the first state in history to legislate a death sentence that applies only to one ethnic group. There's a reason nobody else has ever done this, not even apartheid South Africa did this. It's a depth of evil beyond humanity itself, and while Zack Polanski’s Green Party has now demanded Israel pay a price for that, outlining exactly what they think the UK response right now to this should be, Keir Starmer has still not said a damn thing about it. He was fast enough to make demands of Iran acting in self defence after Israel attacked them roughly one month ago, but over this? Nothing. Well if Starmer’s problem is that Israel won’t like him very much if he dares put so much as a crooked toenail out of joint, or any of their mouthpieces here in the UK for that matter too, then here’s is one Israeli outlining exactly what the problem is here, rather than wait for his focus groups or Morgan McSweeney via his missing mobile to tell him otherwise. That was Israeli left winger Ofer Cassif there, a rare voice in the Knesset capable of speaking truth to power. That is why Starmer ends up sat there being ridiculed across social media, being derided as if he hasn’t got anything to say, because frankly he damn well should, not least because the question has already been answered for him by Green Party Deputy Leader Mothin Ali. Suspend Israel’s senior diplomat. Stop the arms. Sanction the state. The Greens have put a price on the table and Starmer has put nothing on it at all.

They hit cancer treatment, failed to make Iran fold, and Starmer is finding out that being involved does in fact put your own country in the firing line. Right, so nothing quite screams military target quite like Israel and the United States striking a pharmaceutical plant in Iran that produces cancer drugs and anaesthetics, does it? A cancer drug facility struck. Perhaps thewy were trying to hit a valid military target, much like the excuses they gave when they struck the Minab girls school, next to an IRGC facility you might be thinking, well the other targets reportedly hit in the area actually included more residential buildings, a site of religious significance and an orphanage, so anyone telling any such tales can go and shove it where the sun doesn’t shine. Keir Starmer’s pretence that the UK is not involved in the Iran war except in a defensive posture, despite blatantly allowing US bombers to refuel, reload and take off from UK soil, not kidding anyone here in the UK except for the wilfully lobotomised, still trusting mainstream media delivers this abstract concept known as news has just got a big fat Iranian answer now too, as it appears they are no more fooled by his weasel words either. That burns well doesn’t it? That is what remains of a Castrol facility in Iraq. Drones hit Castrol warehouses near Erbil, a British-branded oil company as that is, and so the gap between what Starmer says and what Britain is doing gets a lot harder to manage with tidy little phrases and a straight face in Westminster, when what results is a major fire at the warehouse because Iran isn’t buying the snake oil you’re selling. Or the engine oil for that matter. It does burn rather well. So much for what Keir Starmer has said in the Commons on such things therefore, pathetic claims that kidded nobody. Britain did not join the strikes, he says, this not Britain’s war, we are staying out of it.

Masked officers at dawn for Qesser Zuhrah, paperwork and suspension for a Met officer after Golders Green abuse: same city, same force, different rules. Right, so the Met police are really lapping up the self inflicted damage it would seem as not only have they been shamed over the conduct of one of their special officers – and he really was something quite special – in amongst scenes of abuse aimed at an Al Jazeera news crew attempting to report on the arson attack on Jewish ambulances in Golders Green, but now they are back to arresting Palestine Action hunger strikers just a month after they were released and the tape from Watford concerning the arrest of Qesser Zuhrah has already done the damage. Qesser Zuhrah there, put in a car, masked officers are around her, and one of the first sensible questions in the whole affair is the one she asks herself, aimed at the police and others there asked the same thing too - why are the police masked? That is not some tiny aesthetic detail is it? The Metropolitan Police, along with Counter Terrorism Policing South East have helped turn the arrest of a 21-year-old woman over an alleged call for “direct action” - not illegal in itself of course - into a public argument about fear and accountability before most people have even got to the legal wording. Nothing says calm, proportionate confidence like covering your face to arrest a young activist at dawn is there? The Met has then managed to do this while still carrying the fallout from the recent incident at Golders Green, where a serving Special Constable, David Soffer, was filmed abusing and helping intimidate an Al Jazeera crew wishing to cover the arson of those Hatzola ambulances the night before and not wishing them to do so. Well, he has now been suspended. Perhaps that is why the masks matter now. They arrived after the force had already made itself part of another Palestine story and after Declassified UK, through their investigative journalism, had already put one of its own officers on the public record.

Ben Gvir got his hanging law, but Israel has made itself harder to defend and dragged every ally still pretending otherwise deeper into the disgrace. Right, so Itamar Ben-Gvir has got his hanging law through the Knesset, Benjamin Netanyahu voted for it himself, what a way to prove both of them are in fact still alive and the first thing this has done is make Israel so much harder to defend in every capital still pretending there is some decent democratic core concerning this blatantly apartheid state, a hanging law after all that only applies to Palestinians. Any politician or media pundit denying that now is either wilfully stupid or bought and paid for. A majority of 62 Knesset members has backed a law that sets the death penalty as the default in military courts – which are the only courts Palestinians are tried through - for Palestinians convicted of terror-related murder, and allows life only in vague “special circumstances”, strips out the notion of pardon completely, and drives toward execution inside 90 days. Ben Gvir’s reaction? This. Then the smiling started. Then the drinks went up. Then the whole thing stopped looking like a grim act of state necessity, the darkest of laws being passed and this maniac and his ilk popped champagne corks. It looks like exactly what it is and I don’t apologise for showing that clip either, because if it makes your blood boil then good, it should. A far-right political trophy being waved about by men who think cruelty is strength and a legal spit polish can make it look respectable. The Association for Civil Rights in Israel, ACRI – believe it or not, there is such a thing - has spelt the consequences of this out for Palestinians in very stark and straightforward terms, adding to a point I made a moment ago. Palestinians in the territories go through military courts. Israeli citizens, including settlers in the West Bank, go through civilian courts. The entire legal system was therefore an example of apartheid before this death penalty bill passed. In that military track, the death sentence is the default, hence it only applies to Palestinians. In the civilian track, the law is framed around intent to negate the existence of the state, which ACRI says means Jews will not in practice face this punishment, again nailing on the obvious apartheid here. That is not one justice system being applied equally.

Netanyahu sold an Iran war on nuclear fear, but has he now let the cat out of the bag about what it is really all about? Right, so Benjamin Netanyahu has gone on camera, been asked what the end of this war with iran is supposed to look like, and answered not with some last-ditch line about centrifuges being destroyed, not with some grim little sermon about imminent nuclear doom if they fail, but he came out with something else entirely instead, which has now got people wondering if he’s just given the game away. The war ends with oil and gas pipelines running west through the Arabian Peninsula to Israeli Mediterranean ports, bypassing Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb entirely for forever and a day. Israel’s security assured, who would target the global hub for all oil and gas coming out of the Middle East? He said the old sea lanes have to be bypassed and the new route ends in Israel. So the man who went to war and went scurrying away again last year, who convinced Trump this was an easy win to try again this year, and is again being handed his backside, has all the same suddenly dropped the Iran will have a nuclear bomb in 30 minutes line and started talking up oil and gas rerouting instead. War in the language of emergency has started describing victory in the language of infrastructure and commercial interests. Of course the head of the IAEA Rafael Grossi has already said there is no evidence Iran is building a nuclear bomb, the entire premise of the Israeli -US attacks on Iran are built on sand. The IAEA has said diplomacy is needed to ensure Iran will not acquire nuclear weapons as well, showing where they sit politically too, knowing there’s no plans still at this time to do so on Iran’s part, the fatwa in place forbidding it, put in place by the former Supreme Leader remains in place as well. A state with no nukes has been hit under the language of having them anyway, all besides Israel very much having them and not being signatories to the Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty unlike Iran as well.

The Houthis hitting Israel mattered as proof that another front had opened at exactly the moment Netanyahu most needed the war to stop getting wider. Right, so the spokesman for the Ansarallah Movement, Yahya Saree has now said the Houthis are entering the Iran war. You might have been wondering what had been keeping them all of this time, they’d announced their readiness some time ago after all. Well in case you had been missing his daily reports from Houthi HQ, he’s happy to update you Houthi forces have therefore carried out their first military operation against Israel since they downed tools at the start of the sick joke of a Gaza ceasefire began last year, using ballistic missiles against military sites in the south, with Israeli reporting they had sirens sounding around Beersheba with a missile allegedly intercepted before it crossed into Israeli territory, assuming there were rockets left with which to do that with. Ansarallah leader Abdul Malik al-Houthi had already been making it perfectly clear that the Houthis were ready to move in support of Iran, and Yahya Saree had already put the warning out in public too: keep widening this war, use the Red Sea for hostile operations, and they were ready to step in directly to block it again, just as they did before. They’ve been biding their time, reminding people periodically that they were at readiness, had not formally stepped in yet, but now they have. The Houthis were not hiding their capability after all, we’ve all seen what they can do, hold off the US and Israel at the same time, keep the Red Sea blockaded with little more than dinghies and drones and then they wheeled out their bigger toys. And now they’ve made their move again. Netanyahu’s problem is that this is now one more front at the exact moment he most needed fewer of them, but he only has himself to blame. He needed the war narrowing. He needed his enemies separated instead of united. He only has himself to blame for starting so much war on so many fronts that one more might now actually break him and Israel itself.

A small anti-motion bloc could not beat Zionism is Racism openly, so after conference pushed it up the agenda, they ran down the clock instead. Right, so safe to safe to say matters didn’t quite go our way at Green Party Spring Conference yesterday, but not for the reasons being widely propagated either, that the Greens are clearly just another liberal party that will allow Zionism to persist, that we failed because that’s the kind of party we are and whether the membership has grown or not, that won’t change, with a new leader that won’t change, but actually Polanski is largely irrelevant, because members make policy in the Greens and that growing membership did make itself known, because we had the Zionists running scared, we had them beaten in several votes in relation to getting Zionism declared racism within the party, which is why they had to resort to procedure and running down the clock to finally stop us getting to the big vote, it was the only tool they had left after we’d dismantled ever other attempt to derail it during the day’s proceedings before that. The first attempt of theirs was to try and get this motion called out of order. That failed. We came back with a move to get the motion moved up the running order, from E12, the 12th non organisational policy motion to be heard in other words, to E03, up 9 places, higher up the running order. We won that. It became E03. The clock got run down before E03 could be heard though. Conference shut before the vote happened, stalling tactics, such as time wasting almost concurrent votes of no confidence in the chair for the weakest possible reasons being the main one and so the clock ended up finishing what the direct blocking attempts earlier in the day could not. Anybody calling what happened yesterday a routine procedural outcome is taking the piss. If opponents thought they could beat the motion in the open, they would have let it reach the floor. If they had the numbers, they could have walked out leaving the plenary session inquorate and unable to continue business. They didn’t have them. What they had was procedure.

Israel has opened so many war fronts that it is now running short of soldiers, running short of public patience, and running out of time and money too. Right, so Israel’s Chief of Staff, head of the IDF Eyal Zamir has warned Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet that the Israeli army is running short of bodies and cannot carry on like this. Oh dear, how sad, never mind, we might just be starting this video, but already I have a sense of a great many very tiny violins all being broken out in sympathy with such news. Zamir is of course the top serving military officer, and the reporting out of Israel says he has told ministers the army could collapse into itself if they do not solve the manpower crisis they face, which was an issue long before they decided to make war on Iran and anyone else they felt like at the same time, from Gaza to Lebanon at that. Now it it is apparently existentially worse. Zamir has apparently raised ten red flags over this, though conspicuously no publication seems to have listed all ten – that pesky military censor doing the rounds I presume – but amongst the recommendations we do know about are a demand for a conscription law, a reserve-duty law, and a demand for even longer regular service. It doesn’t exactly scream in control does it? It’s coercion into military service whether you want it or not it seems. The army Israel sells to the world as permanently ready, permanently sharp, permanently one step ahead and very much the most moral, has had its own commander warning the political class that unless there is a dramatic, legally enforceable shift, they’re done for in effect.

Greens pour scorn over main media telling them to know their place over Zionism is Racism motion, but has Germany set the precedent first? Right, so tomorrow Green Party Spring Conference kicks off, a lot of reports, organisation stuff sure, but also policy motions, the ability to make and shape Green Party policy belongs to all of us as members and the one that has won the most focus understandably is very much currently going by the official name of Motion E12, but is much better known now as the “Zionism Is Racism” motion. But right up until the day it finally goes before the membership, it is still under attack. But, while the press has already spent weeks throwing muck at it, a regional branch of Die Linke, the German Democratic Socialist Party in Lower Saxony has already managed to beat the Greens to it – at least in a sense, I’ll explain more in a moment, Germany of all places you might be thinking, well indeed. So we have this situation right now where one party in Britain is being told to know its place and get back in its box with regards to Zionism, and yet another party in arguably even more Zionist Germany has already said enough to trigger the very same shift, and all the people who normally insist these arguments belong only on the activist fringe are left trying to explain why they are suddenly shouting so loudly about something they insist does not matter. Because clearly this is not a conversation just happening here and now in the UK, within one main party, this is happening elsewhere too and the change I for one certainly hope to see voted through tomorrow is already being voted through elsewhere too. Those complaining and wailing that the old taboo around Zionism is breaking, that all those false accusations of antisemitism are no longer landing are shouting because it does matter, and because once this moves from placards and meetings into formal party procedure, they lose all the comfort of pretending it is them that are the only ones who do the serious politics.

Arabic Al Jazeera journalists were abused in Golders Green by local Jewry, and Britain’s anti-racism values suddenly went missing. Right, so an Al Jazeera crew turned up in Golders Green to report on the arson attack on that Jewish volunteer ambulance service and ended up being shouted out of the area by men from the same local community that had just been given the full language of national sympathy, but has had scant coverage in the mainstream because they’re still falling all over themselves covering the ambulance side of the story, talking up claims of an Iranian terror group that has apparently only existed for all of 5 minutes as the apparent perpetrators, so take a look at this, because if we’re going to talk racist attacks, as this ambulance arson story has been readily referred to as antisemitic, then lets be even handed about it. Pretty disgusting all in all isn’t it? The crowd is there. “Go back to Qatar” is there. The police officer saying they are reporting the news is there. The men insisting they feel threatened by the journalists while surrounding them and yelling in their faces is there. And once the animal slurs start, once you get donkeys and dogs thrown at Arab journalists in the middle of a London street, all the careful little pretence about community upset and understandable tension and emotions running high start falling apart on contact with the footage. Keir Starmer had already chosen his line by then. The Home Office had already chosen its line by then. The first incident, the burning of four Hatzola ambulances outside the synagogue on Highfield Road at about 1.45 in the morning, was treated as an antisemitic hate crime, handed to Counter Terrorism Policing, condemned from the top, and turned into a national statement about solidarity with British Jews. Four ambulances were destroyed. Thirty-four residents were displaced after oxygen canisters exploded. Replacement ambulances were promised by the next morning. Government money was put up for permanent replacements. The whole machine knew exactly what tone to use, exactly what moral language to reach for, exactly whose fear to centre.