Kernow Damo

Right, so Malaysia has taken possession of three Israel-bound containers, which are now hanging around one of Southeast Asia's busiest ports like lost luggage. They have been sitting there since 19 August without batting an eyelid, awaiting divine intervention or for someone in Tel Aviv to explain why a Malaysian port should do as it’s told.

Malaysia has banned Israeli shipping and Israel-bound cargo since 2023, which, if you were already aware of this, might make you wonder what all the fuss is about now. And it’s a case of, they always made an exception when they get to play the middle man. Transhipment as its called, where cargo gets offloaded from one vessel to another, without ever being imported, so Malaysia don’t technically handle the goods, they just let others do it instead.

That changed on 7 August however, when Malaysian border officials pulled a container reportedly headed for Elbit Systems, Israel’s weapons giant, aside for a spot of very unwelcome attention.

Now, Malaysia did not say it had found weapons. It said it was investigating whether the contents amounted to controlled or strategic goods. But Elbit ended up discovering nonetheless, that a shipping manifest, even an Israeli one, is not, in fact, a royal decree ordering Malaysian authorities to mind their own business.

Two weeks later came three more containers bound for Ashdod in Israel. They also got held while Malaysia reviewed the cargo and Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim decided nobody should be left squinting at the shipping labels trying to work out the message as if they were written in code. Malaysia, he said, would not allow itself to become “a conduit for any shipment that supports or contributes to Israel’s military capabilities.”

And that is when the policy stopped being a statement and started becoming enforcement.

Right, so carrot-coloured calamity Donald Trump’s war on Iran has consumed half to two-thirds of America's most advanced interceptors, the very missiles designed to prevent Iranian drones and ballistic missiles from turning American bases into costly fires.

They're mumbling about a lack of strategic inventories, military speak for: we ran out of all our best toys, and our factory elves can't come up with anything new anytime soon to bail us out of this self-inflicted act of idiocy. The Congressional Budget Office, the CBO, now says it will take five years to make it up, and that is after they’ve converted hundreds of US military barracks into modern art installations and have sent dozens of planes to the scrap heap.

Trump has, without doubt, left the US insufficiently stocked for the next conflict, and replenishment may be difficult to complete before his term ends. Quite the legacy.

Trump's Iran war has already melted down thirty-eight billion dollars of American cash; US military bases have been tenderised like discount steak, planes have been shredded or vaporised, and the interceptors that were to protect them have been burnt so quickly that they won't be able to be replaced for five years either.

So what is Donald Trump's answer to this sparkling new American crisis of defence then?

He has, of course, come out for Israel again, with another $2.8 billion arms package that will include 40,000 bombs some of which will weigh in at more than 2000lbs.

America pays for Trump’s war in Iran. America pays again for all the things this war eats up and spits out.

And then America pays yet again, because heaven forbid Benjamin Netanyahu's bomb pantry ever looks a bit bare. Israel first, then Israel again and then Israel again.

Right, so Israel’s got rats and no I’m not talking about Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, I’m talking about literal rats and there’s not a Pied Piper in all of Hamelin that can fix this either, because Israel appear to have done it to themselves.

They have turned up around houses, fields, and military barracks near Gaza. They are said to have bitten people, and the pest controllers are struggling on the job. Some residents are catching dozens of them. But where have they all come from?

Well, almost poetically, after three years of Israel turning Gaza into a garbage dump, which in some places is literally filled with raw sewage, it seems as though Mr Netanyahu had called up the Old Testament and asked for the deluxe plague package, in deeds if not so much in words anyway.

The state that thought that it could let Gaza fester behind walls and fences is learning in the most terrible way that when you start blowing hell out of the worlds largest open air concentration camp, the rats are not very respectful of the borders of Israel, nor the very walls and fences designed to keep the Palestinians in, especially when you’ve literally been giving them every reason to leave.

So before any one of you deliberately misunderstands me amidst the talk of plagues and wrath of God and biblical stuff like that, I am not saying that God had a battalion of rats in heaven and decided to send them to Israel, but given Israel’s insistence that they are divinely favoured and that this land was promised to them, the bible jokes write themselves.

Right, so it's been announced that the Labour Party has selected Sagal Abdi-Wali to replace Keir Starmer in Holborn and St Pancras, and the campaign slogans are being laid on thick and fast.

She's local. She's a community champion. She says her priorities are tackling homelessness, improving housing, supporting families and giving local people a stronger voice. She came to Camden as a child refugee, and, in the best tradition of political fairytales, wants to give back to the borough that took her in-in the form of more stagnant Labour Party continuity.

It's all fine and good if you're aiming at the top of a ratings chart for a documentary film on Netflix that no one ends up watching.

But it says nothing at all about whether she should be allowed anywhere near the legislature, unless now the job description reads: "Must cut ribbons, smile at the camera, and scatter leaflets like wedding confetti."

But then, a few days after the commencement of her campaign, the council she has only led since May closed a session with as much elegance as a circus elephant stepping on a clown.

That banner says "GENOCIDE".

Camden Council arranged the meeting, a three-hour session in which a resolution against investing pensions in companies involved in grave human rights violations somehow went unmentioned.

They had three hours to pass, enough to deliberate and ponder, and also for a few naps.

But the motion was at the tail end of the agenda - naturally, so the clock was running out, the councillors had begun to leave, and those who had sat through hours of municipal twaddle were left with nothing to do but to shout down at Sagal Abdi-Wali. Democracy in action, if your idea of action is watching tumbleweeds.

Right, so twenty-four Israelis who served inside the military system used to target Gaza have just done something the IDF could really have done without.

They’ve talked.

Soldiers, intelligence officers, people who watched the screens, gathered the surveillance and helped produce the targets.

Their testimony is now a documentary called NAZA, and it has just won the Special Jury Prize at Venice.

So Israel’s response?

Deny the lot, obviously. Then have Netanyahu’s culture minister accuse the filmmakers of treason and threaten to have their citizenship revoked. And there was me thinking this was the ordained by God 3000 years in the making promised land, so how can you do that then?

The people who hid their identities because they feared Israeli retaliation have just been proven rather sensible to do so then.

The IDF has another meltdown on its hands.

And this one is too big to bury.

But the latest public scandal of the Israeli army was home-made. The IDF doesn't have to accuse the usual suspects when it can blow itself up from the inside.

Now the mess is too big to sweep under the carpet, even if you borrowed the largest broom in the world.

Right, so Doctors Without Borders, Medecins Sans Frontiers, are facing charges of terrorism on the part of a certain rather notorious pro-Israel group who are demanding that the Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood considers banning the organisation.

A powerful accusation, heaping out enough melodrama enough to choke an episode of Eastenders.

There is a big fat snag though, because the organisation in question, who have decided MSF need taking down, UKLFI, UK Lawyers for Israel, happens to have its own regulatory skeletons in the cupboard,

So suddenly, the tables are turning faster than a swindled roulette wheel in a seedy gambling den.

That was Talk's Peter Cardwell asking Natasha Hausdorff about the demand to ban Doctors Without Borders over alleged terror links, because of course UKLFI get a warm welcome on Rupert Murdoch media.

Hausdorff is legal director of the UK Lawyers for Israel Charitable Trust, which is related to, but legally distinct from, UK Lawyers for Israel itself.

The UKLFI has made representations to Shabana Mahmood, the Home Secretary, and to the Charity Commission and the Fundraising Regulator.

But what didn’t happen here matters as much as what did, because Mahmood hasn’t publicly responded and actually, this isn’t really about what Mahmood has or hasn’t done yet anyway.

It’s about what UKLFI thinks should be done and the media platforming they’ve got to say it.

Right, so for decades, Israel has been flogging government bonds to anyone keen to prop up the state.

You hand over your cash, Israel pockets it for the general budget, and in return you get a pinky promise that the state will pay you back with interest. What could go wrong?

But if Israel wants to hawk these bonds to the average European punter, it needs a shiny prospectus rubber-stamped by an EU financial regulator. This legal necessity spells out what’s on offer, the fine print, and all the ways you might get burned. Once one member state gives it the nod, Israel Bonds can peddle the same deal across most of the bloc and for the last year, that state was Luxembourg.

Luxembourg’s approval quietly expired on 31 August, and-shock horror-they didn’t bother to renew it and as of today, still not a single EU country had leapt at the chance to take over. The European Securities and Markets Authority, ESMA, which wrangles the bloc’s market rules, has confirmed it hadn’t received even a polite email about a transfer.

So now Israel Bonds-the same outfit that’s spent weeks loudly insisting the boycott movement is a total flop-finds itself wandering Europe like a desperate contestant on a bad dating show, begging anyone to slap their regulatory signature on the paperwork so they can keep rattling the tin for European cash.

Before Brexit, Britain played host. Then Ireland took the hot potato after Britain flounced out of the EU single market. Good heavens we’ve found a Brexit benefit at last! By September of last year, Luxembourg had the job, thanks to the mounting political heat over the bonds. Luxembourg managed a whole year of carrying the growing flak for that it seems before quietly dropping it like a bad habit, evidently unprepared to make it two.

Right, so Israel has thrown a real temper tantrum against Britain, but not because Britain has stopped arming it, because of course we haven’t done that.

Britain announced restrictions on goods from illegal settlements, curbs on British firms selling or promoting settlement property, sanctions on several extremist settlers and a refusal of export licences that materially sustain the occupation. Israel responded by ordering British personnel out, freezing Britain out of Gaza coordination and moving to close the British consulate in occupied East Jerusalem, shame on us for having even established one there.

Britain's answer is less a slap on the wrist, which in itself was grossly insufficient, it was in fact limper than a vicar’s handshake.

And yet it was still enough to have Netanyahu and his crazy cabinet of despots squealing like stuck pigs.

British personnel given just a week to leave.

The consulate in East Jerusalem was allowed 30 days to depart.

Immediately thereafter, Israel began to bar British politicians and other public figures from entering the country, badges of honour for all concerned, all of the Green Party MP’s, Jeremy Corbyn, Zarah Sultana and others, because nothing quite says 'We are not afraid of you' so much as making a blocklist of people you are quite clearly afraid of to let through passport control.

Right, so, Benjamin Netanyahu wanted to send more troops to the war in Lebanon.

He wished to drive Hezbollah away from the Israeli frontier, destroy its military infrastructure, prevent its reconstruction, and retain a security belt in southern Lebanon until Israel, as paranoid as they appear to be, is finally convinced that the threat is over.

Not just one or two more attacks and a few raids. It’s not enough to be in the South for a week or two. We need a real war. More soldiers, more territory, more attacks, more bombing of whatever Israel thinks might be a threat to its security. More war to keep Benjamin Netanyahu out of his corruption trial.

But now the bill for all of this has arrived, faster than the Knesset can say pass this on to Donald, and it’s not as cheap as it looks.

Lebanese newspaper Bint Jbeil, quoting Yedioth Ahronoth, says that hundreds of Israeli Humvees have been destroyed there, so that the IDF is experiencing a severe shortage. The poor darlings are having to walk more it seems.

Right, so South Africa has stomped back into the World Court, brandishing a big fat new dossier and accusing Israel of treating those three binding orders the court had imposed like so much junk mail that’s come through your door that you shove straight in the bin without reading: stop genocidal acts and incitement, let aid into Gaza, and maybe don’t flatten Rafah while you’re at it.

And as if Netanyahu wasn’t already sweating through his suit, Israel’s suppliers might soon find themselves yanked into the dock right alongside him, kicking and screaming or not.

And there he is, basking in his own adulation like a radioactive satsuma.

The head of Israel’s biggest supplier, generously reminding the world that Israel is basically propped up by his own two undersized hands.

Now Trump meant that as a flex, obviously. Look at me, look what I built, look how the universe would collapse if I ever took a day off.

But when South Africa has continued to busy itself compiling all those receipts for what Israel has kept doing after three binding World Court orders, and you have Donald J Trump bragging on camera that Israel depends on US weapons, cash and political cover, he is basically volunteering himself as Exhibit A.