Kernow Damo

Five weeks on hunger strike is now a health catastrophe for the unconvicted Filton hunger strikers and the government denies all knowledge. Right, so you look at what’s happening to the Filton hunger strikers and you start to wonder how many people this government expects to collapse before it admits it knows what’s going on. Seven activists on remand starving in its prisons, two already in hospital, families begging for updates, parliamentarians raising the alarm, doctors warning about organ failure, and the Justice Secretary David Lammy has claimed he’s never heard of any of it. And it’d almost be funny, in that bleak British way, if it weren’t people’s lives on the line. Because when a government claims ignorance while its political prisoners waste away in real time, you’re not looking at incompetence anymore. You’re looking at a state hoping the public won’t notice what it’s prepared to let happen. Right, so you look at what’s happening to the Filton hunger strikers and you realise very quickly that the government is not dealing with a criminal-justice issue here, it’s dealing with a political problem it doesn’t want to name, and because it doesn’t want to name it, it’s letting seven people waste away in its own prisons while ministers pretend not to know a thing about it. And once you understand that, you understand the silence, you understand the denial, and you understand why the situation has been allowed to reach the point where two of them are in hospital and others are close behind. This isn’t a breakdown of process. This is what the state looks like when it is cornered by its own authoritarian drift and still wants to present itself as the grown-up in the room. This is a price for that they seem to want to pay. And you can see it clearly because none of these people have even been tried yet. Yet they’re starving. Inside a system that claims to value the rule of law. Seven political activists associated with Palestine Action are refusing food in UK prisons, six of them for more than a month, and the seventh joining after watching the state ignore the collapsing bodies of the rest. Two are already hospitalised. One is Teuta Hoxha, who deteriorated so sharply she had to be taken out under emergency care. Another is Kamran Ahmed, who collapsed after weeks without food and ended up in hospital with dangerously low blood glucose. Those aren’t symbolic gestures, they’re the final stage of desperation.

Iran just found Israel's weak spot and are now busy exploiting it remorselessly. And there's nothing Israel can do about it either! Right, so Iran hasn’t fired a shot, hasn’t launched a drone, hasn’t even rattled the regional cage this time, yet Israeli media are acting like the Ayatollah has kicked a hole through their living-room wall. And all it took was a news channel being launched in Iran in Hebrew. They’ve gone spare, because Israel’s built its whole information system on the assumption that it alone gets to decide what Israelis hear, and suddenly that assumption isn’t worth the bandwidth it’s broadcast on. The military censor can gag a journalist, but it can’t gag a VPN. It can control a newsroom, but it can’t control Tehran speaking Hebrew back at them. And when the state that censors everything it can starts panicking about something it can’t, you know the real story isn’t the broadcast — it’s the breach. Iran have moved on from 12 days of warfare back in June to launching information warfare instead! Right, so Israel has spent decades building a system that treats information as part of national defence, because it knows its politics, its military posture and its internal cohesion all depend on keeping control of the national story. And you can see that logic in everything the state does with its military censor, its gag orders, its wartime communications rules and its obsession with framing. It isn’t about transparency. It’s about containment. It’s about ownership. It’s about making sure the version of events that reaches the Israeli public is the one the government feels it can manage. But that entire architecture has been hit from a direction the state didn’t prepare for, because Iran has launched a Hebrew-language news service that sits completely outside Israeli jurisdiction, and the reaction inside Israeli media circles has exposed something the government never wanted the public to see: a censorship regime that works only until someone finds the door around it. Because this isn’t just another foreign broadcast. Iran isn’t speaking English to an international audience or Arabic to its neighbours. It’s speaking Hebrew, deliberately, directly, to Israelis, in a language the Israeli state assumed it could monopolise.

Israel's delusions of Lebanese conquest have been dealt a big fat Hezbollah shaped blow from an unexpected source. Right, so you can tell something’s gone badly wrong for Israel when the person spelling it out isn’t a critic, or some regional rival they can laugh off, but US Ambassador Tom Barrack of all people — a man who’s moved comfortably through the same US power circuits Israel depends on. When someone like that comes out and says Israel cannot defeat Hezbollah, he’s not trying to be provocative, he’s just stating the bit everyone inside the system knows already but never says. And that’s exactly why it stings so much. Israel has built years of policy on the claim that force can settle this, and here’s one of their own effectively admitting it can’t. So of course they’re rattled, because they’ve threatened to start up war on Lebanon again, not that they ever really stopped during this year long farce of a ceasefire, but also because once an insider speaks the truth plainly, you can’t stuff that line in the back of the proverbial sock drawer and pretend it isn’t true. Right, so Israel’s cheeks are burning as they got told you aren’t big enough to win in Lebanon. That’s what has happened with Tom Barrack’s comment that Israel cannot defeat Hezbollah in effect. It isn’t an activist line. It isn’t rhetoric from one of the usual states in the region. It’s a statement made by a man who has been stitched into the political fabric of the United States for years, who has raised money for presidents, who has business ties across the Gulf, who has been treated as part of the ecosystem Israel relies on in Washington. When someone like that says Israel cannot win, he’s giving his assessment, one that mirrors what analysts and regional observers have been saying quietly for years even if officials refuse to say it out loud. The significance of this moment is that it strips away the last layer of pretence around Israeli military doctrine in Lebanon. Because for twenty years Israel has sold the idea that Hezbollah can be degraded, cornered, or eliminated if necessary. It has demanded the Lebanese state disarm the group. It has insisted that the Israeli military remains unmatched and therefore capable of forcing any outcome it chooses. That story is central to Israeli policy. But it only works if people believe it. If the myth holds. If the image of unstoppable force remains intact. And Barrack’s statement lands precisely where that myth is most fragile: the gap between what Israel tells the world and what its own military planners already know. Because the truth is simple. Hezbollah is not a militia Israel can uproot. It is not a temporary network. It is a deeply embedded political-military structure with a social base, an arsenal that has grown over years, and defensive positions built into geography that favours them.

An expose abroad has detonated the collusion between UK state and mainstream media - and it puts indy news outlets in the crosshairs. Right, so you know the state of British media is on its backside when an Australian FOI ruling ends up telling us how our own government runs censorship. Because that’s what’s happened here. A pile of Department for Defence Media Advisory Committee DSMA paperwork leaks abroad, gets forced into daylight by someone else’s transparency laws, and suddenly we can see the thing our own press won’t touch and exactly why that is the case — a system that hides politically awkward stories as standard practice. Not for security, but for convenience. And the really telling bit is how calmly it all reads, like this is just how things are done. The mainstream media doesn’t question it, because they already play along as part of the system. The only people who don’t are independent media, and funnily enough they’re the ones now apparently being painted as the threat – as the ‘extremists’. Well there’s a giveaway as to who keeps you genuinely informed isn’t it? When the state fears the people who tell the full truth and not an acceptable version of it, you know exactly who the problem really is. Right, so the thing about this DSMA leak is that it lands differently from most political stories, because most stories revolve around an incident, a mistake, a scandal you can point to and say: that’s where it went wrong. This is nothing like that. This isn’t a glimpse of wrongdoing; it’s the blueprint of the machine behind it all. You look at these documents and you’re not seeing an aberration, you’re seeing an operating manual for how the British state has kept certain truths out of sight for years, and the only reason it feels shocking is because they never meant for anyone outside the club to see it. And once you’ve read it, once you’ve seen the tone, the expectation, the casualness of it all, you can’t pretend anymore that the mainstream press and the state operate on opposite sides of some democratic divide. They don’t. They operate inside the same structure, and the leak is the first time the public has been handed a piece of that structure in writing. So let’s get this clear from the start: the DSMA system, the D-notice system as you might better know it as, isn’t about national security in the way people are encouraged to imagine it. National security is the coat it wears, the story it tells to justify itself, but the documents expose what it actually does. It shields the state from embarrassment. It shields institutions from accountability. It shields officials from scrutiny.

With winter here and in desperation to keep warm, people in Gaza are burning rubbish, and one MK thinks it should cost them their lives. Right, so you look at the state of Israeli politics some days and think it can’t possibly get more brazen, and then a lawmaker sits in a Knesset committee and says Palestinians who burn rubbish should be shot or b*mbed and, somehow, the people in the room don’t flinch. They agree. They treat it like a policy point, not a proposal for k*lling civilians over a waste fire. And you realise, again, that the occupation doesn’t bother with pretence anymore. It creates the conditions where waste piles up, where people have no safe way to dispose of it, and then calls the survival behaviour “terrorism.” It’s the whole structure telling on itself in one moment: destroy the infrastructure, criminalise the consequences, and claim it’s security. You know exactly what you’re looking at here don’t you? Israel depravity is being shouted from the rooftops again, I suppose this guy is in the running compete in Eurovision now as well? Right, so you watch what has unfolded in the Knesset this week and what came out of that committee room was not a slip, not an overheated remark, not a one-off eruption of extremism. It functioned as a statement of intent. Zvi Sukkot is the chap in question, one of Itamar Ben-Gvir’s fellow Jewish Power politicians, renowned for holding extremist positions as they are, and he sits in a parliamentary committee, hearing a discussion on waste-burning, and says Palestinians who burn rubbish should be k*lled. Shot. B*mbed. Take your pick. And the people in the room whose job it is to moderate or restrain that kind of talk don’t push back. They nod. They agree. They normalise it. And that is the bigger story of course: not the outburst, we’ve probably become used to the filth that comes out of some Israeli politicians mouths, but the agreement. And if you want to know why that matters, it’s because you can see the entire apparatus of the occupation in a single exchange. You can see how the policy is built. You can see how civilian behaviour becomes securitised. You can see how the far right in Israel is no longer a fringe but the gravitational force pulling the whole coalition into a posture where Palestinians are treated as a problem to be managed, not a population with rights. And the fact it happens in a committee discussing environmental matters doesn’t soften it; it sharpens it. Because it shows how deeply the logic has seeped into governance.

Microsoft is facing investor pressure from Norway and regulator pressure in Ireland for it's Israel links, so will they be held to account? Right, so Microsoft has spent years telling the world it’s the sensible one in Big Tech, the adult in the room, the company that doesn’t get itself dragged into political mud fights because it’s too busy selling trust and responsibility by the terabyte. Yet here it is, knee-deep in a surveillance scandal tied to an occupation the world is now calling out in the strongest terms, and suddenly all that corporate calm looks like a very expensive illusion. When the biggest sovereign wealth fund on Earth is voting against your own chief executive because you can’t explain what you’ve been doing with Israeli military data, you’re not managing a risk anymore — you’re managing fallout. And the thing Microsoft never imagined could happen to them is exactly what’s happening: the politics they thought they could ignore has turned around, pulled the evidence out of their own cloud, and asked them to explain why they ever thought neutrality covered any of this. Right, so Microsoft has spent years cultivating this image of corporate stability, the big name, the reassuring brand, the sort of company that can stand above the chaos of the tech sector because it doesn’t make reckless bets, it doesn’t chase controversy, and it doesn’t let itself get dragged into the kind of geopolitical mess that ends careers. Yet here it is, watching the consequences pile up because it decided to embed itself in Israel’s digital security apparatus and pretend that the politics wouldn’t follow them home. That was the mistake. The politics always follows you home. You don’t get to power the infrastructure of an occupation, you don’t get to process the communications of an entire population under military rule, and you don’t get to maintain the architecture of state surveillance without eventually finding yourself answering questions that no corporation wants to answer. Microsoft is now in that position, and the thing that makes the whole situation remarkable is that they walked into it thinking their size would protect them.

The BBC has come out in support of the EBU decision to include Israel in next year's Eurovision - but then the BBC helps fund it out of the licence fee! Right, so here’s the thing about Eurovision this year, and the BBC I daresay might have really hoped nobody would join the dots on this – sorry, not sorry. Because while the Eurovision Broadcasting Union was busy insisting the contest is not political – as if you can put Israel on stage while Gaza is being levelled and expect nobody to notice – the BBC have stepped forward to say it agreed with that decision, and that’s where the trouble starts. Not because of the music, not because of the protests, not even because the BBC’s reputation is on its knees these days, but because the BBC pays into Eurovision using the licence fee, meaning households across Britain are now indirectly funding a contest that has chosen to carry on as if none of the devastation in Gaza matters. And once you see that, you can see why the BBC’s statement wasn’t neutral at all. It was staggeringly reckless and I daresay will have more people who might still be paying said fee, to perhaps examine once again why that is. Right, so the strange thing about this year’s Eurovision crisis is that the loudest arguments aren’t the ones that explain what’s actually going on. People are shouting about censorship, about artistic freedom, about whether Israel should be allowed to compete while Gaza is being flattened, about whether Eurovision is political or whether the EBU pretends not to notice when politics walks straight through the front door. Well, we know that isn’t true because they banned Russia of course. But the argument that actually matters is quieter and far more awkward for the people who run British broadcasting, because once you follow the money instead of the noise you end up in a place the BBC really hoped nobody would look too closely at. And that place is the licence fee, the BBC budget it feeds, and the flow of public money into Eurovision, which has made the BBC not just a commentator on the controversy but an institution financially entangled in it. And because the BBC chose to publicly back the EBU’s decision to keep Israel in the contest, it has turned a cultural row into a live question about accountability, public consent, and whether the BBC understands the responsibilities that come with using money taken from households that had no say in the matter. You have to start with the structure because the structure explains the politics. The BBC is not just a broadcaster; it is the UK’s member of the European Broadcasting Union, which runs Eurovision. The EBU does not ask governments for participation money; it asks broadcasters.

The Trump plan for Gaza has taken an even darker turn as a UN block to a real peace plan to make way for it has just emerged. Right, so here’s the thing nobody at the United Nations wants to say out loud: Gaza didn’t get a peace plan this year, it got a paperwork barricade, and the only people it protects are the ones who built it. Colombia tried to drag the UN toward that fabled Uniting for Peace resolution because the Security Council had choked six ceasefire resolutions in a row thanks to the dratted US veto, yet Washington still moved faster than anyone expected, leaning on states until the whole thing stalled. Then, just to make sure the escape route was sealed, the US pushed through a resolution, Trump’s peace plan for Gaza, that created a Board of Peace with no members willing to sit on it and a stabilisation force with no troops seemingly joining that either and yet this somehow still counts as the Council “acting.” And once you grasp that, you can see the shape of the game: a plan that never had to work, that only had to pass in order to achieve an outcome that ends up sparing Israel from international censure once again. Right, so here’s where we are, the world had a tool sitting right there on the table, a tool designed for exactly the situation we’ve been living through, a Security Council paralysed by a permanent member’s veto, a humanitarian crisis unfolding in front of everyone, small states demanding that something be done, and large states blocking it. That tool is Uniting for Peace. It’s been there since 1950. It’s been used before. And for a brief moment back in September, it looked like the world might actually use it again because Colombia stepped forward and said that if the veto is being used to stop the UN from acting, then the General Assembly needs to take over. This is after all what the Uniting for Peace Resolution, Resolution 377A as it’s officially known, is for – to break the deadlock. And that is the moment the United States moved to shut it down, because Washington could see exactly where this might go if they didn’t intervene, and they weren’t about to let the General Assembly take Gaza out of theirs and Israel’s hands. The thing about Uniting for Peace is that it isn’t magic. It doesn’t hand you an army or guarantee peacekeepers or give you a switch that stops a war. What it does is remove the veto as the choke point. If the Security Council fails to act because a permanent member keeps saying no, the General Assembly can take the file and recommend collective measures. It gives the rest of the world a legal pathway around a blockade.

Eurovision has rolled over for Israel and four other nations have walked out over it, but another body HAS had the guts to so no to Israel... Right, so Eurovision has finally hit the point where the organisers can’t keep up the pretence anymore, because when Spain, Ireland, the Netherlands and Slovenia all walk rather than share a stage with Israel, it tells you the whole neutrality myth has rotted through. The European Broadcasting Union is still trying to sell the idea that this isn’t political, which is quite something when the public can watch Gaza being levelled in real time and then watch the EBU act like participation is just a technical matter. And the funniest part is that Guinness World Records, of all things, has shown more awareness of the moment by quietly freezing submissions from Israel and the Palestinian territories, because even the people who count the world’s tallest dog know when a situation is too toxic to pretend otherwise. The EBU just hasn’t caught up. Right, so Eurovision likes to pretend it exists somewhere above politics, that it sits in this sealed-off cultural bubble where music floats free of the real world, yet here we are watching the whole thing come apart because the European Broadcasting Union has decided that Israel’s participation matters more than the credibility of the contest and more than the broadcasters who actually make it work. Spain has walked. Ireland has walked. The Netherlands and Slovenia have walked. And these aren’t fringe withdrawals from countries who dip in and out depending on the budget; these are core European broadcasters, and Spain in particular is part of the financial backbone of Eurovision, so the idea that this is just another flare-up that will settle down again doesn’t hold. The structure is cracking because the myth the EBU keeps selling, the one about neutrality and music being above politics, has finally collided with reality, and reality is winning. What’s happening here is the result of years of selective enforcement and double standards. The EBU moved fast when Russia invaded Ukraine. It didn’t wait for debate or consensus. It didn’t hide behind process. It banned Russia outright, and that ban was framed as a moral necessity. Nobody in the EBU seemed confused about Eurovision’s political role then. Nobody said “music must stay separate.” They understood that participation has a political meaning whether they admit it or not, which is why watching them now try to pretend that Israel’s participation is some kind of neutral decision is embarrassing, because even people who don’t normally follow Eurovision can see that the EBU isn’t dealing with principle, it’s dealing with fear.

Benjamin Netanyahu's desperation for a pardon has now seen even former Israeli police officers turn against him now. Right, so for the first time in twenty years you can actually see Benjamin Netanyahu flinch, because no man who thinks he’s winning asks the president to pardon him before the case is over, and no man who believes in his own innocence rings Donald Trump begging for a second round of help to secure said pardon, yet here he is doing both, and pretending it’s about “national unity” while four hundred retired police officers have joined forces, warning Isaac Herzog that granting this political favour could rip the country open. It’s the sort of move you make when you’ve run out of moves, when the trial you’ve spent half a decade attacking is finally closing in, and when even your own legal team can’t promise the next witness won’t sink you. Netanyahu built a career on looking untouchable; now he’s acting like a man looks like he sees exactly where the next blow is coming from and knows he can’t block it. Right, so for the first time in two decades, Benjamin Netanyahu is behaving like a man who seems to believe the machinery he has leaned on, bullied, stalled, and bent to his needs is finally slipping out of his control, and the tone of the entire political moment shifts when you realise he knows it, because nothing else explains why a sitting prime minister who has spent years telling Israelis he is the only adult in the room is now asking the president to save him from his own corruption trial before the verdict even arrives, and nothing else explains why he reached for a pardon with no admission of guilt – flat refusing even now to go there - in the middle of an ongoing case when every adviser knows that move screams panic, not strength.