Kernow Damo

Right, so here we are.

Israel cannot stop actual fibre-optic killer drones. These are not ordinary drones; they are guided by a cable instead of radio, so all the jamming in the world is about as useful as a chocolate teapot and it is Hezbollah in Lebanon that have shown this to be the case over and over. They skim close to the ground, avoid detection, and can be directed straight into troops or equipment. Israelis have died, and the IDF has admitted it does not have a solution. That is a real threat. Which makes the sudden military panic over four harmless paper kites seem like a toddler screaming the place down because a butterfly has landed on it.

But kites? Israel's elite kite patrol is apparently on the case. Nothing escapes the blue and white state’s string-and-paper elite.

Their stated reason was that kites, balloons, now belong in the same category as drones coming from Gaza could threaten Israeli border communities. Netanyahu has called them a "lethal weapon" and said Israel would not return to the pre-7 October reality, which apparently now includes kids getting to fly kites. Deranged defence minister Israel Katz said a kite should be treated like a drone, explosives or not. You great big whopper of a snowflake you. The problem for them is that the four kites their own army inspected had no suspicious material and posed no public risk. This is literally punching down on one of the only ways a kid in Gaza right now can be a kid, can play a game, can have any semblance of what it means to have a childhood, growing up in a state of daily trauma.

And of course, given the lethal measures the IDF will carry out, even against small children, parents in Gaza are stopping their children from flying these kites, knowing what Israel might do if they spot a bit of coloured paper in the sky.

Right, so Benjamin Netanyahu has managed to torch through what regional reporting is saying is the equivalent of thirty years’ of normal ammunition use in less than three. Thirty years. That’s Bibi’s idea of portion control apparently: empty the buffet, burn the kitchen down, then ask America if it does refills. You need Slimming World sunshine.

His army is holding fifty-three thousand reservists in service every day. Its tanks and armoured vehicles are needing engines by the thousand. Its air force has crammed roughly nine years of ordinary operations into less than three.

And now he wants more.

More American weapons, that even America itself doesn’t have, because America has been firing its own high-end missiles in Iran, all for Israel’s sake of course, and has been told in no uncertain terms that some of them take years to replace.

Trump promised Israel unlimited weapons.

Netanyahu has found the limit.

That thirty-year figure has come from investigation from Maariv, its also been carried by Anadolu as well. But it’s worth pointing out that this is not a public IDF inventory audit. No one has produced a ledger showing every shell, bomb and missile used in either period.

It is a comparison of use. A claim about the rate Israel has been consuming ammunition since October 2023 compared with the previous three decades.

Right, so tiny violins at the ready folks, because things seem to be going all wrong again for Benjamin Netanyahu.

All of this war against Iran was meant to leave Tehran battered, isolated, and standing outside the Middle East's version of a nightclub as if they’d just turned up wearing Crocs.

Instead, Saudi Arabia has signed a new defence pact with Türkiye and Pakistan, Iranian officials have been strutting around as if they’d just won some sort of a diplomatic jackpot over it, and Saudi Arabia's clever workaround for Hormuz to get away from Iran, has just ended up with a problem that could put them in a Great Dane level of diplomatic doggie doo doo in terms of the scale.

That workaround is their East-West pipeline. Their plan B to get the oil out. It allows the Saudis to move oil across the kingdom to Yanbu, load it onto tankers in the Red Sea, and avoid Hormuz like it's an ex turning up at your wedding. Brilliant in theory, until commercial shipping starts getting hit near Yanbu as well. The little matter of you’re your Yemeni government allies starting beef with the Houthis again and them taking it directly to your doorstep.

So if Netanyahu's main strategy was to sideline Iran, he may have just handed Tehran the biggest regional opportunity ever offered on a silver platter, complete with a bow and a card saying, “Love from, Bibi.”

Well now it might just be about to get so much worse for him.

Mehdi Rahimi, the head of Iran's parliamentary news agency Khaneh Mellat, told Al Mayadeen that Iran had received an invitation to join the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement and that the proposal was under consideration.

That's quite something, given that the whole point of Netanyahu and Trump's war was to lock Tehran up in diplomatic isolation and throw away the key. But don't break out the confetti and party hats just yet.

Right, so you can tell your gold-plated security plan is going well when the big idea is to put the oil tanks inside a giant hamster cage. Because that is exactly what you are looking at here. Huge steel-and-mesh structures have been built around fuel-storage tanks in the United Arab Emirates, including near Dubai International Airport. Cages. Around the fuel. The UAE has spent years selling itself as the safe part of the Gulf. Dubai is where you change planes, move your money, buy the apartment, host the conference and pretend the rest of the region exploding is happening at a comfortable distance away. Why else would you get great British patriots like Reform UK’s Richard Tice setting up home there to serve the people of Skegness from?

Abu Dhabi has the oil, the sovereign wealth, the American military relationship, the Israel normalisation and all the imported weapons money can buy. It hosts American forces at Al Dhafra, has advanced air defences, and its relationship with Israel has deepened since this war began.

It has also paid a political price for choosing that side. Iran has treated the UAE’s hosting of US forces and Israeli-linked assets as part of the regional war, and it’s not like the Emirates have exactly sat out of that confrontation.

Right, so Britain has just spent almost three years and a mountain of public money trying to transform three tweets from Tony Greenstein, a 72-year-old Jewish anti-Zionist from Brighton, into the Philosopher's Stone of terrorism convictions and all they produced for themselves was an even bigger mountain of embarrassment.

Greenstein's supposed crime? He was accused of inviting support for Hamas, because of a few posts he made on 7 October 2023.

His defence? He supported Palestinian resistance, not Hamas itself, though it is hard to expect the CPS to see the difference after three years spent poring over his blog.

Apparently, national security in 2026 involves chasing after bloggers in their seventies while anyone truly dangerous is left to enjoy their scones and jam in peace. Especially those ones who don’t put the jam on first. Proper wrong’uns.

But it failed. Oh how did it fail! Not just failed, this was failed on a scale that would get you booed off Britain's Got Talent, making a complete arse of itself in public, with absolutely nothing to show for it.

Tony Greenstein was facing the possibility of 14 years in prison over it though. The CPS spent years polishing this turd of a case, trying to make it shiny, presumably hoping to dazzle the jury into blindly coming up with that sought after guilty verdict. The jury however, left distinctly unimpressed, took two hours and eleven minutes to toss the whole thing into the nearest skip.

That is Tony Greenstein outside Kingston Crown Court after being unanimously found not guilty of inviting support for a proscribed organisation.

That organisation being Hamas of course. The case focused on three posts Greenstein published on 7 October 2023. The prosecution argued they crossed the line from political speech into inviting others to support Hamas.

Greenstein said they did not.

The jury agreed the CPS had not proved its charge.

Three years of investigation, prosecution, and legal theatrics, all for a verdict that landed faster than a Cabinet minister scrabbling around to avoid the truth on a Sunday-morning politics show.

Right, so Benjamin Netanyahu made Iran the defining mission of the man he personally installed at the top of Mossad.

He even said it out loud at this chap Roman Gofman’s appointment.

“This is your mission, Roman.”

Barely nine weeks later, two of the most senior people working on that mission had reportedly been removed from their posts though. One headed Mossad’s Intelligence Directorate. The other ran its Iran Division.

And what had they reportedly been working on?

A written plan to help bring down Iran’s government of course. Another attempt because the riots of last year, of which Mossad was apparently a part of, failed so miserably didn’t they?

Well, guess what? Iran’s government is still standing, isn’t it?

Netanyahu wanted upheaval in Tehran and got it on Mossad’s top floor instead.

But this gets far grubber than just a couple of intelligence chiefs being blamed for a plan that went nowhere. Because, this is Israel of course. The reported scheme involved trying to turn Iranian protests, ethnic minorities and Kurdish armed groups into the moving parts of an Israeli regime-change operation. There was allegedly foreign air power in the plan too. There was even a former Iranian president being lined up for the aftermath.

Right, so Britain would have us believe it is furious about the lack of justice in Gaza.

Furious enough to call Israel's decision not to prosecute anyone over the killing of seven World Central Kitchen aid workers back in 2024 as "shameful". Three of those workers were of course British.

But apparently Britain's anger fades as soon as someone suggests opening the filing cabinet of course, because when the families of those 3 British aid workers went to court to seek the British surveillance footage of Gaza - providing it to Israel as we blatantly were from RAF Akrotiri - from the MoD to help with their case for justice for their loved ones, Britain of course said no. Israel can have it but British families seeking justice can’t.

Meanwhile, Israel is busy pinning another gold star on its own chest for a job well done investigating itself and finding itself completely innocent of any wrongdoing over that World Central Kitchen attack hence it backfiring once more on the British state right now, but even worse than that is the timing, because as all of this is coming out, the British tax system is quietly still sprinkling Gift Aid like confetti on donations to treat Israeli soldiers just back from following their genocidal orders in Gaza, because nothing says 'justice' quite like a congratulatory handshake and a little tax sweetener courtesy of the British government for those poor, poor IDF soldiers. Why are we paying to help the mental health of IDF soldiers returning from Gaza, when we can’t even enable British people to seek justice for the loved ones, who lost their lives at the hands of this same IDF?

Why is Britain sitting on its evidence like Smaug on a pile of gold? And how many times does Israel get to mark its own homework in another sham of an investigation that is obviously anything but independent, before we all admit this 'accountability' charade is pure pantomime?

Right, so Labour's crackdown on Palestine Action has just run into a jury-shaped obstacle at the Old Bailey.

Eight weeks in court. Thirty-seven hours of deliberation. One conviction, but no verdicts against seven supposed organisers.

And this has happened while Labour’s broader ban on Palestine Action has led to a prosecution backlog so large that 1,579 section 13 cases had to be managed through a single Westminster court review.

And Labour, somehow without a trace of irony, claims they had to do this, because the courts simply cannot cope with the workload.

So apparently what we now have is a situation where, once Palestine Action was proscribed, publicly supporting it became a criminal offence, so police and prosecutors say they are just enforcing the law Parliament passed. Yet separately, Labour argues jury reform is needed because the current backlog is leaving victims and defendants waiting too long for justice.

Fine. But maybe someone should ask why Labour keeps filling the courts with terrorism cases featuring protesters, pensioners, and the occasional threatening placard, as if the real danger to Britain is a grandmother with a marker pen, filling courts of up with too many cases they can’t cope with and at the same time making juries the problem, when juries are the ones refusing to convict the supposed terrorists. Anyone would think they’ve an ulterior motive here, don’t you think?

Right, so Israel’s main airport has just gone to pieces on its busiest day. Check-in shut, landings were halted and passengers filled the terminal and Benjamin Netanyahu’s answer was to threaten to fire the workers.

The problem for him? Twenty-four hours earlier, he’d turned up at the same airport for a visit about how those workers were keeping everything going, Israel was ticking over because of their hard work. Anyone would think Bibi turning up in your workplace might be bad for business off the back of this and yet Netanyahu being Netanyahu only he could manage to actually make a poor situation that he has presided over, get even worse by having turned up in person, pressed the flesh and then threatened to fire people for going on strike the next day. Go back to work, you’re making me look bad – I don’t think there is a single way on Earth after Gaza, after Lebanon, after the West Bank and Syria and Iran and Yemen that you can ever again possibly look good, but then it is not we who are the audience here and not the rest of us who are still in possession of compassion or a pulse. Threatening to sack people a day after praising them hardly screams strong and stable leadership though does it?

So what happened between Bibi’s photo op and Bibi’s threats inside a day?

Well, Benjamin Netanyahu and his Transport Minister Miri Regev showed up at Ben Gurion airport for a photo op on the 19th August, walking around as if they had just discovered airports, shaking hands, nodding at conveyor belts, and all the rest of the political inanity in the run up to an election.

And as you are now aware, within a day, the whole spectacle unravelled.

Check-in stopped. Landings were halted. Passengers filled the terminal.

And Netanyahu’s response was not to clarify what had gone wrong.

It was to fire the only people keeping the place from turning into a real-life version of Lord of the Flies, because people were getting pretty aggro and is it just me or does Ben-Gvir pop into your head now when you think of Piggy?

Right, so Israel has decided to lob a few bombs at a Syrian airbase, just a stone’s throw from the Turkish border.

Turkey, ever the picture of calm, insists it had no troops there, wasn’t given a heads-up, and just watched Israeli jets cruise by like it was an airshow, while America’s envoy helpfully points out that Ankara could have, you know, started World War Three over this if it had felt like it.

And just to spice things up that little bit more, Turkey had of course signed a mutual-defence pact with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan less than a fortnight before this little fireworks display, courtesy of Benjamin Netanyahu.

So Israel, in its infinite wisdom, has managed to try blocking Turkey’s Syrian ambitions, nearly spark a direct punch-up with Ankara, and drag Turkey’s new best friends into the mess for good measure, one of which Israel is desperate to normalise ties with, not make an enemy out of.

The mutual-defence pact hasn’t been triggered-yet. Israel hit Syria, not Turkey. But if Turkish boots are on the tarmac next time, Netanyahu might discover he’s turned a tiny Syrian airstrip into the trigger of a war that for once, would be the last thing he wanted.

So what was Israel's official justification then Damo? Well, Syria was allegedly on the verge of disrupting a so-called security 'status quo' by allowing Turkish troops to establish a presence at Abu al-Duhur. Supposedly, even the possibility of Turkish military forces-perhaps with some air-defence systems-would complicate Israel’s ability to carry out unannounced operations, which, from Tel Aviv’s perspective, is considered a direct threat to – well, you’ll never guess what? Yep, Israeli security again.

There were no Turkish troops present. No deployment occurred. Not even a hint of Turkish presence-no evidence, not even something as trivial as a food wrapper marked with a crescent moon. There had been no attack on Israel from the base. Still, facts did not prevent an airstrike.

Netanyahu ordered the bombing anyway, suggesting that sometimes an imagined threat is treated as seriously as a real one and you can imagine he imagines a lot of imaginary threats I imagine.