Kernow Damo

Greens For Palestine Fire Back; Stop Apologising To The Israel Lobby

If the Greens want Palestine credibility, they can stop apologising to the lobby and start defending the people who gave it to them. Right, so Greens for Palestine have just done the thing the Green Party machine should have done for itself. Anti-Zionist candidates are being thrown under the bus the moment hostile mainstream media pressure arrives. Palestinians inside the party are saying attempts are being made against their own “Zionism is Racism” motion set to return at Autumn Conference to soften or rewrite it by non-Palestinians, notably despite the fact Jewish members amongst others helped draft the original and very much accepted motion. And that the party that has gained credibility from being better than Labour and other parties on the subject of Palestine and the genocide in Gaza is now being warned not to become Labour the moment the Israel lobby starts banging on the door once more. Greens for Palestine are telling their own party, that solidarity is not a badge you wear when it wins applause and then shove in a drawer the moment it attracts some pressure. You either mean it or you don’t, you stand by it or you don’t. You can’t keep saying it while candidates get thrown under a bus the minute they breathe in a direction Zionists don’t like. Greens for Palestine have sent one warning to the Green Party Executive, the national executive layer of the party, because they say local and national party figures are believing hostile press attacks and hanging members out to dry. They have also put out a separate statement over their Zionism is racism motion. That second letter is even sharper in some ways, because it is not just about candidates. It is about Palestinians inside the Green Party saying that their own political words, their own description of their own oppression, are not there to be cleaned up by people who are more frightened of accusations than they are committed to justice, quite rightly in my view. The complaint is that non-Palestinian Greens are trying to rewrite or soften it before the party’s own members get to deal with it democratically.

Ben-Gvir Couldn’t Help Himself; Now He’ll Live To Regret It

More ICC arrest warrants are mooted for Israel's very worst, but instead of changing their ways, they're doubling down while claiming victim status. Right, so Bezalel Smotrich, the Israeli finance minister who also holds power inside the defence ministry over the occupied West Bank, has reported that an international arrest-warrant request may have been filed against him, and his response to that was to target Khan al-Ahmar, the Palestinian Bedouin village Israel has been trying to erase for years. A mocking come get me message quite frankly, thumbing his nose at international law. Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s national security minister, the man in charge of police and prisons, has heard that possible action against him is under review, and his response? Well that’s been going somewhat viral His reaction was to say no order would stop him, before filming himself mocking detained Gaza flotilla activists who had been handcuffed, blindfolded and forced to kneel. Benjamin Netanyahu leads the government these men sit in, shelters the coalition they keep alive, and now watches the thugs he needs for power behave like they are helping the prosecution with the subtitles. The International Criminal Court has denied that five new warrants have already been issued, so let’s be precise before the usual bad-faith brigade start yapping about fake news.

Trump & Israel Panic; Iran Adds To Their Hormuz Leverage

Trump tried to choke Iran through Hormuz, and Iran looked under the water and found the Gulf’s internet bill. Right, so Iran has just found a new switch under the Strait of Hormuz, a secret weapon you could say and Donald Trump helped put it within reach. But it’s not a missile switch, not an oil tanker switch, not another warship photo-op for the world’s most overfunded floating panic attack AKA the US Navy, but something quieter, buried, and far more awkward for the Gulf states that thought American protection made them safe. You see when Iranian military spokesman Ebrahim Zolfaghari brought this hidden asset up, he wasn’t talking about a big red button in a Bond villain bunker, because that would be very silly, though don’t put it past America to yet depict the Ayatollah stroking a white cat dressed up as Dr Evil, but unfortunately for Trump, what Iran is now pointing at is more practical than that. It is the undersea fibre-optic infrastructure running through and around Hormuz, the same narrow passage everybody talks about when oil tankers are involved, but somehow forgets when cloud services, banking traffic, Gulf data centres, telecoms operators and the shiny new artificial intelligence economy need somewhere to send their traffic. Iran is apparently laying out a plan to charge licence fees, require annual renewals, push foreign tech companies under Iranian law, and reserve cable repair and maintenance for Iranian companies. So the American blockade that was meant to squeeze Iran’s ports has now been answered with a very simple question from Tehran: if everybody else gets to price risk in Hormuz, why exactly should the cables under it not be priced in too?

Iraq Found Another Israeli Base; Netanyahu’s Secret War Is Spilling Out

Israel got caught treating Iraq like a spare runway, and now even the cover story needs air support. Right, so Iraq has apparently not just found one secret Israeli operating site in its western desert, Iraqi officials and lawmakers are now saying there was another one as well, because apparently one clandestine Israeli base on somebody else’s land was not quite enough to satisfy the region’s most heavily subsidised arsonist. [CLIP] Well there we are. Israel is accused of setting up shop in Iraq’s desert to support its war on Iran, the first site was exposed after a local shepherd reported unusual helicopter activity, Iraqi troops went to investigate, they were fired on from the air, one Iraqi soldier was killed and two were wounded. So before anyone starts hiding behind the language of temporary presence, staging area, operational support, logistical node, or whatever little Pentagon-scented phrase somebody has pulled out of the drawer to make an illegal war platform sound like a camping weekend, there is the blunt version. A foreign military force was allegedly on Iraqi soil, Iraqi soldiers went near it, and an Iraqi soldier ended up dead. And Israel has not exactly rushed forward to explain itself here, funny that, and the silence is doing a lot of work for a state that normally cannot shut up about its own military reach. The first site was in Iraq’s western desert, around the al-Nukhaib area, southwest of Najaf and Karbala, the sort of terrain that looks empty if you are a civilian and looks perfect if you need aircraft, special forces, deniability and nobody asking why there are helicopters in the middle of nowhere. But the story now widens because Iraqi officials are saying that first site was not the only one. Hassan Fadaam, an Iraqi lawmaker, reportedly said the one at al-Nukhaib was simply the one that got found, which is a hell of a sentence to be hanging in the air when the subject is Israeli military activity inside a country that does not recognise Israel and says it did not authorise foreign forces to be there. A second official is reported to have confirmed another base in a western desert region, without giving a location.

Israel’s Sea Raid Hit A Big Problem; Cyprus Won’t Like Where It Leads

Israel chased aid boats near Cyprus, Britain had people caught in it, and Starmer somehow found more public urgency for golf. Right, so Israel has just dragged its Gaza siege hundreds of nautical miles out into the Mediterranean, boarded civilian aid boats near Cyprus, detained foreign nationals, and somehow Keir Starmer has still managed to make the British part of this story look even worse by finding time to talk about golf instead. Britons have been seized at sea after Israeli forces intercepted the latest Global Sumud Flotilla mission which left Turkey last week, another aid mission heading for Gaza hot on the heels of the last one, and the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom has not exactly strained himself in public outrage on their behalf. There are people with UK links on those boats, people whose names have been put into the public domain, people whose safety now sits inside an Israeli detention process, and Downing Street runs and hides. That is a British government watching Israel do to its own citizens – again, because we’ve had this before on previous flotillas - what it would call an outrage in five minutes flat if almost any other state had done it. Starmer does not need a complicated briefing to understand this one. He needs a spine. He needs the same instinct any government is supposed to have when its nationals are seized by a foreign military in international waters, and if that instinct has been replaced by yet more silence around Israel, then the silence carries responsibility. Israeli naval forces did not stop this flotilla at Gaza’s beach, did not intercept it at the mouth of a harbour, did not meet it in some final stretch where the argument could be dressed up as a border issue. The Global Sumud Flotilla says its boats were surrounded and boarded in international waters around two hundred and fifty nautical miles from Gaza, near Cyprus, after setting out from Marmaris in Turkey with dozens of vessels, volunteers, aid workers, medical workers, journalists and campaigners from across the world.