Into the Levantine quagmire

Who could benefit most from civil unrest among rival factions who choose to believe radically divergent narratives?

For postmodern Zionists, Israel can never do any harm, only try desperately to defend Israel’s right to exist and to combat genocidal terrorists hiding among civilians who may also be responsible for aiding and abetting mass murder. Inevitably, Israeli propagandists seldom miss an opportunity to evoke the Nazi Holocaust and accuse their opponents of antisemitism. This narrative appeals not only to those who may have a vested interest in Israeli exceptionalism, but also to most mainstream politicians in North America and many in Western Europe. They choose to turn a blind eye to collateral damage caused by Israeli airstrikes and incursions and to overstress the crimes attributed to Hamas and their alleged sympathisers. Apparently, calling for a ceasefire will only empower Hamas. We must let the IDF surgically cleanse the Gaza Strip of all undesirables to save the Jewish homeland. Anything less would be antisemitic.

The trouble is many nationalists, social conservatives and Christians have fallen for this rhetoric too as they feel threatened by the growth of political Islam. Many talk of their country’s Judaeo-Christian culture. Alas they find themselves in bed with global Zionists, who have long advocated the phasing out of nation states everywhere, except Israel, promoted mass migration and alternatives to traditional two-parent families. Bibi Netanyahu may have courted Donald Trump and Eastern European nationalists like Viktor Orbán, but he also has close links with investment bankers and the upper echelons of the Biotech Industrial Complex, neither of whom believe in self-determination at any level of human organisation.

That’s not to say those on the other side of the toxic Israeli-Palestinian debate are any better. Some hardcore protesters blame the native working classes for crimes committed by the Israeli armed forces or for the repercussions of the Balfour Declaration and later Anglo-American military adventurism in the region. While we may observe Saudi Arabia has shifted its allegiances from the West to the BRICS block, it still expects the same degree of social conformity from its citizens with a strict enforcement of sharia law for the masses, but convenient exemptions for the aristocracy and wealthy ex-pat communities. As much as Muslim leaders preach solidarity and Islamic values, they’ve collaborated with international bankers and the Western military industrial complex. Until China brokered a deal between Saudi Arabia and Iran, the British Royal Air Force was training Saudi Air Force pilots to bomb Northern Yemen with Eurofighter typhoons. As Mark Curtis documented so well in Secret Affairs: Britain’s Collusion with Radical Islam, the West has often armed and funded proponents of Islamic fundamentalism as the best means of pacifying the populace and suppressing dissent. Islamic Pakistan is in the process of expelling 1.7 million Afghan refugees with barely a murmur of protest from Western NGOs. Some of us can still remember when the US and UK armed and trained the Mujahadeen, who later morphed into the Taliban, to fight the Soviet Union’s occupation. Now Saudi Arabia no longer depends on American and European money, they’re free to realign with Iran against Israel. If the Lebanese Hezbollah joins the conflict with Iranian supports, things could turn very nasty. As Scott Ritter and Douglas MacGregor have observed, given the Collective West’s current weakness in the closing stages of the war over Eastern Ukraine, Israel may well lose the war without an immediate ceasefire.

The Western ruling classes are no better than their Arab counterparts. They’re busy managing the staged downsizing of their once powerful economies with little regard to defending their self-determination or borders. The armed forces of all major Western countries are fully integrated into NATO, AUKUS and/or the EU, who over the last three decades have been mainly engaged in often counterproductive global policing operations. As the balance of power heads east and south with growing competition over strategic resources, populist leaders will seek retribution against the Old World Order or what the Neocons once called the New American Century, with the working classes paying the heaviest prices. You can bet American attitudes to foreign policy will change once Saudi Arabia imposes an oil embargo on Israel’s allies, which will drive up prices at the pump.

Delusions of Grandeur

Many self-defined British patriots, who have fallen out of favour with the UK’s globally minded metropolitan elites, have sided with the Israeli government. Some may genuinely believe they share a common struggle with Israel to defend their homeland against hostile Islamists who threaten the liberal enlightenment. Yet the most influential friends of Israel among British parliamentarians are by and large supportive of both mass immigration and multiculturalism with the mirage of gay nightclubs and casinos happily plying their trade alongside Mosques and Kebab shops. The stage is set for a turf war between rival factions of commoners identifying with different faiths. One adheres to British exceptionalism, long abandoned by the upper classes, and the other either to Islamism or some brand of international socialism, both subservient to global banksters.

Many feared the large National March for Palestine in London today would end in violence. In the event there were skirmishes with the police on the side-lines with one reported stabbing of a counter-protester holding up a sign reading “Hamas is Isis”. I fear both may have been agent provocateurs, for neither would have existed without Western military intervention and both may well have created, at least in part, by American and/or Israeli secret services.

How long can Western leaders keep up the pretence that Israel is only acting in self-defence. Emanuel Macron, the darling of global governance think tanks, has broken ranks and called for a ceasefire. Do they realise the game is up? Are this just a dress rehearsal for the next phase of destabilisation, as Sonia Poulton suggests?

Tribal Skirmishes

I’ve read conflicting reports of rightwing thugs attacking the police as they kept them apart from the main pro-ceasefire march and of pro-Palestine protestors harassing poppy sellers and throwing fireworks at the police. Rebel News circulated a video clip of a masked protestor claiming that “Hitler knew how to deal with the Jews“. Was he an actor? Other clips on social media show Israelis, speaking in Hebrew with English subtitles, calling for the eradication of non-compliant Palestinians. Whatever happened to interethnic tolerance or the great melting pot of humanity? The mainstream media outlets still deny spreading such hatred. Pro-Israeli opinion-leaders like to claim only Hamas oppress Gaza residents, while pro-Palestinians claim many Jews both in the West and in Israel itself support their cause. Whichever way, it’s hard to reason with people who believe the other side wants to exterminate them. Yet the ruling classes seem to get along fine. Netanyahu had no qualms about flying to Moscow last December to meet Vladimir Putin. Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, is happy to cultivate good relations with his counterparts in Russia, Saudi Arabia, the US and Europe. By contrast, on the ground rival groups blame either Islam or Zionism for their woes. To keep the peace, our local administrators will inevitably use hate-speech laws to clamp down on dissent as they preside over falling living standards.