All out war in the Middle East just 48 hours away?

Right, so are we just 48 hours from a Middle Eastern war escalation then? Well that is the approximate headline the Daily Mirror have put out today, and fundamentally it is exactly what Israel want, they want the West to be drawn into a wider war of their instigation, their genocide in Gaza triggering responses from other nations in the Middle East, from Lebanon, to Syria, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, both directly and indirectly, through blockades and sanctions and yet Israel continues to be protected by the West. For as much as our media likes to fixate on Iran’s proxy agents, from Hamas, to Hezbollah and the Houthis in Yemen, are the likes of the US, the EU, or us here in the UK any less proxies for Israel, given their pervasive influence amongst our media, our politicians, their money being used to fund donations, subvert political parties, the party of government right now, Keir Starmer’s Labour heavily influenced by Labour Friends of Israel, by the pro Israel backing of donors, of the Board of Deputies, the Jewish Leadership Council and others, all in defiance of those Jewish bodies speaking out against the atrocities, from Jewish Voice for Labour to Na’amod, who last night organised a protest outside Downing Street.
With 48 hours apparently to go until a wider war erupts in the Middle East, it is no less this government and those with influence upon it who have brought us to this point, even as David Lammy is in the Middle East right now, cosplaying as someone trying to avert this when he himself, with his pro Israel leanings, the donations he’s taken from pro Israel sources hardly being seen as a moral arbiter here, not least when one of his senior diplomats has just quit citing as much. If we truly are 48 hours away from an explosive increase in armed conflict, then in no small part is that on our governments in the west and our media, it is their failure, as they will no doubt ready themselves to again blame others, Iran, and their proxies will be top of that list.
Right, so I’ve happened across one of the most damning assessments of Israel I think I’ve ever read, before I get into the main points of this video because this lays out in a manner I’ve seldom seen better done, exactly what Israel is and what Israel does and it’s a poem by US journalist Chris Hedges which I hope I can do justice to.
‘RUN, RUN, RUN "Run, the Israelis demand of the Palestinians, run for your lives. Run from Rafah the way you ran from Gaza City, the way you ran from Jabalia, the way you ran from Deir al-Balah, the way you ran from Beit Hanoun, the way you ran from Bani Suheila, the way you ran from Khan Yunis. Run or we will kill you. We will drop GBU-39 bombs on your tent encampments and set them ablaze. We will spray you with bullets from our machine-gun-equipped drones. We will pound you with artillery and tank shells. We will shoot you down with snipers. We will decimate your tents, your refugee camps, your cities and towns, your homes, your schools, your hospitals and your water purification plants. We will rain death from the sky. Run for your lives. Again and again and again. Pack up the few belongings you have left. Blankets. A couple of pots. Some clothes. We don’t care how exhausted you are, how hungry you are, how terrified you are, how sick you are, how old, or how young you are. Run. Run. Run. And when you run in terror to one part of Gaza, we will make you turn around and run to another. Trapped in a labyrinth of death. Back and forth. Up and down. Side to side. Six. Seven. Eight times. We toy with you like mice in a trap. Then we deport you so you can never return. Or we kill you. Let the world denounce our genocide. What do we care? The billions in military aid flows unchecked from our American ally. The fighter jets. The artillery shells. The tanks. The bombs. An endless supply. We kill children by the thousands. We kill women and the elderly by the thousands. The sick and injured, without medicine and hospitals die. We poison the water. We cut off the food. We make you starve. We created this hell. We are the masters. Law. Duty. A code of conduct. They do not exist for us. But first we toy with you. We humiliate you. We terrorize you. We revel in your fear. We are amused by your pathetic attempts to survive. You are not human. You are creatures. Untermensch. We feed our lust for domination. Look at our posts on social media. They have gone viral. One shows soldiers grinning in a Palestinian home with the owners tied up and blindfolded in the background. We loot. Rugs. Cosmetics. Motorbikes. Jewellery. Watches. Cash. Gold. Antiquities. We mock your misery. We cheer your death. We celebrate our religion, our nation, our identity, our superiority, by negating and erasing yours. Depravity is moral. Atrocity is heroism. Genocide is redemption."’
That poem incidentally, is called Nero’s Guests, there’s a lot of similarity between the Roman Emperor of that name and what passes for an Israeli government under Benjamin Netanyahu certainly and you can see Hedges himself make I would humbly suggest a better showing of reading that poem on his own YouTube channel, if you care to watch that too.
It reminds us of all the atrocity Israel has meted out itself and I thought that particularly relevant to this story, given that the potential widening escalation of warfare in the Middle East fundamentally boils down to everything that poem talks about.
Of course our role in that, the role in the West to enable Israel, arming it, supporting it, providing cover for it from censure or legal ramifications has driven this spoilt brat attitude, that Israel can do what it likes, but other nations, Middle Eastern nations who the West, it’s governments, it’s media might prefer to paint as the bad guys aren’t having any of it and it’s a viewpoint gaining more and more traction as the views of those Western pro Israeli voices, become more inexcusable and harder to take seriously.
The 24 hour warning from one of our mainstream media outlets, the Mirror, supposedly a lefty paper, but it really isn’t, points the finger of blame for any potential escalation coming at Iran. They responded with airstrikes, the first time they’d ever directly attacked Israel themselves, following Israel’s attack on their embassy in the Syrian capital of Damascus some months ago, and now of course Israel are at fault, for an assassination in the Iranian capital itself, Tehran, the assassination, it has to be said, of one of the chief negotiators for peace from Hamas, massively damaging the peace process itself, one of Hamas’s moderate voices taken out, so Israel can continue it can only be assumed after all of this time, as it has been doing for 10 months, whilst as always it seems, pleading the victim. And so this Mirror piece in no uncertain terms paints Iran as the bad guy if they retaliate, even though they were the ones attacked. Israel has a right to defend itself, but not Iran is the underlined point this actually ends up raising.
Where pressure should be put on Israel to stop, they being the true instigators of everything, the night of October 7th itself a direct response to hostage taking by Israel of thousands of Palestinians, several times more held by them in detention than Hamas are holding in Gaza and so whenever politicians demand the release of all hostages of course we must all agree with that, but in my mind I’m thinking of those held by Israel too and I don’t believe any of our politicians are.
Iran have not yet responded to the attack in Tehran two weeks ago now, they’ve kept people wondering and waiting as to when that retaliation would come as it surely will, Iran not the sort to let something like that slide, not when it was their own capital city this time at that.
The double standards are staggering really. Backing their own ally in Israel to do as they like and blame others should they retaliate. You’re never going to bring about a peace resolution unless those truly to blame are held to account.
The West telling the likes of Iran that they cannot retaliate, telling Hezbollah they can’t either as a recent rocket attack by Israel has killed several in Lebanon in just the last few days, is pretty much just as bad, just as tone deaf and tin eared as continuing to supply arms to Israel and excusing them the decimation they mete out on a daily basis, being able to strike and harm whatever and whoever they want without consequence. And the West thinks going out there themselves will build towards peace with that attitude having been on show for months and still on show now going with them? Delusional isn’t a big enough word.
There’s no changing tack in the West though, all that influence having been achieved, it isn’t just going to disappear. Should Iran attack, to be honest, I think it’s more of a when not an if, what will the West do then? Will the war widen, because they then choose to get involved? That is functionally what would widen it isn’t it? We know Iran has ben arming it’s allies, the likes of Hezbollah and the Houthis to retaliate in the manner they have been in solidarity with Gaza, to widen the conflict would be direct Western involvement which is exactly what Netanyahu wants, US boots on the ground in Iran and it would be catastrophic, Iran’s allies would surely be drawn in too, the likes of the other BRICS nations potentially not least Russia and China, it’s so east and obvious to see how this could escalate into a global conflict, all over the fact some nations won’t do what should be done to just one, Israel, in order to get it out of Gaza, to force Netanyahu’s hands on the matter of a peace deal, with sanctions applied if he doesn’t go along with it. This entire situation that has raged on for 10 months, with over 40,000 Gazan deaths as has been the result and still it’s not a high enough price in blood to have been paid to make Israel finally do the right thing, rather than just carry on without censure still. Any escalation coming has been because the West has allowed Israel to be like this, to behave like this, to carry on like this and not rein them in. It is a failure to uphold International Law, it is a failure to abide by the Geneva Conventions and it has all been done as those laws, those protections are abused, that their mere existence will shield the world from the fallout they were supposed to prevent ever happening again and that abuse of their existence sadly risks seeing history repeated. What comes next, should an escalation happen, is on Israel and on it’s Western allies that have allowed this situation to go on this long and it is they who must be held to account, it is they against whom international law must be applied, or international law will simply not matter any more, will be worth nothing and we know where that will inevitably end up leading.
Perhaps Israel will collapse from within though? Perhaps the hard right coalition government of Benjamin Netanyahu will fall as a result of ongoing increasing tensions, not least of which being caused from within? It’s not entirely beyond the realm of possibility. If one more coalition partner party leaves, then Netanyahu’s majority goes with it and it might be on the verge of happening. Get the details of that story in this video recommendation here and I’ll hopefully catch you on the next vid. Cheers folks.