Richard Ian Coates

The emerging Iran deal puts Netanyahu in a serious bind. Elections are coming in September, and he has been unable to achieve security or achievements on any front. Hamas is still in power in Gaza, Hezbollah is still strong in Lebanon, the IRGC is now in charge in Iran, and the IDF is overworked and on the verge of collapse. He cannot go to the elections in that condition. So he will take the following steps: 1) He will look to directly undermine the Iran deal. Netanyahu has warned that the chances of returning to war with Iran are "greater than 50/50". He is publicly pressuring the U.S. to ensure any final deal includes the total dismantling of Iran's nuclear sites, or Israel will resume strikes. 2) He will try to indirectly destroy the deal through Lebanon. Netanyahu stated that a ceasefire with Iran does not mean a ceasefire with Hezbollah. He is asserting "freedom of action" to continue strikes in Lebanon even if a regional deal is signed, potentially turning Lebanon into the primary active front. 3) If neither of those succeeds he will start a new operation in Gaza to try and show that Hamas are not still strong heading into the elections. Israel is going to be even more dangerous over the next few months as Netanyahu heads into the elections.

The Isaac Herzog quote from October 2023, where he said "it's an entire nation out there that is responsible," is incredibly difficult to find. Did Isaac Herzog try to scrub this clip from the internet? Has anyone investigated this?

🇱🇧 Hezbollah's Naim Qassem is turning up the pressure on the Lebanese government. "If this government is incapable of securing sovereignty, then it should step down." - Tells Beirut to walk away from U.S. negotiations: "Then the Americans will come running to you, begging for the agreement themselves" - Questions what the government has accomplished in a year and a half Hezbollah is threatening the Lebanese government from inside Lebanon while Iran negotiates a deal that includes Lebanon's ceasefire as a condition.

Claims that the Palestinians were in 1948 ordered to evacuate their homes and homeland by Arab leaders in a series of radio broadcasts has been a perennial Hasbara Symphony Orchestra favourite since the Nakba, and continues to be widely promoted to this day. The BBC journalist and United Nations official Erskine Barton Childers (not to be confused with his father, Ireland's fourth president, Erskine Hamilton Childers) thoroughly debunked this claim more than half a century ago in his article, "The Other Exodus" published in The Spectator on 12 May 1961. Childers reviewed the comprehensive archives of Arab radio broadcasts compiled during that period by both the BBC monitoring station in Cyprus and its US counterpart, the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) run by the CIA, and found nothing. I have posted a link to Childers's article in the comments, which is worth reading because it includes details of additional fabrications concocted by Israeli officials to further this foundational hasbara myth. Abba Eban, then Israel's permanent representative to the UN and later foreign minister, and easily its most celebrated diplomat, for example claimed that the Greek Catholic Archbishop of Haifa, George Hakim, "fully confirmed" that Palestinians were encouraged to flee by their leaders. Yet, according to Childers: "I wrote to His Grace [Hakim], asking for his evidence of such orders. I hold signed letters from him, with permission to publish, in which he has categorically denied ever alleging Arab evacuation orders; he states that no such orders were ever given. He says that his name has been abused for years; and that the Arabs fled through panic and forcible eviction by Jewish troops." This is the same Abba Eban who on 6 June 1967 falsely informed the UN Security Council that Israel had launched the June War the previous day in response to a series of non-existent attacks on Israel on the morning of 5 June by the Egyptian air force and artillery units. I was previously unaware that the Israeli archives also include records of these radio broadcasts. As the British-Israeli historian Benny Morris reports below, he went through these records and also found that such broadcasts, whether by local Palestinian or Arab leaders, simply do not exist. While the research conducted by Childers and more recently Morris is of course useful in providing official confirmation that such broadcasts are a figment of the Zionist imagination, logic alone should suffice to debunk this myth. In May 1948, the Arab states intervened in Palestine to put an end to the mass expulsions of Palestinians, which since November 1947 already numbered in the hundreds of thousands, and to defeat the Israeli forces responsible for this monumental crime. Does it make any sense that prior to their intervention they would have ordered hundreds of thousands of civilians to clog every road they hoped to use to enter Palestine, for miles and days on end? Of course not. As for the silly claim that the objective of the Arab intervention was genocide, there is no evidence for it, and the conduct of the Arab militaries during the Palestine War supports this conclusion. Nor was it the case that the Arab intervention was a coordinated military campaign to eradicate the nascent Israeli state. Some of the participating Arab states, Syria and Iraq, did have this as an objective. Transjordan clearly did not. Its leadership had already cut a deal with the Zionist leadership to partition Palestine between them and prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state. Armed conflict between Israel and Transjordan in fact ensued only after Israeli forces reneged on their agreement and initiated seizures of territory beyond the partition boundary. Egypt's position was more ambiguous. It seemed to be primarily motivated by rivalry with Jordan, and ensuring Jordan did not become the main Arab power in Palestine. In short, no Arab state wanted to see the emergence of the Israeli state, but in most cases Arab leaders had more pressing priorities. Coordination between them was primarily notable for its absence. Arab public opinion, by contrast, considered the failure of their leaders to successfully confront the Zionist project nothing short of treason, and it served as a catalyst for more than a decade of revolutions, coups, and uprisings throughout the region.

It is difficult to fathom how people can commit truly evil acts, such as genocide and the murder of children. What is even more difficult to comprehend, is others ENJOYING and CELEBRATING images of those evil acts. But that is what you get in Israel now, with parties of people watching and cheering videos of Israel blowing up villages in Southern Lebanon.

It is difficult to fathom how people can commit truly evil acts, such as genocide and the murder of children. What is even more difficult to comprehend, is others ENJOYING and CELEBRATING images of those evil acts. But that is what you get in Israel now, with parties of people watching and cheering videos of Israel blowing up villages in Southern Lebanon.

I welcome the progress towards an agreement between the US and Iran. We need to see an agreement that brings the conflict to an end and reopens the Strait of Hormuz, with unconditional and unrestricted freedom of navigation. It’s vital that Iran must never be allowed to develop a nuclear weapon. My government will continue to do everything we can to protect British people from the impact of this conflict. We will work with our international partners to seize this moment and achieve a long-term diplomatic settlement.