“Events, dear boy !” 

Mick Murray

“A terrible beauty”?

Harold Macmillan was the author of such enduring soundbites, as they would now be called,  such as “the winds of change” a euphemistic term for the beginnings of the decolonialisation of Africa and“they’ve never had it so good” to describe the social change in Britain as it began to enjoy the benefits of post WWII regeneration. 

But the most outstanding one was“events dear boy” to explain what sparks dramatic, unexpected radical political change.  

Lenin reportedly said something along the same lines: “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”

The Hamas-led breakout from what former British Prime Minister Cameron once called the world’s biggest concentration camp was such a political catalyst.  And look how the impact has manifested itself globally in a matter of weeks? Things will never be the same.  For Palestine – and for the wider world. Changed utterly. 

“A terrible beauty is born”

Quoting Yeats?  Yes. The Paddy, the anti-colonialist Paddy in me coming out, despite being an ex-serviceman – or maybe because of it. 

I spent two continuous years in the South China Sea in the early 1960’s moving between the two naval bases of Singapore and Hong Kong returning  radically politicised by that experience. How and why that happened is for another day and another forum. But let’s just say I’m pleased to see belated confirmation of Britain’s covert involvement in the Vietnam war – and the confrontation with Sukarno’s Indonesia across its border with British North Borneo – in a recent issue of “Declassified.” 

Regarding Vietnam, it was a story of lies to the people and to Parliament, Labour-Tory bipartisanship on the Vietnam war – and most other areas of foreign policy, or, perhaps, more pertinently, interference,  while carrying on the two cheeks of the same arse charade of Government and “Opposition”; of saying one thing on public platforms and doing another out of sight. This is best illustrated by the following extract from the Declassified article.

The My Lai massacre was a tipping point for turning public opinion against the war, not quite on the scale of the Gaza destruction, but in the same ballpark. But it was only one of many war crimes carried out in that unequal war in which Britain colluded and covered up US war crimes. However, news got out, thanks to intrepid photo journalists like Don McCullen – and Seymour Hersch.  

“As a result massive public protests against the war took place in the US and Europe, British governments hardly wavered in their support of US strategy. US vice president Hubert Humphrey told Harold Wilson in April 1967 that “there were two prime ministers on whom he could really rely – those of the United Kingdom and of Australia”. 

{REF: BRITAIN’S SECRET ROLE IN THE BRUTAL US WAR IN VIETNAM: Declassified UK, 16 November, 2023}

Ditto for the dirty war fought across the north Borneo-Indonesia land border which culminated in a bloody civil war instigated by the US/UK claiming one and a half million Indonesian deaths and utilising a now recognisable strategy: pitting the jihadist Muslims against the secular, non-aligned  Muslims (in the Cold War context).   

Israeli intelligence and the IDF have learned the lessons of Vietnam and other war zones for dealing with the media and are applying them in their own inimitable way. 

And, true to form, British Government, Opposition and main stream media give them a free pass to do their worst.

Thus the CPJ.ORG could report:  “(In the Israel-Gaza war) As of November 29: 57 journalists and media workers were confirmed dead: 50 Palestinian, 4 Israeli, and 3 Lebanese. 11 journalists were reported injured. 3 journalists were reported missing. 19 journalists were reported arrested. Multiple assaults, threats, cyberattacks, censorship and killing of families. CPJ is also investigating numerous unconfirmed reports of other journalists being killed, missing, detained, hurt, or threatened, and of damage to media offices and journalists’ homes.” (CPJ: New York based “Committee for the Protection of Journalists”) 

To conclude this section: I have to say I rejoice in the rise of the East to its former thousands of years old position as the beating heart of the globe while the “West” struggles to redefine its global role as its 400 years max of pre-eminence  comes to an end and it’s forced to come to terms with the resurgence of the thousands of years old civilisation state of China. Martin Jacques is one of the best authorities on this subject and explains the geopolitical change that is unfolding so well. 

{REF: MARTIN JACQUES, “When China rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Rise of a New Global Order, “ 2011 and reprints.}

{REF: The periodical,“Friends of Socialist China,” is a good British-based source of general information} 

REF: “Why isn’t the British Left excited by what’s happening in China?”  In  September 2021 labouraffairs.com  is a quick read which attempts to address the most common questions asked about China, its place in the world and its socialism. And its relevance to Britain. 

“Do you condemn Hamas?” Or: “The politics of the last atrocity”

No: Hamas is not to be condemned. We have no right to judge how a people will respond having been occupied for 75 years – brutally occupied, as the whole world knows. Being clear about who the Occupiers are, and who are the Occupied is our starting point. And whose side are we on: the Occupied or the Occupier?

It brings to mind the calls to condemn the Provisional IRA. And the manipulative “politics of the last atrocity” in place of identifying and acknowledging the root causes of a 30 year old conflict (of course it goes back further than that). And it brings to mind the British toleration – and active support for, when necessary – a Protestant Unionist supremacy and all that went with it: political gerrymandering, wholesale discrimination in housing, education, jobs “over there” (i.e., deliberately kept at arms length from British Democracy and the Mother of all Parliaments not least through the main political parties not operating in the north of Ireland). 

And, no: the Irish “Troubles” didn’t start when the first IRA bomb was exploded in some business in Belfast or Derry, any more than the Ukraine conflict began in February, 2022 or Gaza on 7th October, 2023.  

Norman Finkelstein, when asked by Piers Morgan if he condemned Hamas, responded in words and recreated mental pictures that, thanks to the wonders of the internet, will stay long in the collective mind. 

{LINK Piers Morgan vs Norman Finkelstein On Israel and Palestine I The Full Interview – Piers Morgan Uncensored. (Youtube)}

Having seen so much footage of a bombed out Gaza I remembered an article by a writer hitherto unknown to me, describing Yeats’ immediate train of thinking seeing the smouldering rubble of his beloved city, Dublin, in the aftermath of the 1916 Rising: an event that took Ireland, the British empire and the world by surprise.  

“As yet one knows nothing of the future except that it must be very unlike the past.”,”  Yeats is quoted by Kim Bielenberg as having said, (Irish Independent, 2 May, 2015)

We can be sure it will be. Times have changed in the decades since the 1948 Naqba –  let’s not forget an estimated 70% plus of the people of Gaza comprise the dispossessed of the Naqba, and their descendants. 

“A Silk Road to Palestinian Reconstruction?”

There’s the promise of BRICS and the BRI (Belt and Road Initiative) for a future free Palestine – and Israel also: because both will have to come to their own “Good Friday Agreement” if there is to be enduring peace. And not  peace meaning the absence of war: peace with justice. 

BRICS/BRI is inclusive not exclusive and is led by “the adults in the room” who have come out of the  reawakened, reinvigorated former colonies representing 85% of  the world’s population. (People lose track of the fact that the US comprises only 4% of the world’s population.) 

Its focus is on diplomacy, problem solving, conflict resolution and win-win cooperation in trade and development, not hegemony and unilateralism destructively pursued through endless war.  Yes: very, very unlike the past. 

This article, the last in 2023, was intended to be an attempt at assessing the first ten years of the BRI, in which it has delivered over a trillion dollars of infrastructural development across the world and shown the formerly colonised world an inspirational way forward. 

However “events” dictated otherwise, and we find ourselves writing about Gaza and what it signifies.  

Of course, events in Gaza and BRI/BRICS are not unconnected, not least because the US attempted to initiate an alternative “BRI” at this year’s G20 Summit, with Israel intended as a key part of it because of its geopolitical location. 

And BRICS broke from its practice of sticking to issues of trade, development and mutual cooperation to condemn the Gaza massacre.

Apropos, the world renowned economist Michael Hudson has written: 

“This genocide in Gaza may be the defining moment of the young 21st century – realigning the entire Global South/Global Majority and clarifying who’s on the right side of History. Whatever it does next, the Hegemon seems destined to totally lose the entire West Asia, the Heartland, wider Eurasia and the Global South/Global Majority.

“Blowback works in mysterious ways: as the US’s ‘aircraft carrier’ in West Asia went utterly insane, it only turbo-charged the Russian-China strategic partnership to mould history further down the road to the Eurasian Century.” 

Japan’s response to Gaza has the potential to be the  strongest “blowback” of all.  

At a recent meeting between  China’s Xi Jinping and Japanese President Kishida, Japan’s alignment with China’s Israel-Palestine policy was publicly confirmed.

{LINK: “Japan disobeys the US and stands with China on Israel-Palestine conflict.” – Business and Geopolitics.  (Youtube)}

David Hearst summarises the evolving geopolitical impact of Netanyahu’s misjudgement succinctly: :“Israel is shredding US global influence one bomb at a time” (Middle East Eye, 10 November 2023)

“Where the feck is the UN in all of this”

Biden famously said that if Israel didn’t exist we’d have to invent an Israel to protect our interests in the middle east. (June, 1986: Senate debate on funding Israel)

In the light of that I wonder if the Catholic Irish American Biden has expressed an opinion on a very similarly worded, and equally well known quote from a memoir of  the lesser known Sir Ronald Storrs:  (the self-defined “first Military Governor of Palestine since Pontius Pilate”) who explained that the  Balfour Declaration’s purpose was to form: a “little loyal Jewish Ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism.” (Winston Churchill sent the Black and Tans to Palestine, Irish Times, 19 May, 2017) 

(Until I read this article I didn’t know a Dubliner – no doubt a West Brit – was in charge of the 1948 Naqba.)

To paraphrase Biden, above: If the UN did not exist, we’d have to invent a UN.  And this may well be another game-changing unintended consequence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: the re-engineering of a rules-making body that truly reflects the emerging multipolar, multilateral ambitions of the developing world.  

Ditto the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO – and the WHO.

As the late George Woodcock, GS of the TUC said all those years ago, regarding organisations:  “Structure is a function of Purpose.”  

The director of the New York Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rightslearned about the truth of that maxim the hard way.  For him, Gaza was the last straw. 

“This is a text-book case of genocide,” he felt compelled to write to his superior, The UN High Commissioner of Human Rights….. 

“The European, ethno-nationalist, settler colonial project in Palestine has entered its final phase, toward the expedited destruction of the last remnants of indigenous Palestinian life in Palestine. 

“What’s more, the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, and much of Europe, are wholly complicit in the horrific assault. Not only are these governments refusing to meet their treaty obligations “to ensure respect” for the Geneva Conventions, but they are in fact actively arming the assault, providing economic and intelligence support, and giving political and diplomatic cover for Israel’s atrocities…. 

“In such circumstances, the demands on our organization for principled and effective action are greater than ever. But we have not met the challenge. The protective enforcement power Security Council has again been blocked by US intransigence, the SG is under assault for the mildest of protestations, and our human rights mechanisms are under sustained slanderous attack by an organized, online impunity network….

“In recent decades, key parts of the UN have surrendered to the power of the US, and to fear of the Israel Lobby, to abandon these principles, and to retreat from international law itself. We have lost a lot in this abandonment, not least our own global credibility. 

“But the Palestinian people have sustained the biggest losses as a result of our failures.”

To this letter, only short extracts of which are cited here, he appended his resignation. 

{REF Letter from Director of New York Office of the UN High Commissioner of Human Rights,            1 November, 2023 Craig Mokhiber}     

Note:  the countries he cited as subverting the purpose of the UN: US/UK and Europe – comprise  less than 12% of the world the UN is supposed to represents. 

(The photo above is by Michael Murray)