In which things take a serious turn with Dame Slap and prattling Polonius and extensive quotes from elsewhere for a little balance ...

 

Across the way, the talk has all been of Rish! and Uncle Elon, as in Marina Hyde's When Musk met Sunak: the prime minister was more starry-eyed than a SpaceX telescope.

Caroline Davies even thought to take the conversation seriously and penned No utopia: experts question Elon Musk’s vision of world without work.

That's a bit like listening to Joe Rogan for your medical advice - do you really have to question a man who's halved or more the value of an acquisition in little over a year? Do you even need experts to do the job? - but on the plus side there was a cartoon to go with it ...

The pond had to hire the best AI available to work out that the fantasist super-rich nerds had a nose or a foot or some other body part in pretty much every square ...

Meanwhile John Crace was providing a guide to the sort of language the pond should employ, in The trolleying PM: a guide to the language of Boris Johnson’s No 10

The pond enjoyed "to trolley" but also liked this one:

Jaws mode wank: Like so much No 10 pillow talk, this was also dreamed up by Cummings. It refers to those occasions when Boris Johnson was having one of his regular fantasies about being the mayor of Amity in the film Jaws, deciding to keep the beach open and letting people take their chances with the shark. Boris used to keep himself amused by openly wondering if he should ignore the scientific advice – what sensible government wouldn’t? – and not bother with a lockdown. Just to see how many people would die.

Speaking of just seeing how many people would die, the pond was reminded of Global heating is accelerating, warns scientist who sounded climate alarm in the 80s.

For some reason the pond was reminded of the onion muncher, recently in full Jaws mode wank at that conference ...

There was a cartoon to go with that too ...

But enough already with the fun, it's time to get serious and the pond yesterday noted this odd coupling ...

The pond has already featured the saucy doubts and fears of Cameron, but has routinely red carded Dame Slap for yonks ... then something eerie and unsettling happened yesterday, and the pond felt the need to share it ....

Unequivocal? That damned (unnamed by Dame Slap) conference in London has a lot to answer for, not least a case of cognitive dissonance in Dame Slap.

It turned out that she was inclined to be just a teeny weeny equivocal ...

First however the pond must get through all the illustrations slipped in by the reptiles to hide what Dame Slap was saying.

There were a heck of a lot of them ...

Done and dusted, and as a result Dame Slap was reduced to a series of short, unnerving gobbets ... though she was just asking questions ...

Remember this is a woman who proudly donned a MAGA cap and headed out into the New York night to celebrate the elevation of the Mango Mussolini, feeling elated and at one with Faux Noise. Even the shadow of a doubt of a hint of uncertainty is something to see ...

Following her usual Faux Noise form would see Dame Slap join Jesse Waters in a full on rant, as featured in the Daily Beast (sorry paywall) ...

Fox News host Jesse Watters, no stranger to accusations of racism and bigotry, decided to go full-on Islamophobic on Wednesday by claiming that he’s “had it” with Arab Americans and Muslims.

More precisely:

“I want to say something about Arab Americans and about the Muslim world,” he began.

“We—and when I say we I mean the West and Western technology—have created the Middle East,” Watters continued. “We made them rich. We got that oil out of the ground, our military protects all of these oil shipments flying around the world, making them rich. We fund their military. We respect their kings. We kill their terrorists. Okay? But we’ve had it. We’ve had it with them!”

Or she'd be at one with Mark Levin, ranting away about Wolf Blitzer and Jake Tapper, as per the Graudian, White House denounces Fox News over host’s ‘foul’ remarks on CNN pair.

So the pond was disturbed to see Dame Slap put a very cautious toe in the water, fenced around by all sorts of equivocations, what you might call a Jaws mode wank sotto voce ...

It took Dame Slap some time to get to the point ...

Still can't quite get there, still can't quite get to the point ... still not quite ready to do the hard yards on say a story that was all the go yesterday ... the pond kept a snap thinking the news might come in handy ...

Still not quite ready to denounce ethnic cleansing, and collective punishment and war crimes and and all the rest, but also not quite a reliable lizard Oz team player ...

Indeed, indeed, the pond remembers being taught to hate Oliver Cromwell - an eminently despicable human being - though the immediate matters to hand happened some four hundred years before ...

The pond still remembers thinking it was odd the way ancient tribalism still lingered in Tamworth.

Hate can hang around for a long time, especially when the English have fucked over your country. 

Does anybody remember the role that the English played in what they quaintly call the middle east, from the time of the crusades to the twentieth century and beyond ...

...During World War I, continued Arab disquiet over Allied intentions led in 1918 to the British “Declaration to the Seven” and the “Anglo-French Declaration,” the latter promising “the complete and final liberation of the peoples who have for so long been oppressed by the Turks, and the setting up of national governments and administrations deriving their authority from the free exercise of the initiative and choice of the indigenous populations.”

The British were awarded three mandated territories by the League of Nations after WWI: Palestine, Mesopotamia (later Iraq), and control of the coastal strip between the Mediterranean Sea and the River Jordan. A son of Sharif Hussein (who helped lead the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire), Faisal, was installed as King of Iraq, with Transjordan providing a throne for another of Hussein’s sons, Abdullah. Mandatory Palestine was placed under direct British administration, and the Jewish population was allowed to increase, initially under British protection. Most of the Arabian peninsula fell to another British ally, Ibn Saud, who created the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932.

British support for an increased Jewish presence in Palestine, though idealistically embedded in 19th-century evangelical Christian feelings that the country should play a role in Christ’s Second Coming, was primarily geopolitical. Early British political support was precipitated in the 1830s and 1840s as a result of the Eastern Crisis after Muhammad Ali occupied Syria and Palestine. Though these calculations had lapsed as Theodor Herzl’s attempts to obtain international support for his project failed, WWI led to renewed strategic assessments and political bargaining regarding the Middle and Far East.

Zionism was first discussed at the British Cabinet level on November 9, 1914, four days after Britain’s declaration of war on the Ottoman Empire. David Lloyd George, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, “referred to the ultimate destiny of Palestine.” In a discussion after the meeting with fellow Zionist and President of the Local Government Board Herbert Samuel, Lloyd George assured him that “he was very keen to see a Jewish state established in Palestine.” He spoke of Zionist aspirations for a Jewish state in Palestine and of Palestine’s geographical importance to the British Empire. Samuel wrote in his memoirs: “I mentioned that two things would be essential—that the state should be neutralized, since it could not be large enough to defend itself, and that the free access of Christian pilgrims should be guaranteed. … I also said it would be a great advantage if the remainder of Syria were annexed by France, as it would be far better for the state to have a European power as neighbour than the Turk.”

James Balfour of the Balfour Declaration declared that: “The four Great Powers are committed to Zionism. And Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.” (here)

An epic dudding, done and dusted before the first world war had ended.

Sorry, the pond doesn't mean to pre-empt Dame Slap, though she's a little askew in her history ...

Thus far, Dame Slap herself seems to lack the moral clarity required to distinguish between one form of barbarism and another form of barbarism, but there seems to be something of a realisation - bizarre for a fundamentalist - that fundamentalist war mongering might not quite be the answer, and might lead to further generations of hate and fear and loathing ...

Amazing really that Dame Slap made the first faltering, halting step, confessing to moral confusion (presuming she counts herself in the "many of us") and refusing to offer unequivocal support and getting terribly worried at the notion of being taken by the Australian Jewish community as someone who refuses to go the full nine yards with war mongering Benji, suffering under the delusion that he's the new Churchill ...

Luckily no such saucy doubts and fears afflicted Polonius in his standard prattle about greenies and lefties ...

The pond realises that there's no chance Polonius would ever remove the patch that makes him splendidly one-eyed, unwisely following the Wells' advice that in the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king ... (you might want to think about leaving the country) ....so in between the gobbets, the pond decided to offer a few interstitials ...

There was this in a Q & A in The New Yorker, The Gaza-ification of the West Bank (sorry, paywall):

Isaac Chotinr: What has been happening in the West Bank since the attacks of October 7th?

Hagai El-Ad: The Israeli goal of cleansing as much of Area C as possible from Palestinian communities is not a new goal. Area C is just over sixty per cent of the West Bank—basically, all of the West Bank outside of the major Palestinian population centers and towns. All of the Jewish settlements in the West Bank are in Area C. The major Palestinian population centers are like holes in Swiss cheese, where the cheese itself is Area C, engulfing everything: the Jordan Valley, the South Hebron Hills, part of the northern West Bank.

These Palestinian communities have been under threat and pressure of military violence and settler violence and whatnot for years already. The legal phrase that describes it is creating a “coercive environment” so that the Palestinians will leave of their own volition—that they will just eventually, one day, collapse under this ongoing pressure. And this is not new.

What has happened since October 7th is an escalation of this process. The Israeli state, through its settlers, is trying to take advantage of the fact that all eyes are on Gaza and is intensifying dramatically the pressure on Palestinian communities. I would assume from the Israeli perspective this has been a success. Thirteen Palestinian communities have basically fled in horror in the three weeks since October 7th.

And this:

Isaac Chotiner: There have been reports that the Israeli Army has assisted or stood by as these settlers have ejected Palestinian communities. When we read that settlers are moving Palestinians out of an area, what does that look like? How does that operate and what specifically is the role of the state?

Hagai El-Ad: First try to imagine a reality in which already, for years, you are living in this situation in which you can’t get a building permit because Israel just doesn’t give many to Palestinian communities. So you’re under constant threat of home demolition, and sometimes not only the threat. Sometimes the bulldozers show up. You’re not allowed to have running water or electricity; maybe you have electricity from solar panels that were donated to you by a European humanitarian agency. And even those solar panels sometimes get confiscated by the Army with the excuse that they’re not legal. Sometimes the Army comes and trains on your field. Sometimes settlers show up and rough up some people, beat them, threaten them. Sometimes soldiers come and do that.

There are checkpoints. There are threats. And all this goes on for years. And yet somehow you managed to stay on the land and make a living and try to raise a family under these conditions. And that in and of itself is horrific and criminal and appalling, and also happens in broad daylight. Everything I’ve been talking about now and describing has been documented for years already by Palestinian, Israeli, and international human-rights organizations. But Israel never relented and never stopped because, as I said, it’s part of the state’s goal to accomplish that. What has escalated in recent weeks is that you have repeated reports of masked men showing up in the middle of the night. Armed, masked men.

Maybe they are settlers, maybe they’re soldiers, maybe they’re a mix. And they openly threaten the people in the community and tell them that they have twenty-four hours to leave, and if you say otherwise we would wipe you out. You asked me specifically about the involvement of soldiers, if anyone is now shocked that Israeli soldiers are involved in this. You should have been shocked five years ago. You should have been shocked twenty years ago. Because the involvement of soldiers has been also documented for years, not only with testimonies but also with video footage.

There will be a group of armed settlers who come to the outskirts of a Palestinian community and attack the community. There are soldiers with them who almost always protect the attacking settlers and sometimes join them in attacking the Palestinians. And of course Palestinians, if they try to act in self-defense, will almost always have that used as an excuse to frame them as terrorists and to use lethal force against them. It cannot be overstated how exposed the lives of Palestinians are in the West Bank under these conditions. This is the reality that Palestinian communities all over the West Bank are always facing.

Of course all this means nothing to Polonius. Ethnic cleansing and collective punishment is just grist to the Polonial mill ...

The pond has no idea why Polonius has the authority, as a scribbler for the lizard Oz, and head of a lobby group dressed up as an institute, to advise that others have no authority to speak on the Middle East, whereas somehow, perhaps because he has the divine blessing of Ming the Merciless, is fully able to do the speak ...Jaws mode wank as it were ...

But as he's raised the matter of ethnic cleansing, another quote, this time Raja Shedadeh talking with Sharhabeel Al Zaeem in The New Yorker in The Uprooting of Life in Gaza and the West Bank (sorry, paywall) ...

...A recent editorial in Haaretz argued that the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank is “a broad campaign, taking place under the auspices of the government of the right-wing and the settlers, and that now, under cover of the war, has gained immense momentum.” Two weeks ago, the U.N. announced that more than four hundred and twenty-three thousand people have been displaced from their homes by air strikes, and are being herded to the south, close to the border with Egypt. On Tuesday, out of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million, 1.4 million were internally displaced.

Palestinians were forced to leave their towns and villages in 1948, in a displacement known as the nakba. Today, there is some comfort to be found in the fact that leaders of surrounding countries are, perhaps inadvertently, preventing another nakba from taking place. Egypt has secured its border against a large influx of refugees. Jordan’s King Abdullah II has said, “No refugees in Jordan, no refugees in Egypt. This is a situation of humanitarian dimension that has to be dealt with inside of Gaza.” In any case, an overwhelming majority of those enduring the hellish bombardment in Gaza would accept temporary refuge only if guarantees were provided for their return to their homes in Gaza after the war ends. This determination of Palestinians not to allow Israel to displace them once again also acts as a restraint against a second nakba.

And yet there’s no way to know how long these barriers can persist. War has begun, and there is no end in sight. Israeli military planners are now saying that the war could last for months. On October 23rd, Israel confirmed that two more of the people held hostage in Gaza since October 7th have been released, bringing the number freed by Hamas to four. Hamas has intimated that more hostages could be released in exchange for a ceasefire and the arrival of more aid to Gaza. Yet Israel has so far ruled out any ceasefire as it intensifies its military operations.

In the meantime, olive-picking season in the West Bank, once a quiet, contemplative time for Palestinians, has become its own kind of battlefront. On October 11th, in the village of Qusra, Israeli settlers shot and killed three Palestinians. The next day, settlers killed a father and son participating in the funeral procession. As I was picking olives, twelve more Palestinians were killed in the refugee camp Nur Shams, near the city of Tulkarm. The Israeli Army is not holding the violent settlers at bay. On October 15th, the Knesset National Security Committee approved loosening regulations to make it easier for Israelis to obtain gun licenses. The lack of security felt by Palestinians in the West Bank has only weakened the appeal of the Palestinian Authority.

The last invasion by the Israeli Army of the entire West Bank, in 2002, followed a series of horrific suicide bombings that were perpetrated by individuals and militant groups against Israeli civilians in Israeli cities. The subsequent invasion tore apart the two nations as never before, with Israel dramatically increasing the building of settlements, confining Palestinians in separate ghettos, and further entrenching Israeli colonization of the West Bank. Unless the U.S. puts pressure on Israel to pursue a ceasefire, and to begin working with Palestinian leaders to reach a comprehensive resolution to this conflict, then the present war will not only move the two sides apart to an even greater extent but inflame the Middle East for many years to come.

And so on, and yet it all washes over Polonius, still stuck somewhere back in the 1950s and at war with Stalinists ... and yet if you wanted to look for an inspiration for the sort of ethnic cleansing and collective punishment going on in Israel today, could you hope to find a better model, a more superior example than Stalinism in action? (Wiki Population transfer in the Soviet Union)

Yes, Stalin would think nothing of displacing a million people, and then bombing their former lives into rubble ...

...On October 13th, the Israeli government, in preparation for its ground invasion, ordered a million Palestians in northern Gaza to flee south. But the effort to empty the north has had mixed success. The destruction is undeniable. Almost a hundred and seventy thousand residential units have been destroyed, according to the Palestinian foreign minister. And, since October 15th, according to the Israeli military, six hundred thousand people have left for the south. But an estimated hundred thousand people remain in Gaza City. “We will die with dignity and with pride, but we are not going to be killed according to the Israeli army orders and instructions,” as another colleague of mine, Raji Sourani, recently told “Democracy Now!” “I am here like an olive tree. We will never leave our homeland.” Many Palestinians are also returning to the north after discovering that it isn’t any safer in the south, where the bombing has continued.

The violence permeating Gaza has begun to erupt in the West Bank. Since October 7th, the Health Ministry has counted at least ninety Palestinians killed by Israeli troops or settlers. And, as in Gaza, Palestinians have been leaving their homes in the West Bank, out of fear of settler violence. According to B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, eight communities—home to four hundred and seventy-two people, including a hundred and thirty-six children—have been vacated. In six more communities, at least eighty people have left their homes.

Up against that,  Luckovich seems a tad over-optimistic ...

And now, just to balance up things a little more, back to that original Q and A in The New Yorker:

...Q: What’s your understanding of what the Israeli government is doing here? And I don’t mean to make a moral distinction necessarily, but I’m just trying to understand how this operates. Is this the Israeli government, the Israeli military, pursuing an active policy of helping settlers uproot Palestinian communities? Or is it your sense that there’s vigilantism among Israeli soldiers and the Israeli government is fine with that going on?

A: Some readers might think that there is a distinction between potentially “bad settlers” and the Israeli state. The question is to what extent is the state effective in handling these “bad settlers”? This is the wrong way of thinking about it. The uprooting of Palestinian communities all over the West Bank is not a project of the settlers, the bad ones, the good ones, or the other ones. It is a state project. All of these policies have been in place in a variety of ways. There are legal mechanisms that the state has been using to take land from Palestinians and settle Jewish communities on it instead. It’s so cynical, it’s really unbelievable. But that is the way things have been unfolding in the West Bank for more than half a century already. There are announcements of new state land. Who’s the state in the West Bank? It’s the Israeli state. So land that’s announced as state land is public land, and then cannot be used for the benefit of the Palestinian population. It’s used by the state for the purpose it wants to advance, which is Jewish settlement, right? And the regime issues building permits for Jewish settlements and issues demolition orders for Palestinian communities.

All of these things that I’ve been describing are official bureaucratic mechanisms backed by government ministries, the Army, the Israeli courts, all of these entities working jointly to achieve the same goal, pushing out Palestinians, taking over their land. When these official mechanisms fail and Palestinian communities show perseverance to stay on the land, then what you have is that other mechanism, the one that tends to make more headlines. You might catch sight of a violent settler torching a Palestinian’s field or using weapons provided to the settlers by the Army.

But a coercive environment rather than forcible transfer is more beneficial for the Israeli state. All of those boring, bureaucratic, complicated mechanisms that I’ve described, the balance there is that, on the one hand, you need patience because you’re making the lives of people a nightmare for a long duration of time. But the upside is that maybe after five years, maybe after ten years, they will just give up. And, if they give up, then you don’t end up with sensational TV footage that might create alarm internationally.

What we’ve been seeing since October 7th, after all these years of suffering and orchestrated bureaucratic violence, are direct threats and direct actions against these communities. It happens very quickly, but it does create international friction, and that is the balance that Israel has been playing with, trying to accomplish as much displacement of Palestinians as possible while paying the minimal international price.

Q: My understanding of the Netanyahu government’s approach to the Palestinians before October 7th was that Gaza, at least rhetorically, was largely ignored, but that many extremist officials would talk openly about the need to expand settlements in the West Bank. Has that changed? How much is this rhetoric about Israelis taking more land in the West Bank happening out in the open and how much is it quietly taking advantage of a situation when everyone’s attention is focussed on Gaza?

A: The displacement of Palestinians and the growth of settlements—these are two processes that go hand in hand. This is not about this government, this is not about Netanyahu or his ministers. This is an Israeli project that has been unfolding under left, right, and center governments. Each and every one of them have been doing exactly this since 1967. Let’s not be ahistorical. That is a key part of understanding what is unfolding here. Because if there’s a sense that somehow this is about, as I said before, “bad settlers” or this is somehow about a specific individual who has been Prime Minister for a long time, then we’re missing the bigger picture.

Q: I asked about the current government because I’m interested in how they have rhetorically handled what has been going on in the West Bank during the last three weeks.

A: There is almost zero media coverage in Hebrew in Israel about this. One of the only news outlet that professionally addresses this is Haaretz. Almost no one else discusses it. And to the extent that it is being discussed by other outlets, it is in a very specific context, not about the brutality and the sickening efforts to try and take advantage of the current situation in order to destroy Palestinian communities. It is only discussed in the context of what is perceived to be the Israeli interest of trying to limit the military conflict to Gaza, so that there won’t be another front that opens in the West Bank. So you would have commentators on TV saying, “This is bad for us because if this continues maybe we are risking an uprising of Palestinians in the West Bank.” Forcible transfer is a war crime, plain and simple. This is brutality against innocent civilians that are trying to have a life on their land. It’s not discussed in that way.

Q: I’m very cognizant of what you said. But we have heard over and over again that this is the most right-wing government in Israel’s history. In the first nine months of this government’s existence, before the current war, was the situation in the West Bank different at all?

A: I think it was indisputable that the situation was escalating, absolutely. But the situation was not new. These processes that I’ve been describing have been unfolding for years already, and the differences from one decade to the next, one government to the next, have been in the pace, but not in the over-all trajectory. Even right-wing governments, when they feel international pushback, would take a step back for a month or two until attention moves somewhere else.

Then they would pick up the pace again. In that sense, it’s always heading in the same direction. This is how Israel accomplished getting more than two hundred and fifty settlements and more than seven hundred and fifty thousand settlers into the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. One step at a time, always trying to fly below the level of international outrage that might trigger a real response. Think about a memorable moment from this government, the pogrom by Israeli settlers in Huwara. Many dozens of settlers were involved in the pogrom. That caused a lot of outrage because of the statement Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister, made about wiping out Huwara and so on. That’s like a large-scale pogrom. I wouldn’t say that this didn’t happen before, but it wasn’t a frequent occurrence. So that was definitely a moment of escalation under this government.

How come so many settlers thought that they could be involved in that and get away with it? That there would be no consequences? They have been enjoying this kind of impunity for decades. Not just in recent months but also under previous governments that were more internationally digestible.

Q: What happens to these Palestinian communities who are kicked off their land? Is there any sort of infrastructure to help them? What’s a typical journey like for a Palestinian family who’s been forced to move?

A: There are international agencies, and obviously they’re doing their best, but what is not happening is the rebuilding of those communities on their land. People will be typically forced to move to other villages, other Palestinian communities, which is exactly as the Israelis desire. And Palestinians will be told openly by Israeli officials, by settlers, that their future is in Area A, not in Area C. Area A is twenty per cent of the West Bank—the large Palestinian population centers.

Q: So the goal seems to be to insure that more and more people in Area C are in Area A, so that the Palestinian communities in the West Bank are concentrated in several large, denser areas?

A: Yeah. And you can think about this process as the Gaza-ification of the West Bank. One step at a time, Israel is pushing Palestinians in that direction. There will be a number of Palestinian Bantustans, Gaza-style, all over the West Bank. And each one of these Palestinian enclaves is already surrounded and gradually will be more surrounded by this mix of measures, whether it be Israeli infrastructure such as roads or military bases or walls or fences or settlements and so on. And if one visits any one of the large Palestinian cities like Hebron, Jenin, or Ramallah, you will see this process gradually unfolding.

After all that, it's very hard to run with cartoons, but the pond missed out on Halloween, and Satanic influences and all that, so just a few to wrap up proceedings for the day ...