Kernow Damo

New York just elected a pro-Palestine mayor and the reaction in Tel Aviv was panic, because the story they’ve relied on for fifty years just broke. Right, so New York didn’t just elect Zohran Mamdani — it also triggered an absolute meltdown in Tel Aviv. The city with the largest Jewish population outside Israel just chose a mayor who called for a ceasefire in Gaza and opposed NYPD–Israel police exchange programmes, and did it without apology. And the moment that result hit, the reaction in Israel was not calm, not measured, not diplomatic — it was panic. Netanyahu flapping because Mamdani said ICC warrants should apply to everyone. Itamar Ben-Gvir — a man with a documented conviction for incitement — called the election a disgrace. Meanwhile, the likes of Jewish Voice for Peace, IfNotNow and Jews for Racial & Economic Justice, the JFREJ had been openly campaigning for him in full daylight. They weren’t crying in Tel Aviv because New York changed. They were crying because the narrative did. And its finally turned against them in NYC. Right, so New York didn’t just elect a mayor — it broke a story that was never supposed to break. Zohran Mamdani won, emphatically and cleanly. There has been no dispute, no recount theatre, no quiet backroom reassurance to the people who usually get reassured. And here’s the thing that matters: he won exactly as he is. No distancing. No coded language. No “of course I support Israel’s security” throat-clearing. He went in with a ceasefire demand in public view, with his opposition to NYPD-Israel training exchanges on record, and he didn’t apologise for any of it. That’s the point. There was no retreat. And this isn’t some rural backwater or a city council ward. It’s New York. The largest Jewish population outside Israel. The city that has been treated like a satellite capital for Israeli messaging. The place where political consultants have spent decades telling every candidate the same thing: you don’t cross that line. And Mamdani crossed it. Stepped over it like it wasn’t there. And the city voted him in anyway. This wasn’t a boutique left coalition. It wasn’t a grad-seminar activist bloc. This was tenants’ unions, nurses, subway riders, restaurant workers, people paying rent to hedge funds, people being policed like a problem instead of a public. It was the class that actually lives in the city, not the class that owns pieces of it. And that class did not flinch when the smear started.

Trump called it peace. What he actually built was a weapons corridor, and now it’s blowing up in his face and Iran have popcorn. Right, so Donald Trump said he’d built a bridge of peace, and what he actually built was an arms market with a flag on it. The TRIPP corridor — his grand plan to join Armenia and Azerbaijan, box in Iran and call it diplomacy — has gone the way of every Trump deal before it: the photo survived, the peace didn’t. Within months of the signing, the two sides were buying jets from opposite sides of another diplomatic split, India and Pakistan were dragged into the fallout, and Iran, the country Trump swore to isolate, has ended up even stronger than when he started. The cameras caught a handshake; history caught a scam. This wasn’t peace through strength, it was profit through instability — a 99-year lease on chaos sold as vision, and another Trump instigated project that may have run its course, having run on headlines and little else. Right, so Trump called it peace. The cameras caught the handshake, the flags, the podium, the promise of a corridor that would turn two old enemies into trading partners and show the world that American deal-making still ruled the map. Trump and his art of the deal. The ink was barely dry before the headlines declared it historic: Armenia and Azerbaijan signing a White House-brokered agreement to open a route through Armenia’s southern Syunik province, linking Azerbaijan’s mainland to its Nakhchivan exclave and on to Turkey. They called it the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity — TRIPP for short — a modern Silk Road with Trump’s name on it, his ego must be stroked at all times, but living up to the more literal definition of the word now, as the plan has tripped up and fallen on its face. Washington sold it as the moment the Caucasus would finally break its habit of war. But the habit didn’t break. It just shifted. Within months both sides were buying new aircraft, Iran was running drills on its northern border, and the map Trump claimed as his triumph had become the outline of another arms race. Everything about TRIPP was built on imbalance. Armenia came to the table weakened, cut adrift from Moscow, far too preoccupied with Ukraine. Azerbaijan arrived emboldened, armed by Turkey, flush with energy money from selling its oil via Turkey to Israel, fresh from victory over Armenia previously. The deal that followed reflected that power gap: a corridor carved through Armenian soil giving Azerbaijan a direct road to Turkey and giving the US a permanent foothold in the one strip of land that still connected Iran to the Caucasus. On paper it was about trade and transit; in practice it was about control.

They say Lebanon is a failed state — but Iraq just proved that’s a lie. Same resistance, same logic, but only one faces US coercion. Why? Right, so apparently linking disarmament to foreign withdrawal is a mark of statehood in Iraq but a mark of failure in Lebanon. Same sentence, different accent, opposite outcome. Baghdad tells Washington the militias will stand down when the Americans finally pack up and go, and it’s called sovereignty. Beirut says Hezbollah will disarm when Israel stops crossing its border and breaching a ceasefire it has abused for almost a year now and it’s called collapse. Tom Barrack calls that proof that Lebanon is “a failed state.” Well he should know — Washington’s been rehearsing that diagnosis for years in Israel’s interests – how else do you turn a blind eye to thousands upon thousands of ceasefire breaches and still blame the victim of them? When a country stops being useful, the US stops calling it sovereign. “Failed State” in this playbook doesn’t mean collapse, it means disobedience. Iraq still fits inside the the banner of usefulness because it has oil and strategic importance; Lebanon doesn’t. It has Hezbollah and is therefore a threat to Israel in their book, even as Israel once again launches strikes across the south of their country. That’s the real divide. But the hypocrisy of Trump’s pro Israel goons isn’t going to go ignored.

They said trade with Israel was “paused.” The government’s own data tells a different story. The date it OMITTED Tells an even bigger one. Right, so the government’s own figures have given the game away. Buried in a Department for Business and Trade factsheet dated 31 October, because Halloween is frankly the perfect day to release news like this, it says exports to Israel rose 10.5 percent to £3.6 billion in the year to June 2025. That’s from the previous June, so that is basically Starmer’s first year in power — and it happened while Gaza continued to be burned and Labour claimed to have “paused” a trade deal out of principle. The truth is, they only paused the headlines. And those billions they’ve just announced? Well they are just the part they’re willing to print. It’s just the tip of the iceberg because they don’t include everything. They don’t include the arms licences, MoD contracts, offshore finance and hidden service deals – they all sit below the waterline. What they published is just the tip; what they’re profiting from is the iceberg. And for a government that talks so much about moral clarity, it’s remarkable how much they’ve managed to hide and now it’s going to blow up in their face. Right so the figures are not leaked. They’re not hearsay. They’re the government’s own numbers here, sitting quietly in a Department for Business and Trade factsheet from Halloween. In the twelve months to the end of June 2025 - the first full year of Keir Starmer’s premiership, so this is on him - British exports to Israel rose by £342 million, up 10.5 per cent, to £3.6 billion. Imports from Israel dipped slightly to £2.6 billion, a 4.6 per cent fall. People here not wanting to buy Israeli it seems, or invest in a nation so destabilised by its own crackpot and genocidal government, but actually that’s only a small part of the truth. The total value of trade between the two countries reached £6.2 billion, a 3.7 per cent increase on the previous year. Those numbers appear under the seal of His Majesty’s Government, not in a campaign pamphlet, they are official, they are shameful. The contradiction is in and of itself damaging enough to Starmer’s regime. In public the Labour government told the country it had “paused” talks on a new UK–Israel Free Trade Agreement. In private, or at least on paper, trade was still climbing. What was frozen was not the money; it was the accountability. The figures show that far from retreating, Britain deepened its commercial ties at the very moment it claimed to be distancing itself.

Israel just arrested its top military lawyer — not for a crime, but for exposing one. The whistleblower told the truth… and now she’s the one in handcuffs. Right, so imagine being Israel’s top military lawyer — years spent defending the “most moral army in the world,” turning war crimes into paperwork as that entails, and then one day realising the paperwork itself is the crime. That was Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi. She leaked the footage from Sde Teiman — soldiers assaulting a bound Palestinian prisoner — she was the whistleblower. She resigned, vanished, was found, and was promptly arrested. The soldiers? Out on bail, arguing due process. The whistle-blower? Treated like a spy. That’s Israel’s most moral army for you though isn’t it? Aside from all of their misconduct on the battlefield, back at home t*rture gets court management; truth gets handcuffs. And the best part? The system thinks it’s proving its own integrity by prosecuting the only honest person in uniform. They tried to bury a whistleblower, and instead the state has indicted itself once more as amoral, bereft of legitimacy and where the crime of speaking out is the worst crime of all. Right, so Israel’s top military lawyer leaked proof of a war crime committed by her own state military, how mad a sentence is that at any time anywhere — yet instead of addressing what is a massive scandal in any other state, the system she served came for her instead of for the soldiers. Major General Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi wasn’t some dissident clerk. She was the head of the army’s law machine, the woman who signed off every operation the politicians called legal. When she confirmed she’d leaked the Sde Teiman video — soldiers surrounding a restrained Palestinian prisoner and assaulting him — she didn’t just break secrecy. She broke the illusion that the law still ruled. She resigned last Friday. By Sunday she was missing, her car abandoned on a Tel Aviv beach, a letter at home that made her family fear the worst. Hours later police said she was safe. Then they arrested her. The soldiers stayed free; the lawyer went in cuffs. That’s Israel’s moral order laid out in sequence. Sde Teiman isn’t a secret any more. It’s a desert compound where Palestinians are dumped after raids — shackled, blindfolded, left unnamed. It is a place notorious for beatings, medical neglect and d*aths in custody.

The former Prince Andrew has been destroyed over Epstein. So why is Peter Mandelson, with the same connections, still sitting in power untouched? Right, so Prince Andrew’s out — stripped, erased, repackaged as Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor — the royal family finally admitting what everyone else already knew: he was a liability they couldn’t spin their way out of anymore. The King swung the axe, all titles gone, Royal Lodge soon to follow. And yet Peter Mandelson, who spent his own holidays in Jeffrey Epstein’s company and wrote “my best pal” in the man’s birthday book, still floats serenely through Westminster as Lord Mandelson. That’s the state of British morality in one picture: a monarch of all people playing moral referee while an elected government hides behind procedure to avoid doing likewise with Mandelson. Andrew loses his titles to save the brand; Mandelson keeps his but why? One rule for royals, none for Starmer’s sort? And presumably Starmer’s fine with that in spite of everything. Right, so when even the monarchy is more willing to cut loose its own than the government, you know the country has rotted from the inside out. On 30 October Charles signed off on the removal of every title and honour that still tied Prince Andrew to the institution that raised him. Buckingham Palace confirmed that he would now be known as Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. The phrase carried quiet violence. His style “His Royal Highness” was gone. His right to call himself Prince was gone. The Duke of York, the Earl of Inverness, the Baron Killyleagh — all set aside, pending the legal wash-through that will eventually return them to the Crown. The same week, palace aides briefed that he would vacate Royal Lodge in Windsor and move into private accommodation. For a family that measures itself in continuity, that was a decapitation. No one pretended it was an act of morality in the biblical sense. It was self-preservation. The Firm was circling the wagons. The monarchy’s entire business model is moral appearance. When that collapses, the brand dies. After years of pressure — the BBC interview, the Virginia Giuffre lawsuit, the settlement that cost roughly £12 million — Charles finally did what the late Queen had only half done.

Israel says Hamas returned the 'wrong remains' — but the facts tell a different story. They've literally banned DNA kits from Gaza. Right, so Israel’s run out of excuses again — so they’ve started digging up new ones. The b*mbing as we know never stopped, it just got relabelled “ceasefire,” and now the latest moral cover story is that Hamas sent them the wrong remains of Israeli hostages and they must have done it on purpose. That’s the hook — the pretext to switch the war machine back on. Trouble is, it’s already falling apart. Haaretz, one of Israel’s own papers says Hamas warned them the IDs were uncertain. Other outlets have said Israel is blocking forensic tools and every DNA kit that could’ve proved who was who and that they’ve banned the autopsy tools needed as well. Then CENTCOM steps in with a miracle drone clip of “Hamas looting aid” — one truck, no proof, just propaganda. The whole thing stinks of coordination: Washington and Israel both fabricate stories which get debunked, Israel of course fabricates more moral outrage despite the clear lack of morals on show in their government, and together it is becoming more and more obvious that they are both clearing the runway to start the genocide in full all over again. Right, so Israel’s government is accusing Hamas of returning “the wrong remains.” The claim runs like this: Hamas sent back bodies said to be Israeli captives, and forensic tests proved they weren’t. The insinuation is deliberate deceit though — that Hamas is mocking Israel by handing over random corpses.