Crisis Update: Gaza, An Open And Closed Case

War and bloodshed stops us making common cause

• Saudi Arabia has ended talks to normalize relations with Israel

• 'Hamas' operatives promise escalation, faces covered - who are they?

• This was allowed to happen, at the very least

• Gaza's prison city is a prototype for UN 15-minute cities as per Agenda 21

• 15 minutes is even less travel than you'd have in Gaza

• War, at this moment, is the gravest threat to our civil liberties

• Pretext and objective is all: escalation and war could herald martial law

• Digital ID, rationing, limits to freedoms of travel, association and speech

• Be careful what you cheer for

• Twitter is laden with gore that should have been censored, yet serves the narrative

• You may pick sides but remember that is to following the yarn

• Conservative Inc, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro etc, reveal their paymasters

• Taliban asks Iran for safe passage to cross from Afghanistan to fight Israel

• Armed with $70 billion of U.S. armory left in Afghanistan, what do you expect?

• Stay behind forces in Ukraine, now say 'smash Gaza'

See Israel-Gaza Clash Is More Than Bad Neighbours (Oct 8, 2023)

(Words 3,300 or 15 minutes of your company.)

Oct 10, 2023

You live in an open world; more free than even you know. You can fly or live anywhere — for now.

The borders are tumbling in Europe and the U.S.. Millions of migrants, mostly young men, are arriving, often with the assistance of the United Nations and NGOs. We are told the West must lose its homogeneity and abandon its sense of difference. [1]

See From Argentina To A Street Near You (Aug 16, 2022)

The world, we are told, is interconnected.

Yet over there, in Palestine, are people at each others' throats. There is no attempt at integration. It sticks out like a sore thumb, in many painful ways.

A sliver of land 25 miles long and 3-to-7 miles wide (41 km by 6-12 km) has exploded, first in rage, and now with the bombs of Israel's response.

You can cross its full length by car in an hour, travelling past 2 million people. It has one border entry into Egypt, another into Israel. The rest is surrounded by barbed wire fence through which militants cut their way this past week, leading to a brutal massacre of lives. Though it borders the Mediterranean sea, Israel restricts access to water in defiance of the UN. [2]

When Israel's prime minister Benjamin Netanhayu told Gazans to leave the city in preparation for sending in the jets, only its residents, and those few foreigners who know something about Gaza, recognized that the locals had nowhere to escape.

Gaza is an open air prison — and this is your future too, if 15 minute cities are imposed.

Consider the improbable, the inversion of logic, the opposite of common sense. Because that is where society is heading.

Anger, adrenaline

Outrage messes with logic. It unleashes adrenaline. Those horrific rapes and murders, practically live-streamed, leave one in no mood to consider the long term implications of the war that Hamas challenged and prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu accepted.

Consider, however, that social media is usually very careful to censor such scenes of gore. You see them now because they want you to witness atrocity; they need you angry. There is no way that CEO of Twitter/X Linda Yaccarino .@lindayaX allows such gore, except that it is supportive of the response that is planned. She promotes, by her own admission, the banning of "lawful but awful."

I cannot deny your anger, nor your right to pick a side. But remember that to take sides is to subscribe to a narrative that may not be yours.

Weights and measures

Saudi Arabia says it has ended talks on closer relations with Israel due to the war on Hamas. Washington insists there is still scope, but Riyadh has told the US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, that it is "ending all negotiations" on normalising relations with Israel, according to The Jerusalem Post.

The 2020 Abraham Accords saw several Arab countries, including the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Sudan, establish diplomatic ties with Israel. Saudi Arabia was seen as a key player in advancing these efforts.

Since we don't yet know how or whether the war will escalate, it is too soon to ask what shape future talks could take.

Recall it was China that negotiated a resumption of ties between Saudi Arabia and Iran. China is also invested in Israel, which along with India has purchased Mediterranean shipping terminals in the port of Haifa. The port has capacity that exceeds Israel's needs and could become a strategic trading hub.

For that to happen, Israel must become more integrated with regional partners, ending its isolation over the issue of Palestine.

The country is on the route of the Suez canal, and railways are being built to carry freight that could, if the process of integration continues, reach through Jordan to Iraq and Saudi Arabia. [3]

This may seem dry economics but it is trade that makes your iPhone and lifts billions out of poverty. It is ultimately money that drives wars for resources, land grabs, population and depopulation. The good and the evil.

Palestinians, too?

For all its talk of ending poverty and hunger, the United Nations has been pathetic on Palestine. The UN has confirmed its record of failure to prevent conflict in its 77 years of existence. [4]

The UN is more concerned with sophistry and to wrangle control of land from native inhabitants under a scheme called UNDRIP, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Like The Voice proposal in Australia, this is an end run around aboriginal rights, that could expropriate first nations, as blatantly as is happening in Hawaii right now.

See Indigenous People Under Attack – From Hawaii to Australia (Aug 18, 2023)

While the UN system assaults nation states and their borders, the care and refuge of peoples has never rested so much in the hands of nation states as it does today.

The Line

Saudi Arabia has a plan for a SMART city, a linear metropolis stretching 105 miles (170 km) housing 9 million people who will live in a space station on earth, in "Green" environs, bereft of private transport, but conveyed from cradle to grave by the state.

The parallel with Gaza is unmistakeable. Is the Neom line a potential home for the Palestinians? They have already been acclimatised to living in an enclosed territory.

"Neom (styled NEOM; Arabic: نيوم, romanized: Niyūm, Hejazi Arabic pronunciation: [nɪˈjo̞ːm]) is a new urban area planned by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to be built in its northwestern Tabuk Province. The site is north of the Red Sea, east of Egypt across the Gulf of Aqaba and south of Jordan. The total planned area of Neom is 26,500 km2 (10,200 s... ... ...

This, my contacts suggest, is a city of national security. If it was simply a vanity project, why not like Türkiye president Recep Tayyip Erdogan build masses of gigantic mosques, or the 12 football stadiums that Russia constructed for the World Cup of 2018?

Secure cities are built for reasons of security. Neom could be one, albeit improbable, solution for Palestine.

See Opposing Ideologies Serve The Same Masters (Aug 4, 2022)

The horror

Set aside, for a moment, your horror to acknowledge how the crimson mist of bloodshed distorts vision by refraction: we no longer see straight.

Like all wars, the anger induced by carnage stops us from recognising our common interest. War has always been a tool to divide the people and conquer them, regardless of whether the warmongers conspire or simply take advantage of crisis.

The domestic population is the target in all wars, as much as the enemy. This is no exception.

The immediate slaughter threatens to escalate. If this becomes a bigger war, such as an attack on Iran, it will likely be used to declare an emergency (or even martial law) to push through the measures the power elite have already stated they want:

• digital ID

• rationing

• limits to freedoms of travel, association, speech etc

And even if it finishes within a month, what then? When government agencies "miss" terror threats, failure has its own reward: extra staff, bigger budgets and more draconian laws, introduced while the public is still seething with anger and whipped to fury.

Given the tendency to government over-reach during the Covid response, war at this moment would be a grave threat to civil liberties.

Tongue-tied and censored

Unless you can give voice to your worries, all you can do is cower in fear. The brutality in Israel demands that we speak freely. How to articulate ideas except by words; how to explain to children.

Your right to express ideas is counterpoised to the needs of the national security state.

Social media, populated with agents of the state, as the Twitter files revealed, will silence dissent. Anyone defending individual rights will be branded a friend of "terrorists."

The language of politicos — not just in Israel — is worrisome: former U.S. ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley called for Israel to “finish” Hamas. Israel's defence minister Yoav Gallant ordered a "complete siege" of Gaza and some expect a ground force of 100,000 troops to "cleanse" Palestinian neighbourhoods — language that Israel has heard before. [5]

A U.S. House Representative refers to a "war to end all wars," which only the most tone deaf and ignorant can swallow without knowing that this was the lie that lured millions of loyal civilians to their slaughter in World War One.

The head of the ADL talks of an atomic bomb. Behind these injunctions to reflexive behaviour is the training of televised sports that constrains us to follow the winning team.

Caste and protected classes

These times coincide with an unprecedented push for censorship, by governments around the world. "Online safety" laws to regulate "hate speech" laws are already in place, to create "protected classes" and limit the discussion of certain topics.

Corporations and private foundations want to decide who is a trusted voice. Criticism of government is out; criticism of the police and military puts you in their sights.

You shall be banned from criticising war, as has happened so many times before.

Mark Steyn is in rant mode but makes some fair points.

"Perhaps we will learn the truth about that "intelligence failure". Or perhaps it will join the increasing list of perplexing events - in America alone, from the Vegas massacre to the trans shooter's manifesto - that remain "unexplained".

But in the meantime we have real victims, real corpses, real desecrated corpses. And we have the barbarians rejoicing in them. And huge numbers of westerners supporting those monsters. Let's take it as read that you don't dig the Jews. In the end, which will be coming soon enough, this isn't about the Jews, it's about you."

He's right, though not in directing his anger at Muslims. Where he is right is to say, this isn't about the Jews, it's about you and me in every country. The globalist project made that very clear during the Covid response. [6]

Someone posted under a video of Palestinian celebrations on Sweden, "I hope everything returns to normal."

Some people just don't get it. This is the new normal. Brutality punctuated by interludes. Peace is the push back against evil until we are too tired or complacent to resist.

Then brutality smashes through the wall in an armoured bulldozer and intrudes on you and your family: Gaza militants in a bulldozer, Israeli soldiers in a bulldozer, the militarized police in a bulldozer.

A Cherry Orchard

Anton Chekhov described the tension between the world as is, and life as it should be.

“The best of them are realists and depict life as it is, but because every line they write is permeated, as with a juice, by a consciousness of an aim, you feel in addition to life as it is, also life as it should be, and it is that that delights you.”

We have no such simple pleasures. Things are changing too fast. There is life as it is — in its cascading crises — and what it threatens to become, in all its brutality.

Let us reverse engineer this: how did things get to this point? We should consider on a material and spiritual level, taking into account that we may have been manipulated to the extent that our actions and ideas are not ours.