Since I have commented quite extensively on the Israeli action in Gaza I think I should do so on the Iranian / Israeli conflict.
There are a number of things to point out. The first is that theocracy is not a sound basis for government anywhere. Nor does it produce stability.
I do, of course, have major concerns about the direction of politics in Iran. As it moves increasingly to the right the risk of conflict is growing.
The same is true, though, in Israel where increasingly powerful right-wing theocratic groups have also helped destabilise the country and good government, resulting in the current regime that is as worrying as that in Tehran.
I make the point for the obvious reason that there are no governments worthy of support in this conflict.
Intervention has then to be to preserve a greater good, which is the existential right of states to be. I presume that this is the justification for UK and US intervention on behalf of Israel, although I do not hear that being said. If it is, there is a logic to it. Israel has a right to be.
However, the right to preserve this greater good is not restricted to Israel. Palestine also has a right to be. Israel appears to be denying that by its actions in both Gaza and the West Bank.
In that case I think support for Israel has to be conditional to match the condemnation of the actions of Iran. If it is to be supported Israel's government must respect boundaries determined in law and international agreements. The US and UK have the necessary obligation to make that clear.
This conflict has been created by the actions of two governments that have few redeeming characteristics. I support neither, but respect the rights of the nations and peoples they represent. The role of the international community is to find a higher good. David Cameron ‘s ‘Top gun' language this morning does not suggest we are in anything like that position as yet. That's as depressing as is the persistence of these theocratic governments that are promoting fear and terror.
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You are a retired ex accountant FFS, why are you believing you are a Kissinger type figure whose opinions should be heard on the world stage?..anyway off you go to make a tik-tok video on it. Utterly bizarre..
I would usually delete such an obvious ad hominem from a troll, as this so obviously is. It is, however, archetypal in form and I thought, therefore, it worthy of comment.
Ignoring the crass stupidity of describing me as just a retired accountant (not that there would be anything wrong in being such a thing, because that would still have provided me with considerably more life experience than almost any cabinet minister has, or which the Labour Party has to offer), it is the idea that one can only be one thing, defined by an education 40+ years ago, that I find so absurd in comments of this sort.
As a matter of fact, I have engaged with politicians and the structural instruments of power at a national and international level.
I have also been an academic studying and publishing on these issues with some success, which is ignored.
And anyone is allowed an opinion, come what may. Unless you oppose right-wing ideology that is. Then alternative opinion is barred, apparently. And that is why comments of this sort are so indicative of extremist thinking.
And of course, it is your blog, Richard, to do with as you wish (within the law of course)!
You are not forcing anyone to read your blog. What a bizarre notion this “Jacob Mendy” has.
Well put, Richard. And I’ll add that I value your analyses, critiques and opinions on this and many other topics far more than those of various (ex)footballers, movie stars, musicians and others, who seem to have ready access to popular media!
Not to say that some of them, at least, do also have relevant life experience to bring to some of the discussions; unlike some of our ‘professional’ politicians…
Jacob,
Not sure if you follow this blog in any detail. Only yesterday on the topic “How are we going to pay for it”, It seemed that Richard was being criticised for not criticising recent Iranian actions — which wasn’t the heading / topic.
Today he does mention the conflict – and rather than engage with the discussion, you criticise his right to express a view (since he is ‘only’ an accountant). It does seem that he is damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t ….
This blog is now much broader than issues related to accounting and MMT. The choices that are being made are deeply political and impact on all members of society – the conflict has the potential to have a global impact. UK govt spokespeople seem very keen to express support for the right of Israel to defend itself and its people – less so to support the rights of others (under recognised global rules).
I’d suggest that the economic impact, the politics and the consequences for the UK make this topic entirely appropriate for this blog. If you want to engage – please do so constructively. If you want to cast shade – please reflect – and stop it.
Thank you
No man is an island Jacob.
Silo thinking is one of the main reasons that the international ‘community’ is so incapable of acting collectively.
Political economy at all levels needs to be more joined up don’t you agree ?
Jacob
Congratulations on winning promotion to League One, with Wrexham on Saturday there…
And you, Jacob, would appear to be a Wrexham and Gambia footballer, so by your own logic what would make your views on this topic any more valid or worthy of consideration than Richard’s?
Congratulations on achieving promotion at the weekend btw.
I was unaware of that
Ipswich Town are taking all my footballing attention right now
And Liverpool….
I agree. You must be at least an Oxford-educated aristocrat before you can blabber on any topic you desire.
Putting the ad hominem to one side – perhaps this blog should focus on the Uk & its myriad of problems – there are loads of them – rather than events in strange foreign lands.
As for events in these far away foreign lands, the Uk government should have no involvement whatsoever. Again something I know you would support – if only as a taxpayer not wanting his taxes wasted on missiles, jet fuel etc etc. I assume you are a British citizen and tax payer? Why else would you be visiting this blog?
Furthermore, in the interests of British non-interference & neutrality there is a very good case to be made to withdraw the embassy both from Iran & Israel – given that a quasi state of war exists between the two countries. De minimis I think you would agree that risking British lives is not worth it. Soap, bowel, towel – wash our hands of the whole thing. What do you say old chap? Good plan? Honestly what does either country have to offer the UK? carpets? jaffa oranges? terrorism?
Irony alert 🙂
It is a feature of political and moral ignorance in the UK, and elsewhere, that people cannot envisage a conflict where all actors are malign or amoral. Encouraged by education and media, there is always a ‘good’ side and a ‘bad’ side, and the consequences are never considered separately (e.g. civilian casualties).
It is echoed in films – in the original Blade Runner, Roy Batty is actually the hero, fighting for replicant freedom, Deckard on the side of the villains. The tropes of Western civilisation invert this.
In both the US and UK there are well funded lobby groups on behalf of Israel. AIPAC in the Us and Conservative and Labour Friends of Israel. When politicians appear on our screens, we are not told they members of a lobby group and their analysis of the situation or recommendations for policy must be influenced by that.
Alan Duncan pointed out that four leading Tories did not seem to agree with the party policy of a two state solution. Within hours he was told he would be subject to party disciplinary procedures.
Both Sunak and Cameron tell us Israel is an ally. Why?
On the West Bank we see numerous human rights abuses and acts of terrorism perpetrated by settlers facilitated by the Israeli Defence Force, They amount to cases of ethnic cleansing. Apart from being wrong, not calling this out does no good to our reputation in the developing world.
The International court of Justice said in January, aid should be immediate and effective. Israel, has not done so and their spokespeople have denied famine in Gaza. The evidence is overwhelming. But our media dare not say they are lying, as they would with, say, Russia. One can only presume there are forces at work in the highest levels which are not disclosed to the public.
Has BBC ever asked Cameron/Sunak -the simple direct question whether they backed Israel’s bombing an Iranian embassy in Syria – which is apparently against international law. Probably not – after all they are not the ‘public service broadcaster’ are they ? And they dont have editorial guidelines ‘to hold power to account’ do they…(whoops….)
The embassy bombing seemed to be a clear provocation to Iran -and an attempt by Netanyahu to shift international attention away from the slaughter in Gaza , and which , thanks to the stupidity of the Ayatollah, has succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.
So the Ayatollah, Biden, Sunak walked straight into the trap set by Natanyahu – and handed the intitiative right back to him while ‘urging caution’ ………despair.
As the BBC correspondent says ‘the ball is now in Israel’s court’ – well done chaps.
Andrew, Israel has been repeatedly attacked by Iranian proxies..the attack on the embassy to kill senior military figures was a response. Please don’t infer it was “unprovoked”, it wasn’t.
And for the record, Israel also engages in continual subversive attacks. There is no good side here. Stop pretending there is.
Not just footballers today Richard but middleweight boxers as well?
Really?
These people are tedious
Israel has a very long history of “unprovoked” assassinations.
Dr Gerald Bull was assasinated by the Israelis in March 1990 in Brussels. He was murdered cos he was working with the Iraquis on a super gun. The Brits could have stopped him (& the matrix affair was how they put a plug in the whole thing) but as usual, the Israelie’s preferred modus operandi is extra-judicial murder preferably in foreign countries.
In this case singly, in the case of Gaza by the 10s of thousands. Finishing, in this respect the Israelis are no different to the Russians – who have a very similar record in this area.
On radio 4 Cameron laid out accusations against Iran. Much of the media portrays Iran as an aggressive influence in the region which needs to be contained. There is another side to this.
Israeli spokesman last night suggested Israel needs to ally with ‘moderate Arab states’ to contain Iran. Having seen a poll conducted throughout the Arab world, I suspect even the more dictatorial states will find this difficult to go into a closer alliance.
There was a 2019 documentary on the Iranian general Soleimani and at the end a British general said ‘unless we want perpetual war, we should try to understand where they are coming from.’ Always a good idea.
We could back to the coup in the 1950s orchestrated by MI6 and the CIA.
In 1980 Iraq attacked Iran. Some aid was secretly given to Iran by the US and the proceeds used to fund the “Contras’ in Central America. But by Reagan’s second term the west sold weapons to Iraq. Towards the end of the war, the Iraqis used nerve gas. Steven Coll , an historian of the time and place (and not just him) show the US at least knew of it and did nothing. Iran refused to retaliate as nerve gas was ‘un-Islamic’ and they negotiated an end to the war.
When the West invaded Afghanistan in 2001, the Iranians gave a lot of valuable assistance and talked about co-operation in combating terrorism. I hear Jack Straw call it a re-set. Unfortunately, Bush gave his Axis of Evil speech and it didn’t happen.
In 2014 we signed the nuclear treaty the JCPOA. This enabled some inspection. The Religious leadership reject nuclear weapons but probably some ‘hawks’ think it necessary to deter. No one talks about the Israeli nuclear weapons.
Trump withdrew from the treaty in 2018. Some think because Obama got credit , and he wanted to show it was a poor deal. There are other suggestions. The IAEA International Atomic energy Authority did not agree the treaty was being broken, neither did the other five signatories. Trump also imposed economic sanctions. In other words waged economic war. Iran started to enrich uranium , it is said to force the west back into talks. They moved closer to Russia and China-which buys more of their oil. I feel this could, possibly, have been prevented.
Cyber warfare was waged against their nuclear facilities doing a lot of damage. Nuclear scientists have been assassinated.
After Trump lost the election, he spoke about an attack on Iran (see Bob Woodward’s book for one account) but was talked out of it. Iranians can read English. They know. Trump did though kill Soleimani in Iraq, in an action which most think was illegal. They have to prepare for Trump’s possible re-election. Only yesterday Trump issued capital letter tweets threatening them.
Iran knows they can’t match US military technology but have a forward defence strategy (Axis of Resistance) which is arming fellow Shias in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen.
Some American and Israeli politicians speak of pre-emptive attacks on Iran. Put this together and one can see why Iran fears what they call ‘western aggression.’
The justification for UK and US (France too?) intervention that I heard was “to protect civilian lives”. In that case why has the UK, US and France failed to intervene to protect Palestinian civilian lives?
They have Jim. All three have called for a ceasefire conditional on hostage releases, provided aid funding and aid workers, called for restraint and to be mindful of avoiding genocide (old meaning).
But they still supply Israel with arms, in contravention of international law.
I was briefly (a week, mostly Tehran) in Iran just before the revolution, when revolution was already in the air. It was a cash poor but culturally rich and lively country. I have always thought what a tragedy it was for the citizenry to be liberated from a US backed exploiter by an even more thuggish theocracy.
Coincidentally I was there too, travelling across Iran. Found ourselves in a serious riot and subsequently saw rather too many troops and tanks for comfort… that said, individual Iranians could not have been more friendly.
As you say, Iran has a great history and culture and it is a tragedy that it went from one kind of autocracy to another, a theocracy. One could say similar things about Syria and Iraq.
Like Richard I support the right of states to exist within their boundaries.
I also recognise that the collapse or destruction of the state of Israel would be potentially catastrophic for a number of reasons.
having said that however it doesnt necessarily mean that I would want British Weapons, Money or Personnel used to keep it in existence
I just don’t know how the international community can coalesce and pursue regional peace and stability effectively.
Two competing powerful theocratic and militaristic states close by is not double but quadruple jeopardy for both their peoples and planetary peace.
(I find Israel’s claim to be a democracy both superficial and risible)
It presents a recipe for continual 1984 like conflict, especially when the underpinning Abrahamic religions have such propensity for aggression and expansionism, in their most dogmatic expressions.
The mindset and the ingrained militaristic traits of expansionism and maintenance of power seem locked in and will permanently prevent peaceful co-existence.
That Israel is a proxy as the US regional power in the Levant for the larger Middle East, acting as a controlling state for US oil interests, reinforces the situation and actively prevents peace.
If the US ever pulled away from unconditional support for Israel, the fossil fuel corporations would be absolutely howling about their stranded assets.
Iran is their default enemy and it is the US driving Israel as their understudy.
The US bankrolling of Israel’s defence to the tune of $3.8bn a year is essential for survival as a military power, and makes Israel a client state for ‘pax Americana’ – which has always been fairly brutal beneath the surface, to protect perceived US interests.
The cost of the defence on Saturday night of the Iranian attack was reported as over $1 billion. So who won ?
And still the military industrial complex forever underpins the US economy.
Such can be GDP growth….
Neither Iran nor Israel can ever know real peace – all theocracies rely on authoritarianism, and brute force. All militaristic states have to enforce loyalty to both state and religion.
Our lens of western liberal democracy makes this seem unbelievably depressing.
In the case of Iran, the extreme interpretation of the current Shiistic religious leadership leads to a highly oppressed internal society, especially women, so half the population permanently subjugated, just as the austerity of Wahhabism does in Saudi and the Taliban does in Afghanistan.
Maintaining this requires considerable effort on the part of the Iranian state.
In the case of Israel militarism requires a permanent war footing.
It feeds demand in their manufacturing and technological sectors, so directs both economy and its governing priorities. A lot of these companies are state owned and export to the UK.
Israel’s existential threat from its neighbours is but one aspect. Then we have a Zionism as expansionist as the lebensraum notion, and equally fascistic.
Any state with disproportionately sized armed forces and an administration permanently focussed on internal security and securing its boundaries will find it exceptionally difficult to defuse, disarm and seek peaceful co-existence, as there is always that perceived existential threat to justify its militarism. Even Israel’s uneasy peace with Egypt seems insecure..
Attitudinal and behavioural change with entrenched militarism, especially in the ruling elite, whose positions, like Netanyahu’s, depend on a permanent war footing, presents huge problems for the rest of the world, as well as the protagonists populations.
Then there is the necessity for such states to permanently demonise and dehumanise its perceived enemies, the ‘human animals’ of the Palestinians, and the equivalent from militant Islam. The general population cannot be kept onside unless they are in a constant state of anxiety , even fear, and so a powerful propaganda machine is necessary to serve that interest, and justify the bellicose first response of vengeance and force majeure, and then subsequent oppression of the conquered.
We’ve all noted the way Israeli spokespersons operate when interviewed on our media.
How can these poor long suffering peoples in the Middle East ever live in peace with all this against them ?
I’m wondering what happened to Pilgrim Slight Return of this parish. He always found a way to condemn both sides equally with some interesting historical tit-bits thrown in.
He has decided to take a break
He did before
The ‘slight return’ was adopted as a name after the Pilfrim came back the first time and then made 8,000 comments
It’s up to him if and when he returns
We are in touch
I often wondered.
I send my regards.
Cameron has admitted to Kay Burley that if it was our embassy that was bombed there would be serious retaliation. Hypocrite.
To say that the state of Israel and the state (?) of Palestine have an existential right to exist is, of course, contested by some. But setting aside the more-extreme views, still leaves the questions of what are ‘Israel’ and ‘Palestine’ and what is a ‘state’?
How do you define these words?
Is a ‘state’ an independent polity responsible for ordering its own internal affairs according to its own constitutional rules and political processes; and not to impose any matter on any other such states (what I think would be called a ‘Westphalian’ state)? Yet this is challenged by internationalism and the ideals of universal human rights and the ‘responsibility to protect’ (legitimating some form of ‘intervention’ in the internal affairs of an otherwise sovereign nation) – both to protect a minority in the second state that is ethnically or similarly attached to the intervening state(s) or to protect some group that is simply suffering abuse by their own ‘legitimate’ authorities.
Added to that is the issue of self-defence justifying pre-emptive action (per Bush-Blair war on terror/Iraq and others) – which is a different matter, although self-defence and protection of minorities etc within a foreign state are often mixed in order to obfuscate an issue.
And what are ‘Israel’ and ‘Palestine’ as states? Within what borders, legitimated by whom/what? The outcome of the ‘freedom fighter’/independence/nakba of 1947-8 and its borders; or after 1967 or even later Israeli occupation and settlements?
These are the tough questions in any attempt at a two-state solution, I think; noting that the pre-1947 situation (or indeed pre-1918 situation) was not ‘Westphalian’ but colonial; and internally seems to have had property rights that also don’t align with a ‘modern, western’ state.
As you and others have pointed out, there is evil on both (all..!) sides here; even if there are ‘justifications’ for retaliations (interestingly, often called ‘responses’ – a rather neutral word) to prior provocations.
As someone said: “If we all follow ‘An eye for an eye’ the whole world will end up blind.” Or as someone commented earlier, an Orwellian condition of continuous war – which will accelerate our slide down the global, existential, slippery slope of climate and ecological disaster and mass misery or even extinction.