MarkNew retweeted
Bottom line: Eisenkot has failed. The group of four parties he leads, a group that spans the spectrum from the far-left to the “hard right but hates Netanyahu and Haredim”, will not have the votes to unseat him unless they do the unthinkable and do so with the aid of not just the Muslim Brotherhood-aligned Mansour Abbas (who, like the BBC, refuses to call Hamas “terrorists”) but also the Jihad-sympathetic members of the Arab Joint List.
If they were to do this, they could get their scalp and kick Netanyahu out of office for a little while until their coalition collapsed under the contradiction of leading a war against Hamas while being propped up by allies of Hamas.
Kick out Zionists over political issues by using the clout of literal Hamas allies, who would then crow about how they “defeated Netanyahu and Likud as revenge on behalf of Hamas”?
This graph explains why Netanyahu survived yesterday’s election: he has a reliable core coalition. The opposition, for decades now, has been a shapeshifting mess of mergers, all trying but failing to tempt a few seats off the right. The only time it worked was when Bennett ran as right-wing and earned six seats, and then transferred them to the opposition coalition in return for being Prime Minister.
In game-theoretical terms, Israeli politics isn’t a simple game; it’s an “iterated game”, where “reputation effects” are key. So, if Yair Golan gets his way, and the votes or absence of Hamas fans in the Joint List are used to oust the Zionist Right, rather than form some compromise unity coalition, when that inevitably collapses after a few months (at best), all the people involved will face the judgement of the voters in a new game, with collapsed reputations.
Apart from that, they wouldn’t be able to do it, since Lieberman and others are smart enough to realise this. It’s pie in the sky, but would be Netanyahu’s dream. Six months out of power as a martyr to what he will present as an amoral left-Islamist alliance to write his memoirs while all his enemies discredit themselves.
A portion of their base might accept this, but a large portion would not. Obtuse attempts to argue that Netanyahu “also relies on anti-Zionists” by allying with Haredim over decades won’t help. There is a difference between opposing Zionism on arcane technical grounds and demanding the destruction, by violence if needed, of the Jewish State.
This is merely the latest iterative failed phase of the “not Netanyahu” alliance. The problem again and again has been that the underlying political views of the Jewish population do not allow it. This has been going on since 1999 and Ehud Barak, and has failed continuously since. The last time they managed to unseat him was only by a ruse, when Bennett, whose hard-right voters anticipated he would sit in a Netanyahu coalition, traded his political credibility with his base for being the Prime Minister of a rainbow coalition for a year.
The problem is that the core of the Jewish electorate is, for various reasons, loyal to Netanyahu. Even the failures of October 7 didn’t dampen that. Once the 5% of right-wing votes “wasted” on various small right-wing parties are included, approximately half of Israel’s population (and 60%+ of its Jews) picked Netanyahu, directly or by proxy, as their chosen leader.
Netanyahu “survived” the judgement of the people over October 7. Either that or the people decided that while he has culpability, the generals, represented in the election by his chief rivals, former chief of staff until 2019, Eisenkot, and former deputy chief of staff until 2018, Yair Golan, allies and friends of Netanyahu’s arch-enemy Ehud Barak, are more culpable.
Ten years of prosecutions didn’t change the math; the failures of October 7 didn’t change the math; a majority of Israel’s Jews still prefer Netanyahu. His rivals ran an obsessively negative campaign of “centrist populism”, mostly on the Haredi draft issue and on Netanyahu’s personality.
Eisenkot’s dilemma:
1. His failed “change coalition” will be crushed at a second election if they use the Jihadi-supporting Joint List to “stick it to the right” and temporarily get their Bibi scalp.
2. If he doesn’t, but also doesn’t partake in some form of unity coalition, Netanyahu, from the comfort of the Prime Minister’s chair, will run out the clock and call new elections in May, in which he will do better, since he lost 5% of the right-wing votes to Winter’s and Hendel’s failed start-up parties. Also, events in the region—war with Iran, and perhaps peace with the Saudis—will likely play to Netanyahu’s favour.
3. So the smart play for him is to offer Netanyahu his party in a unity coalition, but he comes with a very weak hand, since he won’t be able to bring the leftists under Golan with him, or Liberman’s party (whose entire career is focused on unseating Netanyahu).
And what would be in it for Netanyahu? Netanyahu is aware of points 1 and 2 above. He could simply play out the clock, let the negotiations fail, blame Eisenkot, and come back with the extra few seats he needs in May. Would he betray his reliable hard-right and Haredi allies for what could be a short-term coalition? Unlikely.
The problem is that when someone has the choice of who gets to extort them, nobody gets to do it. And that is the definition of power. Optionality. All Eisenkot’s options are bad, all Netanyahu’s are good.
MarkNew retweeted
Find the full UKLFI-UN Watch report here:
unwatch.org/wp-content/uploa…
MarkNew retweeted
The UN Commission of Inquiry report published this week selectively quoted Israeli officials, relied on unsubstantiated allegations, omitted crucial context, and failed to apply an appropriate standard of proof to exceptionally serious accusations. It should be called out for these failings, and the Commission should respond.
In this exchange, I summarise the report in which we challenge the evidence, methodology and legal reasoning of the report, which accuses Israel of genocide in Gaza and extermination in Judea and Samaria. @UKLFI @UNWatch
MarkNew retweeted
Please do follow @HausdorffMedia if you don't already. An important account on X which should have a much larger audience. Unlike all the frauds and the grifters that populate this platform, this is someone doing crucial work in real life and is a much-needed voice for Israel and for Jews around the world. 👇🇮🇱🇮🇱
The UN Commission of Inquiry report published this week selectively quoted Israeli officials, relied on unsubstantiated allegations, omitted crucial context, and failed to apply an appropriate standard of proof to exceptionally serious accusations. It should be called out for these failings, and the Commission should respond.
In this exchange, I summarise the report in which we challenge the evidence, methodology and legal reasoning of the report, which accuses Israel of genocide in Gaza and extermination in Judea and Samaria. @UKLFI @UNWatch
MarkNew retweeted
Libi Cohen-Meguri was murdered on October 7th at just 22 years old.
She went to dance at the Nova festival and was shot by Hamas terrorists while trying to escape on Route 232.
At 8:11 AM, she called her parents:
“I’ve been shot in the stomach, I’ve been shot in the arm, I’m losing blood. I’m going to die.”
In calm and heartbreaking words, she understood the end had come.
She asked to speak to her twin brother Tomer and little sister Maya:
“I’m going to die. Just listen.
I love you, Yariv — the best dad I could’ve had.
Mom, please stop screaming, just listen — you’re the best mom we could have asked for.
Don’t forget to be a good mom to Tomer and Maya.
Tomer, how lucky we were to live life together. I love you.
Maya, never forget you are the treasure of my life.”
Her parents begged her to lie on the road and pretend to be dead. She did.
But the terrorists saw her move.
“Mom, they’re coming to shoot me again...”
Screams in Arabic. A long burst of gunfire.
And the call was cut.
Alone on the road divider, her body was riddled with bullets at point-blank range.
Murdered in cold blood.
But Libi was light. Joy. Love.
A proud and outstanding IDF infantry officer, full of life and laughter, always giving to others.
Her photos radiate kindness.
Her memory will live forever.
MarkNew retweeted
A wake up call – for some
I’m reading some of the early analysis of the Israeli election results and I’m surprised at some of the basic misunderstandings I’m seeing from some of the experts. A few points stand out clearly this morning.
The results are skewed by the high Arab turnout. Any conclusions about how Israelis lean, whether left or right or pro-Bibi or anti-Bibi, must be understood without counting the Arab votes. I’ve seen analysis that treats Arab votes as anti-Bibi votes and then concludes Israel turned against him yesterday. Arabs aren’t voting on Bibi. The country didn’t come out in support of Bibi and it also didn’t come out against him. Although the current government won fewer seats than it holds now, Likud still won the most seats.
Netanyahu has good reason to be satisfied this morning.
The country has shifted seriously right wing. Many outsiders conflate anti-Bibi with left wing and that remains an obvious mistake. Eisenkot, Liberman, and many of Bennett-Lapid’s policies are right wing. The right wing won over 80 seats last night. When subtracting the Arab votes, that leaves Israel’s left, those who used to govern this country for decades, with less than 25 seats. Those numbers are statistically insignificant and they form a clear statement of the Israeli people’s views.
Itamar Ben-Gvir and his supporters need serious introspection this morning after underperforming despite his record as minister. His radical rhetoric turned many Israelis off while driving Arab turnout higher than ever as voters took revenge at the polls. Supporters claimed the words deterred terror yet ignored that Arab citizens could answer with their votes, leaving no one else to blame for the results. I hope they recognize the miscalculations, adjust their approach, and rebound.
Herzl wrote in Altneuland that his associates make no distinctions between men and ask neither race nor religion, since being a man is enough for them. Jabotinsky took the opposite view and said no voluntary agreement would be reached because Arabs hold national aspirations they will not trade for kind words or bread and butter. Herzl saw Arab acceptance as possible through diplomacy, economic benefits, and shared progress while Jabotinsky held that only Jewish power ending any realistic chance of blocking a Jewish majority and state could produce it, making Herzl’s vision more utopian and conciliatory and Jabotinsky’s focused on irreversible facts of power.
This morning many people are using the high Arab turnout to support the talking point that Israel isn’t an apartheid. That point is fair yet it doesn’t tell the whole story. Arabs aren’t Zionist and they don’t believe in a Jewish state. Many support the dissolution of Israel as a Jewish state and many would like to see a Palestinian state replace it.
Democracy remains important and as citizens they have the right to vote, yet we should not fool ourselves into thinking Arab Israelis as a community are loyal members of the Jewish State of Israel. Yesterday’s high Arab turnout worries many Israelis this morning. They recognize that a sizeable population of Israel’s residents aren’t Zionist and might gain the power to determine the future of the Zionist state. Jerusalem, we have a problem.
MarkNew retweeted
On paper, the anti-Netanyahu bloc has a majority: 67 seats, counting the Arab parties. But it can’t form a government, because of the pledges its leaders made. Netanyahu, with 53 seats, can’t form one either, at least not yet. So what’s his strategy?
First, Netanyahu will start with his own bloc. We tend to forget it, but his bloc was on the verge of falling apart, and it’s still lying on the floor waiting to be put back together. There was Ofer Winter, whom he couldn’t bring back in, and there were Noam and the Haredi Public. We spent so many words on so few votes, but that’s a story for another day. His biggest headache is United Torah Judaism, which has splintered into three separate parties.
So step one is to consolidate the bloc and prevent any defections to the other side. Not that I think there’s any real chance of that. The math doesn’t work. Running on an “alliance of those who serve” and then forming a government with the haredim doesn’t seem to serve the cause, so it won’t happen.
Only once that’s done will Netanyahu turn to hunting for partners on the other side. And at 53, he needs a lot of them. I suspect this won’t be a hunt for individual defectors, as it was with Idit Silman back in the day. He’ll be looking to acquire whole parties. He has three options: Bennett, Lieberman and Eisenkot.
On the face of it, Eisenkot is the easiest. But I suspect Bennett and Lieberman are closer ideologically. Remember that each of them left the right-wing bloc in his time, partly because they understood that the race to lead the right was closed: Netanyahu would be there forever.
If they start from the assumption that Netanyahu is on his way out, joining now, through the front door, puts them at the top of Likud and at the top of the country. That could be tempting. But both carry baggage. Bennett’s is called Lapid. Lieberman’s is that just yesterday he accused Netanyahu of treason. Neither is an insurmountable obstacle.
MarkNew retweeted
🇮🇱👏🏻A Proud Arab Zionist Speaks Out:
“I’m an Arab Muslim, an Israeli, and a proud Zionist.
I have paid a heavy personal price for saying the truth but I’ll keep saying it, I want to live in a Jewish state under a right-wing Jewish government led by Benjamin Netanyahu.”
MarkNew retweeted
Must retweet of the day - Burnham in major scandal!
TWO TIER JUSTICE AND LABOUR COVER UP
Tommy Robinson has hired investigators to find out things about journalists.
He has been prosecuted for harassment.
Josh Simons, Labour MP and senior Keir Starmer No10 advisor, ran an illegal investigations and MI5 like data gathering, from inside No 10, to gather private and personal data about journalists to be used to coerce and blackmail them into being nice about Labour.
Labour set the spy operation up to spy on journo's and find embarrassing things about them to blackmail them with.
Josh Simons, Labor MP resigned in shame from No10 to evade a parliamentary and ICO investigation that could have led to CRIMINAL prosecution for SERIOUS GDPR/Data Protection offences.
Starmer denied all knowledge.
Josh Simons, then MP for Makerfield, latter resigned as an MP to open the door for Andrew Burnham.
Josh Simons is now back on twice an MPs salary as a special political advisor to guess who, ANDREW BURNHAM, in No 10!
Doxxed by the Daily Mail on holiday. But it was @TRobinsonNewEra who was convicted of harassment.
Tommy Robinson’s trial raises serious questions about two-tier justice in Britain.
I was there. Here’s what I witnessed. 👇
normanfenton.com/post/doxxed…
MarkNew retweeted
In summer 2014, Hamas launched thousands of rockets from Gaza at Israeli towns and cities. Israel responded with a military operation to stop the attacks.
At the same time, then-MP Shabana Mahmood joined a coordinated protest outside a Sainsbury’s supermarket in Birmingham. About 200 activists blocked the store because it stocked products from Israeli settlements, forcing it to close for several hours during peak Saturday trading. Mahmood later bragged that the action cost the supermarket hours of business and urged the public to join boycott campaigns against Israeli goods.
She did not treat the rocket fire as the central problem. While Israeli civilians were under direct attack, she focused on economic pressure designed to isolate and weaken Israel. Such actions reduce trade, investment, and practical support for the country defending its people from Islamic terrorism. In effect, she sided with the economic front of the campaign against Israel while it fought to stop the military front.
That same person is now the UK Home Secretary—the minister responsible for policing, counter-terrorism, and the physical safety of Jewish communities across Britain. During a rocket war, she helped organize direct action to damage Israel’s economy instead of condemning the rockets.
Readers outside the UK may not remember the 2014 protest. The sequence is simple: rockets hit Israeli cities; she helped shut down a British store over Israeli products and promoted the boycott; today she holds the job meant to protect British non-Muslims.
The contradiction is not theoretical. It is operational.
MarkNew retweeted
Last night, the exit polls told one story: Netanyahu had lost, but it wasn’t clear who on the other side had won. This morning, the results are telling another. Netanyahu hasn’t won yet, but the change bloc has clearly lost.
I’ve covered politics since the start of the century. I have never seen a camp organize for an election as impeccably, as efficiently and as energetically as the change bloc did. It signed model surplus-vote agreements, so that no leftover votes would go to waste, and ran an unprecedented operation flying Israelis home from abroad to vote. And by the actual count, it ended up with more or less the same number of seats as in the last election.
Demography beat energy, and the message also proved flawed and unsuccessful. The public wasn’t convinced that the war had been a total victory, as Netanyahu claimed, but it also refused to buy the opposition’s claim that it was a total failure. It was repelled by Haredi draft-dodging, but didn’t think the solution was a minority government propped up by draft refusers and anti-Zionists. It was disgusted when ultra-Orthodox protesters chanted “We do not believe in the rule of the Zionists,” but it was just as shocked when “Biladi, Biladi,” the Palestinian national anthem, was sung at the Joint List’s headquarters last night.
Netanyahu’s position changed completely between the release of the exit polls and the arrival of the real results. Last night it seemed clear that Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana, a Likud loyalist, would be ousted and that, one way or another, Gadi Eisenkot, the former IDF chief of staff, would form a minority government. Now, by the criteria Eisenkot himself set, he has lost the legitimacy to form such a government. He promised he wouldn’t rely on the Arab parties’ votes, yet without a majority he would now need the active support of the Joint List, which looks futile and pointless. In post-October 7 Israel, there is no chance that a coalition including six candidates who lost immediate family to Hamas could last long alongside Joint List lawmakers who claim Hamas is simply a charitable organization.
After the 1967 war, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan famously said Israel was waiting for the Arabs to call. In the same spirit, Netanyahu in effect told the change camp before dawn: here’s my phone number, feel free to use it. Yisrael Beiteinu’s Avigdor Lieberman, former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Eisenkot now face a dilemma from hell. They can go to another election, one that Israelis abroad will no longer fly home for. They can try to join Netanyahu’s bloc on tough terms, breaking their campaign pledges never to sit with him. Or they can beg the Islamist Ra’am and the Joint List, now drunk on their success, for support.
And one final note: for the entire campaign, we searched for a third bloc, a centrist unity bloc between Netanyahu and his rivals. Candidates included Benny Gantz and former UN Ambassador Gilad Erdan, former general Ofer Winter and economist Yaron Zelekha, former Culture Minister Hili Tropper and who even remembers who else. They all collapsed, evaporated or vanished. And now it turns out the unity bloc may have been the Arab parties all along. Their historic, almost hysterical turnout, at rates that will need careful examination, shattered both sides’ dreams of a 61-seat majority. It reminded Jews on both sides that, after years of division, they may have to learn to sit together after all.
newsletter.amitsegal.net/p/i…
MarkNew retweeted
This is THE guy for Israeli election results. Follow Amit!
Last night, the exit polls told one story: Netanyahu had lost, but it wasn’t clear who on the other side had won. This morning, the results are telling another. Netanyahu hasn’t won yet, but the change bloc has clearly lost.
I’ve covered politics since the start of the century. I have never seen a camp organize for an election as impeccably, as efficiently and as energetically as the change bloc did. It signed model surplus-vote agreements, so that no leftover votes would go to waste, and ran an unprecedented operation flying Israelis home from abroad to vote. And by the actual count, it ended up with more or less the same number of seats as in the last election.
Demography beat energy, and the message also proved flawed and unsuccessful. The public wasn’t convinced that the war had been a total victory, as Netanyahu claimed, but it also refused to buy the opposition’s claim that it was a total failure. It was repelled by Haredi draft-dodging, but didn’t think the solution was a minority government propped up by draft refusers and anti-Zionists. It was disgusted when ultra-Orthodox protesters chanted “We do not believe in the rule of the Zionists,” but it was just as shocked when “Biladi, Biladi,” the Palestinian national anthem, was sung at the Joint List’s headquarters last night.
Netanyahu’s position changed completely between the release of the exit polls and the arrival of the real results. Last night it seemed clear that Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana, a Likud loyalist, would be ousted and that, one way or another, Gadi Eisenkot, the former IDF chief of staff, would form a minority government. Now, by the criteria Eisenkot himself set, he has lost the legitimacy to form such a government. He promised he wouldn’t rely on the Arab parties’ votes, yet without a majority he would now need the active support of the Joint List, which looks futile and pointless. In post-October 7 Israel, there is no chance that a coalition including six candidates who lost immediate family to Hamas could last long alongside Joint List lawmakers who claim Hamas is simply a charitable organization.
After the 1967 war, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan famously said Israel was waiting for the Arabs to call. In the same spirit, Netanyahu in effect told the change camp before dawn: here’s my phone number, feel free to use it. Yisrael Beiteinu’s Avigdor Lieberman, former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Eisenkot now face a dilemma from hell. They can go to another election, one that Israelis abroad will no longer fly home for. They can try to join Netanyahu’s bloc on tough terms, breaking their campaign pledges never to sit with him. Or they can beg the Islamist Ra’am and the Joint List, now drunk on their success, for support.
And one final note: for the entire campaign, we searched for a third bloc, a centrist unity bloc between Netanyahu and his rivals. Candidates included Benny Gantz and former UN Ambassador Gilad Erdan, former general Ofer Winter and economist Yaron Zelekha, former Culture Minister Hili Tropper and who even remembers who else. They all collapsed, evaporated or vanished. And now it turns out the unity bloc may have been the Arab parties all along. Their historic, almost hysterical turnout, at rates that will need careful examination, shattered both sides’ dreams of a 61-seat majority. It reminded Jews on both sides that, after years of division, they may have to learn to sit together after all.
newsletter.amitsegal.net/p/i…
MarkNew retweeted
Lost his life this day 29th.October 1940.
Sgt. Alexander George Girdwood.
One of THE FEW.
bbm.org.uk/airmen/Girdwood.h…
Killed when he was shot down by Me109s.
He could not be rescued because of exploding ammunition and he burned to death in the cockpit.
TRAGIC.
MarkNew retweeted
The level of corruption involving the #Labour government #KeirStarmer & Powell is unlike anything ever seen in the UK before.
And alongside that you see #itv & #channel4 investing #ReformUK for hurty words compared to genuine treason and obvious large backhanders.
Madness
MarkNew retweeted
Correct Doc, but I didn't want to go back too far.
1982 seemed a good point to start, as it explains why Mauritius started spending £millions on the best British lawyers money can buy.
Mauritius is smaller than Luxembourg; it didn't spend the money to police a marine protection zone the size of France more than a thousand miles away where no Mauritians live.
Also one of the Mauritius politicians, who was around when the 1982 select committee was set up to look into the potential mineral wealth in the Chagos seabed, is Alvin Boolell, the older brother of Satyajit Boolell, who invited Starmer to Mauritius in 2013.
Alvin was foreign minister in 2013 and is the current minister for fisheries and the blue economy.
Here are a couple of links to info you may find interesting. The first is about the Boolell family. The second is an excellent article from the local Mauritius news outlet le Express.
tedkel.com/boolell-connectio…
fondaskreyol.org/article/ind…
MarkNew retweeted
Because Burnham would have to sack National Security Advisor, Jonathan Powell, and Cabinet Secretary ,Antonia Romeo, who both pressed him to to continue with the deal when he replaced Starmer.
MarkNew retweeted
Why were Jonathan Powell, Peter Mandelson and Lord Hermer appointed without vetting?
The answer is that Chagos was a deal Starmer couldn't refuse to make.
Here's a timeline of the key stages of the Chagos treachery.
In 1982, after it became known that the Chagos seabed may contain vast mineral wealth, Mauritius set up a select committee to examine the matter.
However, sea-mining technology was in its infancy, and it was too expensive to be commercially viable at that time.
In 2003, as underwater mining technologies advanced and the value of minerals and rare earth elements soared, mining the Chagos seabed became an exciting possibility again; Mauritius appointed the eminent international barrister Sir Ian Brownlie as advisor for the Chagos Archipelago.
A former member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, Brownlie was a good friend of Sir Satcam Boolell, a former Labour deputy prime minister of Mauritius, and High Commissioner in London.
In 2009, Brownlie led the first Mauritius delegation to the Foreign Office in London seeking a Chagos deal.
Among the delegation was Sir Satcam Boolell's son Satyajit, who became Mauritius Director of Public Prosecutions the same year.
In 2010, after Brownlie died in a motor accident in Egypt, Sir Keir Starmer’s “great mate”, Philippe Sands, a leading human-rights lawyer who has publicly boasted of humiliating the UK in international courts, took over as counsel to Mauritius for Chagos.
In 2013, Satyajit Boolell invited Keir Starmer, whom he had become friendly with during Starmer's time as the UK's DPP, to a legal conference at the 5-star Balaclava resort in Mauritius.
During the trip, Starmer discussed the future of the Chagos Archipelago with then Mauritius prime minister Navin Ramgoolam.
After Starmer’s 2013 visit, Ramgoolam wrote that he and Starmer were aligned over Chagos.
In 2015, Ramgoolam was arrested on money-laundering charges when large sums of cash in foreign currencies, suitcases full of brand-new luxury watches, and blank British visas were found in his home.
Also in 2015, Starmer was elected to the British Parliament.
In 2019, Philippe Sands, after a campaign of lobbying the UN, obtained an International Court of Justice ruling (advisory opinion only, and non-binding) that the Chagos islands should be given to Mauritius.
Sands used the ICJ ruling as leverage in the following years in his efforts to persuade the Conservative government to give Chagos to Mauritius.
In 2020, Starmer became leader of the Labour Party.
In 2021, Sands received Mauritius' top honour, The Most Distinguished Order of the Star and Key of the Indian Ocean.
In 2022, Sands made an unauthorized entry into the Chagos Archipelago for a flag-raising ceremony. Sands tweets at the time, “It’s morning on Chagos, where the flag of Mauritius flies."
In 2023, Sands became a Mauritius citizen, but retains his British and French citizenships.
🧧In November 2023, David Cameron replaced James Cleverly as Foreign Secretary and, with the support of other senior Tories, stopped a Chagos deal saying, it’s not in the national interest, as reported in Hansard.
In July 2024, Starmer became UK Prime Minister and just ten weeks after entering Downing Street, he agreed a deal with Mauritius, despite there having been no mention of Chagos during the election campaign, and the Labour manifesto pledging to protect the BOT.
in November of 2024, Ramgoolam was elected Mauritius prime minister again after a snap general election, and took over from the incumbent PM, Pravind Jugnauth, to lead the Chagos negotiations with the UK.
In December 2024, after 14 years in the role, Philippe Sands steps down as Mauritius counsel for Chagos.
In January 2025, Attorney General Lord Hermer recused himself from signing off on the Chagos deal, and declined to say why.
In February 2025, Jugnauth was arrested on money-laundering charges after large sums of cash in foreign currencies and suitcases full of brand-new luxury watches were found in his home.
In May 2025, twelve years after discussing the future of Chagos in Mauritius, Starmer and Ramgoolam sat down in London to sign the treaty that transfers the archipelago's sovereignty to Mauritius.
The Fall Out.
The Chagos deal does🟥NOT secure the joint UK/US military base on Diego Garcia.
The deal operationally hobbles the base, and increases the dangers to the British and American military personnel, and the civilians who work there, and in the wider Central Indian Ocean region.
Diego Garcia's remoteness made it easy to defend in the past. This deal leaves the base horribly vulnerable to the growing threats posed by the new longer-range missiles, and more sophisticated and lethal drones.
When Keir Starmer, Lord Hermer and Vijay Rangarajan, the Director General at the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, made the deal it was fully understood that the outer islands of the Chagos Archipelago were by far the best locations to deploy early warning, and air-defense systems, to protect the main base from missile and drone attacks.
Yet they still decided to lease only Diego Garcia.
Andy Burnham, Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband, and Defense Minister Wes Streeting, know the deal increases the dangers to the lives of British service personnel, and our NATO allies personnel, in the strategically important Central Indian Ocean region.
To double down and push the deal with that knowledge is a shameful act of betrayal.
While the deal leaves Diego Garcia vulnerable to attack, it also renders the base itself ineffective and operationally hobbled.
Mauritius is a signatory of the Pelindaba African Weapon-Free Zone Treaty which bans all nuclear weapons from treaty members' territory.
Pelindaba gives each of the more the 40 countries who have signed it the right to inspect the facilities on Diego Garcia if they suspect nuclear arms are being stored there.
The UK's nuclear-armed Trident submarines will no longer be able to enter Chagos waters, or visit Diego Garcia which is the only island in the region which has suitable anchorage and facilities for maintenance and restocking provisions, etc.
The US's nuclear-armed submarines, ships, and planes will also be banned from Diego Garcia and the Chagos Archipelago's waters.
Mauritius gets complete sovereignty over everything, including control of the airspace above the Chagos Archipelago, which at 250,000 square miles is the same size as France.
The implications of controlling such a vast area of airspace in a strategically vital region are huge.
Mauritius has shown it will ban planes entering its current airspace when China asks.
The Chagos Deal does not ‘secure the base’. It methodically destroys every element required for operations. The text and annexes state it will:
❌Constrain future Ops and use of the base
❌Prevent the placing of sensors and other maritime installations
❌Require us to sight our foes on defence planning
❌Mean we’re unable to use our preferred contractors
❌See us lose of control over electromagnetic spectrum.
MarkNew retweeted
Israel has become the Jew among nations at the UN: my response today at the UN General Assembly.
For centuries, Jews were singled out, demonized, and held to standards demanded of no one else. Today, Israel has become the Jew among nations at the United Nations.
Israel is entitled to the same standards of justice as every other nation—no more and no less.
Antisemitism does not become acceptable because it is stamped with the seal of the UN. This so-called Commission of Inquiry is a biased, illegitimate inquisition. We reject it. @AmbUNReform