IN SHORT: A SUMMARY FOR PEOPLE WITH PLACES TO BE
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After receiving a strongly-worded letter from several mid-level managers (Albanese, Starmer, Carney), the regional boss (Netanyahu) has publicly used their letter as toilet paper.
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The boss stated plainly that the business will continue as usual, which involves intimidation and aggressive expansion, and warned the managers to “stand by” for a particularly nasty memo.
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Meanwhile, the managers are still hoping to get a meeting with the CEO of the entire corporation (Trump), who generally approves of the regional boss’s methods.
Folks, this is a gift. A moment of pure, unvarnished clarity. This isn’t history repeating itself; this is history holding a press conference and telling you to go screw yourself.
Prime Minister Albanese is over there in New York, playing the game. He’s doing political aikido. He’s meeting with the King of Jordan, issuing joint statements, reaffirming his “longstanding support for a two-state solution.” This is the language of diplomacy. It’s polite. It’s procedural. It’s what George Carlin would call “soft language” designed to hide a brutal reality. Albanese is playing by the official rulebook.
And then Netanyahu comes along, lights the rulebook on fire, and uses it to light his victory cigar.
Read his words. This isn’t a dog-whistle; it’s a bullhorn.
“There will be no Palestinian state.”
“You are rewarding terror.”
“We have doubled the Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria, and we will continue on this path.”
And the grand finale, the two words that tell you everything you need to know about the power dynamic here: “Stand by.”
That’s not the statement of a diplomat. That is the statement of a man who knows he has impunity. That’s the schoolyard bully telling the hall monitor he’s about to give someone a wedgie and daring him to do something about it.
The official documents, the UN resolutions, the diplomatic statements—they are a fantasy world. The real history is written on the ground with bulldozers and checkpoints. Netanyahu is openly boasting about his government’s policy of illegal settlement expansion—the literal, physical process of enclosure and dispossession. He is telling you, “While you clowns are debating the idea of a Palestinian state, I am actively destroying any possibility of it.”
Why can Netanyahu speak this way to the leaders of Australia, the UK, and Canada? Because he knows they are client states of the United States. They are middle management. Their “recognition” of Palestine is a symbolic gesture with no teeth, and Netanyahu knows it. His real audience isn’t Albanese; his real audience is his far-right base at home and his backers in Washington. The “Stand by” is a threat, yes, but it’s also a performance. It’s a show of strength to demonstrate that he, not them, dictates the terms of reality in the region, because he has the backing of the only opinion that matters: the American military-industrial complex.
The Moral of This Grim Fairy Tale
When someone holds all the guns, your strongly-worded letter is just a piece of paper. The moral is this: Power does not respond to symbolic appeals; it only responds to a counter-power. Words and recognitions are meaningless unless they are backed by material consequences: sanctions, boycotts, divestment, an end to military aid.
Without that, you’re just screaming into a hurricane.
The History Lesson, Simplified (Because You’re Busy Scrolling)
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Netanyahu’s “against tremendous pressure” comment is the key. He’s admitting that people have been pushing back. But his solution isn’t to address the pressure; it’s to dig in his heels and keep doing what he’s doing. This is the behavior of an entrenched power structure that fears losing control more than it fears being morally bankrupt.
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Netanyahu isn’t hiding it; he’s boasting about it. “We have doubled the Jewish settlement.” This is the ongoing primitive accumulation of capital, the violent seizure of land, cloaked in religious and nationalistic fervor. Recognizing a Palestinian state on paper means nothing if the actual physical territory is being eaten away like Pac-Man on a power pellet.
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“Terror state.” “Rewarding terror.” This is pure propaganda, a rhetorical weapon. It’s designed to short-circuit any rational discussion. If you label everything the other side does as “terror,” then any action taken against them, no matter how brutal, can be justified as “counter-terror.” It’s the linguistic sleight of hand that allows atrocities to be committed in broad daylight.
What to Expect Next (Because This Show Only Has One Season)
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The “Response”: Netanyahu will deliver on his “Stand by.” Expect the announcement of thousands of new settlement units. It’s his go-to move. It’s a way of saying, “Not only do I reject your symbolic state, I will create more of my state on its corpse.”
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The Whimpering Reply: Albanese and his friends will express that they are “deeply concerned” or “gravely disappointed” by the settlement announcement. This is the diplomatic equivalent of a sad trombone sound. It is the ritualistic noise they are required to make to maintain the fiction that they care.
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The American Role: The Trump administration will mutter something about how settlements are “not helpful to the peace process” before approving the next billion-dollar shipment of advanced weaponry to Israel. Because, as Bill Hicks would say, “Go back to bed, America, your government has figured out how it all transpired. Go back to bed, America, your government is in control again.”
This whole affair is a perfect microcosm of the global order. You have the well-meaning (or at least, appearing well-meaning) middle powers making a symbolic gesture for justice. And you have the practitioner of hard power, backed by the empire, telling them all to get lost.
The joke isn’t that Netanyahu is saying this. The joke is that anyone is surprised.
Welcome to the show.
It’s a rerun.
This is not a time for polite applause.
This is a time to scream for tangible action.
Boycott the companies that profit from occupation.
Demand sanctions.
Demand an end to military aid.
Because if you wait for the politicians to do the right thing, you’ll be waiting until the sun burns out.
And even then, they’ll probably still be having a “summit” on it.