Monthly Archives: July 2024

Britain, Government, Iran, Israel, Lebanon, Middle East, Politics, United States

Israel is on the brink of total cataclysm

MIDDLE EAST

AFTER more than nine months of desperate fighting against Hamas in Gaza, events in the Middle East with Lebanon now being drawn in suggest that Israel may be on the brink of total cataclysm.

Military action against Hezbollah, Iran’s largest and best-trained proxy group, in neighbouring Lebanon, could bring war on a totally different scale, a war which Israel is far from certain to win.

Worryingly, it is a war that might easily involve Britain – not only in supplying arms and air cover for Israel, but potentially hurling the UK into armed conflict with Hezbollah. Such a war would have a seismic effect on our domestic politics, already riven by pro-Palestinian protests.

The unprecedented chaos in America’s presidential election as it currently stands will be upended if Iran openly declares its military support for Hezbollah. That’s one step short away from a war that would engulf the whole of the Middle East.

And in the ultimate nightmare scenario, if Israel determines that its very existence is threatened and deploys its nuclear arsenal, then a global war would almost certainly ensue, with Russia and Pakistan likely to be among the first to react.

This may seem alarmist to those who have followed the Israel Defence Forces’ unrelenting campaign against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, since the October 7 massacre of 1,200 Israelis. The battering of Rafah and other populous areas, which has reduced entire cities to rubble and forced more than 1.5million displaced people into refugee camps, has given the world an illusion of Israel’s invincibility.

But this is far from the reality. Israel is exhausted by the conflict. Previous wars in the nation’s 76-year history have been brief and decisive affairs, and this one is neither.

After nearly 300 days of conflict, not only does prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hardline Government continue to resist international calls for a ceasefire, but the army of Hamas fighters has proved to be robust and resilient. Their failure to wipe out Hamas will be concerning for Israelis. And Hezbollah is no Hamas. It is far larger, with the support and backing of 2.5million Lebanese, almost half the population.

In fact, the group rules the country south of Beirut and its leaders have been preparing for war against Israel for many years. Hezbollah is backed by vast funding and training from Iran.

Their fighters are not a volunteer militia hiding among the civilian population and scurrying through underground tunnels, but a highly organised, well-equipped, disciplined army, dug into heavily fortified positions.

Whether the slaughter of 12 children in a rocket attack in the last few days was intended as the starting gun for a war is not wholly clear. It was, however, an outrageous provocation by Hezbollah.

Israel has already retaliated with air strikes against targets in Lebanon. And there is a danger that if its response to the killings is not sufficiently forceful, then Hezbollah and its Iranian paymasters will feel emboldened.

Yet if Israel pursues further escalation, as seems probable, it couldn’t come at a better time for Hezbollah. This could start a much wider war most Israelis don’t want, undermining Netanyahu. Already, 120,000 people have fled their homes in the north because of Lebanese rocket attacks.

For western politicians, decision-makers are facing a policy crisis. In the United States, Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate to replace President Joe Biden in the White House, will face a dilemma. If she advocates backing Israel, she will alienate Muslim voters, while attracting no Republicans to her side. Donald Trump is 100 per cent pro-Israel.

For Sir Keir Starmer, the crisis could prove even worse. Many Labour MPs, particularly on the left of the party, are furious at his past support for Israel. Protests on Britain’s streets could quickly escalate to rioting, especially in urban areas with large Muslim populations, such as Birmingham and Leeds.

And if the RAF is deployed to protect Israel against missile attacks once again, Hezbollah could strike at British air bases in Cyprus, which is only 60 miles from the Lebanese coast.

The risks now are higher than ever.

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Arts, History, Philosophy, Science

Quantum Leaps: John Dalton

1766–1844

FOR much of his life, the primary interest of John Dalton, an English Quaker, was the weather. Living in the notoriously wet country of Cumbria, he maintained a daily diary of meteorological occurrences from 1787 until his death, recording in total some 200,000 entries. It was, however, his development of atomic theory for which he is most remembered.

Different atoms – It was around the turn of the nineteenth century that Dalton started to formulate his theory. He had been undertaking experiments with gases, in particular on how soluble they were in water. A teacher by profession, who only practised science in his spare time, he had expected different gases would dissolve in water in the same way, but this was not the case. In trying to explain why, he speculated that perhaps the gases were composed of distinctly different “atoms”, or individual particles, which each had different masses. Of course, the idea of an atomic explanation of matter was not new, going way back to Democritus of Abdera (c. 460–370 BCE) in ancient Greece, but now Dalton had the discoveries of recent science to reinforce his theory. On further examination of his thesis, he realised that not only would it explain the different solubility of gases in water, but would also account for the “conservation of mass” observed during chemical reactions as well as the combinations into which elements apparently entered when forming compounds (because the atoms were simply “rearranging” themselves and not being created or destroyed).

Atomic theory – Dalton publicly outlined his support for this atomic theory in a lecture in 1803, although its complete explanation had to wait until his book of 1808 entitled A New System of Chemical Philosophy. Here, he summarised his beliefs based on key principles, including: atoms of the same element are identical; distinct elements have distinct atoms; atoms are neither created nor destroyed; everything is made up of atoms; a chemical change is simply the reshuffling of atoms; and compounds are made up of atoms from the relevant elements. In the same book he published a table of known atoms and their weights, although some of these were slightly wrong due to the crudeness of Dalton’s equipment, based on hydrogen having a mass of one. It was a basic framework for subsequent atomic tables, which are today based on carbon (having a mass of 12), rather than hydrogen. Dalton also erroneously assumed elements would combine in one-to-one ratios (for example, water being HO not H2O) as a base principle, only converting into “multiple proportions” (for example, from carbon monoxide, CO, to carbon dioxide, CO2) under certain conditions. Although scientific arguments over the validity of Dalton’s thesis would continue for decades, the foundations for the study of modern atomic theory had been laid and with ongoing refinement were gradually accepted.

Prior to atomic theory, Dalton had also made a number of other important discoveries and observations in the course of his work. These included his “law of partial pressures” of 1801, which stated that a blend of gases exerts pressure which is equivalent to the total of all the pressures each gas would wield if they were alone in the same volume as the entire mixture.

Dalton also explained that air was a blend of independent gases, not a compound. He was the first to publish the law later credited to and named after Jacques-Alexandre-César Charles (1746–1823). Although the Frenchman had been the first to articulate the law concerning the equal expansion of all gases when raised in equal increments of temperature, Dalton had discovered it independently and had been the first to publish.

Dalton also discovered the “dew point” and that the behaviour of water vapour is consistent with that of other gases, and hypothesised on the causes of the aurora borealis, the mysterious Northern Lights. His further meteorological observations included confirmation of the cause of rain being due to a fall in temperature not pressure.

Further achievements – John Dalton began teaching at his local school at the age of 12. Two years later, he and his elder brother purchased a school where they taught some 60 children.

His paper on colour blindness, which both he and his brother suffered from, and which was known as daltonism for a long while, was the first to be published on the condition. Dalton is also largely responsible for transferring meteorology from being an imprecise art on folklore to a real science.

Chronology  

. 1793 Meteorological Observations and Essays published

. 1801 Dalton states his Law of Partial Pressure

. 1803 Outlines his atomic theory in a lecture. This transformed the basics of chemistry and physics

. 1808 A New System of Chemical Philosophy published.

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Arts, Books, France, History, Scotland

Book Review: The Thistle and The Rose

LITERARY REVIEW

HISTORY has taught us and we have become accustomed to the idea of Henry VIII being so vile and dastardly to his wives that it has been easy to overlook the fact that he was equally cruel and beastly to his sister.

Margaret Tudor was born two years before Henry, and he never seems to have forgiven her for arriving first. Add in the fact that she became Queen of Scotland at the age of just 13 when he was still only Prince of Wales and you have the makings of a sibling rivalry that stretched until Margaret’s death in 1541.

Instead of squabbling over who was better at Latin or who had the nicest pony, the royal brother and sister indulged in vicious politicking which descended into their respective kingdoms taking up arms against each other.

Henry outlived his sister by just over five years, but it was long enough to ensure that he won the PR war. Consequently, Margaret Tudor has gone down in the historical records as a silly woman who spent her time buying clothes she couldn’t afford and of being highly promiscuous.

Repugnant of all, Henry accused his sister of writing him begging letters and whingeing about being short of money. What he didn’t mention was that he had deliberately withheld from her the fortune that she had inherited under the terms of their father’s will. In the circumstances, she had every right to complain.

In this passionate act of rehabilitation, Linda Porter argues that Margaret Tudor was a lot more than an airhead who didn’t know where to stop with the diamonds.

From the moment she arrived north, barely into her teens, to marry James IV of Scotland, she developed a subtle but powerful sense of what needed to be done to prevent Scotland from fracturing into warring clans. You have only to know that the people around her were called things such as Archibald the Grim, James the Gross, and Robert Blackadder to soon realise that this was a wild and wuthering place.

The one saving grace in Margaret’s new life north of the border was her husband, King James. Modern alarm bells will ring when it is known that he was 30 and she 13 years old, but the record documents that he seems to have been a genuinely loving and attentive husband.

He also appreciated the subtle power that came with dressing well, and he showered his young wife with expensive furs, silks, and jewels so that she looked as glamorous as any French princess. Readers will recall that Scotland and France were historically bound together in the “Auld Alliance” which, naturally, gave Henry the jitters.

Of more significance, and from a tactical point of view, was that Margaret produced a string of babies in the first few years of her marriage, ensuring the Stuart dynasty’s security for the next generation and beyond. One of her grandchildren became Mary, Queen of Scots.

It was his sister’s fertility that made Henry especially furious. Despite having been married to Katherine of Aragon for seven years, he was still childless, which meant that, should anything happen to him, Margaret would inherit the English throne, quite possibly with James ruling alongside her. For such a competitive man, the thought was unbearable.

This simmering bad feeling came to a head in 1513 at the Battle of Flodden between the English and Scots, which led to the bloody death of James and most of his nobles.

For the rest of her life Margaret found herself in a tenuous position. Her baby son was now crowned James V and she was installed as his Regent. But this arrangement was never going to please ruthless Scottish clansmen, who now vied to see who could dethrone her.

At this point Henry could have stepped in to help his sister. Instead, he took perverse pleasure in making things difficult.

When she announced her intention to divorce her next husband, a rotter called Archibald Douglas who had siphoned off what remained of her money, Henry delivered a condescending lecture on her low moral standards. This was particularly rich given the way that he was going through wives like a hot knife through butter.

Ironically, in the long term, it was Margaret who won this deadly sibling feud. Despite his multiple marriages, Henry failed to establish a secure Tudor bloodline – none of his children produced an heir.

By contrast, Margaret’s great-grandson, ruled Scotland as James VI and, in 1603, on Queen Elizabeth I’s death, was invited south to become James I of England.

Within a year he decreed that he would be known as the King of Great Britain and insisted that Scotland and England would walk together in unity. But as history clearly shows there have been many subsequent attempts to divide. Certainly, the monarchy in Scotland is seen very differently to how it is perceived in England.

Linda Porter has drawn on the latest scholarship and offers an entertaining book that lights up a shadowy and fascinating corner of Tudor history.

– The Thistle and The Rose by Linda Porter is published by Head of Zeus, 400pp

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