THE PREDICTIONS OF OLD BORE'S KNACKER-SACK

After casting runes, studying the entrails of disembowelled goats, gazing at the remains of beer in the bottom of the glass, studying my swirling balls, tossing coins etc,  herewith my predictions for the developments and outcome of the current Middle East conflict over the next 3 years or so - and it's grim.

Firstly, people have got to accept that this is only the start.  This is a 'trigger point' and it is going to cascade from Gaza and will quickly get out of control once it does.  And under-pining it is the rock-solid fact that no matter what, the USA will not let Israel lose, no matter what neither Israel nor USA will allow Iran to develop 'the bomb' and no matter what, islamist terror groups will never stop attacking Israel.   These are immutable rock-solid facts that cannot be changed and will not be changed and they dictate how everything else unfolds.

There is going to be a massive refugee crisis as the people of Gaza flood into Egypt whether the Egyptians want them or not.   Like 1.5m+,  very quickly and over the next few months, just from Gaza alone.  Egypt will do nothing to help and will be quite happy to let them rot in the Sinai - it does not want the Palestinians.  It regards them as radicalised trouble.  It will turn it's back and throw it at the UN which will not be able to cope.  Don't think that the current activity around Gaza City and northern Gaza is the end - it isn't.  Once it has finished,  Israel will do the same to central Gaza and finally southern Gaza - it has no option.  Most of the strip's housing will be destroyed.  There will be no mains water, no sewage, no treatment plants, no electricity powerstations, etc etc etc.  It will all have been destroyed.  Not broken - destroyed.  There will be nothing left for the Gazans to return to except rubble and squalor and if they did return, it will be decades before it is functioning again.   So they will leave.

The West Bank will disintegrate next. HAMAS will agitate and create problems there & Israel will launch ever-increasing actions into there and eventually similar will happen as happened to Gaza, with that population in turn fleeing to Jordan - and just like Egypt, Jordan doesn't want them.  The population of West Bank is twice that of Gaza so expect another 2.5m or so to not go home. 

The end result in both cases will be those that are young enough and strong enough will head for Europe.  Hundreds & hundreds of thousands of mostly young males, who are heavily radicalised, who hate the west and believe fervently in the expansion of radical islam.  And virtually all of them have been doing weapon training to one degree or other since they were 10 years old.

At that point the oil price will start to increase.

Europe initially will be stupidly welcoming - but the pace with which this happens, and the type of person coming means that very quickly Europe will have no option other than to close it's borders and pull up the draw-bridge, creating resentment with the islamic populations already resident in continental Europe.

And then Lebanon will start - because a lot of people who left northern Gaza will have headed there, further destabilising what is already a nutters paradise, leading inevitably to further Israeli action which will inevitably draw in Iran, Syria and the Iraqi militias even further, which in turn will lead to western troops havng no option other than to enter onto the ground to protect countries like Saudi Arabia and also to protect the canal, Hormuz and the oil-fields.

And the price of oil will accelerate faster.

At some point, Israel - with the assistance of the USA, will attack the Iranian nuclear facilities and rocket sites. Neither Israel nor the USA have any option. Iran cannot be allowed to develop a viable nuclear device - they already have large missiles - large enough to carry a warhead and large enough to reach any capital in Europe. They already have the capability to produce fissile material they just haven't yet grasped the miniaturisation proces - but there are Russian and North Korean scientsts there helping them to do just that.  This will be a major major air strike because of the depth of the Iranian facilities and it is going to cause significant damage to Iran because a lot of these facilities are deep underneath Iranian cities.  And Iran will not take this lying down.

And the price of oil will go sky-high and collapse the west's economies

There are going to be a lot more terrorist attacks right across Europe, including the UK, over the next few years - some bigger than we have ever experienced before. Resentment and outright hatred of the west by islamist extremists, including the thousands already enbedded across Europe from Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan etc, will increase dramatically.

This will have to be met with ever-increasing police powers and ever-increasing security restrictions on travel for ordinary people.  Artificial Intelligence will be rapidly rolled out in background policing.  The 2024 Paris Olympics will be a prime terrorist target.

Rioting in immigrant muslim areas - such as the UK's northern mill towns, the Paris suburbs, Berlin, Brussels, Rotterdam, Madrid, Naples, Rome  etc is going to break out more frequently and increase significantly - worse than you have seen before, leading to growing resentment and demands for a clamp-down by the indiginous population and non-muslim immigrants, which in turn increases the isolation and counter-reaction by the muslim communities who will become ripe for exploitation and further radicalisation by extremists. 

There will be an explosion in growth for far-Right parties right across europe.  Not so much of a problem in UK because of our first-past-the-post voting system which is designed to keep politics in UK stable and roughly centrist no matter who is in power, but in countries using PR-type voting systems this will create huge problems and it will seriously disrupt the EU as the balance of powers shifts dramatically and swiftly.

Facial recognition will become common place, possibly embedded in things such as CCTV (even in supermarkets), traffic cameras and security cameras in airports, ports, rail stations, motorway services etc etc as european governments try to control what is going on and covering your face in public will becomne illegal.  Initially the public will be hostile but as the terrorist attacks increase in frequency and savagery the public will swing to demanding it - fear is a wonderful motivator and being a liberal is seen as a weakness by terrorists and the liberal-west as an easy target.

The Middle East is going to slowly fall apart in a war seemingly without end that will see western troops once again taking an active combat role on the ground.  It will eventually - probably in 3-4 years time at least,  take Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan - in conjunction with Israel, USA and NATO, all working together to a common purpose to sort this out and bring it to an end - but not until they all agree on what that common purpose is and how it should be done.

And all the while, China will be watching - with one eye on Taiwan.