...one has to wonder what the latest Blinken round of visits to the Middle East was supposed to accomplish, since all it did was expose our impotence. Even the Financial Times could not hide that the meetings with Netanyahu and then Arab leaders were a train wreck. Netanyahu rejected even any itty bitty ceasefire, branded a humanitarian pause, to get relief in, demanding that Hamas release all hostages first. The fact that Israel has welched or underperformed on its past begrudging promises to let trucks from Egypt in, would make that a non-starter even before getting to Hamas being sure to stick to its position of wanting to trade hostages for Palestinian prisoners. And of course the Arab states are not about to budge. Blinken got a more pointed version of what he was told before.
Antony Blinken faced intense pressure from regional allies to facilitate an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, laying bare the stark gap between US support for Israel and the outrage in Arab capitals over the siege and bombardment of the strip….
Sameh Shoukry, the Egyptian foreign minister, demanded an unconditional ceasefire, a commitment that Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu bluntly rejected after meeting Blinken on Friday.
Blinken had been expected to “brainstorm” with Arab diplomats the future of Gaza, home to 2.3mn Palestinians, after the war ends. Safadi bluntly rejected those talks as premature. “How can we even entertain what will happen in Gaza when we do not know how Gaza will be left?” he asked Blinken. “Are we going to be talking about a wasteland? Are we talking about a whole population reduced to refugees?”
This comes off as the sort of thing someone who had just read classic texts on negotiating trying to put in practice: “Gee, let’s get a dialogue going! Let’s get to ‘Yes’ on some less fraught issues to pave the way for further agreement!” In addition, “brainstorming” is cringemakingly American. You don’t do that with people who are mad at you. You don’t do that in a crisis. Between independent entities, you do not do that at the top level. You have low level people or emissaries float ideas. So why this exercise? The worst is that Biden and Blinken come off as so disconnected from reality that they though they might get someone to accommodate US needs.
Friendly reminder: when commenting about a news event, especially something that just happened, please provide a source of some kind. While ideally this would be on nitter or archived, any source is preferable to none at all given.
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA daily-ish reports on Israel's destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news (and has automated posting when the person running it goes to sleep).
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
The Country of the Week is still Lebanon! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.
You're going to have to (hex)bear with me on the update this week. Have you been feeling generally pretty terrible this last month or so? So have I, and doomscrolling and archiving it all is my quasi-job at this point. Not good, folks, more and more people are saying it. I'll get over it eventually.
Links and Stuff
The bulletins site is down.
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Add to the above list if you can.
Resources For Understanding The War
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Telegram Channels
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
Pro-Russian
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
Last week's discussion post.
I know the "tanks are outdated" take-havers aren't really right but it sure seems like Israel is using their tanks very wrong to keep losing so many. Does every military have to learn the same lessons the Ukrainians and Russians already figured out last year?
Are they trying to use them in built up urban areas? Tanks have always been very vulnerable to infantry in urban fighting - There's just too many routes to approach the tank from cover and use AT weapons from close range, then scoot away to safety.
I haven't yet seen much footage of attacks in highly urban areas (though it's hard to tell sometimes because, well, half the buildings aren't fucking there anymore) A few videos with houses and gardens and such, and more than a few videos of rural areas. The only video that comes to mind that's a little more built up was the one where they slapped their flag on the destroyed bulldozer. This generally supports the assertion that Israel is having a hard time entering the city proper, or doesn't want to yet for some reason.
If I was a genocidal fascist in a vulnerable political position like Bibi I'd sit back and shell the place until there was no one left alive. AFAIK their main incentive for going in on foot is to rescue hostages and probably just flat out vengeance. But the Hannibal Protocol seems to be in full effect with the IDF having no interest in rescuing anyone, and they seem very reluctant to commit ground troops when they will almost certainly suffer losses to some extent.
They don't necessarily need to rush. Palestinian rockets aren't causing significant damage to important infrastructure afaik. They have Gaza besieged very effectively. And they've already dropped two Hiroshima's worth of bombs on the place.
That's my take, anyway. Avoid urban combat unless absolutely necessary. And since their goal is to destroy everything and kill everyone they don't have a pressing need to take and hold territory within Gaza. But, as always, I'm just armchair generalling.
I disagree.
Israel has already 2+ billion on bombing/shelling Gaza, according to Al Jazeera's back of the napkin math. Gaza has 2+ million Palestinians. They have murdered 10k and wounded probably another 50 or so. Given that the blockade and cutoff of food/medicine/electricity will kill tens of thousands more, lets assume 150k "casualties". That's like 8% and not all of that 8% are dead/incapacitated (you can still plant a bomb if you lost an arm). The West Bank has 3ish million Palestinians which further weakens this math. They need to occupy the territory so Gaza's population is more dense so they can throw up their hands when they bomb refugee camps and kill thousands. They also quite obviously want to take the land which must be occupied with ground forces.
They're stupid enough not to think this through like you're describing. Bibi's government is a coalition of fascists--he must be seen as taking "strong action" against "terrorist threats". So the vulnerable position you describe dictates that they move in with ground forces, there's no other real option as, obviously, its not like Hamas is going to sit out in the open. They're stupid enough not to recognize the region's response, as well, and the pressure the US is going to get to not support this. They also probably believe in their own mythmaking about how great and powerful and moral and efficient their armed forces are when in reality they're no different than any other military in the history of militaries.
I'm nothing but an armchair general myself. I don't see this going well for Israel.
Good post. I will incorporate what you have said.
I think if you were Zyklon Bibi, rescuing hostages isn't what you're really trying to do. When hostages are rescued, they say stuff that hurts your genocidal plans, like "they treated me well" and "they provided me with everything I needed to be clean and fed". My understand is that the majority of the captives aren't part of Bibi's voting block, so he extra doesn't give a shit. Beyond that, they're perfectly able to bomb captives and blame Hamas.
I agree. There have long, long been rumors that the IDF has an off-the-books policy of killing hostages so they can't be used to negotiate. It's referred to as the "Hannibal Protocol". It's always been officially denied, but I think that's what we're seeing here.
Most of the hit videos I've seen are just outside urban areas, the shooters are using scrub brush to hide. They're usually just sitting in place without any infantry screen around them. The only tank-in-urban-area video I've seen was the one from a few days ago where a Merkava watches a carload of civilians frantically turn around when they spot it, then the Merkava hits it with an HE shell once it's almost turned around to flee.
It seems like in general militaries have a hard time learning lessons. I'm just thinking of how long it took them to figure out marching into machine gun fire wasn't the best way to go in ww1, or the British navy just forgetting how to run convoys in between ww1 and 2. The Americans are guilty of this as well, I don't see why else they would be training Ukrainians in counter-insurgency and door-kicking tactics.
Maybe it has something to do with the rigid hierarchies that makes it hard to counteract higher ranking officers who are stuck in their ways? Maybe it's all the burn pit chemicals, lead, depleted uranium, black mold, and other extremly toxic substances they have to work with that melt their minds and cause military brain
Yeah, there's a lot of sayings that go like "The army is always prepared to fight the last war".
I think the officer corps fossilizing is a big part of it. They learn how to fight one kind of war, move up the ranks to where they're not doing real fighting anymore, and never really change. Plus a lot of officers have contempt for enlisted. And the whole miltiary of most countries is at the whims of the civilian government that doesn't want to re-tool the whole military every couple of years to deal with emerging circumstances.
And then, in the end, it turns out that conventional near-peer wars still just come down to having absolutely shitloads of artillery guns and most of the hypertech wunderwaffen just aren't all that important.
I think they're just afraid to put the boots on the ground that they'd need to support and defend the tanks properly. Their reservists would fold in a hot second and widen the panic, whereas a tank at least gives a soldier the illusion of safety
Instead of one tank you could build 1,000 drones. Seems like a bad value proposition.
From the few snippets of video, Israeli tactics do seem bad, with no infantry along with tanks in the urban environment. This is the problem with urban combat and tanks.
That said, color me skeptical that all of these reported tank destructions are truly destroyed. Making a big boom on a tank may make it unusable, or it may just be flashy. Recoverable losses are definitely a thing. Tanks are built to take a lot of punishment, and unlike ukraine, Israel has extremely easy logistical lines for recoverable losses to be taken back to their own domestic repair facilities. A big explosion impacting a tank is one thing, a burned out tank husk or a jack in the box turret is another.
yeah, I mean if Ukraine can recover its damaged/destroyed tanks and send them to Poland to be repaired and then bring them back to the front line, sometimes multiple times per tank, against one of the strongest armies on the planet, then Hamas certainly isn't permanently destroying all the tanks Israel sends. perhaps if Hezbollah or Ansarallah can knock out Israeli infrastructure or power generation or transportation then it might be managed, but we aren't there yet. An advantage that the Resistance has here that they don't have in Ukraine is that all the relevant facilities are either inside Israel itself and thus free to strike, or across a sea, adding time and some vulnerability to resupplying (airports can be damaged, seaports can be too), as opposed to Ukraine, where their western border with other countries is a total sieve. I guess they could ship their broken shit, or fuel, or whatever else through Jordan or Egypt and then onwards somewhere else and I doubt those regimes would oppose it if events came to that, but if it does come to that then we're already in a totally different paradigm and current analysis is useless.
nonetheless, guerrilla wars aren't typically won through industrial attrition anyway. I have a feeling that even if all the Merkavas in Israel were destroyed, then the US would start training the IDF on Abrams and just send even more tanks. It's gonna end through internal collapse and/or Israel becoming too exhausted/demoralized on the home front.
For all practical purpose a mobility kill is still a kill. Totally destroying the tank is certainly preferable, but knocking it out of that battle or even just forcing it to retreat is still a win. I do agree that many of the videos of attacks on tanks likely resulted in limited damage, just because a lot of portable AT weapons aren't that effective against modern tank armor.
My guess would be they don't have the stomach for it. Urban fighting is brutal, and while politically Gaza is comparable to Warsaw, the Palestinian troops are far better equipped and prepared than the Warsaw ghetto was. I think sending infantry in large numbers would result in large numbers of dead IDF grunts and I suspect that Bibi and company want to avoid large casualties as much as possible. i remember what bin Laden said long ago about the US being weak and unable to stomach even small troop losses, and how this made the US vulnerable. I think he was talking abou the Black Hawk Down incident in Somalia, and how despite losing only a dozen or so troops the US put so much political pressure on Clinton he was forced to withdraw. The Israeli leadership might be thinking along similar lines; Too many body bags and they'll lose support for the genocide when people realizes that war has consequences and this isn't like sending fighters on raids to blow up random civilian infrastructure in Libya and Iran.
I've remained hesitant to post this take, mainly to avoid "doomer" accusations, but I have also been skeptical of some of the Resistance videos of tank attacks. Pretty much all of the videos show an explosion and a big cloud of smoke/dust, but we don't see any videos of a destroyed tank after the fact. I know some of that is likely due to the hit and run tactics being employed, but it does remain hard to tell what exactly the results have been on the ground.
Pragmatism and realism aren't doomer. I doubt Palestinian soldiers have any illusions about the effectiveness of their weapons against Israeli armor. I agree that many of the videos of attacks on tanks can't be assessed as to whether the tank was truly destroyed or if the AT weapon splashed on the armor. Propaganda is important for keeping up morale and support for the cause, but we can still be realistic - Even the best AT weapons aren't 100% effective. That said, the Palestinians do seem to have tandem warhead weapons among other things, so it is likely they are damaging Israeli vehicles, even if they're not completely destroying them.
Another thing to consider is that even if it doesnt destroy the tank it’s going to make the crew inside panic a bit probably, so even in the worst case scenario of no meaningful damage it’s still harming israeli morale imo
I think the reality is that there's just no clean, efficient way to do war. Learn all the lessons you want, but you aren't going against static targets. You're against people with the sole goal of killing so many of you that you are expelled from their territory. No tactics could ever be good enough to do that without issue.
Apparently. Or maybe they really bought their own propaganda about their invincible Merkavas
I would believe that. The manufactures blew smoke up their asses and they didn’t realize it.