...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.
We'll see, Lebanon is in pretty bad shape. I think a ~~possible~~ interesting "defensive escalation" would be if one of the Syrian S300s magically appeared in Southern Lebanon and shot down an Israeli F-16. Hezbollah gets a win and Assad gets to slap back at the Israelis for hitting the airports again.
That's very unlikely, that would be how WW3 starts. If Israeli jets start getting shot down over Syria and Lebanon, there would be a huge response from Israel.
The jets NEED to be shot down somewhere, or the carpet bombing will simply continue. Until it happens, Israel can just bomb whatever they want. I understand not wanting to be the one to open that can of worms and the brutal retaliation, but Israeli air power is the fundamental mechanism of this genocide.
I think context is key. If Hezbollah is shooting down Israeli aircraft over Lebanese territory, it is fairly clear that plane shouldn't have been there in the first place. It is a harder case for the Zionist state to argue than if these planes are being shot down over Tel Aviv.
As @mkultrawide@hexbear.net points out, Israel won't accept any defiance. They will retaliate. I also feel like that is factored into any military calculations being made.
Who cares? The rest of the world isn't buying it. 80% of the earth didn't buy the Israeli hospital bullshit for even a second. The world is done with Israel's lies, they know they are untrustworthy and perfidious. Let them flounder and lie more.
But no side that has the potential military capability and willingness to shoot down an Israeli jet, has the capability or willingness to deal with the aftermath of such a decision. Last time an Israeli jet was shot down, Putin had to get on the phone to tell Israel to stop bombing Syria in retaliation. Syria had half of their air defense and command centre wiped out as a result. I want the Israeli jets killing innocents to be shot down, but the reality on the ground is grim. I don't think starting a proxy war with Israel by giving Hezbollah advanced anti air weaponry is on the cards right now for Iran, Syria, or Russia. I wish it was so that the bombing of Gaza would end, but it's not.
Oh no he had to get on the phone!
I don't know about that. Syria shot down an Israeli jet in 2018 and the world didn't explode. Israel is already "letting" Hezbollah rockets hit civilians and military targets in Israel. If they shot down an Israeli jet that was in Israeli airspace, then sure, but I'm not sure that anyone is going to feel much sympathy for an Israeli jet shot down over hostile foreign airspace. And again, a significant jump in escalation on the Israelis side is going to force them to shift forces away from Gaza pretty significantly. I susepct they would probably launch some cruise missiles into Beirut and/or Damascus in response, if anything. Who knows, though?
That was also the first time Israel lost an aircraft since the 1980s, and the shot down aircraft was carrying out a bombing mission against Iranian positions in Syria, after an Iranian drone was detected in Israel. Israel then proceeded to go on a retaliatory bombing spree of all the air defense systems in Syria controlled by the Syrian armed forces, until Putin got on the phone to Netanyahu and told him to stop. So it was pretty significant. With the narrative shit post October 7, I could see Israel take very drastic action.
I'm not saying Israel would just take the L and mope away. There would definitely be a response. I'm just saying that there's only so much Israel could do given the current situation, and a shootdown would be pretty embarrassing/demoralizing. This isn't 2018, Israel has a war going on in Gaza, and a "small scale conflict" in the West Bank. They can't afford to open up a third front in earnest with Lebanon and/or Syria.
All that being said, I think the more likely response is more Hezbollah rocket attacks. My point was just that a shootdown inside Lebanese air space would be an interesting "defensive escalation" since Israel isn't going to get much sympathy for losing a jet that was violating Lebanese air space
At least one Israeli F-35 has been “downed” in Syria back in 2017, purportedly by S-300. They just said it was bird strikes and pretended like nothing happened.
S300? Bird? Frankly, for the F-35, what's the difference?
Israeli jets not in Israeli territory can be shot down and nobody will give a single shit except Israel and US. NATO isn’t gonna rally around an Israeli jet in Lebanon getting shot down
Whatever shape Lebanon is in now, it will be worse after open and unanswered Israeli airstrikes. Hezbollah must act now or just slowly get destroyed. Why won’t they fight
There's been reporting that "wagner" is providing S300s and other air defense systems to Hezbollah via Syria. Not sure how much of this is the West trying to create a unified axis of evil, and how much of it is the Russians actually being cool
I saw that it was Pantsir S1s, so the intended usage is probably to defend against Israeli drones and missiles.