...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.
Who will collapse first - Ukraine or Israel?
Ukraine. They're fucked and losing a war of attrition. The zionist entity om the other hand has massive material resources available compared to their opponents. It doesn't seem like Hezbollah or Iran wants to go all in on the war.
The most likely outcome is that the zionist entity grows tired of getting their conscripts killed in Gaza and their economy disrupted, declares that Hamas has been defeated and negotiates some form of ceasefire that might give Palestine a few humanitarian concessions. In a couple of years a new wave of resistance will provoke the occupiers to commit new massacres.
I agree, except I doubt they'll "negotiate" anything or give any kind of concessions. Why should they? They'll just stop bombing and (try to) go back to the status quo, bottling Gaza back up and bombing them again when they feel like it.
AFAIK the war is not the cakewalk the zionist entity tries to give the impression it is. They are losing conscripts which is causing internal tensions among settlers and the war vibes is hurting their economy. It's not like the zionist entity is at the verge of collapse but their incentive to wind down the war is growing by the day.
Historically, the concessions Palestine has won, like the zionist abandonment of Gaza, has been the result of armed struggle. This is why I consider it one of several possible likely outcomes of the war that Gaza will get some concessions in return for a ceasefire. Maybe something like an easement in the decades long siege of Gaza in return for Mahmoud Abbas' comprador regime being installed as the government there and promising to keep Hamas down. The outcome could just as well be genocide or ethnic cleansing of Gaza though.
Wish it was Israel but it’s gonna be Ukraine by a country mile.
The Ukrainians are closer to the finish line in that regards, but the satanically racist Israelis seem so set on pissing off everyone in the region that they are rapidly catching up. If a second front opens up in earnest on Israel, then I'm saying Israel.
I think so too, but only because Russia doesn't seem particularly willing to launch some massive destabilizing offensive against Ukraine out of a (quite justified) fear of their own losses being too high, so they'll wait it out at a relatively low level of intensity until Ukraine is so obviously wobbling from blood loss that everybody has already accepted its defeat. Whereas for Israel, I just can't see the conflict getting less bloody as time goes by, particularly in terms of military losses on either side, as I assume that even if there is a ceasefire of some form and civilian deaths fall, that ceasefire won't include Gaza City.
Russia waits until the iron is hot, while the Resistance makes the iron hot by striking.
We’re about to find out how well does the indoctrination work in Israel.
These are people who have been indoctrinated to hate the Arabs and see them as lesser beings since childhood, and further brainwashed during their compulsory military service. If the propaganda is working as intended, I just don’t see the Israeli society backing down, but would instead double down on the destruction of Gaza.
With air superiority and without regard for civilian deaths, they can keep this going for a long time.
And I’ve said before that I would not even be surprised to see Israel using nukes - even on its own people - if they are about to face imminent defeat (especially if there is military intervention from other states).
Russia didn't have to do anything. It's going to just drain Ukraine of any able bodied people and it will get the demilitarized ultrasound it wants through attrition
will the proxies collapse before or after amrika
Gotta get some over/unders and stretches and get this to Vegas baby. Now this is what I called dialectical materialism 💰 🤑 💸