...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.
There is a good article PFLP wrote about this. Of course the PFLP website isn't working right but theres some group that translated it into english.
"The Enemy's Contradictions Do Not Disrupt the Unity of the Killers"
In our Palestinian camp, there is talk about the “infighting of the occupation” and the internal crises and contradictions within the enemy's society. There are high hopes that these contradictions will cause the collapse of the enemy. The problem with this discourse is that it requires many examples to prove that this entity is an unnatural state. Meanwhile, it assumes that this entity is expected to go through the same natural contradictions that other societies have gone through in their unique contexts of development.
The current crisis over the Judicial System of the Zionist entity is one event in which the Zionist entity merely resembles other natural states and societies where there are disputes and clashes over the system of governance and the distribution of wealth. While this situation reflects significant changes in the social base of the Zionist system and its political machinations, and it may change some aspects of the conflict between us and the enemy, it should not hide the most important reality. From our perspective, The enemy's debate today is not really about something fundamental, because no one in this entity is discussing the foundations upon which it was built and the premises that make everyone inside it our enemy.
The Zionist settlers may see themselves in a position of contradiction and disagreement with each other. But for us who receive bullets in our chests, who are uprooted from our land, and who have our people slaughtered in the streets, all these diverse factions remain united in aggression by targeting and killing us. Even if we desire to see and understand these variations within the line of rifles aimed at our heads, it is important that we do so without selling ourselves any illusions. Because, unlike what some may imagine, these contradictions have much less impact than we think, especially when it comes to the fundamental function of this colony.
The role and presence of social and interpersonal contradictions in any community cannot be denied. But we must not ignore the role of systems in controlling these contradictions, and we must place them within certain frameworks related to what binds these societies together. In the Zionist entity, we are talking about a base of invaders who fought and killed everyone around them for over a hundred years. It only survives each day thanks to the disciplined organization and clear commitment to the goals they came for, goals that were determined by the nature of the relationship between this entity and its sponsors. This makes the entity more like a military base than anything else. Despite all that we have been able to resist against it and the damage we have inflicted on its human and material resources, the entity is still active and aware of its goals.
The Zionist entity is still a system specialized in murder and displacement, while building military technologies of repression, killing, domination, and surveillance. It is a system of invasion, displacement, settlement, and maximum security. It cannot abide deviations of the individuals inside it and their relationship with the group from the perspective of these functions.
What is happening today in Tel Aviv is not the essential contradiction of the enemy, but instead, what is happening in Jenin, Nablus and on the borders of Gaza. The extermination system is operating there, and our resistance to it is located there, not in the squares of Tel Aviv. Our bullets are the guarantor of creating real contradictions in this entity, and our steadfastness is the one capable of dispersing the masses of the enemy and tearing apart his battalions. Our people realize this and continue to prove it daily. Far from buying into illusions about the nature of the enemy, our people are betting on the unity of our own guns and not on the disagreements among the ranks of the murderers.
Thanks!!!