Image is of a Hezbollah missile attack on a military camp west of Jenin.
The situation between Hezbollah and Israel is rapidly escalating, with massive bombing campaigns on southern Lebanon by Israel predominantly on civilians (as the tunnels in South Lebanon are mostly unreachable to the Zionists, just like in Gaza), while Hezbollah and its allies respond with missile attacks predominantly on Israeli military facilities. Israel is spreading an evacuation order to the residents of southern Lebanese villages while also bombing their routes of escape and civilian infrastructure, similar to a terror tactic used widely in Gaza.
Northern Israel is currently under military censorship to hide their losses, so we get very little information other than what the Resistance provides and what videos and images get through the censors.
I don’t know if Israel will dare a ground incursion soon, but it seems fairly likely in the coming days or weeks.
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The RSS feed is here.
Last week’s thread is here.
Israel-Palestine Conflict
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA 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.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
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.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
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.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
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 Telegram Channels:
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.
And that means those Israeli air strikes probably have been hitting weapons stockpiles.
I hate it when I construct underground facilities in southern Lebanon to launch missiles and then place those missiles above ground a hundred miles away in Beirut when my enemy has total air superiority and can destroy my stockpiles at any time instead of placing my stockpiles underground and not in northern urban centers, where they are safe and near the launchers. Somebody really needs to organize my military better. I also shouldn’t have put all these rakes in the hallway to my office so that I step on them and the handle hits me on the head a dozen times every time I go there to do paperwork
???
I’m not gonna lie and say that some Hezbollah commanders haven’t been making some questionable decisions about where they meet foreign nationals (a better place might be where you have a hundred feet of solid rock above you) but no amount of Israeli infiltration can magically generate poor decision-making about meeting places. Hopefully the next leader keeps his head below ground most of the time from now on. However, the organization did also defeat Israel when Hezbollah was ten times weaker than they currently are, so these may as well be speedbumps rather than a “very bad situation”. The actual physical capabilities of Hezbollah are approximately the same as they were a month ago.
But i mean - in all seriousness - why aren’t there a hundred missiles on their way to Tel Aviv right now then?
who will give the order? no matter what their line of succession/appointment of a new secretary general looks like, it will take time for them to settle in
thinking some more, if they do decide to go in and bomb the shit out of tel aviv immediately they will probably want to coordinate with the rest of the resistance to strike as devastating blow as possible, which will take time to do as well.
Perhaps. It seems that Israel might not have taken this move if they weren’t certain that such a retaliation wasn’t possible. Certainly restraint based on the logic of mutually assured destruction doesn’t make sense for Hezbollah going forward. So I guess we’ll see in the next few days.
Nobody from the Hezbollah leadership ever tell me anything about their strategic decisions but if I were to guess they might think that such a spectacular move would be exactly the kind of thing that would give the yanks a justification for joining the war directly while it would also do little towards defeating the zionists militarily.
That’s a quick way to get nuked or have a massive joint American-Israeli bombing campaign destroy the entirety of Lebanon.
But the whole point of their missiles was specifically to stop this situation from occurring, ie Israel bombing with impunity.
I’m not gonna lie, following this whole conflict is like if you were following an upcoming match between two boxers, the first of which is a favourite to win but you’ve read that the second has some awesome techniques up their sleeves specifically to counter their style, and he’s given interviews to that effect. And then the match comes after the first boxer has spent the previous match fighting to a draw, bruised and bloody, but they still have to fight the next guy. And you watch as the first boxer just starts tearing into the second boxer, like, you’re watching them do shit that you thought they would only threaten to do but no, they’re actually doing it. And the second boxer is also giving out some punches, but weaker than the first guy. And it seems very unequal at the start, but the second boxer has a knowing smile on their face as if this is actually all part of the plan, and you’re thinking “Aha, very clever, he’s trying to exhaust the guy so that knockout punches later are easier to do.” But it just keeps going, and you begin to question if the second boxer’s smile is actually knowing at all or if somebody wiped their memory of how to box well before the fight started and they just have a dumb, blank smile on their face. And you know that they have prepared for this fight, you’ve literally seen them practice the techniques and shit, but they aren’t using them yet for some unknowable reason.
so that’s all to say that I don’t know and have no way of knowing but I do know that the second boxer’s coach/hypeman in the back is just saying nonsense half the time even if he does actually do a lot of physical work to help him out, so he’s not useless or anything but you shouldn’t really listen to him.
Like, okay, there’s no conceivable way that the thought process over the last couple decades has been:
Hez: “Okay, Israel is beaten back to the border! Let’s acquire a shitload of missiles so that we can destroy Israel in mutually assured destruction if they do drastic shit.”
Everybody: “What is the definition of ‘drastic shit’ in this particular case?”
Hez: “Aha, that’s a secret that only our commanders know, but trust us.”
fast forward 18 years
Hez: “You are weaker than a spider’s web, betcha won’t invade us! It would be SUCH a shame if you did that!”
Israel: “Uh, okay. We will bomb the shit out of you.”
Hez: “Oh yeah? How about we fire missiles at these military bases a bunch of times? What if we try and force you to evacuate Haifa?”
Israel: “Uh, okay. We will bomb the shit out of you and assassinate your leader of three decades.”
Hez: “Oh yeah? How about we fire missiles at Tel Aviv and take out civilian infrastructure with the hundreds of thousands of missiles that we’ve stockpiled for this exact situation?”
Israel: “Uh, well, we’d probably like, nuke you, or just continue bombing the shit out of you conventionally.”
Hez: “…damn, they got us. Fuck. Shit. Why didn’t we think of that? Nuclear blackmail! What the hell are we gonna do now?”
Everybody: “Hey, what does ‘drastic shit’ mean again? Does it mean the bombing of several residential blocks throughout the country, or the assassination of top officials, or anything else?”
Like, all that would be stupid if they didn’t plan for Israel to like, bomb the shit out of them - they literally did that in 2006, and tried to assassinate Nasrallah then too! - and I’m waiting to see what Hezbollah actually does to meaningfully respond to all this, but every day that goes by, I’m getting… not demoralized, I still 100% believe that Israel is in its terminal crisis, but I am getting confused about what precisely the plan is here.
All of this is why I think being like “Oh, you’ve gone WAY too far now, Israel! Hezbollah’s gonna pummel you! You Zionists better stop celebrating and making memes when Hezbollah blows up your cities!” on social media is cringe and unhelpful and embarrassing because people inevitably look like morons when there actually isn’t the level of reprisal that was expected. All I’ve done over the past year is point out that Hezbollah does in fact possess like 100,000 soldiers and hundreds of thousands of missiles, but if and when they actually use the goddamn things has been a critical question over the last year and the answer hasn’t seemed to be elucidated lately despite my expectations. What if Israel just… doesn’t invade? They probably have enough bombs to reduce every major city in Lebanon to a state of unlivableness. What is the internal death count, or number of buildings toppled, or weeks since the bombings started, or whatever combination of metrics that Hezbollah uses, where they’re like “Okay, time to use our arsenal to also take out Israeli infrastructure like they’re doing to us!” in the event that the invasion doesn’t happen, or it’s staggered/slow enough that Hezbollah can’t do enough damage to the army within, say, 6 months to force a surrender? I’m not saying that Hezbollah doesn’t have contigencies and plans, but the breakpoints clearly aren’t where I thought they would be. Perhaps I didn’t learn as much as I thought I did from Russia’s campaign in Ukraine, where the red lines are actually red carpets.
Perhaps I didn’t learn as much as I thought I did from Russia’s campaign in Ukraine, where the red lines are actually red carpets.
I’d say the difference is that Russia has been able to enforce two of it’s biggest red lines, by invading Ukraine after they crossed the red line around seeking NATO membership, and recently the red line around the use of long range NATO weapons in deep strikes into Russia where Russia got NATO to back down. A lot of that has to do with Russia having a relatively large modern army with air, naval and ground forces, and Russia of course having nuclear weapons. Unfortunately that situation is reversed in the Middle East, with Israel having a modern mechanised army and nuclear weapons, and the resistance not having such capabilities.
If you want to do analysis here, I guess it would come down to the five monopolies used to maintain imperial control and reproduce global capitalism: the monopoly of technology generated by the military expenditures of the imperialist centres; the monopoly of access to natural resources; the monopoly over finance; the monopoly over international communication and the media; and the monopoly over the means of mass destruction.
Russia got cut out if the global finance system with SWIFT, and got cut out of “international media” in the West with the banning of it’s media outlets. But with natural resources, technology from China on the civilian front, and their own military technology which is very advanced, and their own nuclear weapons, they were able to do quite well.
With regards to the resistance, they are quite behind the USA and Israel on all five fronts here, although Iran has made great progress in military technology over a short period of time.
