…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.
has there actually been any video from Hamas showing infantry combat? all the videos I’ve seen show them destroying vehicles etc.
addendum: is this the occupation forces being too scared to fight an infantry battle? or is it a pragmatic call (they don’t really have to, they’re safer in tanks, etc). I don’t understand how war works.
@bbnh69420@hexbear.net posted a video with several scenes of infantry combat from the first day of the Al-Aqsa Flood, but it is no longer available. bbnh any other sources for this?
Can’t find it immediately, but I’ll look in a bit. Might have some here? https://t.me/PalestineResist/18488 https://t.me/LebUpdate/32054 https://t.me/LebUpdate/32055
It would be better for Israeli infantry to be present precisely because they can take out any fighters that come out. Like, that video of the Hamas fighter planting an explosive on the Merkava? Should never have happened. We don’t have any definitive answers as to why there’s so little infantry around but I suspect it’s a mixture of being afraid that more troops will be captured, being afraid of high death counts (urban warfare is a hell of a thing even if you destroy half the city with airstrikes before you enter it, let alone with the additional of a sprawling nexus of tunnels), and their soldiers just not being particularly well-trained for this kind of thing, preferring to snipe children throwing rocks in their general direction and doing TikTok dances and pillow fights in barracks. Israel has mandatory conscription - many of these soldiers just aren’t hardened warriors.
Makes sense to me. So their claims of capturing most of Gaza City or whatever are surely bullshit. You haven’t captured territory if you’ve got some of your tanks there, right? There would have to be no Hamas presence there anymore, even if they wanted it. Then again, I guess the argument is that Hamas would be destroying those tanks if they were still there? Idk, this is all quite confusing
So their claims of capturing most of Gaza City or whatever are surely bullshit.
Israel obviously hasn’t captured Gaza City, nor any appreciable part of it. They’ve got a lot of the agricultural areas and some of the less urbanized areas and “encircled” it, but what use an above-ground encirclement is against people many feet below you with tunnels that presumably stretch to southern Gaza is beyond me.
Maps of Israeli progress are a somewhat useful way of demarcating progress, but it’s less meaningful than it is in conventional warfare (and even then, in some situations like attritional warfare, it’s not particularly meaningful). Coloring in a segment of the map in Your Color is fine and all but unless you’re also taking out tunnels then what does it actually mean? Hamas isn’t trying to “hold” territory, they’re trying to defeat the Israeli military. They’ll happily let them advance into the heart of the city, which looks great on the map, if it allows them to more effectively ambush and kill Israeli forces.
Any military claim should be assumed bullshit.
That includes any report from Hamas about destroying material or fighting soldiers.
Any fighting force has no incentive to report the truth and every incentive to exaggerate success
I’ve seen speculation that Israel is worried about soldiers being captured and worsening the hostage situation.
