...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.
Sending in so many tanks with no infantry support really was such a collossal L for Israel. Not just because of military tactics, I don't know anything about that and am kinda just parroting that part from others, but from a PR perspective.
In all the military footage that Hamas releases, Israel effectively dehumanizes itself by only being present inside these huge, bulky war machines while the Hamas fighters are small and more importantly, humans. When you see a group of actual people fighting a tank, you'll instinctively root for the humans. Seeing a human killed by a tank is shocking and disturbing, seeing a tank blown up does not have nearly the same emotional effect, even if you know there's a person in there.
Since Hamas released the footage of the guy running up to the tank, I've seen a noticeable shift from people going from just pro-Palestine to outright cheering for Hamas. The fact that it was always "Tanks vs Humans" made it much easier to root for Hamas as the brave underdogs going up agains the cold, overwhelming, unfeeling war machines. Had there been actual Israeli foot soldiers getting killed in those videos, it would've felt much more symmetrical and visceral, much less black and white. Like I said, Israel effectively dehumanized itself in the eyes of onlookers.
I definitely think there's something to that.
Around the time this all kicked off I went to the cinema to watch The Creator (flawed but extremely anti-US imperialist visually impressive sci-fi schlock, worth a watch) and there's this long scene of a village full of ordinary people and resistance fighters going eerily silent as something enormous and menacing moves through the treeline towards them. It's shot like Godzilla (deliberately, it's directed by Gareth Edwards who did the 2014 Godzilla), like some unspeakable monster you can't yet see but know will spell death and carnage, and when it's finally revealed it's just ludicrously enormous US sci-fi tanks, destroying everything in their path before they start obliterating everyone in the village. Some are eventually destroyed by people bravely running up and planting explosives right on the side of them too.
I don't bring this up to be like hey, real life is just like a movie, but because I think it shows how ingrained in our minds (certainly of even vaguely anti-war/imperialist people) that dynamic of humanity vs machinery is when it comes to war. Obviously images of Vietnam are the big one in the West, but equally drone warefare vs people on thr ground, soldiers vs tanks in WW2, or even lines of men vs the machine gun in WW1.
Tiannemen square as well. There's a reason they go to that famous Tank Man image for propaganda so much
Very true.
hadn't heard of this movie but just checked out some trailers. real the Animatrix Second Renaissance vibes
It's worth a watch. The world building and visual stuff is pretty cool and it's politics are a lot better than you'd ever expect from a Disney funded film, basically a decline of the West, proletarian solidarity will win movie.
I suspect nitbseeingbhumans die was their whole reasoning for not sending infantry support with the tanks — it might demoralize infantry to see bodies of fellow soldiers being shot down.
Also apparently that not-really-working-that-well active protection thing (Trophy) will actively kill friendly soldiers standing too close if it attempts to intercept an incoming projectile
we should call Hasbaraniks "Tankies" now.
chad empathetic bodycam vs virgin disembodied drone cam