…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.
I don’t think it will unless it gets to the point where Hamas is marching on the streets of Tel Aviv or Israel becomes politically radioactive because they nuked Mecca or something. Beyond its strategic importance, there is a pecking order among US vassals with Israel as number one. If the US can’t save Israel, then every other US vassal is going to make the very reasonable conclusion that the US will not save them either and adjust their actions accordingly. The entire empire will unravel.
There is quite literally nothing that Israel could do to get the USA to drop its support for it. It is effectively part of the country and is it’s most important client state because the wound it has gouged into the Arab world justifies US intervention which is necessary for the dollar to retain its dominance (through controlling oil). The control of the Zionist lobby over the US is a myth.
it really seems like they’re going down with the ship here. the entire facade of the ‘international rules based order’ is completely shattered, the Middle East is totally lost.
No Israel is the unsinkable aircraft carrier in the middle east. It is part and parcel of the US strategy, everything else is secondary. If it ever gets to a point that the Israel situation is untenable, another state in the region will be made into the new Israel, though suggestion, regime change, war, or a mix of all. The UAE is a likely candidate here, they’re one of the biggest US puppets and have already bombed Palestine before, as well as Yemen, Syria and Libya. Troop deployments to Kosovo and Afghanistan as well. “Non aligned” in dreamland.
There’s also the fact that if the US fails to guarantee Israel security, every one of their vassal states is on the chopping block.
No, the empire abandons Ukraine because it has already done its job, which is to stop the Euro bloc from defecting when the US inevitably goes to war with China.
European capital is now fully aligned with the US empire and thus eliminating the concern about the possibility of a European center swaying the outcome during the US-China showdown.
The only difference between the pro-Ukraine American right and the “no more funding for Ukraine” American right is that the former sees this as an opportunity to kill more Russians on the way out, while the latter thinks it’s not worth the trouble.
Pro-Ukraine American right (neocons): “yes Ukraine has already done its jobs, but can we kill some more Russians while we’re at it? just a little more…”
Anti-Ukraine American right (realists): “Ukraine has already done its job, we shouldn’t be wasting our time and effort getting bogged down over there, it’s time to fully pivot and focus on China instead.”
Israel, on the other hand, still hasn’t fulfilled its role yet.
America controls Israel, not the other way around. When it becomes a net negative for them then the yanks will drop it
then we have a true “rouge state” with a secret arsenal of nukes capable of taking out up to 400 targets. i hope other powers are planning for how a rapid disarmament could be performed (if at all)
But they did do that? The US didn’t create Israel or support it to an extent comparable to the modern day until over a decade after the Nakba. The US even backed the USSR when they told the entity, France, and Britain to withdraw from Egypt or get nuked during the Suez crisis.
The headaches are the point with Israel because they give everyone else a headache too, and a pretext for US intervention. It’s a core part of the imperial playbook to exacerbate ethnic and religious tensions and exploit the resulting conflicts.
