...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.
"The reason that led your country's government to persecute Jews in the past is the same reason that has led your current government to persecute Palestinians, namely your lack of sufficient moral values to stop it."
waking up in the morning and determining whether WW3 has started yet by checking how many new comments the news megathread has
I can't wait for ghoul libs to try to spin this.
It's official: Israel has now killed more civilians in Gaza in 30 days than Russia has in its entire war in Ukraine, which began over 600 days ago.
My partner and I were talking about the brutality of airstrikes vs other forms of killing people (knives, guns etc) and how airstrikes are depicted as less brutal and personal. I made the point that there is literally no American cultural memory of being bombed under virtually any circumstances.
One movie that I thought did a great job of depicting the terror of airstrikes was the battle of lake changjin, the 2021 Chinese blockbuster about the PLA's counterattack against American invaders in Korea. American bombers were terrifying in that film.
reminder of that thing a month ago where the entire west went to bat defending an SS officer
#ZionismIsNazism is trending on twitter
Radicalism has broken containment, I repeat radicalism has broken containment
Just got back from a local protest, good size crowd but I showed up a few minutes late
Probably shouldn't have responded to the counterprotesters but their genocidal bullshit was pissing me off and I may have gotten a little hot
Long story short, if tomorrow's local paper has a big picture of me with the headline/quote "Hamas is protecting them!" then I'm either the dumbest motherfucker here or one of the coolest, maybe both
I'm really proud of my 12 year old. They asked if we could get a Sodastream and when I said we couldn't because it is an "Israeli" company, they immediately lost interest in getting one and went on to talk about how "everyone supports Palestine" execpt "weird people" like politicians.
I know that you would want to add "And then everybody clapped and that kid's name? Albert Einstein." but this actually happened. The kids are alright.
Brandeis University dissolves Palestinian student organization for holding vigil
Show
We’re starting to see direct action take place, not only is the boat getting blocked in the US (and they even managed to get one of the workers on it to leave!!!), im seeing that dock workers in barcelona are refusing to load ships suspected of carrying military supplies, really hope this continues escalating
The smug IDF Merkava driver shitposter from twitter has not been active for 10 days since bragging about entering Gaza. Tons of banger replies on his last posts.
: You're claiming that Palestinian troops, who are organized under a military command, follow military discipline, wear distinguishing marks, and openly bear arms are legal combatants and not terrorists according to the laws of armed conflict and international norms and customs?I am and I'm tired of pretending I'm not
Why is it that, in the West, WW2 is remembered almost solely for the genocide of Jewish people?
Why does the Nazi genocide of Roma, the Nazi genocide of Russians and Poles, and the Japanese genocide of Chinese not get the same attention?
Edit: as pointed out by others, the Nazis also targeted communists, anarchists, LGBT people, and disabled people.
