…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.
taking a minute to appreciate how easy the whole 🔻thing has made responding to zionists
When you’re defintinely, absolutely “not shooting at the hospital and there is no siege” at the Al-Shifa Hospital. An IDF tweet…
“There is no shooting at the hospital and there is no siege. The East Side of the hospital remains open.”
There’s a IDF turd speaking in Arabic with English subtitles. I wonder what the propaganda is in English language vids.
Iran’s Raisi to Attend Summit in Saudi Arabia on Sunday (WSJ, Nov. 8, 2023)
Raisi’s visit would be the first to Saudi Arabia by an Iranian head of state since 2012. No scheduled meetings have been set between the Iranian president and the Saudi crown prince, according to [unnamed] Saudi officials familiar with the trip.
US university bans Palestinian student group
Brandeis University, a private school outside Boston, has banned a student chapter of National Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), as the war in Gaza reverberates across American campuses.
The university notified the student group that it will no longer recognise the group “because it openly supports Hamas, which the United States has designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organisation.”
The SJP chapter had planned to hold a vigil on campus to mourn the thousands of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in Gaza. After the ban was announced, the vigil was cancelled.
SJP is an active campus-based group for Palestinians and pro-Palestine students. The organisation has 200 chapters at US universities across the country, according to its website.
Paxlovid does not prevent Long Covid
Multivariable logistic regression models controlled for age, sex, race/ethnicity, chronic conditions, and COVID-19 vaccination status. We found that participants who took nirmatrelvir/ritonavir were no less likely to develop long COVID symptoms, compared to those who did not take the medication (44% vs. 49.6%, p = 0.21). Taking nirmatrelvir/ritonavir was associated with a lower odds of two of the eleven long COVID symptoms, brain fog (OR 0.58, 95% CI 0.38–0.88) and chest pain/tightness (OR 0.51, 95% CI 0.28–0.91). Our finding that treatment with nirmatrelvir/ritonavir was not associated with a lower risk of developing long COVID is different from prior studies that obtained data only from electronic medical records.
🟢 Hamas leader Osama Hamdan:
The resistance and Al-Qassam Brigades inflict heavy losses on the ranks of the enemy daily, around the clock.
The resistance in Gaza killed today a colonel from the Shaldag unit.
The losses estimated by the resistance among the enemy’s ranks are many times greater than what is announced.
We tell our Palestinian people that your resistance will continue to defend you and we will sacrifice our lives for you.
The enemy is receiving painful blows that he did not expect in his worst nightmares.
The occupation army is unable to advance and is stuck in the same places it entered from the beginning.
The morale of the resistance is high. They control the course of the battle and are confident in defeating the enemy.
Netanyahu is disrupting the offer we made to release some hostages.
We renew our call to the United Nations and the World Health Organization to send delegations to visit all hospitals to confirm the falsehood of the “israeli” allegations.
There is no force on earth that can impose control over our people.
We tell Biden and the West that they must stop thinking about the future of Gaza.
The American administration bears full responsibility for the massacres committed in the Gaza Strip after the green light given to the occupation.
What is required today is to work to stop the aggression against our people immediately
We tell Netanyahu that our resistance will force you to pay the price in exchange for the release of your soldiers.
Rybar end of day November 7, 2023
spoiler
❗️ Escalation in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Zone - events leading up to November 7, 2023
The situation in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict zone remains tense. The IDF continues to carry out mass strikes in the Gaza Strip while attempting to advance north of the enclave’s capital. Clashes are occurring in the coastal area of Beit Lahia as well as on the border of the Al-Shati region.
There are ongoing clashes between the IDF and Hezbollah on the Lebanese border. Israeli artillery has burned out forests and olive groves along almost the entire border, from Labune to the village of Mays al-Jabal. Additionally, an IDF UAV attacked a Lebanese Armed Forces shooting range in the An-Nakura area.
Mass detentions of journalists, activist demonstrators, and other potential Hamas collaborators have once again taken place in the West Bank. Furthermore, Palestinian law enforcement officers, who are under the control of the autonomy government, conducted an operation to detain drug traffickers in the Jalazun camp near Ramallah. This operation resulted in a fairly large-scale shootout, which some media outlets reported as an attempt on the life of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
Hezbollah did 3 small strikes. Israel on the other hand struck the Lebanon side of the border 10 times.
how long until the idf runs out of tanks?
Blinken denounces civilian toll in Gaza, says ‘far too many Palestinians have been killed’
And the “No Shit Sherlock” award of 2023 goes to:
Macron, Macron, the guy who banned burqas and pro-Palestine protests, is calling for a ceasefire now.
Bernie still isn’t.
Did that nurse who had returned from Gaza and CNN interviewed her condemn Israel? The 8min interview that I saw on YT was her looking traumatized but also careful not to raise anything about Israel, IMO.
To be frank, her working with Doctors Without Borders, which is kind of organization that bad actors like CIA would exploit, is red flag for me. And then CNN bringing her for interview is just so sus to me. Tell me I’m wrong, I’m dying.
Key takeaways from the G7 meeting in Tokyo
Top diplomats of the G7 met in Tokyo today with the continuing war in Gaza high on the agenda. Here are the key takeaways from that meeting:
The ministers “unequivocally” condemned Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel and its subsequent rocket attacks, and emphasised Israel’s right to defend itself.
They expressed “deepest sympathy” for all civilians killed in the conflict so far.
The diplomats called for “humanitarian pauses” and for the creation of aid corridors, but stopped short of calling for a ceasefire.
The ministers denounced the rise in “extremist” settler violence in the occupied West Bank and expressed support for a two-state solution.
They also called on Iran to refrain from supporting Hamas and Hezbollah, and to use its influence to de-escalate regional tensions.
sounds productive
If an enterprising regional Resistance group were feeling courageous and looking to at least temporarily hobble the Israeli war machine, one might look towards hijacking a container ship that is entering the Suez and engineering another Ever Given incident, blocking the Suez. Israel’s main crude import terminal in Ashkelon has been closed since the start of the conflict, meaning it is relying on the Eilat oil import terminal. 60% of Israel’s crude oil comes from Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan by way of the Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline, with most of the rest of those imports coming from West Africa. Normally, the oil would be put onto tankers in Ceyhan in Turkey or in West Africa and shipped by sea to Ashkelon, where it would then be sent by pipeline to Ashdod or Haifa for refining. With the port of Ashkelon closed, the oil has to be sent through the Suez to Eilat, to then be sent by pipeline to Ashdod and Haifa. With the Suez blocked, the oil would have to go all the way around Africa to get to Eilat, which would delivery increase time and shipping costs.
The downside is that this would piss off the US, Israel, Egypt, Europe, and probably a bunch of GCC nations, so it would have to be done by a group that is already not on good terms with them.
Who will collapse first - Ukraine or Israel?
