Image is of a Hezbollah missile attack on a military camp west of Jenin.
The situation between Hezbollah and Israel is rapidly escalating, with massive bombing campaigns on southern Lebanon by Israel predominantly on civilians (as the tunnels in South Lebanon are mostly unreachable to the Zionists, just like in Gaza), while Hezbollah and its allies respond with missile attacks predominantly on Israeli military facilities. Israel is spreading an evacuation order to the residents of southern Lebanese villages while also bombing their routes of escape and civilian infrastructure, similar to a terror tactic used widely in Gaza.
Northern Israel is currently under military censorship to hide their losses, so we get very little information other than what the Resistance provides and what videos and images get through the censors.
I don’t know if Israel will dare a ground incursion soon, but it seems fairly likely in the coming days or weeks.
Please check out the HexAtlas!
The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
Last week’s thread is here.
Israel-Palestine Conflict
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA 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.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
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.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
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.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
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 Telegram Channels:
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.
Trying to determine the extent to which the US and Israel actually differ has been a real headache for me. We can obviously ditch all the performative nonsense about how “Biden is VERY unhappy at Netanyahu who is using the bombs the US gave them, as Biden had been informed they’d instead be recycled into plowshares and fireworks!” but I haven’t yet seen a convincing angle for how the US benefits from a regional war.
It’s often stated that the US benefits from spreading chaos wherever it goes, but that’s only true if they don’t have more to lose from spreading that chaos - the deep state aren’t like, inciting riots every week inside Washington DC because they think it would be a bit of a laugh and they just love doing chaotic things like the goshdarned Joker, because there would be no point. Internal chaos, and chaos inside their allies (to a certain extent) is ruthlessly crushed. Losing Israel, naval resources (at a time where US shipyards aren’t exactly performing at their peak) and/or oilfields in friendly monarchies doesn’t seem like a worthy trade to potentially getting to bomb the shit out of Iran (I doubt that an invasion is possible - from where? Naval invasions are famously difficult to do even on a medium scale. How long will a land/sea invasion take to set up? Are the resources actually available? Is the manpower? etc) I don’t think the US is getting pulled into anything, I think it’s getting trapped and is struggling to find a way out of the situation that simultaneously keeps Israel intact and weakens their enemies, when both might not be possible and they’ll have to choose one or the other.
The best case scenario for the US is that most of the Middle East including Israel lies in ruins, Iran is destroyed as a political force for decades to come and/or is directly under a Western-backed dictatorship (how stable would that be?) after the whole Iranian army is somehow destroyed, oil markets are completely fucked but maybe domestic supplies and a quick deal with Venezuela and Russia means that things that require oil don’t entirely collapse, hopefully only a small part of your navy has been sunk, and hopefully it took only a few years and a relatively small number of men (and doesn’t follow in the footsteps of Iraq and Afghanistan) to destroy, invade, or otherwise “placate” Iran. Congratulations - the entire time, China has been getting stronger and, fuck, they’ve probably almost reached chip parity with Taiwan or something. You now have to recover from that war to try and take on an even more powerful China, your true enemy, with depleted resources. It’s not geopolitically viable.
It’s a good point, but I think we have to be open to the idea that the people running the show are not rational, not intelligent, and perhaps even in the throes of hubris. Perhaps they have an exaggerated sense of their own capability and a mistaken belief in the power of their bombs and drones. Maybe they think they can defeat Iran easily, even if their generals tell them otherwise. And they believe that they need to clear the board before engaging with China, to pick off China’s potential allies ahead of time.
The only evidence I can give for this hypothesis is that they do seem to believe that by giving Ukraine an unlimited number of missiles, that Ukraine can expel Russia from its borders. That is without going into the absurd predictions being made at the onset of the war about Russia’s imminent total economic and industrial collapse. They have not (recently) proven themselves as being able to, uh, calculate.
I think they’ve known China has outflanked them in a structural way for a while now, as in China is using the contradictions produced by the global capitalist order to its advantage in a way the US can’t respond as effectively to as it has past adversaries, and in a way that has structural momentum for China.
If I were a decision maker in this apparatus and my negative goal was to prevent China from taking advantage in this way, while my positive goal was to entrench the capitalist order as an American hegemony for another hundred years at least, then I would see eventually a direct war with China is inevitable because the US can’t outright overcome the structural momentum China has. I think specifically because the type of crises that are mounting and will continue to increase are best navigated by a coordinated, centralized apparatus that the financial interests driving the Western blob hegemon see as more an existential threat than the crises themselves.
Once I see that, I think it’s as simple as, create chaos through proxies worldwide as best as I can, with the aim to both isolate China and control its emerging allies. Because the inevitable fight is only winnable if the “Eastern”/Global South is exhausted. Destroy the playing field before the game