Bulletins and News Discussion from November 6th to November 12th, 2023 - Apartheid Antony's Asinine Adventure

...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.

If you have evidence of Israeli crimes and atrocities that you wish to preserve, there is a thread here in which to do so.

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.

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It's surreal to watch people I knew in High School post about Palestine. The same people that heard bullshit propaganda with me. I can't help to feel the tide is changing. Question is what can we do with the tide changing? Our government is a tidal wall.
- Entirely anecdotal of course but I don’t know a single “normal” person under 40 who supports Israel. Was partying last weekend and one new guy said he was part Israeli, literally every person in the room just starred at him for a moment until he said “don’t worry guys I support Palestine”. There have been increasingly large pro-palestinian protests in my irrelevant shitstain midwest city every single weekend, not a pro Israel rally in sight.
  Honestly never seen such a significant gap between the foreign policy of my country and what the vast majority of people want and believe in. Tide definitely changing, hopefully it continues.
  
  Yeah. I see quite a few people I know don't really trust Hamas. Basically 20+ years of Islamophobic propaganda and our own experiences with religious people in charge, but even they are saying they get their militancy when seeing what Israel will do to Palestinians.
  Also yeah there is an Israeli guy that my group knows. Nice guy to us, but as I warned my friends, just wait until Palestine comes up, and I was right. Insta feed around the 7th was all Israeli propaganda, however he seems to have shut up now.
- I’ve said many times that unless there is a left wing movement that can channel the protest energy into direct action, nothing will get done.
  Remember when everyone thought Bernie’s momentum was unstoppable, and Biden wasn’t even in the top 3? In just a few months that energy had all but dissipated.
  Remember when BLM seemed like it was going to achieve something? In a few months everyone had forgotten about it.
  It’s the same here. In a few months everyone will get distracted by something new (Taiwan?), then they’d jump on to the next trendy and flashy stuff and quickly forget the last thing they had followed.
  This is why organization is so important. The left failed to capture that energy during COVID, during BLM, during the Ukraine War, this is why the ruling class is not afraid of leftist opposition and protests in this country.
  
  Again, the only solution to this is to build up working class institutions. Go to where the masses are. Unionize. Join the DSA.
  Don't do it alone, find other radicals and caucus with them inside of these institutions, but Join them. We need to build organs of working class power.
  
  Honestly I don’t even know what you can do with this. There are some groups blockading shipments of weapons, and even though they ultimately get shipped, I would say it’s progress from simple chants. But those typically involve a lot more vetting and secrecy, so I’m not sure how you’re gonna involve the masses.
  Another is dockworkers in Barcelona refusing to ship weapons. This doesn’t involve too much secrecy and vetting, but you’ll need a union leadership that’s staunchly against Israel and not just worried about the company’s employees’ rights in a vacuum. Unless your organization already has this leadership, I don’t think telling someone to just join an org will be too useful for this instance because it takes time to rise through the ranks.
  I have a hard time imagining a Lockheed plant being bombed (even if they deserve worse) in today’s age. I know some Brits have sabotaged IDF plants, but see the first point. I guess my point is that I’m unable to see what direct action will be effective outside of marginally inconveniencing the ruling class
  
  The problem with left wing organizations in the West is that they don’t have a strategy. They don’t have a strategy because they are unwilling to engage with theory. The most they can do is merely reacting to the global events.
  We’ve seen this with COVID - the left had no strategy even when there was a global pandemic going on giving them a golden opportunity to push for what they had been advocating for years.
  Releasing statements condemning the war and killing is not strategy. Organizing protests is not strategy. You need to know exactly how to achieve your political goals, both short and long term planning.
  Lenin had a strategy. Mao had a strategy. Strategies established using the framework developed by Marx and Engels. That’s why their movements succeeded (or at the very least, have a realistic chance of succeeding). Gramsci also had a strategy, and almost succeeded, unfortunately they were crushed by the fascists.
  This is why theory is so important. You can organize if you don’t have theory to guide your movement, but it won’t go anywhere even when you have a strong support from the workers. Similarly, theory alone doesn’t get anything done unless you have the capacity to organize. Gramsci called this praxis.
  For example, Mao was OBSESSED with land reform. He was convinced of the revolutionary potential that land reform could unleash from the Chinese peasantry, even when the Chinese communists were down to ~1000 party cadres during the Long March.
  The Chinese communists won not because the KMT nationalists were militarily inferior, but because the KMT did not anticipate the revolutionary potential unleashed by Mao’s land reform. Mao changed the game completely in the early 20th century China - now, suddenly, you find yourself playing by their rules, the tables have turned.
  
  I have a hard time imagining a Lockheed plant being bombed
  We are at least one generation away from something like that happening. Probably more. It will happen eventually, but until it does nothing will come of these protests.
  
  Oh yeah, the movement void is an issue.

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