SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him] @ SeventyTwoTrillion @hexbear.net

"Crises teasingly hold out the possibility of dramatic reversals only to be

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I just meant in the sense that both Syria and Burkina Faso are assaulted by rebel groups and the government doesn't control the whole territory. I trust Traore more than I do Assad, though.

Whereas Maduro does actually have control over all of Venezuela and it's not a flimsy control either, there is genuine popular support. It could obviously be better given Venezuela's economic problems causing internal strife, but I don't think it's particularly at risk of being successfully couped. And if it is, there would probably be a rapid reversal. The biggest danger is an outright military attack by the US or other countries in the region deciding to isolate them economically.

I don't think Syria and Venezuela are in the same conversation, you're comparing apples and ICBMs

Syria and Burkina Faso, on the other hand...

my sense of Assad is that:

1. he's kind of a moron, especially if he's refusing Iranian military aid
2. nonetheless, he has some supernaturally good survival skills
3. the accusations that the West have levied at him are in excess of his actual crimes
4. he's still done some legitimately bad things
5. he represents merely one faction in a sea of battling factions, and not the dominant one (certainly not anymore given what's happening)

I'm seeing reporting from The Cradle that the Syrian Army has set up defensive positions at Homs and are confident that they can defend the city, so I reckon we're looking at only a 12 hour collapse instead of a 6 hour one this time around. Hopefully they only lose 50 tanks without firing a shot today

It's genuinely remarkable that a country that remained relatively stable for a decade (at least, as stable as a country undergoing a civil war can be judged to be) then collapsed in a week. In retrospect there will have been a dozen signs, but nobody could have predicted the timescale. Rven if in October 2024 you were told "The Syrian government will one day collapse - what year do you think this will be?" I would have guessed like, early 2030s maybe.

It does give me hope that the situation in Israel can be made similarly unstable, and apparently a majority of Israelis believe that they have lost to Hezbollah which is encouraging despite us knowing that unless Hezbollah gets back into the fight, Israel will eventually annex South Lebanon under the guise of a "ceasefire".

Egypt is unpredictable to me; it's conventional wisdom that repression + bad economic conditions = revolution, but this equation only holds for the enemies of the US because they provide the agents and funding to topple the governments.

Popular protests never topple governments - it's actually a big part of why the US does colour revolutions, because it generates the idea that protests can topple governments when it was actually covert activity by the West that provided the impetus, which means that movements in the developed and developing world are inspired by them and do not become as militant, which means they can be more easily destroyed by pro-West government forces.

Well, if Iran and Russia go against their interests and do nothing then the Syrian government will indeed fall. Every day that goes by increases the pressure and yet they have so far not massively intervened beyond the usual airstrikes, so perhaps Putin and/or Pezeshkian are willing to let Assad fall and don't see a future where he can remain in charge.

My guiding geopolitical assumption is that countries and organizations follow their interests, and yet the last few weeks has put a real dent in that assumption. Either they are no longer following their interests for some reason, or they are, and are doing galaxy-brained strategies like signing ceasefires which equate to giving permission to ethnic cleansing, or letting your logistics be massively disrupted for some reason.

So under that model of reality, my current guess is that the rebel offensive is halted before they take Damascus and then reversed by Russian/Iraqi forces sent by Iran, resulting in a (faulty) return to the status quo pre-2024.

It's impossible to know exactly how much Iran manages to get through to Yemen via sea routes because they'd never tell us but I've been under the impression that Ansarallah's capabilities are mostly domestically supplied at this point, based on various statements by the government there

Nah, Russia and Iran have invested way too much into Syria over the last decade to allow Assad to fall; it would be akin to the US just deciding to let Israel fall if it looked like it was on the verge of political/military collapse

So I have concluded:

1. Israel has achieved its goal of detaching the Gaza and Lebanon fronts from each other. Nasrallah's doctrine is broken.
2. The "ceasefire" isn't a ceasefire; it's a continuation of Israeli policy to try and ethnically cleanse South Lebanon but with less Hezbollah resistance to the plan. Israel's bombings have not stopped. Nonetheless, both Lebanon and Hezbollah seem desperate for the ceasefire to hold, allowing many dozens of Israeli violations and continued bombing. This indicates that damage to Hezbollah and/or internal stability has been more substantial than I previously anticipated.
3. Israel has failed to achieve its goal of destroying Hezbollah and Hamas. It was forced to sign a ceasefire to prevent further attrition and is now going after Syria instead, as it is weaker than Hezbollah.
4. Israel probably intends to use the 60 day window to try and destroy Syria to disrupt Resistance supply lines. Israel will probably invade Syria from the Golan Heights at a pre-determined point to trap Damascus in a two-front battle and end Assad's government. If this fails due to Iraqi and Iranian involvement, then Israel may not restart the war with Hezbollah. If it succeeds and Assad is removed from power and HTS takes power (or there's a power vacuum), then Israel may try and go for Hezbollah once again.
5. Lebanon's official army will likely not be strong enough to stop an advance by Israel to the Litani River. If Hezbollah is intelligent, they will not meaningfully withdraw past the Litani until at least after the 60-day window. Ideally they'll never withdraw and keep substantial underground elements there. It would be quite possibly one of the worst military decisions in all of human history for Hezbollah to obey the command and evacuate its tunnels and soldiers in the coming days and weeks. If they do this, it means that Hezbollah has essentially been defeated in its stated objectives (protect South Lebanon and help Palestine; the second point is now fractured), without Israel even needing to endure Hezbollah's feared missile barrages, and Israel will likely succeed - at least temporarily - in annexing South Lebanon in the near future, as well as whatever they potentially grab in Syria. Hezbollah's continued existence is questionable if they have no reason to exist.
6. The ball is now in Iran's court. If they fumble the situation and are unwilling to counter the escalation with another escalation, it is possible that their regional allies will be systematically destroyed by bombing campaigns over the coming months and years. On the other hand, if Syria can be stabilized and Hezbollah kept resupplied by manpower and materiel, and they don't do anything stupid like withdrawing from South Lebanon, then Israel will have failed in its objectives and Zionism as a settler ideology will have been critically damaged. It is possible that the Lebanon and Gaza fronts could be reconnected under these conditions if Israel is even then unwilling to end the genocide and withdraw from Gaza, but given Hezbollah's general willingness to put up with Israeli bombings (aside from the occasional warning shot), it's equally possible that they will be unwilling to step up to help Palestine anymore as the damage may have been too great.

The Cradle: 60 days of uncertainty: Can the Israel–Hezbollah ceasefire hold out?

In the early hours of 27 November, the shaky ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hezbollah, brokered by the US and France, with widespread international and regional support, came into effect. The fragile truce was immediately met with skepticism by many Israelis – officials and civilians – who doubted their country’s ability to follow through.

Some officials openly labeled the deal a defeat against Hezbollah and placed the blame squarely on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for failing to achieve both the stated and hidden objectives of his war on Lebanon – particularly the goals of eliminating the resistance movement and returning hundreds of thousands of displaced settlers back to the north. A poll conducted by Israel's Channel 12 revealed that over 80 percent of Netanyahu’s support base opposed the ceasefire. Residents in northern Israel, many of whom were evacuated due to Hezbollah's strikes, also expressed outrage. Domestically, Israel was deeply divided over the agreement, with polls showing 37 percent supporting the ceasefire and 32 percent opposing it.

False sense of victory

The shock among Israeli elites following the prime minister's endorsement of the truce agreement was due to a false sense of victory. Netanyahu, along with former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, had misled them into believing that the Israeli military had destroyed 80 percent of Hezbollah’s missile capabilities, giving the impression that the Lebanese resistance movement was on the brink of collapse. Israelis watched in humiliation as Hezbollah prevented five enemy divisions from advancing more than three to five kilometers into Lebanese territory – an advance that was, anyway, tactically insignificant, as the divisions should have penetrated 20 kilometers deep.

Strategically, Hezbollah continued to target Israeli military assets well beyond the border, reaching as far as the Ashdod naval base, 150 kilometers inside Israel, and maintaining blistering attacks on key cities like Haifa and Tel Aviv. These strikes severely disrupted daily life inside the most populated centers of the occupation state, paralyzing military operations and showing Israel that eliminating Hezbollah was not a feasible war goal. Hezbollah’s missiles even reached Tel Aviv, reinforcing a "Beirut–Tel Aviv" deterrence equation. Netanyahu ultimately conceded that diplomacy was his only viable solution, particularly given the growing issues within the occupation military itself: exhaustion, injuries, munitions shortages, and limited progress.

Israel’s 60-day strategy

The unease within Israel over this agreement has led Netanyahu and new Defense Minister Israel Katz to direct the army to develop a new strategy within the next 60 days, a period stipulated in the agreement for Israel’s full withdrawal from Lebanese territory. This strategy involves two main actions: first, conducting targeted airstrikes on Hezbollah positions both inside and beyond the area south of the Litani River, and second, preventing Lebanese residents from returning to villages and towns within a 10-kilometer range of the border.

The airstrike directive is meant to reaffirm Israel's military freedom of action, in part to assure the Israeli public that occupation forces retain their ability to strike Hezbollah when necessary. This controversial clause, which Lebanon completely rejected, was part of private, unseen US guarantees to Tel Aviv, given without Beirut's consent. Netanyahu aims to portray Israel as having accepted the agreement from a position of strength while buying time until the five-member Monitoring Committee begins its work on addressing ceasefire violations. During the next 60 days, the presence of occupation forces in Lebanon will keep tensions high, requiring close monitoring of Hezbollah to ensure the security of these troops until their full withdrawal.

The decision to prevent Lebanese residents of border areas from returning to their homes aims to avoid an awkward contrast between the resettlement of southern Lebanese residents while the displacement of northern Israelis continues. Those optics would be politically damaging for the Israeli government.

Managing withdrawal and maintaining strength

In essence, the Israeli military’s strategy over the coming 60 days revolves around maintaining a veneer of strength and managing the delicate withdrawal process, which will conclude with the Lebanese army, in coordination with UNIFIL, taking full control of the region’s security. Afterward, the Monitoring Committee will enforce compliance with UN Resolution 1701, which prohibits Israeli military actions within Lebanon. This was confirmed by Hezbollah Secretary General Sheikh Naim Qassem in his last speech when he announced his commitment to the agreement and that coordination with the Lebanese army would be at the highest level.

If Israel insists on continuing to violate the agreement based on US guarantees that Lebanon has neither seen nor accepted – and continues to launch attacks under the oversight of the Monitoring Committee and its American chair, it could provoke a reciprocal response from Lebanon and possibly lead to a resumption of hostilities. Hezbollah has already fired a warning shot on 2 December, targeting Israeli-occupied Lebanese territory. This comes after Israel has violated the ceasefire dozens of times since it went into effect seven days ago. Tel Aviv responded disproportionately to the single Hezbollah retaliation, striking a number of sites across Lebanon. CNN itself admits, citing a UN peacekeeping source, to over 100 violations as of 3 December.

But both Israel and Lebanon need this agreement: their two-month military confrontation underscored that a continued war would only lead to further exhaustion and unsustainable losses on both sides. The ceasefire also came about due to international pressure, particularly from the US – a principal mediator – which sought to end a conflict that had become an embarrassment due to Israel’s disregard for international law and civilian lives. Despite ongoing violations, including artillery shelling, air raids, and drone activity, the agreement appears poised to stabilize the situation due to mutual necessity. For Israel, continued conflict would only lead to greater attrition, while Lebanon benefits from halting aggression and ensuring stability along the border.

Given these circumstances, it seems likely that the agreement will hold, benefiting all parties. Any violations should be addressed by the Monitoring Committee, which will aim to restore stability along the border, especially after the 60-day period and the full deployment of the Lebanese army.

The Resistance is not dismantled, and I would hesitate to even call it substantially damaged (compared to say, three months ago). Hezbollah still has plenty of escalation left to do with its missile stockpiles; things were worse in 2006 and yet they still won. Hamas is still operational, and Assad isn't (yet) defeated.

We are getting to the point in the conflict now where it's a contest of basic state survival between Israel and Iran. Israel is doing absolutely everything it can to survive, using every trick it has, calling in every favor from every terrorist group in the region, and Iran will have to join in and fight dirty too and they will possibly win. Or they won't meet the challenge, and therefore may well lose.

We all knew that as Israel got closer to defeat, they would bring down as many countries with it as possible. The rules would be increasingly thrown out. We are now in that phase. The Resistance must rise to the occasion or Israel risks limping out to survive a little while longer. It all now depends on how much Iran is truly willing to risk for their allies, and how much the Palestinian and anti-Israel cause genuinely means for them.

I don't believe Assad will fall and he'll probably get his territory back eventually - as in every single conflict nowadays, if it takes a day to lose a town to the imperialists then it'll take a year to re-take it. HTS will likely reach a point where their offensive becomes untenable to continue even with US and Israeli backing, with Russia bombing supply routes and headquarters; they don't strike me as a group as literally or figuratively embedded as Hamas is in Gaza or Hezbollah is in Lebanon.

What I do hope is that this is the final kick up the ass of the Iranians and even Russians to actually fucking do something meaningful. If there's a single critique I have of the Resistance Axis, it's that they are very slow, especially when they should be fast. The US and Israelis are somehow working at quintuple speed compared to everybody else. They zip from failure to success to failure, but at least they're zipping. Iran's first strike on Israel should have been in the same year of October 7th, and their second strike should have been in like, February. It shouldn't have taken a full year of genocide - 365 goddamn days - for them to realize that they'd maybe have to start seriously hitting Israel directly. Hezbollah was on that shit on October 8th, and Ansarallah, under some of the worst conditions on the planet, virtually the Haiti of the Middle East, was setting up their blockade within a couple months. Maybe if Putin stopped doing will-I-won't-I shit with threats to use nuclear weapons or conventional ones against NATO forces in Ukraine or whatever, and instead did something actually productive and drop a few Oreshniks on HTS sites a month ago (as I presume the Russians of all superpowers with pretty competent intelligence agencies had some idea of what was soon to occur in Syria), then maybe the US would have truly realized that Putin wasn't fucking around anymore.

We all know that it won't propel the Iranians to do anything which is the most frustrating part, possibly. I'm not accusing them of doing nothing, I'm actually probably Iran's strongest defender in the news megathread, they are a critical part of the Resistance and Palestine might well have fallen without them and their influence being more covert shouldn't mean that they're underappreciated. But, like, the United States, thousands of miles away, has taken more substantial hits for their allies in the past year than Iran has for their's, in the same goddamn region. I think we all have issues with Putin's conduct of the Ukraine War, but at least he had the balls to directly start a war despite all the consequences instead of continuing to meekly supply arms and the odd piece of intel to the Donbass while the Ukrainians kept murdering them.

I don't think Iran should necessarily start a direct war with Israel or the US, the nukes make that an unbelievably risky move, but the Iranian government is gonna reach a point similar to the Russian government where they realize that it's either take a stand now and possibly win, or stand by and watch as their allies are picked apart and they are left alone against a region full of either US allies or countries that have been bombed and ripped apart internally by "rebel forces". Not necessarily this year or the next, but at some point. The Russians watched NATO militarily march to their borders over the course of a few decades and finally had enough. When will Iran have that same breaking point? Will Assad have to fall? Will Iraq and Yemen? Will Hezbollah? Will every Palestinian have to die or be exiled? If Hamas does eventually fall or become too damaged to stop their activity in Gaza, will Iran be like "Hm, yes, well... we've received the latest dispatch from the Israelis and they seem intent to sign a deal with us to establish a committee on the possibility of eventually discussing the possibility of starting a bipartisan super-committee on the prospects of eventually signing a deal to..." How many Minsks will Tehran need to go through before they realize that the US is actually and truly agreement-incapable?

And jesus fucking christ, we'll have to go through the same process AGAIN with China and Taiwan. Can't wait for Xi or whoever's in charge by then to agree to pause the Taiwan offensive in exchange for XYZ and then have the US betray the deal by sending in arms to Taiwan and then do that another three times before the Chinese government realizes that no, there CANNOT be any agreement with the United States. Every single group or country - with the exception of like, Ansarallah and Hamas, if only out of necessity - seems to be totally unable of observing the process other countries go through and have to be forced to painstakingly learn that the US will NEVER play fair.

America might well survive another hundred years SOLELY because every anti-imperialist force will go through a three-decade process where they sign like five Minsk Agreements with their own Israels/Taiwans/Ukraines and it takes an entire generation to internalize that the only language that America understands is overwhelming and terrifying brutality and violence. Meanwhile, every decade, another 50 million people are dead in either wars or climate disasters. The incoming decades might well be characterized by governments moving glacially while crises arrive and compound year-after-year, until they either undergo revolution or break into a dozen warring mini-states.

as predicted by many in the News Megathread. The immortal science takes another easy point

This can't even be attributed to Marxism, this is a combination of 1) having a memory that lasts more than 3 days, and 2) the ability to perform the kind of basic pattern recognition that an earthworm probably possesses.

Anybody who didn't think this would be the outcome and that the West would report honestly if Israel broke the ceasefire first are gonna get fast-tracked into the re-education camps, but deep down I'm not sure if it's possible to save them. If Hezbollah didn't think this would happen and didn't plan for this exact outcome and another five steps in advance past this point when they signed the "ceasefire", this war's already over because whoever's in the top command will probably forget how to breathe air and keel over.

It's always very funny when they're like "omg, the authoritarian Chinese Communist Party is unwilling to display images that are even mildly critical of their regime, hence the censorship in this film" when almost every large cultural product in the West is produced by tightly-controlled American media funded and advised by the military and similar organizations. There's no post-production censorship in America because it's pre-censored, nothing gets made which is genuinely critical of the US, its armies, its police, and/or intelligence agencies.

The best you can do is satire and everybody-here-sucks cynicism where the "subversive" message is that a plucky CIA agent is actually only a little less of a scumbag than the terrorist leader (inevitably named something like Muhammed al-Islam Jihadi) using that classic trope where the villain talks about how they and the hero are the same deep down.

Sure, I get that angle hypothetically, perhaps it might cause some people inside Lebanon who already hate Hezbollah to blame them even more and work against them, but what was the reason for Hezbollah agreeing to it in the first place? "Oh no, the West might believe that we're terrorists if we don't sign this deal!"? They already believe that! They've pumped weapons into Israel dedicated to your explicit and total destruction as an organisation for years! You aren't gonna get Biden or Macron to be like "Aw jeez, Netanyahu, I really liked that Nasrallah fella, please stop violating the ceasefire." They already hate you, there's nothing you can really do to make them hate you even more, so there's no reason to sign a ceasefire if you know that a) it's going to get broken by Israel, and b) when it does break, they'll blame you for it.

For Hamas, the only time a ceasefire occurred, it actually did have a tangible outcome, because it allowed an exchange of Palestinian and Israeli hostages. Even if we all knew that Israel would just go arrest another 10,000 Palestinians for the crime of walking down the street in their own neighbourhoods, there was at least something everybody could point at there as being the point of it. For this ceasefire, all that appears to be happening is that Israel has... maybe turned down the bombing a little? They're still bombing and firing at Lebanese people, though. If Hezbollah calculated that they could go no further without Lebanon descending into civil war and had to sue for peace, then they might as well just hunker down now and not bother militarily responding to Israel because the same people who would have fought against Hezbollah for not signing the deal will now fight against Hezbollah for signing the deal and then "breaking" it (after Israel has broken it a dozen times).

On the other side, the reason for Israel signing the deal is also quite confusing if they didn't actually intend to meaningfully change strategy regardless of what a piece of paper says, they might as well have just kept up the charade of being just one week away from a deal for the next straight year, like the strategy is with Hamas. What, it might boost world opinion of Israel to sign a ceasefire? Let me know when World Opinion develops anti-air technology or can fire missiles at Israeli military sites.

“During the Vietnam War... every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.”

Makes me wonder what the point of the ceasefire even was, from the Israeli side especially but also Lebanon's side. Like, I'm sorry, the West has proved itself agreement-incapable for centuries. Fool me once, shame on you. fool me five million, six hundred and forty one thousand, five hundred and four times, shame on-- you can't get fooled again.

It's why some commentators saying things like, to paraphrase, "There's a new system of warfare that America is using - they've turned even diplomacy into a weapon of war" - it always makes me scoff. There might be something there about how Israel has been uniquely targetting journalists and medical workers when those people have usually been allowed a significant degree of protection - prior to 2023, the idea of just straight-up firing at and killing somebody in a very visible PRESS vest, regardless of whether they're on the enemy side, would have been seen as pretty abhorrent and the domain only of universally-agreed-to-be terrorist organizations like ISIS (at least, universally agreed outside of Western intelligence agencies) - but diplomacy has been a subsection of warfare for thousands of years. It's how you do violent atrocities, ethnic cleansing, backstabbing deals, etc if you don't physically want to get blood on your hands. Diplomacy is and has always been a critical part of domination.

Next megathread here.

Personally, I'm staying out of engaging with the doom spiral (neither joining nor opposing it) and will probably get back to posting when Syria inevitably does not fall.

It's Kharkiv all over again, and I've learned my lesson from that. I'd have hoped we would have all practiced some self-discipline over the years but given how several people have gone from "We're winning, Israel is being fucking owned, we will all live to see a free Palestine" to "Well, that's it I suppose. Aleppo has been PERMANENTLY taken, every victory is transient and every defeat is irreversible, we're losing, we were always losing, Israel stands victorious on the battlefield over the corpses of a million Muslims" merely over the course of a week, I suppose not.

We go from "Don't panic if Israel manages to push all the way to Tyre in a week, this is a guerrilla war and Israel has been defeated in Lebanon before thanks to Hezbollah" to "Actually, never mind, Israel is barely able to occupy the first line of villages" to then establishing that as the new baseline of expectations and going "Israel being forced into a ceasefire without achieving a single objective actually indicates that they're winning outright." Some of us may espouse ourselves as calm and collected Marxist/anarchist analysts, and yet we all descend into frenzies of unjustified pessimism (or, indeed, optimism) whenever anything happens. I partially include myself in this characterization, hence my earnest attempt to disengage from the discussion around Syria until the picture has been elucidated, hopefully by next weekend. I've made jokes before about how I should only allow myself to talk about events that are a minimum of a week old, to prevent my emotions clouding things; since the Lebanon ceasefire began, I've since looked at the situation and shifted position from that it's a mild Israeli victory to that it's a mild Hezbollah victory.

Either the fundamentals for Resistance victory are there or they are not. Hindsight gives us the ability to determine which side in a conflict was, in some way, "winning" all along because of the assemblage of factors that eventually brought about their victory. The Soviets retreating their forces back most of the way to Moscow, and their factories past the Urals, was a short term defeat but was one of the reasons why they were eventually able to win; if the Soviets had insisted on not retreating then that might have been a "victory" or at least stalemate but would have resulted in their ultimate destruction.

I'm not claiming that the situation in Syria is remotely analogous, merely making a more general statement on how the victories and defeats of both the Resistance and, importantly, Israel can be totally reclassified over time and with additional context. Even the words "defeat" and "victory" imply at least a degree of finality; really I should be saying something like "positive/negative developments." Things are always in motion, never settled, and it's tempting to ignore that in times of emotional duress, hence why I've been more strictly controlling my usage of the internet over the last two months and been posting less. Even if Palestine achieves a state, the forces of reaction will then try and take it from them and destroy it. Even if Israel kills everybody in Gaza and Syria is toppled, the forces of revolution will continue to assemble against Israel, with neoliberal contradictions continuing and China's ascension bringing Russia and Iran upwards with it. There will be no finality until communism - well, even then, contradictions unforeseen by Marx will keep biting at the heels of humanity.

Regarding that last point, yeah when looking at it without cope from my side, yeah we lost.

I don't think that's true necessarily, it's true that Israel failed to achieve their goals, it's just that (depending on the terms of the agreement, whether the ceasefire holds, etc etc) the Resistance might have also failed to achieve their goals, so we're now in an uncomfortable no-man's-land where we don't really know who will be doing better in 5, 10, 20 years time. "Existence is resistance" is like lesser-evilism: it's only a decent slogan/strategy when used to withstand a single discrete event - it doesn't get you anywhere in the long term. You still exist after every conflict, sure, but you're stuck in a time loop of genocide and flawed recovery. Adherence to a strategy of "Let's bloody the nose of Israel to try and shock them into achieving our statehood, an-- fuck, every building just got levelled again and another hundred thousand of our people are dead. Well, let's strike a deal to get them off our land and end the war and return to the status quo, I guess" will lead to a 9th Intifada in 2076, with a few hundred Palestinians wandering the moon-cratered surface of the fenced-in Gaza Desert guarded by a hundred thousand Boston Dynamics murderbots.

Unless Israel has suddenly decided that it's going to make good on promises vis a vis Gaza that it has rejected for a year, I struggle to see how this isn't a temporary ceasefire dressed up as a permanent one. And I see a less than 0% chance that Israel will seriously consider Palestinian statehood - they aren't even off the position of "There should no longer be Palestinians at all, kill every one of them."

Is the Israeli government actually going to decide to withdraw fully from Gaza, let aid in unrestricted, provide resources to rebuild the place, etc? What happens when Trump assumes office, and/or if Israel starts going after the West Bank? e.g. are there any guarantees that the Resistance has extracted from Israel to prevent them from saying "actually, nah" when asked to start rebuilding Gaza, or are we purely going off their word? It's the problem with making the issue about "merely" ending the genocide and withdrawing troops from Gaza and rebuilding it - if Israel then does that, does Hamas go "Alright, sweet! Time to prep for our next Oct7 in 15 years time against a triple-strengthened Gaza envelope with quantum computer algorithms alerting 50,000 soldiers the second that a drone hits a camera! Who's buying the paragliders?"

I sure hope the Resistance is getting a better deal out of it than "Congratulations! We're returning to the pre-Oct7 status quo, but with hundreds of thousands of our own people dead, most of Gaza a crumbling ruin, significant amounts of Lebanon bombed to pieces, a Lebanese refugee crisis to unravel, and several dead officials to replace!" or in the grand scheme of things, I would have to say the last year has been an Israeli W. Not a big W - Israel and Zionism have been substantially damaged both socially, economically, and militarily, and the end of the settler-colonial project has been accelerated - but when I tally everything up, Gaza and Lebanon are probably coming out of this worse than Israel is if it's a return to the status quo and the war+genocide ends here. It's obviously not my place to judge their decisions, they're actually in the goddamn war and have been committed to Israel's destruction for generations, but until we see the full terms of the deal, I am skeptical.