https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-12-29/ty-article/.premium/catch-24-israel-is-caught-in-a-strategic-trap/0000018c-b19e-d014-a3cd-bb9edd900000
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Hamas proved to be a very tough and innovative group. The occupation forces are facing tougher fighters and losing equipment and soldiers in a way they haven’t lost against any Arab army before. A reminder that in 1967 they took Sinai in 6 days, yet can’t take the Gaza Strip in almost 3 months. Hamas has popular support and the only way for the settlers to win is to kill every last Palestinian, exiles too, or at least reduce them to a negligible minority a la US, Canada and Australia. Any other outcome is a win for the Palestinians even if they expel them to Sinai.
The problem for them though, and as much as they have tried to separate Palestinians from other Arabs, they will still be in a fragile situation surrounded by people they have drove to hate them -Arabs witnessing the genocide have no desire to coexist with the settlers- and still highly dependent on US aid for its existence. The moment the US stops bankrolling Israel, is the day it stops existing. This war disproved the lie that Israel is strong, independent and an asset to the US. How long can the US maintain a liability and a drain?
The actions of the Yemeni government reflects the will of the people, and the blockade has shown the fragility of the occupation’s economy. If Arab countries were democracies or at least not corrupt collaborators there would have been armies marching to Palestine by now. Sooner or later, more honest Arab governments will come into power and the Zionist settlers will find themselves overwhelmed and isolated.
"Modern" armies have 0 ground skills, this is why they always get their asses kicked in ground invasions and have to rely completely on bombing campaigns.
Iraq war? (2003 US invasion of Iraq)
2003 invasion of Iraq ended in total US occupation of Iraq after just a bit more than 1 month of fighting.
That was mostly an air campaign against a disorganized Iraqi army across the flattest, most open, terrain imaginable. If anything, NATO countries learned the wrong lessons from Iraq because recent conflicts point to air power being insufficient to destroy the enemy if there's cities or other terrain to fight over.
Most of the Iraqi army didn't fight at all. Their commanders were heftily bribed beforehand by the Americans. For all intents and purposes the US didn't even fight a real war, they were faced with an opponent that largely didn't fight back or even turned on their own. It is however indicative of how a real war would have gone that the few Iraqi units that did fight and put up resistance by all accounts caused a huge amount of problems for the American units that were supposed to just steamroll over them, and almost threw their entire plan into disarray.
This "war" also followed a decade of strangulating sanctions on the heels of another war intentionally provoked by the West in which the Iraqi forces were badly mauled when the US persuaded Iraq to retreat out of Kuwait with the promise that they wouldn't engage the retreating troops but proceeded to bomb the shit out of them anyway. And this after Iraq had already been fighting a devastating years long conflict against Iran, instigated by the Americans and fueled by European and American weapons for the specific purpose of weakening both countries.
So yeah, it's easy fighting a crippled nation that doesn't put up a fight, it's different when you are faced with an enemy that actually fights back as they learned in Vietnam and Afghanistan, no matter how technologically superior you think you are.
They also got lucky that sectarian violence amongst groups (incited by the US) took a lot of the heat off them. If they had united, it may have very well been different. You need a national liberation struggle to unite people for this reason.
Kind of reminds me of how the Nazis rolled over a France riven with sectarian fighting so they concluded that kicking in the door with a tank spearhead would always make the whole house fall down. That, and a deep-rooted racism, made the Germans utterly unprepared for the USSR fighting tooth and nail the whole way.
TBH, the main reason for France's defeat wasn't sectarian fighting, it was that Allied command literally sent better half of their army straight into the trap, expecting Germans to repeat 1914. And then they were encircled and crushed.
it's a very nazi type of idiocy to loudly shout for 10-20 years that you'll murder every slav from poland to the pacific, and then get caught with your pants down when they really really dont want that to happen.
meanwhile, most of the french could expect life to more or less go on under nazi rule. they could afford to surrender.
They had no air force, their artillery were stilling ducks if they fired a single shot (between the AWACS and Counter Battery units attached to the Armored Cavalry) and the goal wasn't to pacify an entire country's worth of population it was to 1) fight any organized military resistance and 2) capture Baghdad.
(Unpopular statement incoming) I was with the invasion forces and at that time, most of the forward combat units actually were making an effort to limit civilian casualties and not damage critical infrastructure and places where civilians would be congregating even if there was a decent chance that they were being used by Iraqi military forces.
Most places weren't all that well defended. Any cities that had dug in troops were bypassed if it looked like it was going to take too long and mess up the time tables to "get to Baghdad".
It wasn't until the invasion was "over" and the occupation started that shit quickly hit the fan.
Do you mean that this non pro-Israeli government media is Hamas? If you say Al-Jazeera as Hamas, for which they are supporting Hamas, I get it. But, Haaretz is more of a left and liberal news media. Just because it doesn't support what Bibi does, it doesn't mean it is part of them Hamas.
It's ironic you have an Ukrainian flag next to your handle. Ukrainians tend to adore Israel.
That aside, many Israelis already accuse anybody of views sufficiently different from them, like this newspaper, of being allied to Hamas and whatever else.
Do you really think there would be an unironic Ukrainian-flag-waver on lemmygrad? Ukrainian SR, absolutely, but not the blue and yellow.
Yeah, can't agree with that. Ukrainian society is fucked up, but I fail to see how changing the flag and trying, say, to restore some formal entity from USSR would make things better.
Also it's administratively still quite close to an SSR, more than Russia.
It's not about revanchism but what the better aspects of their heritage are. The current government rejects the SR and endlessly lionizes the OUN and shit like that.
Being "closer to a SR than the Russian Federation is" is like being "closer to a house than an elephant is," it's not a useful comparison. Only the most braindead moron takes Russia's side believing it's still anything like the SR (contrary to some weird "anti-tankie" claims), they support it for other reasons like, idk, being more accepting of ethnic pluralism or being preferred by Donbas or not lionizing actual perpetrators of the Holocaust.
The current government rejects the SR
Legally it's very appreciative of it. Ukraine is probably the only ex-USSR state which hasn't just discarded anything Soviet as "legacy of occupation" or whatever else in legal domain, where it matters.
And, of course, the "recognized borders" and so on they just love.
and endlessly lionizes the OUN and shit like that.
How do I say that ... Some of the Ukrainian patriotic songs which you can find on YouTube or somewhere else, performed and recorded and popular and known in the USSR, had authors from those nationalist organizations.
USSR's policy on nationalism since after WWII in every republic was controlling and directing it. Plenty of historical revisionism of today in ex-USSR takes root in official historiography of Soviet republics.
Making OUN itself etc heroes was, yes, something out of mainstream in the USSR. But it doesn't make for a contrast.
it’s not a useful comparison
In the context I started this comment with - it is.
like, idk, being more accepting of ethnic pluralism
It's not. It's about the same. In many cases worse.
or being preferred by Donbas
That's history. If you can somehow assemble all the refugees and people who left the area since 2014 and have a vote, I'm pretty certain you won't get any signs preference for Russia.
or not lionizing actual perpetrators of the Holocaust
Yeah, just employing neo-Nazi volunteer battalions like DShRG "Rusich".
It’s ironic you have an Ukrainian flag next to your handle.
To quote Rafiki: "Look harder" ;)
Ah. Well, I still don't agree Ukraine is recyclable and other waste, it is still a country, even though I don't like the way its society works, but then I'm looking at that all from Russia which is worse (not much, though).
Is Hamas or anyone actually fighting back on a level of it being a threat? Don't get me wrong but all I see from Palestinian pages on Instagram is just slaughter of Palestinians. Maybe a few incidents in which some groups fought back for a while but nothing major it seems.
Israel is suffering a lot of losses, even they're starting to admit it now. They're stuck doing door to door combat in Gaza, and this negates a lot f their tech advantage. On telegram there have been lots of videos from Al Qassam brigades showing attacks on Israeli tanks as well as soldiers. I'm guessing this is the kind of stuff that never makes it to Instagram.
It's like everywhere else on western controlled social media. The videos can make it onto the platform but then they get taken down. The Electronic Intifada on YouTube has a few good videos where they talked about censorship of Palestinian voices (including the resistance) on social media.
On a side note, I highly recommend the Electronic Intifada, probably one of the best media outlets on coverage for this in my opinion.
Israel lost lots of tanks and armored vehicles, either completely or partially destroyed, more than they lost in prior wars except for 1973. A total of 825 up to 2 days ago according to Abu Obaida. An average of 10 armored vehicles daily. You can begin to imagine how many soldiers have been killed or severely wounded.
Lots of this have been happening https://youtu.be/hQrkspXDwdg the occupation's tanks are sitting ducks. Their army is only good at bombing civilians from a far. Their tactic so far was to kill as many civilians as possible and hope they turn against Hamas, not happening, instead Hamas's popularity grew stronger in Palestine and across the Arab World.
Pay attention to the tactics of the resistance. We may need to use them one day.
Absolutely they are, all of the Resistance Brigades from Hamas to PFLP have been defeating ground incursions by the IOF, like, badly. They are masters of guerilla warfare with their tandem RPG rounds, taking out dozens of IOF armor per campaign. The Resistance posts videos daily basically: Example
These videos are so popular that the IOF has been making their own copies where they are killing windows and chairs
This is like if the nazis had bombed Stalingrad and then insisted on driving their tanks in anyway,
These videos are so popular that the IOF has been making their own copies where they are killing windows and chairs
reactionaries and swinging at chairs, name a more iconic duo
Not sure but it's possibly a tactic as many of the tanks have a trophy system that can shoot down one rocket. If the second reaches the plates it blows a hole into the cabin and we've seen some pics of the mess that gets made inside.
There's been a lot of coverups on the part of the zionists in terms of hiding deaths and injuries (various hospitals reporting thousands of injuries alone). There's a lot of arabic media youtube channels that show resistance fighting back and there's subreddits like Askmiddleeast which have plenty of resistance combat footage. The fact that the zionists are pulling back their ground forces should indicate where the current state of the siege on gaza is.
I like to imagine the paper starts to smoulder more and more while the tiger tries to hide it. We can only hope that those embers light into flames and poof goes the paper.
Any resistance video is taken down if it gets posted, mad narrative control is happening on social media.
I've been following the resistance telegram groups to get updates.
