Palestine Open Thread 2024-192

News & views related to the war in Palestine ...

Ukraine Open Thread 2024-191

News & views related to the war in Ukraine ...

The MoA Week In Review - OT 2024-190

Last week's posts on Moon of Alabama:

• Aug 5 - Markets Down - Risks Up
  Related:
  - A tale of two bubbles - Asia Times
  - Geopolitical Risk and Decoupling: Evidence from U.S. Export Controls - New York Fed

• Aug 6 - Gaza As A New(?) Western Method To Wage War
  Related:
  - The Radicalization of Israel’s Military - New Yorker
  - The World Court has ended the Oslo ruse - Mondoweiss
  - U.S. will fund Israeli unit accused of gross human rights abuses - Washington Post
  - Israel’s use of ‘dirty diplomacy’ to force the resistance to surrender - E.J. Magnier
  - Amnesty investigation claims US-made weapon used in two Israeli airstrikes in Gaza that killed 43 civilians - CNN

Ori Goldberg @ori_goldberg - 9:01 UTC · Aug 10, 2024

1/ The massacre at the Al-Taba'een school is a crime and a horror. It is genocide. Leaving civilians no choice but to take refuge at a school and then bombing it is a crime even if Yahya Sinwar was hiding in the building. How does such dehumanization come into being? --->
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8/ This is what we've been doing since there was an "us" here. In the name of "security" we have been establishing supremacy. We would be secure when "they" knew and accepted that their place was out of our sight. They were here at our indulgence. The whole thing was ours. --->

• Aug 7 - Ukraine SitRep: Incursion Towards Kursk
• Aug 9 - Ukraine SitRep: Kursk Campaign Designed To Keep War Going
  Related:
  - The logic of Ukraine’s Kursk offensive - Spectator
  - Ukraine gambles with Kursk invasion of Russia - Asia Times
  - Invading Russia is Zelensky’s riskiest decision yet (archived) - The Times

> President Zelensky’s personal fingerprints are all over it. It’s been an open secret in Kyiv for many months that the president was pressing his military chiefs to launch a summer offensive.

Given Ukraine’s manpower and resources problems, they were hesitant. But Zelensky is desperate to reverse the narrative that Ukraine is losing its war. <

• Aug 10 - The Sanctions Are Working

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Other issues:

Cont. reading: The MoA Week In Review - OT 2024-190

The Sanctions Are Working

In March 2022 I predicted some consequences of the sanctions imposed on Russia:

The first [map] shows the countries which banned Russian airplanes from their airspace. Russia in turn denied its airspace to operators from those countries. It will cost quite a bit for U.S. and EU airlines as their flight times and cost to and from Asia, which typically fly through Russian airspace, will now increase. Carriers from Asian countries will now easily out-compete U.S. and European airlines on these routes.

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As British media reported yesterday:

Cont. reading: The Sanctions Are Working

Ukraine SitRep: Kursk Campaign Designed To Keep War Going

The (former) President of Ukraine Vlodomir Zelenski recently made some ambivalent remarks about potential peace talks:

Volodymyr Zelensky told the newspaper "Le Monde" that he does not rule out holding a referendum on the future of Ukrainian territories to end the war, but "it requires the will of the Ukrainian people."
...
According to the president of the country, Ukraine should not liberate all its territories by "force and weapons," because this option "costs us a lot of time and human lives." Zelensky added: - We can return our territories through diplomatic means.

This is another groundbreaking statement from the Ukrainian leader. On July 22, he said in an interview with the BBC that Ukraine is ready to negotiate the end of the war with Russia, even if Vladimir Putin leads the latter. According to the president of Ukraine, the most essential thing in this matter is a genuine desire for peace on terms consistent with international law.
...
He added that the "hot" stage of the war could end before the end of 2024, but the peace plan must be fully agreed with Ukraine's allies "so that no one plays with their own initiatives for ending the war."

It was and is doubtful that Zelenski really wants to make peace. In talks with the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban he had pointed to a theory of victory over Russia. As Orban explained (machine translation):

Cont. reading: Ukraine SitRep: Kursk Campaign Designed To Keep War Going

Palestine Open Thread 2024-189

News & views related to the war in Palestine ...

Ukraine Open Thread 2024-188

News & views related to the war in Ukraine ...

Open (Neither Ukraine Nor Palestine) Thread 2024-187

News & views not related to the wars in Ukraine and Palestine ...

Ukraine SitRep: Incursion Towards Kursk

Yesterday the Ukrainian army started an attack on Russia from the northern Sumy region into the Russian Kursk oblast. Two to three Ukrainian brigades are involved. They progressed some 5 kilometer but immediately took severe casualties and losses of equipment due to Russian air force action. But over night the Ukrainian troops dug in and this morning tried to expand their holdings by attacking the city of Sudzha.

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The Russian military says that the Ukrainian attack has been stopped. Reserves in the region have been activated and will remove the Ukrainians from Russian terrain. There is no doubt that this will, within a day or two, be achieved.

The Ukrainian operation makes little sense. It is well known that Russia has plenty of forces in the area. It will not need to stop its attacks in the Donetsk region to counter the Ukrainian forces near Sumy.

In 1943 the German attack on Kursk was launched for a similar reason - to divert Russian forces from attacking in the Donetsk region. It ended in utter defeat.

Even pro-Ukrainian commentators are aghast about this obvious waste of men and resources:

Tatarigami_UA @Tatarigami_UA - 14:23 UTC · Aug 6, 2024

The situation in the Pokrovsk direction is critical, with defenses in several areas collapsed and yet to stabilize, largely due to a shortage of personnel. Diverting nearly a brigade to launch an assault on Kursk Oblast, which lacks strategic sense, borders on mental disability.

Well, General Budanov, the head of the Ukrainian military intelligence and reportedly responsible for this operation, is known to be a fool.

There have been rumors for some time that Russia was planing to repeat in Sumy the diversion it has achieved in the Kharkiv region. North of Kharkiv Russian forces crossed the border into Ukraine, progressed some 10 kilometer and dug in. The Ukrainians had to pull troops from the Donetsk front to counter the threatening Russian move towards Kharkiv. The diversion of Ukrainian troops enabled Russian breakthroughs in the Donetsk region.

The current Ukrainian attack from Sumy towards Kursk is giving Russia the perfect pretext to launch another incursion into Ukraine.

Two to three Russian brigades could move towards Sumy, dig in and destroy any counterattacking Ukrainian units. Whatever units the Ukrainians would throw in to stop a Russian incursion towards Sumy would be missing in other parts of the front where they are urgently needed.

Gaza As A New(?) Western Method To Wage War

We have seen a myriad of reports about systematic torture and murder in Israeli concentration camps, aka prisons, for Palestinians.

These reports come even from prime media which generally serve as outlets of the ruling class. There are by now so many of these reports that there is no doubt that they are real.

• Inside Israel’s torture camp for Gaza detainees - 972mag, Jan 5 2024
• Strapped down, blindfolded, held in diapers: Israeli whistleblowers detail abuse of Palestinians in shadowy detention center- CNN, May 11 2024
• Inside the Base Where Israel Has Detained Thousands of Gazans - New York Times, June 6 2024
• ‘More horrific than Abu Ghraib’: Lawyer recounts visit to Israeli detention center - 972mag, June 27 2024
• Blindfolded, bound and beaten: Palestinians tell of Israeli jail abuse - BBC, August 5 2024

However there have been no political consequences from those reports. I have also not seen or heard any western politician or any editorials condemning the Israel over these reports. To my best knowledge no western country has punished the Zionist government over such behavior.

This even as it is obvious who the main people responsible for this are. Everyone knows and talks about them:

Musa ‘Aasi, a 58-year-old painter-decorator and father of four, said he heard guards beat 38-year-old Tha’er Abu ‘Asab to death in a neighbouring cell at Ketziot in November. One guard told 50-year-old Firas Hassan, from Bethlehem: “We are livestreaming this for Ben-Gvir”.

Ben Gvir’s spokesperson said the minister was “proud” of his prison policy, and that it was in line with international law. “The conditions of the terrorists imprisoned in Israeli prisons have been tightened to the minimum required by law. In accordance with the minister’s policy, the terrorists do not receive the improved conditions they received in the past,” they said.

The Guardian fails to refute those lies from Ben Gvir's spokesperson.

The Palestinians will continue to be tortured and killed. And all their families - in fact - every Palestinian in Gaza shall be killed:

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich implies he believes that blocking humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip is “justified and moral” even if it causes 2 million civilians to die of hunger, adding however that the international community won’t allow this to happen.

“We are bringing in aid because there is no choice,” Smotrich says at a conference in Yad Binyamin hosted by the Israel Hayom outlet. “We can’t, in the current global reality, manage a war. Nobody will let us cause 2 million civilians to die of hunger even though it might be justified and moral until our hostages are returned. Humanitarian in exchange for humanitarian is morally justified, but what can we do? We live today in a certain reality, we need international legitimacy for this war.”

As no one, Smotrich claims, will let the Zionist kill 2 million civilians by hunger at once, it must be done slowly. By now some 10% of the once 2.3 million people in Gaza are likely already dead - killed by bombs or by the consequences of the war the Zionist are waging against them.

Moshe “Bogie” Ya’alon, a former Chief of Staff of the IDF, who also served as Israel’s Defence Minister, is quoted by Alastair Crooke as saying this.

“When you talk about Smotrich and Ben Gvir: They have a Rabbi. His name is Dov Lior. He is the Rabbi of the Jewish Underground, who intended to blow up the Dome of the Rock – and before that the buses in Jerusalem. Why? In order to hurry up the ‘Last War’. Do you [not] hear them talking in terms of the Last War; or of Smotrich’s concept of ‘subjugation’? Read the article he published in Shiloh in 2017. First of all, this concept rests on Jewish supremacy: Mein Kampf in reverse”.

Smotrich and Ben Gvir are sitting right in the cabinet. But has any western country even blocked their travel or entry or sanctioned them?

Why is this allowed to happen?

Cont. reading: Gaza As A New(?) Western Method To Wage War