Image is of Ansarallah military spokesman Yahya Saree delivering a statement/speech.
The ceasefire appears to be at least temporarily over, with an exchange of fire between (what appears to be) predominantly Iran and the entity, though as always I expect we’ll find increasing evidence of direct US involvement.
The chain of events was as follows, in spoilers below for those who haven’t been keeping up:
chain of events summary
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A while ago, Iran warned the occupation entity that if they strike Beirut (with particular emphasis on its southern suburbs, which is an area where Hezbollah officials/structures are concentrated as I understand it) then they will directly strike the north of Occupied Palestine, turning the area into a military zone, and encouraged settlers to leave to avoid civilian casualties.
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This warning was grudging accepted by the entity, who ordinarily has a policy called the Daniyeh Doctrine, in which they murder civilians en masse by bombing apartment buildings and houses in enemy cities in order to pressure the military forces they are battling to give into conditions they ordinarily would not be obliged to accept, because the Zionist ground campaigns are usually fairly ineffective at achieving goals on medium to long timescales. While removing their ability to bomb Beirut didn’t halt the Daniyeh Doctrine entirely (they could and did hit other places), their distinct inability to strike the capital when they ordinarily could do that freely was a big source of discontentment in both the civilian population and the military.
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As Hezbollah increasingly attrited the Zionist offensive forces, the attractiveness of bombing Beirut in retaliation increased regardless of the consequences, and of course the Zionists do still want to do anything they can to attack and weaken Iran directly and are much worse at hiding this than even the US. This resentment culminated on June 7th, where the Zionists conducted an airstrike on Beirut on a Hezbollah HQ.
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Iran immediately said that this constituted a break in the ceasefire, and Khamenei put Iran back on a full war footing. Within 6 hours of the strike on Beirut, Iranian missiles were flying towards the northern occupied territories, in what they regarded as merely a warning shot. Western media was obviously fairly dismissive of this; 182% interception rates and all that jazz, but we have several videos of missiles hitting targets.
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Trump publicly warned the Zionists to not respond, which many sensible people immediately diagnosed as kayfabe, and Iran obviously remained on guard against a counterattack. This came a few hours later from Zionist drones and stand-off strikes from aircraft likely in Iraqi airspace, just like in the initial phase of the war months ago. These hit sites in western and central Iran, including a petrochemical facility, but also with some interceptions.
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Iran then responded to this counterattack with a yet bigger warning shot into the occupied territories. Ansarallah also joined in with strikes on the Zionists, and they additionally announced that the Red Sea is now closed to all vessels linked directly to the entity. Certain accounts have said that the Bab el Mandab is now actually under full blockade, but this is not clearly substantiated as of me writing this at about 2pm BST, June 8th. There’s been a lot of “considering closing” and “threatening to close” and “moving to close” the Red Sea over the ceasefire period that hasn’t materialized, so I don’t want to get out over my skis.
Worth noting that according to Yves over at Naked Capitalism (a fairly reliable and left-leaning, but not communist, website), we’re now about a month or so away from reaching “tank bottom”. This is largely because commercial demand destruction has not sufficiently occurred due to oil price market manipulations keeping it low, and also because there have been basically no government policies in the US like widespread work-from-home orders. So, soon the shortages will be of the literal oil molecules not being available and not just the price signal. So there’s an increasing anxiety in the US to get this conflict over before the economy really starts to crash in the latter half of the year, one way or another. As a deal seems only increasingly unlikely given US stubborness and inability to accept battlefield realities, a return to military strikes as we’ve seen appears the only way forward, despite almost catastrophic munitions shortages.
Last week’s thread is here.
The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
Please check out the RedAtlas!
The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.
The Zionist Entity's Genocide of Palestine
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against the temporary Zionist entity. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA reports on the Zionists’ 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.
Mirrors of Telegram channels that have been erased by Zionist censorship.
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.
Bare minimum for Israel to withdraw from Gaza and Lebanon. Not a “ceasefire”. A withdrawal of their occupation forces and complete cessation of hostilities. The fact that Gaza and Palestine is not mentioned whatsoever is deeply concerning. Neither is withdrawing of occupation forces.
Israel will just break the ceasefire and resume stealing territory afterwards. Then a new ceasefire where they pause. Then they will resume later. The end result of this is the same as the end result of the treaties with Native American tribes, a slow creeping takeover and genocide. This war was supposed to be the breaking point that stopped this process or reversed it, but instead Iranian leadership seemingly isn’t interested in that. So when will the liberation of Palestine come? The can keeps getting kicked down the road in favor of short-term economic gains for Iran itself while the genocide is ongoing.
Iran is not in the position to force Israel to withdraw from Gaza, nor can it ever be unless it is willing to march across Iraq and Jordan or Syria and invade Israel proper, which would frankly be absurd. The best they could acomplish is create a serious rift between the interests of the Americans and the Israelis, which is indeed coming to fruition. It is frustrating that Iran will not achieving some grand victory over the Entity, but it is nor realistic nor fair to expect Iran (and only Iran) to somehow end the genocide by themselves. Every bomb dropped on Iran was one not dropped on Gaza. What more can we reasonably expect? It is not a defeat to not achieve 110% all objectives in a defensive war.
yes they are, the can cause complete global economic collapse and famine. They are in the position to demand whatever they wish. They hold the ultimate trump card.
No it isn’t. The fights between Trump and Netanyahu are kayfabe. Israel and the US are integrating their military industries and intelligence sectors officially, doing an outright merge. They are more unified than ever.
They are not by themselves, they have the axis of resistance. If they will not end the genocide then it will be completed. They are the only ones who can.
This is just preemptive defeatism and excuses.
What is the point of the axis of resistance strategy if Iran will never pull the trigger to end Israel? It’s all just a fucking LARP? Iran planning an upcoming offensive war to liberate Palestine that I don’t know about? Every war involving Israel will be defensive because they’re a rabid dog that will always be on the offense. Every war between Iran and Israel will likely be picked by the Zionists and be “defensive” in nature, so does that mean we can never expect to see Iranian demands to liberate Palestine?
Israel does not depend on the global economy in any real sense. This is the tension between the Americans and the Israelis I am talking about. Global economic meltdown is a trump card against the global hegemon that very much cares about the global economy. Israel cares about its genocidal project above all else, and their oil and gas supply is not reliant on the Gulf. They are well insulated from global economic swings. Iran holds no trump card against them. There is no magic “end Israel” button that Iran has but is simply not pressing, unless you mean some all out existential war against Israel that then involves Tehran getting nuked. Israel is running up against the limits of its own power. The psychotic expansionist tenedencies that they’ve been cultivating no longer have anywhere to go, and war is only getting more in favor of defenders with low cost drones and missiles.
There is increasing divergence between Israeli and American aims, and there will be a time after Trump. A huge number on both the right and the left want an end to American support of Israel. One day, that will come to pass. The Israelis are living on borrowed time. All of this is because of Iran and its performance in both wars, coupled with the horrific images of genocide out of Gaza. Israel’s image worldwide has never been worse, and there is no going back.
Yes they do, what the hell are you talking about? They are completely dependent on exterior support from over 50 countries to prop up their tenuous existence. If isolated they would fold within months or years.
All the old “Israel will destroy itself canard” i’ve been hearing in leftist spaces for decades. They will not, they must be destroyed by an external force or isolated from the outside actors that prop it up. Nazi Germany was destroyed by the USSR, not internal contradictions. They have plenty of places to go still. Lebanon, the remainder of Palestine, Syria, Jordan, Sinai, all of Greater Israel. They have only just begun and American-Israeli military-intelligence cooperation has spiked upwards rapidly, not downwards. They are closer aligned than ever before, there is no split.
Yes if every country on earth refused to trade with Israel they would collapse. If global GDP contracts for a few years and oil prices double, Israel’s economy doesn’t collapse “more” than anybody else’s. Like obviously global economic recession is bad for everybody, but it’s a lot worse for like Vietnam or Nigeria than Israel, because Israel’s top industries are things like arms manufacturing and cybersecurity, stuff that gets more important when things get hairy.
In Lebanon a Hezbollah pounded after three years of war has halted the entire IDF to a tiny slither of southern Lebanon with low cost FPV drones. Syria is an absolute clusterfuck, no question there, but let’s see what happens if the Israelis attempt to fight the Egyptians or the Turks. They cannot achieve victory in Iran. They will try in another place where they cannot achieve victory, and one those places will share a land border with Israel, and then… who knows?
If Israel permanently occupies more and more land they have achieved a creeping “victory” in the sense that their long term project is forwarded. Every ceasefire where they don’t have to give back the land they occupy is a victory for them because their strategic goal is to annex Greater Israel in its entirety. In what sense has Israel “lost” in this war? They have gained territory in Palestine, Syria and Lebanon and the US is more integrated with them than ever before, they have ethnically cleansed Southern Lebanon and Gaza. They didn’t get regime change in Iran (yet) but that was more a hail mary bonus than the actual strategic goal, they haven’t really lost anything by this war other than global popularity but that seems to not really be that relevant.
If there’s a global economic collapse, a whole lot of countries will start to find their own domestic situations increasingly unstable and there may be regime changes to less zionist-friendly factions that more closely reflect the positions of their populations. There will also be extreme unrest and anger at any “giving away” of money to Israel as domestic conditions get more dire. The Arab comprador regimes are particularly vulnerable, since their oil industries are going up in smoke. If every Arab comprador state flipped during a global economic collapse, that would spell the end of Israel.