Stylistillusional

I keep going back and forth over whether Western governments actually understand what type of government and society they are dealing with in Israel.

Not that I expect them to do anything good but the West sees Israel as part of their group. It's like they expect Isreal to have the same taste and class as the rest of the Western elites. But why should Israel care whether Biden gets elected or care about international support when the US has reiterated time and time again that their material support is unconditional.

It's definitely all cynical, but are they cynical enough to understand the huge liability that is Isreal?

Wait, is that my boy Prigozhin?

In the Netherlands, if the right-wing parties can get their act together and form a coalition government, they will have 88 seats in parliament.👁️

Can't stop thinking about the mad lads in Yemen and how much respect I have for them.

Obama could never.

Everybody is sincere posting about people enjoying stuff. But nobody's talking about how you could possibly feel satisfied after eating a whole bag of candy, instead of feeling like dogshit.

Those small bags of crisps they have in Asia > disgusting Western 300 grams Lays.

Critical support in that case.

If anything big was going to be announced we'd probably already have heard rumours. If Hezbollah is going to make move, they wouldn't announce it first.

A lot of these settlements have either contracters or the IDF directly providing security. So the idea that Hamas could have broken out of Gaza and just found all the soldiers neatly in their bases seems unbelievable. The IDF is an occupying force, not a European military where it's just some dudes with their thumbs up their asses in a barracks near some nature reserve.

Ultimately we can't know how Hamas leadership told their soldiers to behave. But they do have a clear incentives not to condone the killing of civilians: they want to capture hostages and use them as leverage. They need to create the expectation that these hostages are treated fairly and can be returned safely so that it is entirely up to Israel whether it wants those civilians to die.

Tragically, civilians always die in wars. Both sides always propagandise this to claim that it is the other side that is just killing civilians as policy. The facts however, are abundantly clear when it comes to the question of which side shows the greater disregard for civilian casualties.

I think this ignores the fact that Israel has nukes. Them actually using nukes would be disastrous for all sides of course. But it does create a situation where it is unlikely that Israel will back down due to threats of invasion by arab countries.

At this point I am becoming more skeptical of the idea that other countries will get involved directly. Hezbollah is the most likely candidate to act, but their relationships with Syria and Iran would force those countries into the conflict. I don't think either of those countries want to be in a situation where they are dragged in rather than make the active choice to (not) intervene. Likely there is pressure back and forth between those parties to be very careful in how they respond.

The fact that Israel has nukes all but insures that the US will be forced to act no matter what. If Israel would look to be anywhere near collapse, the US would want to prevent at any cost a scenario where Israeli nukes fall into the 'wrong hands'.

One funny wrinkle to recent events in Isreal that I haven't seen mentionied much is that back at the G20 meeting the India-Middle-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), meant to counter China's BRI, was inaugurated. The idea being to facilitate the constructing of things like rail networks and hydrogen pipelines. This initiative finds its origins in the I2U2 group, consisting of India, Isreal, UAE and the US. Notably, Israel proposed the idea of increased interconnectivity through rail.

The inevitable reliance on risk-averse private companies makes the financing of such projects hard for the West under normal circumstances. But with Isreal's genocidal policies flaring up tensions in the whole region, it seems dead in the water.

This whole thing is such a massive strategic failure for the US. They wanted to pivot to East Asia, pull back from West Asia, improve relations in Africa, focus on containing China. But instead they are overextending themselves with Ukraine and Isreal. Their focus completely opposite of where they wanted it it be.

I'll have you know that the 'Two Megathreads One Community'-policy has been recognised by almost the entire world.