One year on. Hundreds of thousands are dying or dead, millions are displaced, the Middle East is undergoing its greatest changes in a generation, Iran has directly attacked Israel twice in one year, and Yemen has proven that the US Navy ain't worth shit. We are the closest we have been to nuclear war (discounting accidents) in decades, but also the fall of Israel.
Because one day, the prisoners of a concentration camp paraglided over a wall.
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Israel-Palestine Conflict
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA reports on Israel's 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.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
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.
Israel deserves to have the most evil villains based off of them in every piece of fiction imaginable, but audiences will probably criticize it for being too "cartoonishly and unrealistically evil"
Probably will veer into wildly antisemitic territory as well
What if it's based entirely on their actions and not you know... anything related to Judaism.
EDIT: I'm talking about the bombing hospitals and refugee camps, deliberate targetting of civilians, troops coming in disguised as aid trucks to commit massacres, blaming their victims for using"human shields", etc.
You could easily have villains based on Zionists without it being antisemitic, just have a bunch of generic white guys with American accents come to some other place, take it over and begin to oppress and murder the indigenous population, all while being a bunch of insufferable whiny little shits. All of that is fine.
But the moment you hint more directly at them being a standin for the zionists it is going to be perceived as antisemitic by most people. One of the many crimes of Zionism is how they have managed to make themselves synonymous with the Jewish people and no matter how unfair and untrue that conflation might be, that is the reality we're dealing with.
This makes it extremely hard to make a fictional standin for Zionism without it being seen as antisemitic. You could do something about a character connected to the same group of villains who breaks free from the fascist ideology but that could easily end up being seen as that character being "one of the good ones" which is just another way of underlining the villainous nature of the entire group.
Either you have to make something that is so removed from the symbols of real-world Zionism that it could just as well be seen as a representation of the generic west or the inherent corruption of human nature. Either you do that or you do something that is a clear synonym for Zionism and end up sending inadvertently antisemitic messages.
The conflation of Judaism and zionism has to be broken. It is one of the zionazi's most powerful propaganda tools.
That is actually exactly what I was thinking.
But would the audience get that you were making a story about Zionism and not just one about generic bad guys?
I guess in the end I was thinking less about Zionism specifically and more about settler colonialism, of which is the major identity of Zionism.
Make it a group of west coast Americans, brits, and the most unhinged Russians coming together, all white, duh, and it should be.
It’s just general observation. if you fictionalize something that truly kinda happens (like person with israeli accent calling cnn to not publish something) without painstakingly showing it’s not new world order stuff, it will read that (nwo) way into public consciousness.
Feel like only documentaries can be useful here. But culture is fuck, and won’t save us, 60s happened with dick to show for it (re:vietnam)
Even a documentary can be seen as antisemitic by those who wants to see it that way (zionist crubullies or gentile antisemites) and by quite a few other people who have not been paying too much attention but who have swallowed the propaganda about Zionism being an integral part of Judaism.
But they'll call you an antisemite regardless. Why give them that power over you?
what I mean is, unless it explicitly anti-capitalist or decolonial creator, I don’t trust simple formula of “israelis bad” to not fuck up anti-semitism part. They are bad, but it’s nuanced bad of why amerikka assists them
(*in that its not "jews control the world", rather "capital needs a dog in middle east to control oil flows and any nascent anti-imperialist movements")
Well it's the difficulty of a group defining itself as the pinnacle of Judaism (or at least it's biggest representative on the world stage). Dialectically, they reshape what fits within "Judaism" through their actions, including committing a genocide, because they claim to be a part of it. There will be cultural creations reflective of that, and it's not gonna be great.
Now the solution is to say that Israel formed a new thing, a separate Judaism from the non-Zionists, which committed these crimes and is not reflective of Judaism. Just call is Zionism (it already is Zionism, but you have to form the zeitgeist around something like that). I hope that can be pulled off and convincingly, because innocent Jews will otherwise be subjected to harm. And I hope we get some rad anti-Zionist films and video games which portray them as the evil they are.
The biggest risk, which we should already prepare for, is that this redefining will be captured by western media to make "Zionism" ONLY about specific actions and not about settler-colonialism more broadly. Like media will try to lump all non-IDF Israelis, and even some of the "nicer" IDF, out of the "evil people" narrative. Then we will have another "of course Hitler was bad, but the average German who just gave up Jews to the SS were normal and ok people."
Yeah, this is a big reason why I am personally obsessed with only ever referencing "the Israeli government" in posts, and not using any other terminology. It's just not a slope I want to start slipping down. Now more than ever before, I think non-Jews like me need to be on our best behaviour with regards to not risking conflating the culture and the religion with the political project. We need to be the best allies we can be to groups like Jewish Voice for Peace. I think comrade Lenin would approve.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy: