By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Russians have never had a higher level of confidence in the Army since the end of World War II,  according to a national poll just published by the independent Levada Centre of Moscow.

This also means a record level of confidence in the General Staff to outwit the principal enemy of the country, the United States, and defeat it and its allies on the Ukrainian battlefield. Most Russians now believe this war will take the Russian Army at least another six months, and more likely a year to finish.

This new poll signals that most Russians believe it prudent not to fight the US with the same intensity in two long wars at the same time – in the Ukraine and in the Middle East — because the Army has decided so. This is despite the overwhelming Russian support for the Palestinians in their fight for survival against Israel. No poll is allowed to measure and publish this support,   and the emotional reaction the majority of Russians feels towards the operations of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the US military to destroy the population of Gaza.

“We should not, we have no right and we cannot allow ourselves to be carried away by emotions,” President Vladimir Putin announced on October 30.  

“We must clearly understand who in reality is behind the tragedy of peoples in the Middle East and in other regions around the world, who has been organising this lethal chaos and who benefits from it. In my opinion, it has already become clear to everyone, as the masterminds brazenly act in the open. These are the current ruling elites in the United States and its satellites who are the main beneficiaries of the global instability that they use to extract their bloody rent. Their strategy is also clear. The United States as a global superpower is becoming weaker and is losing its position, and everyone sees and understands this.”

This is the president running for re-election in five months’ time, speaking directly to Russian voters, reflecting what the polls on his desk tell him they already believe.

The Levada pollsters report there  is a small increase in war weariness across the country, with 56% now saying they favour the start of peace talks soon, compared with 48% measured a year ago, in September 2022. This, however, reflects public belief in the success of the Army in defeating the Ukrainian-NATO  counteroffensive,  and in advancing Russian control of the new Donbass territories and along the front line from Kharkov to Odessa. “In October 2023,” Levada reports, “62% of Russians across the country believe that the special military operation is progressing successfully (12% very successfully, 50% rather successfully), over the past 5 months their number has increased slightly. The opposite point of view is held by 21%.”  

The Levada survey reveals also that “Moscow stands out from other localities. Muscovites are less willing to move on to peace talks — only 38% hold this opinion, while in other localities about half of the respondents believe that it is necessary to start peace talks.  Among those who approve of Vladimir Putin’s activities as president, there are slightly more supporters of peace negotiations than supporters of the continuation of hostilities — 51% and 42%, respectively. The majority (72%) of those who disapprove of the president’s activities believe that it is necessary to move on to peace negotiations.”   

Long war is the assessment of the higher educated, higher class Russian urbanites over forty.

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by Editor - Wednesday, November 1st, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The Semites, the Semitic peoples, and speakers of the Semitic languages started as a figment of the German imagination in the late 18^th century and early 19^th century.

It quickly became a German racial epithet, used in contrast to Aryan. By the time Adolf Hitler came along, this was the pseudo-scientific doctrine in which the Germans lumped both the Jews and the Arabs into a single category – the inferiors of the Aryans.

That is one of the reasons Hitler refused to listen to the advice of his general staff on aiding the Arab nationalist forces in Iraq, Syria and Palestine in the Wehrmacht’s war plans against the British and the Soviet Union. The pseudo-science of Semitism and Aryanism, and the idea of anti-Semitism which the Germans, together with the British and Americans,  adopted in the run-up to World War II was spelled out at Harvard University by an anthropologist called Carleton Coon; he cribbed directly from German academics, turning out papers on the Berbers of Morocco and advancing his racial superiority-inferiority ideas between 1925 and 1939. When the war began, Coon joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) where he demonstrated his keenness for pistol shooting, hare-brained sabotage missions,  and homicidal mania.  Among his wartime schemes he proposed to remove the Arabs of the Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia) as unfit to rule; replace them with the restoration of the French empire; and kill those French officials whom Coon judged to get his way. He was one of the planners of the assassination of Admiral Francois Darlan, the French military commander, in Algiers on December 24, 1942; Coon’s pistol was the murder weapon.**

American murderers of the Arabs like Coon then — like Israeli murderers of Arabs now — have succeeded in establishing their doctrine of exceptionalism and racial superiority in state policy as the successor to the doctrines of Aryanism and Nazism which were interrupted by Hitler’s suicide in 1945, then the Nuremberg trials concluding in 1946.  The crime of racial and cultural genocide became international law in 1948.  It was  then modified by the new Israeli state doctrine of anti-Semitism: this decriminalised the genocide of the Palestinian people; and outlawed instead media criticism, political opposition, even science for threatening the legitimacy of Israel’s Basic Law of Arab exclusion,   and Israeli military operations to enforce it.

In the present war between the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and Hamas on the Gaza battlefield  – “the American project”, as the Russian Foreign Ministry called it in a statement on October 29  ***  – the doctrine of anti-Semitism as a race hatred crime is being applied to protect the race hatred crime being perpetrated against the other Semites,  the Palestinians.

This doctrine, however, has had a negative impact on the ability of the Israelis and the Americans to wage their war. A fresh Russian analysis of the military intelligence failures exposed by Hamas in its offensive of October 7, illustrates how and why the Israelis failed to anticipate because they underestimated their Arab adversary; and because they regarded him as a racial inferior.

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by Editor - Monday, October 30th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

In the war at this stage, the Israeli-American force for genocidal killing and displacement of the Palestinians of Gaza appears to be winning. Not on the ground so much as in the consent of their western allies to supply the logistics, pay the bills, and endorse the morality of the crimes.  

By the time William Shakespeare picked up the idea that force can compel consent, the maxim he made popular had already been expressed in English for two hundred years.  In All’s Well That Ends Well, he has the Countess ask her clown why he wants to marry. He replies: “My poor body, madam, requires it: I am driven on by the flesh; and he must needs go that the devil drives.”  Usually left out of this famous exchange is that the jester explained he had “other holy reasons”. The Countess liked hearing them even less, so she sent him off stage.

In the Gaza operations so far, and in the ideology which Israeli officials and journalists are repeating to the western media, the devil aims to drive every Palestinian, the born and the as yet unborn, to death.  In such a war the first need for Hamas and the Arabs is to survive in order to keep fighting. Nothing is more sure than the “holy reasons” Shakespeare put into the mouth of Lavatch the Clown, that surviving to fight the long war will defeat this devil’s needs in the end.  

In practical politics, Israel and the US either win their genocidal war swiftly now, or else they will lose the long war. Russian military sources are reporting the US is resupplying the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) at a rate of two US Air Force (USAF) transports every hour, moving from the continental US through bases in the UK, Germany, Italy, Greece, and Cyprus. US sources have acknowledged the logistical effort is too great to continue for long. Right now the US Navy and USAF cannot continue delivering on the promised resupply of the Ukrainian forces in their war against Russia, while at US bases in Syria and Iraq  the Pentagon is privately evacuating troops while publicly striking at their Arab attackers.  

The Arab, Iranian, and Russian media are reporting that in response, Hamas and Hezbollah are maintaining a frequent rate of fire against IDF and Israeli territorial targets. They are not yet attacking Israel’s offshore gas production platforms, which provide most of the fuel for the country’s electricity generating plants. They are not yet disabling Israel’s ports and airfields. The Russian military assessment is that for the time being the Hamas and Hezbollah capacity remains intact and in reserve. The Arab side is exercising restraint.

What then are the needs which must now be addressed by the allies of the Palestinians, the Arab states, Iran, and then Russia?

On Sunday, Russia officially called this war “the American project”.   This followed the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) vote last Friday, October 27,  when the US and Israel led a tiny minority in favour of their short war, including a half-dozen island states sinking slowly into the Pacific Ocean.    

A Moscow source confirms the US is the priority Russian target because the IDF cannot continue in Gaza as the US capabilities exhaust themselves. He believes that US over-exertion in the Middle East will accelerate the Russian military’s move on to the offensive on the Ukrainian battlefield, and shorten thereby that war. The public statements for mediation between the warring parties issued by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and his ministry are not the full Russian story, the source believes. The first need in Lavrov’s mediation, he says, is between the General Staff and the Kremlin. The second priority is to let the Americans demonstrate their weakness across the region by conserving the Palestinians in place, deterring Egyptian and Jordanian concessions, and preventing a direct attack on Iran. “The real Russian position , not the public statements , ultimately comes down to what level of military cooperation the Ministry of Defense has with Teheran. The Syrian and Ukrainian wars have made this very deep. I expect the Foreign Ministry’s public line will change when the Palestinian casualties reach 20,000. As the official Israeli statements against the Russian government already make clear, they know what is going on behind the scenes. It’s not just the Caucasian Muslims now but most Russians feel there’s been enough crying support for Israel. Lavrov will catch up.”

“I would say the real work now in Moscow is on ensuring the Americans do not directly attack Iran. The rest is going to play out according to the General Staff’s road map Lavrov could and should have in front of him. Call it the long war for short.”

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by Editor - Monday, October 30th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

According to the rules-based order of the US and allied states now fighting their wars against Russia, Palestine, Syria, Iran, China, and North Korea,  the enemy states are dictatorships by single men ruling by decree without elected legislatures, imposed by armed forces and propaganda apparatus using by terror methods. In a nutshell, the democracies versus the fascists.

In fact the opposite is the case. The US, France, and Germany are more efficiently fascist than the United Kingdom, but this is a matter of degrees.  Since October 7, Israel has become more visibly fascist at the same time as it is proving less efficient, compared to its past in reputation and in fact.

When it comes to performance on the battlefield, where the fascist states must dominate in order to continue to subject their domestic populations, the power of their arms, money, propaganda is being defeated.  This is happening in circumstances when the gender (he/she/they) of the dictatorship is as irrelevant as the mental competence. President Emmanuel Macron is a case of the first; President Joseph Biden a case of the second.

Every so often in the Russian press it is possible to catch a glimpse of how the domestic  democracy really works. Of course, such glimpses and snippets don’t make political science, nor antidotes to the fascist ideology of the US side.  They are also examples of how Russian money talks when it is at home.  

Here is the touchstone question in the history of all the democracies of the west, and, incidentally, the trigger of many of their civil wars and wars of independence – who should pay tax to the state, who should decide, and how much?  

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by Editor - Sunday, October 29th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The Palestinian strategy against Israel is aimed at destroying Israel’s capacity to survive in its present state in a long war.

This means attacking the invincibility of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and their so-called Iron Dome defence; this began with the cross-border offensive on October 7, and continues with daily drone and artillery attacks on targets inside Israel, as well as resistance to IDF incursions in Gaza.

The plan also means exposing the weakness of the state’s infrastructure and economy; extending the battlefield across all of Israel’s territory – the ports, power plants and electricity grid, communications, and financial markets —  making the cost of occupation of the Arab territories unendurable. In a long war, two of Israel’s leading exports earning more than 40% of the state’s trade —  diamonds and tourism — face ruin.*

“The Israelis cannot withstand one year of fighting in a war,” Iraq’s President Saddam Hussein told his general staff in 1983 during a discussion of planning for a regional war of the Arabs against Israel.** In the forty years since then, the evolution of military technology and tactics has expanded  the power of small national liberation armies like Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, of proxy principals like Iran, and of the strategic balancing role of Russia and China. Their combination now has shortened the Zionist state’s endurance in a long war, and that of  its proxy principal, the US.

The Israelis and the Jewish diaspora comprehend this reluctantly. For them,  the short war must be correspondingly shorter. This means the genocide of at least a million Palestinians in lives and displacement.

The war to do that has now become an international war – and this is a war the US cannot sustain. As a Pentagon insider said publicly this week, “because there are so many draws on the logistics and support infrastructure of the Pentagon, we’re not prepared to go in in a concerted way. What we are seeing right now is death by a thousand cuts. Our adversaries know we are stretched so they are going to make us stretch even more, so we can respond even less.”  

The Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman, Maria Zakharova, acknowledged the point in Moscow on Thursday: US naval, air force,  and marine reinforcements deployed around Israel and Gaza are “American tactics to strengthen their own security (this is how it should be interpreted) at someone else’s expense.” They are backfiring on Washington’s capacity to defend US forces in the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and in land bases in Syria, Iraq and Jordan.  “On the contrary,” Zakharova added, the US military deployment “will further rock the situation in the Middle East, create additional tension that can spill out beyond the region.”  

Zakharova’s warning came in the Moscow afternoon. By then Russian Foreign Ministry officials had held meetings with a Hamas delegation, and officials from Iran, Egypt,  and Kuwait. Across the city at the same time, President Vladimir Putin held telephone talks with Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The Kremlin communiqué reported: “Russia and Turkiye have practically overlapping positions.”   

Israeli and US-led media censorship and propaganda are concealing the breadth of impact of   the Palestine warfighting plan, and the deepening military and economic weaknesses of the Israeli state.  

The longer the war continues, the plainer the evidence is on the battlefield that the single-state scheme of Israel and the US is no longer possible. Whether Israel and the US can be compelled to withdraw to the 1967 borders and a new Palestinian state created with partition, demilitarisation, and international security guarantees – the basis of the Russian position announced again on Thursday in Moscow — remains to be fought over.

In this long war, the gods do not favour the Chosen People.  

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by Editor - Friday, October 27th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The sudden change of US warfighting plans in defence of Israel, disclosed on Saturday by General Lloyd Austin, the US Defense Secretary, reveals the trap which Russia, China, and Iran have opened, and the desperate measures the US has taken as it falls in.

Austin announced  that he has “redirected the movement of the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group to the Central Command area of responsibility. This carrier strike group is in addition to the USS Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group, which is currently operating in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea. It will further increase our force posture and strengthen our capabilities and ability to respond to a range of contingencies.”

“I have also activated the deployment of a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) battery as well as additional Patriot battalions to locations throughout the region to increase force protection for U.S. forces.”

The Eisenhower’s new destination has not been announced. US military media are claiming it will be the Persian Gulf or the Red Sea, or both.

The Central Command (CENTCOM) area of responsibility (AOR) is officially the Arab and Iranian territories east of the Mediterranean shoreline, focusing on the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea, and targeting Iran, Russia, and China.  

 “In a small change that could have major meaning,” Pentagon officials are telling their press,    “the U.S. is changing its plans for the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group. The change could place the strike group in waters where Chinese warships have been active in recent months. Last week, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced that the Eisenhower strike group would head to the eastern Mediterranean instead of Europe as had been planned. Sailing in the eastern Mediterranean would have put the strike group to the west of Israel. But that plan changed after a week in which U.S. forces in Syria and Iraq came under fire from Iran-backed militias, and a U.S. Navy ship in the Red Sea downed missiles launched from Yemen…On Saturday, Austin said in a statement the strike group will now go to the ‘Central Command area of responsibility.’ Central Command covers a vast amount of Middle East territory, including the Persian Gulf and Red Sea.”

The purpose of “these steps,” Austin said, is to “bolster regional deterrence efforts, increase force protection for U.S. forces in the region, and assist in the defense of Israel.” The priority order is a switch. Israel comes last – Iran, Russia and China come first.

For the first time too,  the US command has acknowledged what President Vladimir Putin meant when he said in Beijing last Wednesday, October 18,  that he has deployed  MiG-31s armed with Kinzhal missiles within range of the Eisenhower.

Austin added for Sunday television viewers in the US:    “If any group or any country is looking to widen this conflict and take advantage of this very unfortunate situation that we see, our advice is: don’t. We maintain the right to defend ourselves, and we won’t hesitate to take the appropriate action.”

The US doctrine of self-defence while attacking states like Lebanon, Syria, Libya, Iraq, Iran,  Yemen, and Somalia isn’t new. In September 1969, when Libyan Army Captain Muammar Qaddafi took control of his country, he carefully skirted the US Air Force (USAF) base at Wheelus (Mellaha), which was stocking nuclear weapons at the time; Qaddafi then squeezed the US forces out of Wheelus over twelve months, but the USAF evacuated its nuclear weapons swiftly.   

Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon don’t have time; the Israelis even less.

But Austin’s rush to change the sailing orders for the Eisenhower and fly THAADs and Patriots to US bases in the Arab territories reveals he’s short of time too. This is because the entire portfolio of US air defence systems is being defeated. The Russian Kinzhal has defeated the US Patriot batteries around Kiev; the Hamas swarms of drones and rockets defeated Israel’s Iron Dome on October 7. THAAD has been tested in combat once, against a Houthi missile, rocket and drone attack against Abu Dhabi targets in January 2022. “Several were intercepted, a few of them [weren’t].”

The USS Carney’s firing against Houthi missiles and drones in the Red Sea has exposed how vulnerable that southern line of attack against Israel would be if the Houthis try swarming instead of testing their ordnance, as they did against the Carney. Originally, in the Pentagon  version of Friday, October 19,   three Houthi missiles and several drones were intercepted on their way to Israel. A day later, CNN revised the story by reporting “a US official familiar with the situation” to say there had been a “nine-hour duel” and four cruise missiles and fifteen drones came down.  

Tongue-biting and stammering are clinical symptoms of the mind which knows what to say but has difficulty getting it out; this usually causes loss of self-esteem.  When General Austin is speaking like this, it signals the mind doesn’t know what to say, and is desperate for self-esteem.

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by Editor - Sunday, October 22nd, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Preamble
1.  Since 1943 the US and its European allies, including Germany (Olaf Scholz’s government, not Adolf Hitler’s), have aimed to liquidate the secular nationalist Arab leadership capable of co-existence with the West and a state for the Jewish people.

2.  In Palestine Hamas has studied seventy-five years of lessons on the impossibility of coordinating Arab state war in the defence of the Palestine part of the two-state solution.

3. For more than a year, therefore, Hamas has prepared in well-kept secret an offensive against Israel to achieve five objectives – the first to demonstrate how inferior the Israeli military is, how vulnerable, how incompetent their intelligence on the Arab world. This has been achieved by the initial attack of October 7.

4. The second Hamas objective has been to demonstrate the Israeli plan of ethnic cleansing of Gaza,  genocide against the Arabs, and incorporation of all Israeli-occupied territories in a single theocratic Zionist state —  Quod erat demonstrandum. The third objective is to hold out against the expected Israeli counterattack for long enough to activate the Hezbollah forces on the northern Lebanon front;  Syrian and Iranian forces on the eastern Golan front; and the West Bank Palestinians, including the Jordanian Palestinians; the latter’s targets will be US air and armoured land force bases in Jordan. So far, so good.

5. The final Hamas objectives are to compel the vacillating sheikhdoms to resist US pressure; limit oil and gas supplies to the enemy markets; prevent regional land base and air transit rights being activated in support of Israel — so far, so good. And lastly, the fifth objective, to engage the friendly nuclear powers – Russia, China – to deter, and if necessary combat US forces in the region and Israel’s threat to fire its nuclear weapons.

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by Editor - Saturday, October 21st, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

It comes to this now, again.  

Call it a repeat of the SS ultimatum to the Warsaw Ghetto of April 1943 — evacuate and we’ll give you a small chance of surviving, or stay and we’ll kill you for certain.   

Following the embrace of President Joseph Biden and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the  US has endorsed the Israeli plan to force the evacuation of the Palestinians from Gaza City to designated camps in the south. There Israeli forces will allow convoys of humanitarian aid to enter from Egypt and unload after Israeli forces have inspected the cargoes. The new southern zone will be cordoned off by an Israeli ring of fire, and everything north of the line, including Gaza City will be destroyed, hospitals included.  

This formula has been pressed on Egypt, the other Arab states, China, and Russia to accept by the UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, a Portuguese government retiree, and his deputy for humanitarian affairs, Martin Griffiths, a British government retiree. They have emphasized there is no alternative to the destruction of Gaza, and its full absorption into the state of Israel. Reinforcing them, the US has cast its veto of all resolutions proposed in the UN Security Council (UNSC) by Russia, China and the Arab states to create humanitarian corridors under a ceasefire.

China is preparing a new UNSC resolution to face the US veto shortly, according to a statement by Zhang Jun during Wednesday’s UNSC debate in New York.  

In Beijing, President Vladimir Putin and President Xi Jinping discussed between themselves  what they plan to do jointly and publicly. “Over a cup of tea”, Putin told Russian reporters on Wednesday evening, “we talked for another hour and a half, maybe two hours, and discussed some very confidential issues face to face. It was a very productive and informative part of our meeting.”  “Informative” in Russian means they were unable to agree to make a public declaration of a Sino-Russian action plan.

Instead, Putin announced he is deploying supersonic Kinzhal missiles within range of the US naval and air forces positioned in the eastern Mediterranean and in Jordan. “They have upped and dragged two carrier task forces to the Mediterranean. I want to say – what I am going to say and inform you about is not a threat – that I have instructed the Russian Aerospace Forces to start patrolling the neutral zone over the Black Sea on the permanent basis. Our MiG-31 aircraft carry the Kinzhal systems that, as is common knowledge, have a range of over 1,000 kilometres and can reach speeds of up to Mach 9.”

Putin repeated: “This is not a threat. But we will perform visual control, and weapons-based control over what is happening in the Mediterranean Sea.” In Russian, “this is not a threat” means this is exactly what it is.

Said twice, Putin was telling the US, Israel, Guterres, and Griffiths to consult the map of Russian missile strike ranges; and also to remember that the last US Navy aircraft carrier to be sunk by hostile fire was the USS Bismarck Sea which in February 1945 could not defend against waves of Japanese kamikaze aircraft.  

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by Editor - Wednesday, October 18th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The first Moscow newspaper analysis has appeared of Russia’s current position towards Israel and Palestine. It supports President Vladimir Putin’s public endorsement of the two-state solution between the Israelis and Palestinians.  

Entitled “Why Russia remains neutral in the conflict in the Middle East”, Vzglyad, the Moscow security strategy publication, posted the piece late on Friday evening, October 13.   It added an opinion poll for its readers with a single question, “should Russia recognise Hamas as a terrorist organisation?”

The new analysis and conclusion are in contrast to Vzglyad’s call six months ago for Russia to reorient its position towards the Arab side.  This is also a marked change of editorial line in the prevailing silence in Moscow: there has been no Security Council meeting since October 3;  no State Duma debate; no national opinion polling of public attitudes.   

The Arab-Israeli conflict is the one in which Israel is destroying the remnants of the Palestine state territories of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem, and replaces that two-state solution with a single state; that is the Israeli one in which about 7 million Jews restrict about 2 million Arabs in bantustans administered according to an apartheid regime.   

The rules of this Jewish-based order have been fixed in Israel’s constitutional amendment enacted in 2018 as the “Basic Law: Israel – the Nation State of the Jewish People”,    and ratified by the Israeli Supreme Court in 2021.   This adopts the single- state solution expanding territorially by resettlement of the Palestinian territories “as a national value”; and in parallel, combating international opposition to the process by Israeli state operations to “preserve the cultural, historical and religious heritage of the Jewish People among Jews in the Diaspora.”  

By equating Jewish ethnicity and religious faith with nationality of the Israeli state, this constitution eliminates Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim rights with the formula, “the exercise of the right to national self-determination  in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish People.” The corollary is that any Palestinian exercise of the right to self-determination on the expanding Jewish national territory is illegal, anti-Semitic, and terrorist. Internationally, it is the policy of Israel and its allies to make support for or discussion of Palestinian right to self-determination a thought and speech crime.

In Russian politics, this is the one international conflict on which President Vladimir Putin has said so much since the start of his term, and done so little – this has been to advocate the two-state solution in public while in private to impose a do-nothing,  say-catchword line on diplomats and military officials, and the state media.   

The gap between the Kremlin and the General Staff and Defense Ministry became visible in September 2018 after the Israel Air Force caused the shoot-down in Syria of a Russian Ilyushin-20M electronic reconnaissance aircraft, and the killing of all fifteen crewmen on board.  At that time the Russian military expressed a loss of confidence which had not been seen in public since President Boris Yeltsin countermanded orders for Russian military support of Serbia under NATO bombing between March and June 1999, and dismissed Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov on the US demand.   

In the present fighting between Palestinian, Arab and Israeli forces, the options for Russian action are numerous;  the public debate over what the options should be has been nugatory. There have been no national opinion polls;  no State Duma debate; no meeting of the Security Council since October 3.  

An initial statement by Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church was carefully balanced between Palestine and Israel, referring to the “military conflict” between the two sides, not a unilateral act of terrorism. “Peaceful coexistence” between the religious communities, Kirill said, has a “religious dimension” and requires a “just peace”.   In context, this was a tilt against Israel. The Church’s Department for External Church Relations issued the statement on October 7; there has been nothing since.

As a bellwether of Russian security analysts, Vzglyad’s decision to publish a report of expert assessments on “the advantages of Russia’s neutrality in the conflict in the Middle East” is unusual. Vzglyad’s publishing record shows what the new report is not. Strategically, Russia is being obliged by the US and NATO alliance to fight an all-forces war in Europe, and commit small forces in separate conflicts in Syria; Transdnistria and Moldova; Azerbaijan and Armenia; with the possibility of engagement in the Kosovo fight against Serbia.  There is no discussion in the Vzglyad outline of Russian capacities to conduct military operations on all battlefields simultaneously.

No military or intelligence source, to which Vzglyad has frequent and unique access, has been quoted. Privately, some of these sources suspect bargaining with the US in the Quartet format of the American “monopoly” of Israel for Russia’s “monopoly” of the Ukraine.  

Vzglyad’s writers and editors decline to answer questions.

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by Editor - Saturday, October 14th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The leading Russian opinion pollsters said today they are “not planning” to survey nationwide opinion towards the Palestinians, the Israelis, and the current fighting “in the near future”.

The blackout on public opinion comes as President Vladimir Putin gave his first direct interview on the conflict to the Arab press.  “The issue is complex, very sensitive,” Putin told the Jordan-based al-Ghad television channel. “But at the moment, of course, it is necessary to refrain from harsh statements and, no matter what, it is not necessary to offend the feelings of people who are involved in this conflict”, the Kremlin website recorded.  

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by Editor - Thursday, October 12th, 2023
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