Deborah Boyar

Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, Trillium Awakening Teacher, Former Partner at HolacracyOne

[Deborah Boyar @deborahboyar]

https://t.co/k9y57mlRaK

[Deborah Boyar @deborahboyar]

Adam Louis-Klein: "It is a progressive value to oppose antizionism. Antizionism harms Palestinian civilians. Genocidal antizionist militias and regimes cause instability throughout the Middle East, harming Lebanese, Yemenis, Iranians, Yazidis, and many others." @adam_louis52328

[Raylan Givens @JewishWarrior13]

⭕ In every press conference, you will always have some scumbag “reporter” who we will ask if PM Netanyahu controls President Trump. It never fails. BTW, excellent response from @SecWar

[Gad Saad @GadSaad]

In exactly one week from today, Suicidal Empathy will finally be released! Please consider pre-ordering your copy today.

https://t.co/y1CqM1P9Xt

[Izabella Tabarovsky @IzaTabaro]

Absolutely brilliant from @HusseinAboubak.

“The first error is the assumption that anti-Zionism is a position, a policy preference, a discrete item on a list of demands that can be granted in exchange for quiet on the remaining items. No, no, no. This is a major category error. Anti-Zionism is not a position. It is a worldview, and a worldview does not function the way individual policy preferences do. A policy preference can be traded: you give me this, I give you that, and we both go home. A worldview is the structure within which all positions are generated, the logic that determines which sentences can be spoken and which cannot, and when you concede the worldview, you have not bought peace on the other questions. You have conceded the very logic by which all the other questions will be decided.”

“The second error is that the liberal establishment treats the decolonial left as though it were a moral movement; a coalition of idealists whose passion on this one subject must be accommodated because the passion is about something real and the moral claim has traction. This is the view from the outside, from the surface, and it is wrong. What is at work inside the American left on the Israel question is not, or not primarily, some moral awakening. It is an inter-elite ruthless competition for institutional position, and anti-Zionism is the instrument through which that war of position is being waged.”

“Thus, what makes the establishment’s concession so ruinous, so foolish, and so unforgivable is that it misidentifies the recipient. The Democratic leadership believes it is making a concession to some moral constituency, but it is, in fact, making it to a rival power formation within the party’s own institutional base. This is surrender. When the establishment concedes [on] Israel, it does not purchase peace with idealists but ratifies the victory of a competing elite fraction whose interests and ambitions extend to every institution the party touches, and whose appetite will not be diminished by having been fed the Jews.”

Keep reading for historical examples that put this moment in the Democratic Party into crystal-clear perspective.

[Izabella Tabarovsky @IzaTabaro]

The skewering is real.

The “Gazologists” in @MattiFriedman's brilliant essay come across as worthy heirs to Soviet Zionology’s literary club.

On Pankaj Mishra: “Mishra seems to want to be Primo Levi, and even if we understand this is impossible—because Levi is gifted and Mishra is not, because Levi is a witness and Mishra is a voyeur, because Levi’s Holocaust was real and Mishra’s is an ideological fantasy—one still finds something authentic and plaintive in this longing.”

On Peter Beinart: “Any worldview that places Jewish malfeasance at its center will draw Jewish adherents who see the advantage of being at the center of something, and on the Gazology shelf we find a sad little volume by Peter Beinart, an American journalist.”

It's satisfying for me to see that today’s antizionist literati are just as incompetent, ungifted, and opportunistic as their Soviet predecessors — and have the same instinct for jumping on any bandwagon that can carry them to the heart of the prevailing zeitgeist.

And since the zeitgeist today is increasingly coalescing around an antizionist version of the “Jewish Question,” that’s where the grifters are. They’re jumping on the “Jewish Question” fad because that’s what opens doors to cultural insider circles, puts you in the running for the most prestigious literary prizes, and boosts your financial prospects.

Most of the “Gazologists” Matti reviews are not the hard-core ideologues: they are downstream from them, busily building their careers as they work ideology into culture.

Matti notes that dismissing them would be a mistake, and he is right. The more social, financial, and professional incentives align with the current “Jewish Question” moment, the more cultural entrepreneurs will line up to jump on the trend, populating the cultural sphere with "instaclassics" of post-Soviet Zionology.

So we should take them seriously — but we should also laugh at them. And that is exactly what Matti's essay does so beautifully. The "Gazologists" and their enablers have earned every word of ridicule he delivers.

[S Sebag Montefiore @simonmontefiore]

This is essential and coruscating literary and moral criticism of a new genre by the great @MattiFriedman

[The Free Press @TheFP]

There’s a new type of book out there, one that tries to make everything in the world about Gaza and Israel, introducing a new dark political parable with a familiar villain—Jews.

In a new essay for The Free Press, @MattiFriedman explores what ‘Gazology’ says about the West today.

[Hussein Aboubakr Mansour @HusseinAboubak]

I can not congratulate @MattiFriedman enough for this exceptional essay. I hope more people like him stop writing about their feelings and vibes, which are narcissistic and uninteresting anyway, and actually read the damn books that are flooding our world.
https://t.co/KGjillTG8S

[Haviv Rettig Gur @havivrettiggur]

We were never America's charity case.

America gave Israel aid because it was in America's interest to do so. It was buying tech no one else would or could make until Israel proved it was possible, like Iron Dome. It was also a massive federal grants program to certain Congressional districts, because among its many conditions, nearly all of it had to be spent in America.

There's a famous story told by older Israelis about how the aid crashed the textile industry in Israel's south, a major employer in that working-class region, because the IDF started to buy uniforms from American manufacturers.

And over the years, a great many of us have chafed at the loss of independence this aid represented -- including over the past three years, again and again.

@EinatWilf made this point: "I’m soooo on board for that! Does this mean that we will finally be allowed to: 1) buy what we want, and from whomever we want and most important, develop and produce what we want even if it competes with American products? 2) win our wars rather than be constantly subjected to arrested development ceasefires?"

And everybody in Washington knows all this. Netanyahu himself once talked this way, back in the late 90s, until the beneficiaries (on both sides) told him to shut up. This aid was seen in Washington as leverage over the Israelis -- and America has always sought leverage, from the Kennedy-initiated Cold War "bear hug" to keep Israel from going nuclear to Biden's slow-walking of shipments.

There are significant knock-on benefits to Israel if the aid goes away. Here's a big one: A US-induced budget crunch might force Netanyahu to finally cut some of the vast, unique Haredi welfare payouts that keeps half of Haredi men out of the job market.

And in military terms, independence is even more critical. For example, we all need to be building at least ten times as many drones, missiles and missile-defense interceptors going forward. Or maybe 50 times. Israel has to get serious about massively upping indigenous production and getting away from reliance on any foreign power, even an ally as powerful as America. Financial aid that forces Israel to buy American interceptors delays that critical shift.

(America should also be massively upping production and stockpiling, by the way; these technologies are the future of war, and not even America's production capacity reflects that fact.)

Long story short, my "camp" in Israeli thinking -- call us the "fiscal responsibility because we're adults" camp that once, in his better days, included Netanyahu -- has always believed and publicly argued that when the aid ends, it'll be a net benefit for Israel.

And one final comment: If the aid really does dry up, this will be celebrated as a win by our enemies, by those who yearn to see Israel fall.

Good.

In fact, this outcome may be the strongest argument for doing it.

The movement to destroy us, especially among Arab and Muslim ideologues, has spent literally generations explaining that we only win wars or thrive economically because we have the backing of America. (And before America it was the French, and before the French the Soviets, and before the Soviets the British, and before the British the Russians...you get the idea. For a century and a half, our enemies told this same story to avoid the possibility that our own strength and competence are the reasons we survive and win.)

So when we continue to win in a future shorn of American aid, our enemies will learn something valuable about us, something that might make some of them rethink the strategy of sacrificing new generations of Arab or Persian treasure, honor and blood on the altar of our destruction.

So let them celebrate. It's really important that they go through the whole psychological arc. The greater the triumphant expectation, the more powerful and educational will be the ultimate failure.

[Jake Wallis Simons @JakeWSimons]

Sheer excellence from @havivrettiggur. What an utter star he is. A crucial voice.

[Mehdi Parpanchi @Parpanchi]

JD Vance says the 21-hour talks with Iran ended without a deal, and the U.S. delegation is heading back to Washington.

Read this piece I wrote before the negotiations began. It makes even more sense now.

[Gad Saad @GadSaad]

Pre-order your copy of Suicidal Empathy here: https://t.co/MyiE7bjYGx

[Michael Oren @DrMichaelOren]

If the New York Times reported the war in 1944 as it’s reporting the war today.

President Roosevelt continues to pursue a war for which he failed to prepare the United States. Though there have been some significant military achievements, especially in North Africa, U.S. forces remained bogged down in the Pacific and severely bloodied in strategically meaningless places like Tarawa and Guadalcanal. The Italian campaign has totally stalled, with an appalling loss of American life that will soon be surpassed by the utterly reckless and inevitably doomed invasion of France. Meanwhile, the innocent people of Japan and Germany continue to suffer. The damage to both their countries and the impact on the world economy is incalculable. The chances of a negotiated settlement appear more than ever remote. And all of this because the impressionable Roosevelt was duped into going to war by that master manipulator, Churchill.

[Vivid.🇮🇱 @VividProwess]

Israeli pilots are literally above Tehran, recording themselves wishing Shabbat Shalom in the calmest voice you can hear.

Balls of steel.

[Kosher @koshercockney]

Holy sh*t.

Stop what you’re doing. Give yourself 3
minutes. Listen to this.

Marco Rubio 2015.

He called it.

He called it word for word, like a play-by-play.

[Avi Avidan @avavidan]

🇹🇷🇺🇸🇮🇱🇮🇷Iran just launched a barrage of missiles and drones that slammed American assets and civilian targets across the Middle East. Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Oman, Jordan and Iraq all took hits. Airports shut down. Oil infrastructure trembled.Panic spread.

Yet one major NATO country with significant U.S. bases on its soil walked away completely untouched: Turkey.
This was no coincidence. It was a deliberate act that exposes Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s treacherous double game.

For years Erdogan has allowed Turkish intelligence to feed critical information to Iran’s IRGC. This is not occasional cooperation. It is a sustained back-channel relationship built on cold mutual interest.
Tehran and Ankara both fear the same nightmare: a collapse of the Iranian regime that empowers the 15 million Kurds inside Iran.

Kurdish autonomy or annexation of border territories would ignite fresh unrest inside Turkey itself. Erdogan has no intention of allowing that.
He would rather prop up the IRGC than risk a redrawn map that strengthens Kurdish power. That is exactly why Turkey is frantically building a massive border wall through the mountainous frontier with Iran. This is not ordinary border security. It is preparation for the refugee tsunami Erdogan knows would follow regime change. Millions of Iranians and others flooding into Turkey would shatter its economy and destabilize his rule.
Ankara intends to contain the chaos on its own harsh terms, even if it means carving out buffer zones inside Iranian territory.

Erdogan also refuses to tolerate any Israeli gains in a post-regime Iran. A friendly relationship between Jerusalem and a new Iranian government would create dangerous new energy routes and strategic partnerships that sideline Turkey completely. Better to keep the mullahs limping along than allow Israel real influence.

But the core of Erdogan’s strategy runs deeper and more cynical. He is deliberately maneuvering to make Turkey the indispensable member of NATO. Erdogan understands that China’s Belt and Road Initiative cannot reach Europe without eventually plugging through Turkish land.
When the current Iranian regime collapses and the India-Middle East-Europe Corridor surges forward, Beijing will need Turkey as the critical land bridge to the European market if the Iranian part is somehow solved by china.
Erdogan is positioning himself as the gatekeeper that both East and West cannot bypass. By staying inside NATO while quietly shielding the IRGC, he extracts security guarantees, American bases, and political cover from Washington. At the same time he keeps his lines open to Tehran and Beijing.
This allows him to play middleman and maximize Turkish leverage. Regime change in Iran would bury parts of the BRI, torpedo his neo-Ottoman fantasies, and accelerate the collapse of the Turkish lira.
It would also leave him watching helplessly as former allies line up with the US and Israel on IMEC.

Erdogan’s influence operation is working exactly as planned: he collects NATO protection while actively undermining US interests in the region. This cannot continue.

Washington must confront the ugly reality. A NATO ally is actively collaborating with China and the IRGC against U.S. objectives. Erdogan is not a confused partner. He is a calculating operator who believes geography gives him permanent leverage. He thinks Turkey’s position on the BRI map makes him untouchable. He is wrong.

The time have come to make it clear that this double game carries a heavy price. NATO membership is not a shield for those who help the West's enemies.
Erdogan’s exemption from Iranian fire is not clever diplomacy. It is proof of betrayal. Served by the IRGC.
The time for illusions about Turkey is over. America must respond with ruthless clarity before Erdogan’s gamble further destabilizes the entire region.

Erdogan is a strategic wet fart.

[Brit Hume @brithume]

There's been too little discussion of this: the Iran-China connection. This article is very much worth reading.

[Haviv Rettig Gur @havivrettiggur]

America went to war in Iran because Iran made itself a Chinese weapon. I explain in detail in my piece in @TheFP.

America didn’t need to do this -- to invest so much political capital and military firepower -- just to shore up a second-run Israeli operation, nor is it reasonable to believe, as Secretary Rubio claimed, that it's all because of potential Iranian counter-strikes against US forces.

Months of American buildup, America setting the timing and pulling the trigger on the operation, and the growing and increasingly dangerous strategic ties between Iran and China for America's ability to face down its chief adversary in the Pacific -- these are all evidence that this was an American decision, and that Israel is playing second fiddle this time around.

There are now two wars underway in Iran, not one: The longstanding Israel-Iran war playing out on the regional chessboard, and the much larger US-China confrontation on the global chessboard.

They overlap significantly in terms of the two nations' banks of targets in Iran -- but that overlap may not hold to the end.

Two wars, not one. If you can only see one of them, you'll misunderstand what's happening now and what happens next.

--

This Isn’t Israel’s War. It’s America’s. https://t.co/yk9Ajb3uw7