The reality of genocide gives rise to truths immemorial and irrefutable that traverse time. Truths about Israel. ~ilana  

What Israel has done, is doing, to Gaza has not sprung ex nihilo from October 7.

Genocide is not a situational counter-response to aggression. It’s a coming-out event of sorts.

Differently put: There are no legitimate antecedents to genocide. Genocide is not a “war crime” to which a set of mitigating or exculpating legal defenses can attach.

Genocide is a stand-alone indefensible crime—“the blackest of all crimes”—for which there are no extenuating circumstances and to which no traditional legal defenses attach.

Ethnocide, depopulation, domicide and daily mass murder can never be explained away or exculpated using argument from law, ethics or history.

In essence, talk to the hand about October 7, 2023; because the face isn’t listening. Just as there are no legal or moral extenuating circumstances for genocide, so it is that there are no historical defenses for this “blackest of all crimes,” for genocide.

To assert that you are just, justified or even coherent as you carry out that which cannot be just or justified—this is to embody a most grotesque incoherence and contradiction.

At minimum, Israel deserves—and has yet to receive—the unanimous revulsion and isolation reserved for entities whose existence is a confidence trick and a fraud upon us all.

Reality is truth, past and present. The reality of genocide gives rise to irrefutable truths. From the facts of this Twenty-First Century Genocide; certain truths immemorial and irrefutable that traverse time have emerged. Truths about Israel.

Through Gaza, the world has come to know Israel’s ways with the Palestinians, with their lands and homesteads—down to what Israeli terrorists habitually do to the intimate bits-and-bobs that make up a household.

Through Gaza, we have come to know Israel’s ways across the Levant and beyond. They unground and salt the earth forever. They uproot ancient communities and their olive groves. For fun. They deform babies and the baby faces of children for life.

The reality on the ground is of genocide ongoing, of daily extermination. In aggregate, a “child has been killed in Gaza every 71 minutes for three years.” This extermination campaign is not only of children—the one segment of Palestinian society which American conservatives are comfortable defending—but of adults, young and old: admirable, valuable adults. Adult lives matter, yes?

Hasbara and official myth-history aside, because of Gaza and the Ghazzawi you don’t have to know much history at all to arrive at the truth about Israel.

Because of the Palestinians of Gaza, the living, the martyred and those who still resist; the truth about Israel is now ahistoric.

To arrive at that truth about Israel, you don’t have to know much about the genesis of the so-called “conflict” between Israelis and Palestinians in historic Palestine. I hazard that you need to know hardly a thing about this history to arrive at the truth about the lived reality of Palestinians.

You are what you do.

We know the Real Israel through the actions of real Israelis in Gaza. We know how Israel operates and how a preponderance of its people thinks. These realizations came out of the Gaza genocide, which has shown the world in cruel relief how Israel acts and, by extension, what Israel is.

Since October of 2023, the world knows in detail what the untouchable Israel—state and civil society—has done and continues to do to the Strip, to the West Bank and in South Lebanon.

But what have the Ghazzawi, the living and the martyred, accomplished? A great deal. In a manner, Palestine and the Palestinians have won.

Gaza has exposed Israel for the morally and militarily corrupt force that it is. The Genocide of Gaza has, very plainly, invalidated Israel and validated the Palestinian cause.

When you are in the writhing coils of a boa constrictor; it is small comfort to know, as Palestinians have always known, that, while outwardly captive, they are, nevertheless, truly liberated from the illiberal political propaganda that grips the West.

So, they need to know, too, that they have shown good people around the world the way.  For once and for all, Israel’s televised genocide had corroborated the lived reality of the Palestinians; their reasons for rage and their rights to resistance and recompense.

Palestinians had been telling us for decades that they have been set upon by murderers and thieves. Palestinians have told us they are being killed and robbed as a matter of course. Their lived reality has been irrefutably affirmed, and universally so.

“It’s complicated,” Israel’s supporters keep countering. “Study up before you open your mouth.” The opposite is true. It’s absurdly simple.

A moral, sentient human being need know nothing much about the history of the region to arrive at this conclusion.

Israel has had the nerve to play its genocide of the Palestinians of Gaza to a packed house: to the world.

Most galling of all: In the course of this very public genocide, Israel has engaged in the mother of all performative contradictions: denying genocide, while publicly committing genocide, effectively asserting a birthright to commit genocide.

Think about it:

To deny ongoing, prime-time livestreamed genocidal action at the very same time that you are committing these actions, and then to hound and hurt anyone who dares notice: This is a performative contradiction in a category all of its own, like no other.

Caught in the protracted act of genocide, the guilty party, Israel, has continued to cavalierly claim for itself and be granted the right to keep killing and deceiving without being considered and treated as a killer and con-artist.

In essence, Israel exists among nations us as a privileged, protected, well-funded aberration, carrying out unspeakable evil with universal blessings and absolution.

I belabor the most galling reality, as it really gets me: At the same time that Israel and its cringing Western admirers have killed and deceived; they have instructed The World to deny Israel’s genocide, then deny Israel’s deception about its genocide, and finally to justify both or fear defenestration, cancellation, banishment, arrest and worse.

To no avail. Human action is the undeniable key to man-made reality. Israel and the US have acted; they’ve revealed themselves. They’ve been exposed.

“Just as you can identify a tree by its fruit, so you can identify people by their actions,” said Jesus (New Living Translation). As Matthew 7:20 reads, “Therefore by their fruits you will know them.”

With the exception of the flint-hearted ruling political elites—the wholesale slaughter carried out by Israel in Gaza has stirred the hearts of ordinary people across the world. A collective conscience developed around Palestine. Minds not AI became engaged. They said, “We see you, Israel. We revile you. We reject you.”

This is what October 7 will forever mark and signify: The triumph of the Palestinians over the alternate reality mass-marketed to the World by Israel and our ruling elites.

©2026 ILANA MERCER
The Unz Review, October 12
LewRockwell.com, October 13
ilana mercer’s FPV Resistance, Substack, October 

***

SUBSCRIBE to “ILANA MERCER’S FPV Resistance” on Substack.

https://ilanamercersfpvresistance.substack.com

Ilana Mercer, a widely published paleolibertarian author, essayist and theorist, has been writing up an anti-war, anti-woke storm since 1998, starting in Canada. On arriving in the US, in 2002, her weekly column was right away syndicated. Mercer’s national syndication fell through shortly after due to writing in strident opposition to the war in Iraq. ILANA is described as “a system-builder. Distilled, her modus operandi has been to methodically apply first principles to the day’s events.” She’s Jewish, grew up in Israel ages five to nineteen, and left, at 19, decades back, never to return. She had refused to serve in the IDF, Israel’s compulsory military. Ilana’s focus since October of 2023 has been the genocide.

*Screen picture courtesy Shutterstock

The post October 7 Forever Marks The Big Reveal: ‘We See You, Israel, We Revile You, We Reject You!’ appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

NAZA film producers ought to have taken down names.
NAZA producers should have deposed the serial killers as a police officer would depose a criminal.
NAZA producers then should have handed the footage, not to the Venice Film Festival, but to The Hind Rajab Foundation… ~ilana 

 The NAZA documentary presents a particularly galling production and specter.

The creators of NAZA are the +972 Magazine, a very good Israeli outfit, with the backing of the not-so-good British Guardian.

The way I would distill the entire extravaganza is that NAZA has given us a glimpse of the Eichmanns of Israel, but under the protection of anonymity. In NAZA, the Israeli film makers have, I would further emphasize, not uncovered, but very publicly—and, for a mainstream award—interviewed the IDF’s mezzanine-level managers of mass murder, the Eichmanns of Israel, anon, and for a prize.

To sum-up in the briefest way from the wordy newsletter I got from the creators, the NAZA documentary constitutes a series of anonymized interviews with a certain select number of IDF terrorists (who are mischaracterized as “soldiers”). These “soldiers” are part of a genocide machine, we are told, with which nearly an entire Jewish-Israeli society has complied.

Like we didn’t already know.

In particular, the NAZA production exposes, to quote, “a very different kind of Israeli soldier: the intelligence officers considered Israel’s ‘best and brightest.’ They tend to be secular, upper-middle-class, and [they] see themselves as liberal. It is these individuals — sitting behind screens.”

Again, like we never heard of Unit 8200 (members of which are prized employees in the American technology industry).

And like we need to go deeper into the psyches of the serial killers who live free, are nowhere on the lam; and are not fleeing justice.

In other words, the NAZA documentary directors seem to suggest they have worked a so-called “original angle” to the genocide of Palestine, the land and its people.

The Israeli producers walked away with a Venice Film Festival award, which they accepted.

The fakery of it is that, on paper, the Guardian, backers of this vulgar production, still calls the genocide and extermination in Palestine ongoing, a “bombing campaign.” However, now that it’s safer, and the genocide has been accomplished, the Guardian is inching closer to the reality. Vicariously, at least.

I further quote from the VulGuardian:

“The film received a nearly 25-minute standing ovation after its screening,” which was called a record, “for length of applause not just at Venice, but at any major film festival…”

The +972 Magazine, as I said, is a different matter. I like it and I follow their investigative work as well as the Hebrew version. They employ Palestinians and they do excellent work.

And that’s where it should have stopped!

Because this award is worse than unseemly. Few things are tackier and more tasteless than being Jewish-Israeli or Jewish and taking home a prize for working an angle on a genocide in which members of your group are implicated.

Most important, and I wearily repeat what I wrote in a 2025 essay last September: Palestinian have done this work.

I quote from my “Gaza Genocide: The Coverup Begins.   Johnny-Come-Lately Journos & Politicos Start Covering Keister”:

“Palestinian journalists are the greatest journalists to have lived and died on the job. Palestinian truth-tellers have been documenting their own demise so as to bring us The Truth, nothing but the manifestly obvious Truth. And, they are being disappeared by their moral and professional inferiors.”

I went on to finger “The MIA Morgan Media, in other words, the Piers Morgan, Missing-In-Action Media,” for dereliction and complicity. Of course, I’m not placing the +972 Magazine in the category of the MIA Morgan Media, the Guardian included. Never.

However, with the acceptance of an award from the global media-entertainment-industrial-complex, for a documentary on Gaza and their serial-killer countrymen—these Israeli creators have become part of the International Imperial Media Complex:

In other words, NAZA creators risk joining the Imperial, media-entertainment-industrial-complex, which shares in the loot or aspires to share in the loot, in the form of accolades, absolution, or other rewards undeserved.

For you don’t ask for or receive rewards for doing your duty. 

At this point, it is 100 percent fair to point out the following:

“Ilana, you are Jewish. You have been bearing witness in your own work to genocide since 2023. How are you different?”

Fair points all.

Consider: You’d never see my work receive awards (the thought made me chuckle, not once but twice. See for yourself). And not because we here in the truly dissident space are not the best the country has to offer. We are.

But, but, because, first, we tease out the finer details. In the truly dissident space, we say things that are unacceptable even in the alternative media space, and would get you arrested across the Western perpetrator block.

An example is my own three-part essay series on the artificially enforced dichotomy—termed bifurcation—between Zionism and Judaism. (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.)

My obligation, as an American, a Canadian, a South African; as a human being, and as someone who was born Jewish, is to burn up the pixelated pages on the issue of our time, genocide.

It is our duty to use our gifts to that end, for Palestinians.

Further: In my work, I defer mostly to Palestinian sources, actually, for no other reason than that they are the best. I’ve learned what I know from leading Palestinians as well as from honorary Palestinians, who have always done this work.

In the unlikely event that my work on Palestine (to make a book, please God), were ever to be featured even by the independent podcast space (the promised second chuckle)—any financial benefits or accolades will go to Palestine and to Palestinians.

My charities, listed on my website (scroll down to “Charities”), these charities are for Palestinians. They redound to Palestinian welfare and to … animal welfare, including to Solala, a Gaza-based animal rescue, whose saintly proprietor Israel had murdered.

The last time this Unz Review writer was invited to give a public address was in 2025. It was at the invitation of my long-time friend, Dr. Tom DiLorenzo. The address I gave at the Mises Institute’s War Revisionism conference was titled “The Real Israel Vs Hasbara History.”

I ended this address by expressing disgust at the specter of books hitting the market, at the time, which, to quote, were “more about Israeli and Jewish anguish than about their victims.” (LISTEN.)

Verbatim:

Books have now been written, more about Israeli and Jewish anguish than about the victims. Being Jewish after Gaza is one. Israel’s theocracy. Israel’s moral and military degeneration. Israel’s looming collapse. When did it begin. Right wing, left wing. Why, why, why. Everyone is beating on breast about Israel.An apt response are the words of a character from Southern literature: ‘Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn!’And neither should you worry about the perpetrators of genocide—

Only to the extent that punishment is exacted upon Israel for what it has done to Palestinians. That reparations and restitution are extracted from Israel in perpetuity for Palestinians.

This was in May of 2025. As of September 2026, Jewish and Israeli voices are still everywhere dominant.

What should the NAZA Israeli award-winners have done, instead?

FIRST, don’t enter your valuable work into a competition.

SECOND, don’t put the serial killers on the comfortable journalistic couch to plumb the depths of their deformed psyches.

With journalistic psychoanalysis and exposure, you are inviting a certain degree of sympathy.

Not unlike therapy, going deep with mass-murdering serial killers suggests something other than what it is:

What is it? Bestial darkness, unalloyed evil, fiendishness, irredeemable cruelty and inhumanity.

Instead, NAZA was putting on the journalistic couch the greatest evil in the solar system: individuals, representing very many more, who’ve operated their butchery in Gaza with barbaric gaiety.

Not once, in the heat of the moment, but for three years. Ongoing.

In short, I don’t fucking care about the nauseating innards and entrails of the SS IDF. And neither should you.

If you do, you should not!

INSTEAD, NAZA producers ought to have taken down names.

NAZA producers should have deposed the serial killers as a police officer would depose a criminal.

NAZA film producers then should have handed the footage, not to the Venice Film Festival, but to The Hind Rajab Foundation, whose volunteers are doing the work the International Law has refused to do.

This remarkable group will use the genius of its legal volunteers to put the Eichmanns of Israel in the dock, in the Hague.

Or, at the very least, to ensure that the Eichmanns of Israel never gain easy entry to any country again. I don’t want such neighbors. I suggest neither do you.

So, in future, cross-examine Israel’s Eichmanns, in private, then in The Hague, in public. Tell us about your findings, but don’t platform the perpetrators, anon in film, or on podcast.

©2026 ILANA MERCER
The Unz Review, September 27
LewRockwell.com, September 29
ilana mercer’s FPV Resistance, Substack, October 3

Companion podcast, if preferable, is from September 24 and is titled, “NAZA Documentary: Why Taking A Prize For Documenting IDF Exploits Was Wrong & What’s The RIGHT Thing To Do“:

The film directors of NAZA, a Jewish-Israeli documentary, have given us the Eichmanns of Israel—IDF mezzanine-level managers of mass murder—under the shield of anonymity, for a mainstream, entertainment-industry prize …

I’ll tell you why this is WRONG.

And, what’s the RIGHT thing to do.

LISTEN:

©2026 ILANA MERCER
The Unz Review, September 24
LewRockwell.com, September 25
ilana mercer’s FPV Resistance, Substack, September 24

***********************

SUBSCRIBE to “ILANA MERCER’S FPV Resistance” on Substack.

https://ilanamercersfpvresistance.substack.com

Ilana Mercer, a widely published paleolibertarian author, essayist and theorist, has been writing up an anti-war, anti-woke storm since 1998, starting in Canada. On arriving in the US, in 2002, her weekly column was right away syndicated. Mercer’s national syndication fell through shortly after due to writing in strident opposition to the war in Iraq. ILANA is described as “a system-builder. Distilled, her modus operandi has been to methodically apply first principles to the day’s events.” She’s Jewish, grew up in Israel ages five to nineteen, and left, at 19, decades back, never to return. She had refused to serve in the IDF, Israel’s compulsory military. Ilana’s focus since October of 2023 has been the genocide (because it’s our duty).

Podcast: NAZA Documentary: Why Taking a Prize for Documenting IDF Exploits Was Wrong & What’s The Right Thing To Do

The post The Eichmanns Of Israel Granted Anonymity In NAZA Documentary; Israeli Creators Bag Award appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

War is the West’s way in the world; war on civilians. A war against civilians is, of course, a war on civilization. ~ilana.  

Conservative commentators—you know who I mean—persist in their promiscuous prattle about the uncontested superiority of what they call western civilization. This, when every single one of civilization’s edifices has been attacked and collapsed by the … West.

Never do these western commentators, forever dishing sloppy seconds, see fit to reexamine their gag-making gush over the “uncontested superiority” they attach to the West, in the context of western genocidal policies metastasizing.

Any convictions previously held about certain elevated principles still being peculiar to the West—the libertarian non-aggression principle is one—and not surviving once Western Civilization is no more; these are, at best, rickety.

As America and Israel and their auxiliary states across the West make a bonfire of people’s lives around the world, thoughtful individuals whose lives are not in rubble about their feet might wish to do us a kindness: Quit their compartmentalized, spasmodic outbursts about the supremacy of contemporary western civilization.

Remember the Descartes aphorism “I think, therefore I am”? If you are not jaundiced about the West, you aren’t thinking. If you are not thinking, well… you have my sympathies. All I can sincerely say is that this syllogism doesn’t end well for you. 

The noise-making about “western civilization’s” primacy comes from the same prominent people—podcasters, mostly—who sugar the fact that they registered a vote for Trump without question in 2024. If not to questionable intelligence, such a vote, at the very least, makes a person fit to be tied.

This, from a November 10, 2022 column I wrote: “A vote for Trump in 2024 is a vote for the Jarvanka organism, or familial mutations of it. The family will be back in the People’s House, minus the MAGA agenda.”

The years leading to November 2024 had taught the teachable that the next American president, like old skunk Biden before him, would continue to play procurer and pimp for Israel.

Well before Trump’s last election, the Jewish State had effectively asserted its birthright to do genocide, with millions, maybe billions, of people in the front seat, watching that genocide take place. We still are, thanks to the “western civilization” block, which seconded the Israeli motion. For his part, Trump huddled even closer to the genocidal entity.

(And no, there is no authentic, actionable British-French-Canadian plan to sanction products exported by the terrorists who’ve annexed the West Bank. “Britain’s settlement trade ban is cosmetic,” “Kabuki theater.” Truth is at the 31:06-minute mark of the Reason2Resist podcast.)

Three years on, and that birthright to genocide has been extended far and wide, with western imprimatur. Bibi and Trump, men of cold violence (fugitives from natural justice), and their western vassals have refined, standardized and normalized a system of theft, territorial asphyxiation, starvation and mass murder.

Conquest and extermination they call a foreign policy.

For this reason, the emissaries of this foreign policy, including the mincing Mr. Vance trying to act muscular; to pose as a friend to the American masses—have to dub Abdul El-Sayed a terrorist. Rather than plunder and pauper the universe, El-Sayed, an American medic, has served his Michigan locality. Doctor El-Sayed is now standing for election in the US Senate, having disavowed Israeli-backed money.

Once-upon a time, I’d have said, more serenely, that when an American politician preaches about “the values that make our country great,” to quote Mrs. Clinton, and about “our ally Israel sharing these values,” to be spread far and wide, chances are they mean not ordered liberty, but a libertine order, where the Bill of Rights is subordinate to the Security-cum-Surveillance State apparatus, and any common-law traditions remaining are treated as living, breathing, mutating philosophical malignancies that must be made to second and reinforce the murderous apparatus just mentioned.

Without qualm, I’ll now venture that the contemporary version of civilization known as “western” has been repudiated to a great degree by the Axis of Genocide. “You can’t pull too many bricks out of that wall before it caves in,” to borrow from Louis Auchincloss (one of the great writers America once boasted).

The Axis of Genocide’s modus vivendi is instantiated across the West in every single institution of state and civil society. The “perpetrator block” encompasses nearly all western governments and the most powerful economic actors. Its military and civilian squadrons have not only adopted Israel’s inverted reality and morality, but have made it their own. 

The thing, the West, is in a state of putrefaction.

You’d think, then, that the conservative commentariat—many of whom rose through the military- or media-industrial-complex—would finally quell their yelling about “western civilization,” in the context of metastasizing, protracted western genocidal pursuits.

Not a bit. They continue to rabbit on about The (Christian) West vs. The Rest. They continue to figuratively remind us, with a sniff and a sneer, that The Rest once could not make iron or roll a wheel.

One notable exception to the warped rule, aside Jeffrey Sachs—a prince among intellectual and moral scullions—is Professor Stephan Walt, the intellectual in the famous pair that authored the seminal book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

During an August interview, Walt firmly but affably told Tucker Carlson that “people sometimes forget” about the “collapse” of norms against the use of violence, courtesy of the Super Power and its supremacist sidekick, Israel. In his words:

…we’ve seen, a pretty dramatic erosion in the normative environment surrounding the use of force. And I’m a good realist, so I don’t think norms in international law are everything, but they’re not irrelevant. So, one of the things we’ve seen is essentially a collapse of the norm against assassination. For a long time in world history, governments didn’t try to assassinate each other. Leaders of other countries didn’t try and kill each other in conflicts. … this is a very dangerous road to go down because now it’s becoming a much more common practice. Look at what the United States and Israel do at the beginning of the Iran War. They take out all of Iran’s senior leaders. …It also erodes any possibility of trust. I mean, how can you sit down and negotiate an agreement with a regime that has killed your senior leaders and might do something again subsequently…”

With that one, Walt went on to further dig in. He refused to make pat overtures to his celebrity host, when the latter hinted at the monopoly Christianity has over charity.

The somewhat testy exchange began when Walt raised the matter of noblesse oblige with Tucker Carlson—that is the implicit moral duty that once attached to being of the nobility, to being of the hereditary landed aristocracy. Or, in young America’s case, to being terrifically wealthy. Said Walt: “… about previous wealthy elites in the United States. [It’s] not all, by any means, but many of them also had, along with the usual drive and ambition and you could even argue greed, also did have a certain public-mindedness.”

Tucker Carlson: “It was called Christianity!”

“Well, no, it wasn’t just Christianity.” Further to this point, at the 1:32:17 mark, Stephen M. Walt dared to dish up a counterpoint:

… I think some of them were obviously devout and faithful in their own fashion. That may have played a role in it. But even those that weren’t, or didn’t wear their religion on their sleeve, there was a general sense that they were part of a larger society and that they owed—they had to sort of give back in some respects. And that appears to be largely absent in the wealthiest people I could name right now. You don’t get the impression that they care very much about the collectivity. And that’s not healthy. That’s not a good situation.

Tension hung in the air. But Walt just fixed his host with a searing look. It probably won’t make him the most popular podcast guest. Then again, another thing western supremacists tend to believe is that the democratic marketplace adjudicates the quality of a cultural product. It doesn’t.

The mass market does no more than offer an aggregate snapshot of the trillions of subjective preferences enacted by consumers. Joe Rogan’s PowerfulJRE podcast outdoes Dimitri Lascaris’ Reason2Resist (my favorite). For some, this will be faith inspiring, for others deeply distressing.

In any case, the West’s way in the world is war. War on civilians; warring for land and lucre; war to make the World woke à la America and the Middle East Israeli. War to merge both entities into a monster even greater than its constituent elements: That’s the American foreign policy.

If it sounds absurdly simple and cartoonishly evil, it’s because it is. But if you prefer, I’ll dress it up:

The western warfare-woke worldview, the one under which we labor, is when a triumphant neoliberal and neoconservative global establishment arbitrarily imposes meaning on the phenomenological and the real world, as a function of its will to power. It then bullies and takes down all those implacably lined up in opposition, individual and state alike; stateside and abroad.

A war against civilians is, of course, a war on civilization.

©2026 ILANA MERCER
The Unz Review, September 12
LewRockwell.com,  September 12
ilana mercer’s FPV Resistance, Substack, September 13

SUBSCRIBE to “ILANA MERCER’S FPV Resistance” on Substack.
https://ilanamercersfpvresistance.substack.com 

Ilana Mercer, a widely published paleolibertarian author, essayist and theorist, has been writing up an anti-war, anti-woke storm since 1998, starting in Canada. On arriving in the US, in 2002, her weekly column was right away syndicated. Mercer’s national syndication fell through shortly after due to writing in strident opposition to the war in Iraq. ILANA is described as “a system-builder. Distilled, her modus operandi has been to methodically apply first principles to the day’s events.” She’s Jewish, grew up in Israel ages five to nineteen, and left, at 19, decades back, never to return. She had refused to serve in the IDF, Israel’s compulsory military. Ilana’s focus since October of 2023 has been the genocide.

The post On Conservative Kvetching About Contemporary Western Civilization’s Superiority appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

The Axis or Resistance enunciates The Only Truths, licit in natural and international law, to be found in the clutch of ceasefire documents. ~ilana

Allow me to vent spleen over the many ceasefire “agreements”—10-point (April 2026), 15-point (August 2026), and the MOU, Memorandum of Understanding in-between—whose details the “experts” continue to belabor and rehash.

Enough already!

Can we quit the cretinous, make-believe commentary over fakery? Consult a Ouija board if you are in doubt as to how these unilateral things progress. But quit making a mystery of what are manifestly cover operations.

I’ll unburden you if you find it hard to untangle and flush what are layers of loo-paper.

The MOU, the “Hormuz talks,” the 10-point plan, the 15-point plan, the Gaza ‘Peace’ Plan, are all pointless as anything other than cover operations.

Ceasefires à la Israel and America, the two symbiotic, congenital liar entities lording it over the universe, are just one more weapon wielded to destroy the Axis of Resistance, or any resistance to Superpower and Sidekick.

Who the dominatrix is and who is the submissive in the US-Israel relationship—that vexation, I venture, has been adjudicated by reality, as well.

Each one of these farcical ploys, the ceasefires, is meant invariably to end in bombs, with blame imputed to the victims. How do I know? In the same way you ought to know. Reality. Res ipsa loquitur. The thing itself speaks. Screams. Writhes in agony under the rubble.

Did not all of these preordained “negotiated” traps begin with fanfare and end, as described above, in “bombs, with blame imputed to the victims”?

Islamabad was a burlesque to begin with. To arrive at their destination, in April of 2026, the amiable Iranian negotiators had to circumnavigate Israeli assassins, only to confront the tricks and turns and greasy chicanery of the diplomats deputized by another criminal Svengali: Trump.

No sooner was the agreement signed than the US violated it. The Islamabad burlesque continues with an ostensible extension. By the caprice of the same one man, it ended almost as soon as I concluded typing the previous sentence.

The same thing transpires daily in Lebanon, where yesterday, August 17, the Israeli terrorists murdered 11 souls.

When Trump is gone, there’ll be a new Barnum to oversee the US-Israeli ceasefire circus.

More obscene even than this is the fate of Gaza. There, so-called ceasefires and prattle about them coincide with bombs.

Kushner’s August-16 papal visit to Cairo, to meet with Hamas negotiators, leaders and senior officials; who came to Cairo as an effort “to ‘preserve’ the Gaza cease-fire”—this had no bearing on the bombs. They kept falling.

For all we know, strikes and talks could have been timed to coincide. For the Jewish-Israeli terrorists, fugitives from justice, kept up their fiendish “operations” across Palestine, irrespective. On the 16th, Israelis killed a “14-year-old boy in Gaza.”

That’s about the score!

The process-based case against these ceasefires rests on another pedestrian, uncontested reality: The ceasefires reflect power differentials untempered by a shred of American and Israeli honor or decency.

Distilled, the reality on-a-loop is this:

The victim parties (Axis of Resistance) righteously assert and defend their negative, natural, leave-me-alone rights to live unmolested in sovereign territories, to enforce their riparian rights, namely their control over the waterways that abut their lands, and to trade freely and free of US-Israeli violence.

The impugned victims further insist on their right to reject and eject from their midst the overpowering, enervating presence of the Superpower and its Sidekick.

Media pontificating, picking apart, dignifying these make-believe ceasefire games are partaking in The Big Lie. Layering the loo-paper. This Brownian motion, this constant white noise around the US-Israel ceasefire gambit, is a game. The perpetrator block’s victims are like mice before cats.

For those for whom recognition is yet to dawn, the US and Israel lead this orgy of evil and ugly. From Greenland, to Latin America to West Asia to Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, powerless peoples are being corralled, bribed or terrorized by the duo, financially, economically and militarily.

Why? Because, this Axis of Evil views the very acts of asserting and enforcing national sovereignty and self-determination as acts of terroristic resistance, if in defiance of the US-Israeli elite interests and ideas.

Palestinians have been sequestered in an America-approved and assisted genocide for three years. Since Israel’s actions have been sanctified at the highest of political altitudes; the genocidal entity has seen fit to add to its extinction list a few more Axis-of-Resistance member states:

The Lebanese, the Yemeni and the Iranians.

This Axis or Resistance enunciates The Only Truths, licit in natural and international law, to be found in the clutch of ceasefire documents:

The right of Palestinians, Lebanese, Yemeni and Iranians to live free of Israeli and American violence and to defend that right and each other. The right of the brave people of the Resistance to use their native intelligence and natural resources to benefit their own people. Their right to freely trade the bounty from these natural gifts with other willing entities. To have what was stolen from them returned; and what was damaged and destroyed restored, made whole. In other words—

Not only do Palestinians, Lebanese, Yemeni and Iranians have the right of resistance and the obligation to stop genocide—rights and obligations which are licit in natural and international law—but so do they have the right to recompense. To reparations. Because—

After two genocides and the crimes of unprovoked aggression—the crimes-of-all crimes—comes justice, not peace.

The complicit, impunity conferring Superpower and the Serial-Killer State must cough-up and then f-ck off.

The celebrated Palestinian poet Refaat Al-Areer, RIP, perfectly summed-up the ceasefire farce: “A ceasefire is when the Israelis fire and we cease.” By “cease,” I believe Al-Areer meant not cease-to-fire, but cease-to-live, as in die; be deprived of life. The same demons came for him in his home before the year 2023 was out.

When, then, will recognition dawn? In Bushspeak: “Fool me once, shame on … shame on you. Fool me … You can’t get fooled again!” (And, W was an expert in untruths.)

In English: Not allowing the clouds to cap your vision is an admirable quality, but allowing them to cloud reality is hardly praiseworthy.

****

SUBSCRIBE to “ILANA MERCER’S FPV Resistance” on Substack.

https://ilanamercersfpvresistance.substack.com

©2026 ILANA MERCER
The Unz Review, August 18
LewRockwell.com,  August 19
ilana mercer’s FPV Resistance, Substack, August 19

The post Flush ‘Em: Ceasefires À La Israel And America Are Layers Of Loo-Paper appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

HOLISTIC BEAUTY, natural and built, a place where “the architecture” is “fully integrated” into the landscape: This is something “real estate developer”-cum-explorer Ivanka Trump knows all about.

Or, so Mrs. Kushner tells us, in a misty promotional production, in which viewers are tutored about the person, Narcissus herself, and the new “developments” she is pursuing, personal and material. A friendly podcast serves as Barbie Trump’s vanity press. Its title: “Ivanka Trump on Building an Authentic Life.”

As in the story of Narcissus in Greek mythology, we have here malignant narcissism, cruelty, as well as a body of water. But it’s all terribly pretty, you understand.

Ivanka’s plot (as in scheme) is in the same vein as other assets and investment holdings in the Trump-Kushner crime family’s real-estate portfolio, in which Exhibit One is Gaza.

Late in January of 2026, husband Jared Kushner, a criminally acquisitive, empty husk of a man in his own right, presented a slide show in Davos even more garishly hideous than father-in-law’s earlier iteration of the production dubbed the Gaza Plan. The milieu was as ugly as any Trump family venture, or gathering, or trashy cotton-candy colored “couture.”

Kushner’s Master Slave Plan for Gaza—a cover for genocide, much as is the family’s Board of Peace he oversees—was presented before some of the world’s wealthiest men, all parading their greed for the property of the poorest, most-imperiled people in the world, the Palestinians.

Barbie’s sepia-tinted podcast presentation of the plans for the uninhabited Sazan Island, off the coast of Albania, involve conquest and usurpation, but of a better variety.

Like south Lebanon, currently being pulverized by the terrorist state, Israel, which the couple canonizes and runs cover for—Gaza before the Holocaust was quite beautiful, certainly unique. It was a quaint community with a character and a history, some of it ancient. All of it well reflected in its public spaces. Like south Lebanon, Gaza had nothing of the vulgar gilt of the Trump White House and ballroom, or of Ivanka’s many darling, dinky “little” pads.

As to the kitschy interior of the mystery “friend’s boat”: It relates to the “authentic” Gaza or South Lebanon as a centuries-old church relates to a Methodist, big-tent revival pavilion. “Authentic” is another adjective Barbie Trump has appropriated to telegraph her essence.

Did I not dilate on Ivanka’s friend’s “boat”? My bad. Back to the more material aspects of the first daughter’s otherworldly quest:

Nat Rothchild’s superyacht, “Planet Nine,” is obscenely lavish—almost long enough for a 100-meter dash, it has space for two, eight-seater, explorer helicopters onboard, a helipad, a “surround cinema,” spas, desalination facility (the kind bosom buddies of the Kushners destroyed in Gaza), elevator to get you to all 5 levels, a “3,000-square-foot owner’s apartment,” and respectable ice classification.

The Kushners were sailing on this “friend’s boat,” as Mrs. Kushner relayed,   when—Lo!—the acquisitive habit overpowered their conjugal happiness. Embarrassing.

Overcome—and fresh from pillage and rapine in Gaza—the insatiable lovebirds hit on a way to keep their urges in check. First order of business was to cool off. Unlike Narcissus, the two did not come to harm. They allegedly jumped off “the boat,” and proceeded to swim to an Albanian Island that beckoned in the offing.

If Americans are silly enough to dismiss Ivanka’s killer credentials and cultivate scented memories of her, which is what she craves, I urge that searing doubts be put aside in favor of the certainty of 2017. It was then that the first daughter had nagged daddy into strafing Syria. All for The Kids, she claimed. After all, Mrs. Kushner has always been “super mission-driven,” to use another of her phrases. She speaks and thinks in cliches. Brother Eric Trump confirmed: “Sure, Ivanka influenced the Syria strike decision.”

Truth be told, Ivanka is not new to the dark arts. She was as valuable to Trump’s first administration as Laura Loomer and the Israel über alles crowd are to the second. Ivanka has certainly been the driving force behind that androgynous, anemic, shrimp, Jared. Her dilemma, however, is this: The first daughter is delighted to have power, but not at the cost of popularity. Ivanka prefers that husband Jared draw the public’s radiating disapproval away from herself, leaving his wife safely antiseptic. Jared and Ivanka, of course, are twin spirits in every way—both are cunning and coldhearted and not too bright.

What Ivanka lacks in cerebral agility and a sense of propriety, she makes up in swimming prowess. Boy, can the two, husband and wife, swim to sate their greed. Or, as Ivanka put it, she likes it when people “swing for things.” Well, Ivanka and Jared swung for Sazan.

Albania is abuzz over Ivanka’s “incubated,” “super mission-driven,” “spring-out-of-bed,” “daunting”-in-size plot for their one-and-only loved and protected Island.  (The other crap words are Ivanka’s.)

Albanians want the flamingos to stay and the Kushners to fuck off.

The acquisitive couple was helped not at all by Ivanka’s affectatious video attempt to cast her land grab in that country as a return to some primordial, wholesome way of life. (The sibilance of her enunciation might be because of the outsized chicklet veneers in her mouth.)

Ok, “think” is too ambitious a verb to attach to anything Ivanka and Jared. Nevertheless, Barbie Trump believes that people like you and me have a secret yen to live on a one-of-a-kind, pilfered Albanian island. And she’s going to show us how it’s done. 

As to the aesthetics of Project Authenticity (images shared look positively fungal): It’s fair to say that the only spots in the universe more packed with toxic waste than Gaza are the faces and minds of The Don’s family and their loyalists. A look at the Kushner couple and at Laura Loomer, Trump’s other prized, plasticky adviser (who was actually once pretty)—and one thinks Madame Tussauds, the wax museum founded in London in 1835. The three, the Kushners and The Loomer, belong in the museum’s Chamber of Horrors section.

No, Ivanka; the great mass of us would like to live as far from toxic Barbie and her beau, their sticky paws and sticky-sweet presentations and performances.

Sorry to say, but Ivanka is an idiot, as is her husband subpar in every way possible. They both come from crime families. The Don, Trump, has made a present to Israel of everything Palestinians and Lebanese own. His idiot progeny’s “humanitarian concerns” have revolved around the return of Israeli hostages and assorted acts of solidarity in Israel, alongside Witkoaf and the other oaf, Jared. Trump’s daughter “thinks” she can porcelainize her own crimes and those of her husband by appealing to an ostensibly earthy quest we all share to live the “simple” life, like herself—

On stolen land, which she will commercialize and vulgarize to death, and whose critters her uprooting earthworks are already displacing or killing.

Like their beloved Israelis, the Kushners will deform and poison any landscape they touch.

****

SUBSCRIBE to “ILANA MERCER’S FPV Resistance” on Substack.

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©2026 ILANA MERCER
The Unz Review, August 10
LewRockwell.com,  August 11
ilana mercer’s FPV Resistance, Substack, August 11

Ilana Mercer, a widely published paleolibertarian author, essayist and theorist, has been writing up an anti-war, anti-woke storm since 1998, starting in Canada. On arriving in the US, in 2002, her weekly column was right away syndicated. Mercer’s national syndication fell through shortly after due to writing in strident opposition to the war in Iraq. ILANA is described as “a system-builder. Distilled, her modus operandi has been to methodically apply first principles to the day’s events.” She’s Jewish, grew up in Israel ages five to nineteen, and left, at 19, decades back, never to return. She had refused to serve in the IDF, Israel’s compulsory military. Ilana’s focus since October of 2023 has been the genocide. A war against civilians is a war on civilization.

The post Ivanka Does Albania: 1st Daughter Expands Crime Family’s Real-Estate Portfolio, Spins It Like Cotton Candy appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

Without demarcation, Vance has blended into an administration that is terrorizing the world financially, economically and militarily. From Greenland, to Latin America to West Asia to Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. ~ilana

DEVOUTLY AND LOUDLY do various media organs of the establishment—CNN, The War Street Journal, The Hill, Politico or Israel’s Axios—dazzle you with flattering depictions of JD Vance’s foreign-policy stance, almost always based on unnamed sources, which have conveniently slithered out of dank corners, at this point of the election cycle. Experts in untruths, these media tell you that Vance, vice president in the Trump regime, has all-along roared about foreign-policy restraint.

If he has, it’s the least leonine roar ever heard in this neck of the woods.

Or, the most “private” political protest ever, as Politico would counter. “Private” is how this particular Deep-State tool dubs VP Vance’s foreign policy bent.

In short, Vance confines his “subversive” murmurs to carefully leaked and curated after-the-fact comments, credited mostly to unnamed sources.

The following facts need to be stated, too:

Juvenile quips from craven politicians like Vance notwithstanding, the United States of America continues to play planet to Israel’s sun. Israel’s genocides in the Levant are Made-in-America. Not once in the course of Israel’s carnage in Gaza, in the West Bank and in Lebanon, all ongoing, have two genocidal administrations, Democrat and Republican, budged in materially directing resources to the missions of mass murder currently conducted by Israel.

America underwrites Israeli evil financially and diplomatically, running diplomatic cover for the Israeli executioners. To that end, the US even sanctions and persecutes countries and individuals who dare disagree with its Israeli deity’s mass murder; dare agitate for justice, or demand that the laws of the land be levied against the Serial Killer State.

The US has even sanctioned judicial and UN officials tasked with investigating the crimes of U.S. or Israeli nationals. “Sanction” is a weasel way to frame America’s theft of their assets, banning of their travel, and restriction of their rights to trade with American business.

In all, Israel remains the holy of holies for American politicians.

With the reverence reserved for that country, VP Vance’s administration has never stopped the Jewish State from en masse execution of civilians and from the eradication of entire communities who refuse to submit to American and Israeli hegemony. 

The next fact probably also bears repeating: Not once has JD Vance ever personally conveyed to his constituents a principled objection to the crimes of his administration and for those of Israel. No revulsion or reservations from VP Vance. His most coruscating critique of genocide has amounted to strategically intoning about “Israel’s right to defend itself,” a synonym for the practice of state-sponsored terrorism. From this stupid line, Vance has not strayed.

To hear VP Vance tell it, Israel has a bad hand to play. You know—nudge-nudge, wink-wink—it must deal with the caprices of the People of the region. “A ceasefire in that region of the world just means they’re shooting a little bit less at each other than they were before,” the jocular, pompous Vance told the presstitutes present at a June 18 presser. There, Vance also boasted about sending the Iranian economy into “a freefall,” and causing “a trillion dollars of damage to their industrial base over the last three months.” 

Again, I have never heard JD Vance utter a meaningful, principled word in opposition to any depravity, much less Israeli depravity. I have, however, heard Vance echo Trump, the genocidaire. Without demarcation, Vance has blended into an administration that is terrorizing the world financially, economically and militarily. From Greenland, to Latin America to West Asia to Africa and the Arabian Peninsula.

Vance should repulse you, down to the garish eyeliner, which only enhances the “degeneracy of manners and morals” he and his administration represent.

With respect to the criminal, collaborative assault on Iran, Vance has been a “servile cheerleader for the war his boss …launched alongside Israel,” as more honest comment has characterized the Vance stance. Throughout Trump’s many ceasefire farces—all a fig leaf for US-Israel resolve to slowly dissolve Iran, and with it the Axis of Resistance—Vance has eagerly played his part, seconding Trump’s venomous genocidal threats against the Islamic Republic, as well as aping Trump’s idiotic atavistic aggression against other countries.

The insubstantial JD Vance might direct stale, totem words of warning toward those Israelis who speak ill of the Butcher of DC, Trump. But, for the Butcher of Tel Aviv Vance reserves the velvet glove: He took care to exempt Bibi from this particular wrongdoing, during the same June 18 presser, where Vance assured the presstitutes present that he speaks regularly with Bibi and has good rapport with him.

Essentially, Vance, Bibi and Trump are solid partners in vice.

Nonchalantly, VP Vance might opine, as he has, that Israel “can’t kill its way to security.” But that’s the extent of it. The carefully choreographed dance that American and Israeli “leaders” do for the benefit of the perfect American fools who vote for them continues uninterrupted.

A plurality of Israelis, on the other hand, are tickled pink by Bibi’s genocides in Lebanon and Palestine. As the brilliant Diana Buttu gloomily reported, Israeli political candidates are running on a plank of who can inflict more pain on their barely surviving Palestinian victims.

So don’t be swept to sea again, this time by Vance whom the irremediable corporate media (as well as some in the alternative media, regrettably) is portraying as a strident opponent of the war on Iran and wars for Israel. It’s nonsense on stilts. 

What the VP is doing now is what he has done since the auspicious start of his political career:

Vance launched his career with a smug, self-aggrandizing book, in which he slimed his hillbilly relatives, even naming names. The book was very badly received by authentic “hillbillies.” The Establishment, however lapped it up and loved its author. Still does.

During the 2024 campaign, and before he was tapped by Trump, Vance did the same. He made the right noises, ones the voters wanted to hear, against “costly and unsuccessful interventions,” as he put it.

Stoutly strategic, in suiting-up for the 2028 race, Vance has dropped a book about his Catholicism. Nothing if not theologically inventive, the triangulating candidate has coopted his Catholic faith as a reason for his fealty to … Israel.

Israel is another exigency of the moment. Vance is reading the room again. America is just not that keen on Israel any longer—although, sadly for their souls, Americans have yet to turn on the Jewish State completely and altogether.

While opinion of Israel has undeniably plummeted in the US, the “bottom line,” sums Gallup soberly, is that “Americans retain a more positive view of Israel, with 46% viewing it favorably, than of the Palestinian Territories, at 37%”:

‘… Americans still have a more favorable view of Israel, as a country, than of the Palestinian Territories, though views of Israel are among the least favorable Gallup has measured historically. Meanwhile, views of the Palestinian Territories are the most positive to date, albeit still negative overall.’ (Gallup, February 26, 2026)

In all, don’t let your imagination run fevered with respect to Vance. Don’t get played again (and again, and again). When the powers that be, their sub-par publications and their strategists, pool their power to portray JD Vance as something other than what (as opposed to who) he is—one would hope your psychological-warfare antennae begin to transmit robust signals.

The reason I say that Vance is a “what”, not a “who”—that “what” is the better syntactic determiner to attach to VP Vance—is because the VP is a political production, not a real person. A production of the worst pedigree.

Vance is a creation of a tech billionaire PAC, a “tech-aligned super political action committee.”

Vance is the personal creation of Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal. Thiel was/is his mentor. Together, the wild-eyed Thiel and the ugly in-and-out Alex Karp founded, still manage, Palantir Technologies. How intimate are the Israel Genocidal Forces and the “CIA-backed” Palantir?

Conjugally intimate.

If the gateway to the internet is Google, and it is; not even Google—algorithmically set to defend Israel at all costs—can conceal the bonds that bind Palantir to the Serial Killer State’s crimes. Put it this way, Google (an aggregator for Zionism) and pro-Palestine sources are in agreement over the Palantir-IDF connection.

Palantir works closely with the IDF’s notorious Unit 8200, which is comprised of a select group of mama’s boys and girls, who snoop, hack, and assassinate in code and in practice. Unit 8200’s killer AI algorithms both calibrate and codify mass murder into the SS IDF’s military’s legal code. They have given themselves imprimatur to Press Kill on locating a single resistance fighter, amid up to 100 non-combatant family members, friends and neighbor. It’s not in violation of Israeli law. The individual is impugned by the flimsiest evidence.

Instead of in the dock, in the Hague, these computer killers, you should know, are also found in Silicon Valley, Boston’s high-tech corridor, and, presumably, in Washington State’s techno-town. These characters will certainly be coming to a community near you, near me, when JD’s friends and sponsors facilitate the assimilation of this human detritus into our communities, as they flee future International Criminal Court subpoenas.

Israel and Unit 8200 are the face of this global death industry. The SS IDF’s Artificial Intelligence products, out of Unit 8200, have, in particular, perfected the auto-kill computer systems known as “Lavender,” Daddy’s Home, and The Gospel, whose killer code has been applied to Gaza and Lebanon.

Palantir works with Unit 8200, on “war-related missions.” Coward Karp, Thiel’s partner, has proudly spoken of his company as being involved in “crucial operations in Israel.”

In backing Vance, co-founder Thiel and CEO Karp are joined by former tech executive and podcaster David Sacks, an influencer in the Vance orbit. Sacks is close, too, to censor-for-Zionism Elon Musk. Both backed Vance. AI-traders Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz hobnob too in the Vance hood.

Speaking of Google, Vance’s venture capitalism company, Narya Capital, was sponsored by both Thiel and Google’s Eric Schmidt. So, it’s pointless asking Vance to ease up the Google algorithms.

Vance’s Deep Tech billionaire backers are anathema to human flourishing. Theirs is a system of plunder. They are princes who pauper the universe by their deadly fiat pursuits, financial, technocratic, environmental, military. These people and their necro-industries move humanity further away from community, from the locality; from honest industry, from real knowledge and production and into a consumer, bubble-driven technocracy, anchored in illiteracy, gambling, speculation, buying and selling intangible derivative products.

As if American communities are not already distressed; the infrastructure for AI promises to suck the life out of their natural environment, leaving bereft the communities in whose midst these hideous “data centers” are planted. AI Data centers are an assault-on-the-eye and on ethics. Their stratospheric costs as always are socialized; their profits privatized. 

As I say, VP Vance is a slick production. The man is a particularly oleaginous political product, astroturf down to the (alleged) rug on his head.

Lest I forget, in his new book Vance cites Charlie Kirk, a mention that was probably focus-group tested. Metaphorically speaking, Vance is boiling the bones of poor murdered Mr. Kirk to make soup. Mr. Kirk is being exploited posthumously to shape discourse in politically advantageous ways.

**********

Podcast: Beware The JD Vance Political Production

SUBSCRIBE to “ILANA MERCER’S FPV Resistance” on Substack.

https://ilanamercersfpvresistance.substack.com

©2026 ILANA MERCER
The Unz Review, July 12
LewRockwell.com, July 6
Substack, July 13

Ilana Mercer, a widely published paleolibertarian author, essayist and theorist, has been writing up an anti-war, anti-woke storm since 1998, starting in Canada. On arriving in the US, in 2002, her weekly column was right away syndicated. Mercer’s national syndication fell through shortly after due to writing in strident opposition to the war in Iraq. ILANA is described as “a system-builder. Distilled, her modus operandi has been to methodically apply first principles to the day’s events.” She’s Jewish, grew up in Israel ages five to nineteen, and left, at 19, never to return. She had refused to serve in the IDF, Israel’s compulsory military. Ilana’s focus since October of 2023 has been the genocide. A war against civilians is a war on civilization.

The post Here’s JD: The Unbearable Lightness Of VP Vance: A VERY Short Primer (+Podcast) appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

Should the Federal Constitution be ratified, there would be ‘no checks, no real balances,’ thundered Patrick Henry. Instead, the country would live under a ‘powerful and mighty empire.’

On the eve of the federal convention, and following its adjournment in September of 1787, the Anti-Federalists made the case that the Constitution makers in Philadelphia had exceeded the mandate they were given to amend the Articles of Confederation, and nothing more.

The Federal Constitution augured ill for freedom, argued the Anti-Federalists. These unsung heroes had warned early Americans of the “ropes and chains of consolidation,” in Patrick Henry’s magnificent words, inherent in the new dispensation.

Two hundred years into just such “consolidation”—in the magisterial Liberty, Order, And Justice: An Introduction to the Constitutional Principles of American Government—constitutional scholar James McClellan distilled the Anti-Federalist argument with the respect it deserves.

As “strong advocates of States’ Rights,” Anti-Federalists held that “self-government, independence, and individual liberty were best protected at the local level. A distant and powerful central government,” the kind cooked up at the Philadelphia convention, was anathema to these “cherished values.” To that end, Anti-Federalists fought to preserve the “loose-knit relationship” that had existed between the “Confederation government and the States.”

Should the Federal Constitution be ratified, there would be “no checks, no real balances,” thundered Patrick Henry. Instead, the country would live under a “powerful and mighty empire.”

Writing under the assumed name “Agrippa,” yet another Anti-Federalist scoffed at the idea of an enormous “uncompounded republic,” then containing six million inhabitants, all “reduced to the same standard of morals or habits and of laws.” This “in itself is an absurdity,” mocked “Agrippa.”

Twenty-first century America is home not to six but 350 million alienated, antagonistic individuals, philosophically diverse to the point of distrust. These modern-day Americans, some of whose ancestors were brought together by a “profound intellectual and emotional attachment to individual liberty,” possess little by way of “social capital” to unify them.

Surveys say Americans today avoid one another and hunker down unhappily in front of the TV, instead. This would have hardly surprised “Agrippa.”

So, too, did Anti-Federalists predict the problem of representatives who had been imbued with excessive power. “Once elected, representatives would be far from home, comfortable in their jobs, enjoying a big salary … living in some distant, yet-to-be-built city far removed from the watchful eye of the people they represented.”

Sound familiar?

From “Brutus” came perhaps the most “perceptive and far-reaching examinations of congressional power from the Anti-Federalist perspective.” Writing in the New York Journal, “Brutus” observed that “the ‘most natural and grammatical construction’ of the General Welfare Clause in Article I is that it authorizes the Congress ‘to do anything which in their judgment will tend to provide for the general welfare, and this amounts to the same thing as general and unlimited power of legislation in all cases.”

“If only the high-minded Framers had written the Constitution with crooks in mind,” I lamented in 2008. “Brutus” was not nearly as charitable. Bitterly did he complain about a Constitution that was “written ‘in general and indefinite terms, which are either equivocal, ambiguous, or which require definition.’”

The Commerce Clause, for example, was the focus of scathing Anti-Federalist critique. “What is meant by ‘the power to regulate?” they demanded to know. “What, precisely, is ‘commerce’”? The new Constitution, argued the prescient Anti-Federalists, is mum on these matters, providing little by way of precision in definition.

Brilliant too was “Brutus” in his prediction that, if instituted, the “new system of government” would see the Federal judiciary “swallow up the State courts.” Back then, “Brutus” saw Article III, Section 2, of the Constitution as vesting the judicial branch with the kind of power that would bring about “the entire subversion of the legislative, executive, and judiciary power of the individual states,” to say nothing of the individual human being.

As the saying goes, “a prophet is not without honor save in his own country.”

To observe our rulers in action is to realize that Massachusetts delegate Elbridge Gerry and New York Anti-Federalist “Cato” were prophets who deserve a lot more honor in their own country. Both forewarned of an imperial presidency in the making. “‘The president,’ wrote “Cato,” has so much power that his office ‘differs very immaterially from the establishment of monarchy in Great Britain.’”

Correction: The power vested in the American presidency dwarfs that of the largely titular, ceremonial British monarchy.

Indeed, presidents have habitually used executive orders to circumvent federal legislation. They have also exempted their “friends or political cronies” from laws their subjects must obey. And they have ordered the suspension of “duly enacted law”—even “barring enforcement”—because they disliked said law.

A propagandized population has a hard time choosing worthy heroes. It is high time Americans celebrate the Anti-Federalists, for they were correct in predicting the fate of freedom after Philadelphia.

To deny that the Anti-Federalists were right is to deny reality.

Having prophesied that Philadelphia was the beginning of the end of the freedoms won in the American Revolution, our Anti-Federalist philosophical fathers fought to forestall the inevitable. They failed.

****

SUBSCRIBE to “ILANA MERCER’S FPV Resistance “ on Substack.

https://ilanamercersfpvresistance.substack.com

Ilana Mercer, paleolibertarian author, essayist and theorist, has been writing up an anti-war, anti-woke storm since 1998, starting in Canada. On arriving in the US, in 2002, her weekly column was right away syndicated. Mercer’s national syndication fell through shortly after due to writing in strident opposition to the war in Iraq. ILANA is described as “a system-builder. Distilled, her modus operandi has been to methodically apply first principles to the day’s events.” She’s Jewish, grew up in Israel ages five to nineteen, and left, at 19, never to return. She had refused to serve in the IDF, Israel’s compulsory military. Ilana’s focus since October of 2023 has been the genocide. A war against civilians is a war on civilization.

©2026 ILANA MERCER
The Unz Review, July 4
LewRockwell.com, July 6
The New American, July 6

The post The Anti-Federalists, America’s Unsung Heroes, Predicted Evil Empire & The Imperial Presidency appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

Inescapably, it is not Muslims of the Ummah, in the name of Islam, who have committed the Twenty-First Century’s two Holocausts—in Gaza and Southern Lebanon …~ilana 

In examining the causal factors in the criminal psychopathy on display in contemporary Israel, I have questioned “The Judaism-Zionism Bifurcation,” namely the convention, accepted among solidarity commentators and activists, Jews and non-Jews, that there is a strict divide between Judaism and Zionism.

Advocates of this duality portray Judaism as a faith largely beyond reproach—humanistic, universal, and peaceful; Zionism as its opposite. In this asserted split, it is assumed that Judaism is naturally antagonistic to Zionism and always arrayed against Israel.

The zealotry with which our camp, in solidarity with the Palestinians, adheres to the Judaism-Zionism divide can’t but catch one’s attention. It is as though mouthing these platitudes was The Charm, a protective amulet of sorts.

Contrary to this conventional wisdom, I noted that the idée fixe of “The Chosen People” goes a long way to account for the unwarranted sense of supremacy that animates Jewish Israelis. A biblical aspect of Judaism such as “Chosenness” appears to have encouraged, animated and privileged a factional preference among Jews, to the near exclusion of universal fellow-feeling.

Biblically based Chosenness and the corresponding supremacy certainly help explain the indelible reservoir of evil, a bottomless pit of it, expressed and acted out by the Jewish Israeli commonwealth’s most faithful representatives: The People’s army, the IDF, or the Israel Defense Forces.

There is no grimness in the IDF’s approach to the “mission” of mass murder. Undaunted, they go about their “business” with barbaric gaiety. (Remember, I watch the Hebrew-language tv channels. No filters there.) This Israeli “citizen army” is on its second genocide, uninterrupted.

From Gaza, to the West Bank, to Southern Lebanon; from sun-up to sun-down—Israel continues its genocidal deformation of the Levant’s landscape and its people. Now, generations of Lebanese agrarians—food producers, their well-appointed residences, built to blend into, not lord over, the undulating hills—the very means of production: wiped out. Ancient religious heritage sites, Muslim and Christian, gone (although it should be noted that the magnificently spirited Shia community is the prime target of the Terrorist State and its American enabler). Over a million people displaced. Upwards of 4100 murdered. Israel is not on a killing spree; it’s in a comfortable groove, a second-nature killing groove. Jewish Israel is flying close to the sun, and nobody dares to swat it down.

In marked contrast, Haaretz columnist Gideon Levi and the inimitable Norman Finkelstein were quick to implicate “Chosenness” in the psychopathy on display in contemporary Israel. In August of 2024, in conversation with Current Affairs’ editor Nathan J. Robinson, Levi, a veteran dissident journalist, had been commenting about the unexamined lives Israelis lead. Although he has since vacillated; in his better days, alluded to here, Levy had also remarked in anguish that Jewish-Israel shapes its genocidal media, not vice versa. In other words, genocide is market-driven. The general average of Jewish Israelis throughout the country knows and likes what’s going on.

Or, as Levi put it, “They couldn’t be bothered.”

It makes sense that Jewish supremacists—a term I deployed as early as March 31, 2024, in the essay, “ISRAEL: In Violation Of God’s Law, Natural Justice, The Laws Of War, And All Customary International Humanitarian Law”—would lead unexamined lives. They believe they are divinely-anointed superior beings in whom a birthright to commit genocide is inherent.

Lone Israeli voices like Levi and Amira Haas, another Haaretz pro-Palestine columnist, would be first to tell you that, in Israel, “they represent absolutely nobody,” confirmed Norman Finkelstein, also to Current Affairs’ editor on June 6, 2026.

With similar certainty, Dr. Finkelstein has ventured that Jewish supremacy is augmented by economic success. It’s “because Jews are rich,” qualified Finkelstein: They are the wealthiest religious ethnic group in the US. “The Jewish supremacist billionaire class”—Finkelstein’s coinage—is exerting its power. This class is behind the clamp-down on anti-Israel demonstrations and on American constitutional freedoms. “You can’t say anything now critical of Israel,” inveighed Dr. Finkelstein, to podcaster Robinson Erhardt.

Finkelstein has declared “the Jewish supremacist billionaire class” and their proxies as his inveterate enemies, promising that he’ll never ascent to their demands. The upbeat doctrine that these “Jewish supremacist billionaires” have enforced in American campuses is the requirement that everybody be “inclusive and pluralistic toward Israeli students,” or else. Finkelstein, in his inimitable fashion, declared he would never become “inclusive and pluralistic” toward child killers. May they burn in hell, he added.

Over and above the concentration of wealth in Jewish hands, Finkelstein further fingered, on December 12, 2025, a penchant for community organizing and networking among Jews, as well as the impunity that has come with the weaponization of the Holocaust in forming a “lethal combination.” He was speaking to Double Down News. (“Norman Finkelstein Exposes Israel’s Darkest Secret.”)

So, before the curtain falls on this informal inquiry of mine; I’ll ask again: The bloodiest era in Israeli criminal annals—are they not an organic extension of some biblically based, base, atavistic, shared Jewish superiority, grown more regressive, more savage with time and impunity?  

The late great exegete Pope Benedict XVI of the brilliant mind and beatific smile delivered an address, in 2006, to the students at the University of Regensburg, in which he worried out loud that Islam may be a closed system, impermeable to reform.

I now believe the Holy See was wrong, possibly swayed, like the rest of the world, by osmotic Hasbara.

Pope Benedict’s opinion, however, has always been wildly popular in the West, having been propagated by a contingent of ersatz experts, which, it so happens, were also ardently Zionist. Arab scholars attempted, respectfully, as is their wont, to counter. “What is aggravating is that the pope has been free with assumptions, and liberal with its first cousin, innuendo.” In vain. It didn’t help Muslims.

In the address aforementioned, nevertheless, the Holy Father spoke of reason as integral to the Christian faith. He went on to recount how the university formed a “universe of reason,” in which, through rational inquiry, even the existence of God was questioned. Had not the “erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus,” in his exchange with his Persian interlocutor, circa 1391, counsel that, “Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats”? Indeed.

Observed Pope Benedict: “The decisive statement in [the Paleologus] argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature.”

Inescapably, it is not Muslims of the Ummah, in the name of Islam, who have acted out “contrary to God’s nature.”

It is not members of the Ummah who have committed the Twenty-First Century’s two Holocausts—in Gaza and Southern Lebanon both in progress. It is, rather, a cohort of Jews, not insubstantial, who purported to do so in supplication to their faith.

I ask, then:

If it was acceptable for the Pontiff to have tried to puncture the pieties of one of the three major religions, why is it that another faith—the one into which I was born—may not be poked and probed as well?

Is the question, then, purely a Jewish-Israeli question, or is it perhaps a Judaism question?

Could it be that Judaism is in need of a Reformation? And is this Jew, myself, even permitted to ask?

***

SUBSCRIBE to “ILANA MERCER’S FPV Resistance “ on Substack.

Part 1: “The Judaism-Zionism Bifurcation: Chosenness” (May 20, 2026)
Part 2: “The Judaism-Zionism Bifurcation: Tikkun Olam” (May 30, 2026)

Ilana Mercer, paleolibertarian author, essayist and theorist, has been writing up an anti-war, anti-woke storm since 1998, starting in Canada. On arriving in the US, in 2002, her weekly column was right away syndicated. Mercer’s national syndication fell through shortly after due to writing in strident opposition to the war in Iraq. ILANA is described as “a system-builder. Distilled, her modus operandi has been to methodically apply first principles to the day’s events.” She’s Jewish, grew up in Israel ages five to nineteen, and left, at 19, never to return. She had refused to serve in the IDF, Israel’s compulsory military. Ilana’s focus since October of 2023 has been the genocide. A war against civilians is a war on civilization.

©2026 ILANA MERCER
The Unz Review, June 25
LewRockwell.com, June 25

The post Two Genocides Down; Does Judaism Need A Reformation? And Is This Jew Allowed To Ask? appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

Having, attached yourself to the Palestine solidarity movement as an ultra-orthodox Jew; I’m not yet lavish in my praise for you. What excites suspicion is that your conduct, vis-à-vis Palestinian possessions, could be tied to the religious edicts surrounding the coming of messiah. Although the question of messiah’s arrival is more than likely immaterial—the question of ethics is not. ~ilana

Charity ought to be about fellow-feeling, not factional preferences. ~ilana

Contra classical natural law theory, my own religious order, Judaism in its popular rendering has always appeared to me quite sectarian. The faith to which I was born frequently seemed a we-only litany, more about Jews and for Jews than about the world, or for the good of the world.

For “a spectacular sense of otherness and unity” (Jon Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith, p. 262), only the Mormons, tethered to their territory of Utah, equal Jews, with whom Mormons also strongly identify.

Myself, I came alive ideologically when I reached the New World, in the mid-1990s. It was as though a new world of ideas heretofore unknown had unfurled to quench the soul and the intellect. Alas, it did not come from Judaism, to which I was born.

I discovered the very American libertarian non-aggression axiom, which flows, at least in my opinion, from Thomist Catholic philosophy, Just War theory, and the Stoic doctrine of natural law, whose first “interpreter and transmitter” was Cicero,[1] to be followed by Saint Thomas Aquinas and the Roman Church.

As plain as plain is the idea of charity. It’s a religion surety, I had surmised, that benevolence is meant to improve society, not the State; and to do so through personal, not political, acts in the community. Charity ought to be about fellow-feeling, not factional preferences. As instructed in Leviticus 19:18, “You should love your neighbor as you do yourself,” וְאָהַבְתָ לְרֵעֲךָ כָמוֹךָ.

Consider the concept of Tikkun Olam, תקון עולם, the Jewish obligation to repair the world. Perhaps willfully—and to comport with my natural-law bias—I had always interpreted Tikkun Olam as a sublimely modest Jewish obligation.

Developed by the scholars and sages of a dispersed people, Tikkun Olam, I had hoped, was intended as a humble thing—as the duty of the Jewish individual to help, bit-by-bit, to bring about a better world in unassuming, day-to-day righteous acts. In his community and beyond.

In the best sense of that much-abused term “Orthodox” is a reader of ours, “a Torah observant Orthodox Jewish man,” and an attorney at law. JBS, Esq. speaks of Jewish “Chosenness” as follows:

As you are likely aware, Judaism is an ancient religion based upon God’s revelation of Himself to Hebrews at Mt. Sinai. Zionism is a recent [19th Century] political movement associated with Judaism but is not Judaism. Most Jewish people conflate and blur the distinction.
The ‘Chosen People’ concept is misunderstood by most Jews.  God ‘chose’ the Jewish people to receive, accept, keep and fulfill His Torah and teach it to the world, to be a ‘light unto the nations.’ That is all being ‘chosen’ ought to mean, not a Jewish ego trip.
As to Jewish entitlement to the land of Israel: fulfillment of their Godly duties is required.  I think Zionists believe otherwise; that military capture is sufficient. God twice banished Hebrews from the land for their failures and sins.  Many Orthodox Jews (myself included) believe that Jewish entitlement to the land of Israel will require the appearance of Mashiach, the Jewish messiah.  I don’t know much about that. (May, 2026)

Although there is a certain degree of comic protest about my next question; I ask it not to be a smart Aleck:

Does what our laudable reader say mean that, come Mashiach, real or imagined, ultra-orthodox Jews could be given religious license to rob Palestinian homesteaders? That, you see, is unclear. With respect to the ultra-Orthodox anti-Zionist Jewry; although the question of messiah’s arrival is more than likely immaterial—the question of ethics is not.

In particular, the question of situational ethics and ethical relativism.

Having, attached yourself to the Palestine solidarity movement as an ultra-orthodox Jew; I’m not yet lavish in my praise for you. What excites suspicion is that your conduct, vis-à-vis Palestinian possessions, could be tied to the religious edicts surrounding the coming of messiah. History, more significantly, is replete with people who followed a false messiah. There is even a concept for this eventuality in Hebrew lore: משיח שקר (mashiach sheker).

These days, my own humble perspective on the daily practice of piety is a mirage in the desert.

Certainly, my modest, morally universal interpretation of Tikkun Olam is not the one adopted by Jews who are “chosen”; namely favored, esteemed and elevated by gentiles and by institutional Jewry.

Starting with the barefaced Thomas Friedman, a New York Times columnist, Jews and non-Jews alike have lent spiritual credibility to hubristic insolence. Suffused with such hubristic insolence, during the war on Iraq, Friedman had praised former Prime Minister Tony Blair, demonstrably a war criminal, for “always [leaving] you with the impression that for him the Iraq war is just one hammer and one nail in an effort to do Tikkun Olam, to repair the world.”

“Tikkun Olam in this modern sense,” confirms the encyclopedia Britannica, “has become the predominant ideology” following World War II. “Healing the world after its fundamental breakage in the Holocaust” is seen to require “a robust social and this-worldly project.”

In every way more extreme than laptop bombardier Thomas Friedman is a rabbi who shares a vastly different take than mine on Tikkun Olam, the repair of the world (“Israel: The Narcissistic State,”). The rabbi begins his teachings with an assertion few would quibble with: Tikkun Olam prevails when good dominates over bad.

But wait. When does good best bad? (11:46 minutes into “Israel: The Narcissistic State,”). “When clal Israel rules the world.” Translated from the Hebrew: When the Jewish collective rules the world. When the nations of the world are subjects of the Jewish People, says this rabbi, during his shiur (“lesson”).

A “goy” has “Tikkun” (rectification), avers the same rabbi, when said “goy” realizes the supremacy of the Jewish People and assists them in any way. Gentile existence is “for the betterment of the Jewish People.” (11:35-13:06 into “Israel: The Narcissistic State”) Under the rule of the Jewish People, he claims, the world and its people achieve rectitude and correction. In other words, the gentile must recognize the (putative) supremacy of the Jewish People for Tikkun Olam to prevail.

Is this rabbi’s ruling a fringe doctrinal position? Do those ultra-orthodox rabbis who stand bravely against “Zionism,” also reject the indubitably hubristic concept of “Chosenness”—of Jews as His Chosen People? Or, do they, like most other rabbis, simply reassuringly frame “the Jewish idea of a chosen people” as “the most liberal and tolerant approach to religion possible”; a burden only to Jews; but a blessing to gentiles, as does another rabbi, Shmuel Kaplan, of Maryland.

With similar certainty does one Rabbi Pini Dunner labor to distance Tikkun Olam from manifestly universal biblical values, such as the one about loving thy neighbor as thyself. Dunner’s shell-game is a rejection of what he dubs progressive values, on the ground that these can alienate a Jewish person from “the past,” as well as hamper his respect for his “heritage.”

The intra-faith cacophony is indeed confusing.

For my part, I suspect the idea of Jewish Chosenness is the kernel of the maniacal and murderous contempt for The Other, manifest in contemporary Israel.

What I can further tell you is that my own notion of Tikkun Olam was imbibed by reading, in the Hebrew, the shtetl authors, who wrote originally in Yiddish. These authors—Sholem Aleichem and Peretz are examples—evince little of the hangovers of politics or Zionism. Their story-telling is purely descriptive, non-polemical and poignant. Heavily Jewish, it has heart for humanity, too.

On Mencken’s recommendation (AI confirmed), I purchased a 1950 used copy in the Hebrew of America, a book by Sholem Asch. Yes, no other than H. L. Mencken put me on to the author named Sholem Asch, which Mencken reviewed in English. With aching simplicity, Ash describes the cultural shock and the New York heat that bring about the demise of a small Jewish boy on arriving in America. The child had been uprooted from the diaspora’s intense bonds of faith, family and community, and plonked into the atomistic, hedonism and consumerism of American life.

Asch’s frail Jewish boy expires longing not for Zion (Israel), but for the cool, snowy beauty of his east-European home village. In addition to Zionism, also absent from the early literature in this genre is the Jewish Supremacy, which I first fingered on March 31, 2024, in the essay, “Israel: In Violation Of God’s Law, Natural Justice, The Laws Of War, And All Customary International Humanitarian Law.” This Jewish supremacy is a mutation of Jewish Chosenness.

I am not alone in opining so openly—although other than Dr. Norman Finklestein, Ha’aretz’s Gideon Levi and Ron Unz; few are the Jewish individuals who dare acknowledge, for fear of Israel and its Western lobbies and lickspittles, that the “Judaism-Zionism bifurcation” should be legitimately and critically examined, given the erasure of Palestinian life ongoing, the genocidal onslaught on swathes of Lebanon, and Israel’s fight-to-the-finish with Iran. And considering that this trespass was commenced with overwhelming Jewish-Israeli acquiescence, and with the cover of institutionalized Jewry; a cohort that, combined, forms a sizeable portion of our Jewish community worldwide.

Organized world Jewry is an arm of Israel. Joseph Massad, professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia University, goes through the litany of genocide-supporting entities that had checked their humanitarian facade at the Ben Gurion airport, but would now like to reclaim luggage “lost,” for the purposes of being accepted into polite company. “Major British and American pro-Israel Jewish organizations have in their majority remained fully supportive of Israeli actions,” writes the jaded Palestinian scholar.

In the event that Jewish leaders, belatedly, caper about this or the other Israeli or American atrocity; the protest is almost solely anchored not in moral argument, but in utilitarian, sectarian, outcome-based concerns. Nothing else matters to them, other than that this or the other massacre, one among thousands, is bad for Jewish hostages, could impact Israel’s long-term viability, would encourage antisemitism. Or, as when “U.S. Jewish organizations criticized Trump’s diabolical Gaza plan, purely because they were “concerned” it would jeopardize the ongoing “hostage-release agreement.”

By Pew’s April, 2026 poll, “Jewish Americans and White evangelical Protestants have mostly positive views of Israel, at 64 percent and 65 percent, respectively.” In every meaningful way, too many Jews have supported this ebulliently evil entity, Jewish-Israel. 

RELATED:
Part 1: “The Judaism-Zionism Bifurcation: Chosenness.” (May 20, 2026)
Part 3: “Two Genocides Down; Does Judaism Need A Reformation? And Is This Jew Allowed To Ask?” (June 25, 2026)

©2026 ILANA MERCER
The Unz Review, May 30
LewRockwell.com, June 1

Ilana Mercer, paleolibertarian author, essayist and theorist, has been writing up an anti-war, anti-woke storm since 1998, starting in Canada. On arriving in the US, in 2002, her weekly column was right away syndicated. Mercer’s national syndication fell through shortly after due to writing in strident opposition to the war in Iraq. ILANA is described as “a system-builder. Distilled, her modus operandi has been to methodically apply first principles to the day’s events.” She’s Jewish, grew up in Israel ages five to nineteen, and left, at 19, never to return. She had refused to serve in the IDF, Israel’s compulsory military. Ilana’s focus since October of 2023 has been the genocide. A war against civilians is a war on civilization. 

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[1]. Heinrich A. Rommen, The Natural Law, A Study In Legal And Social History And Philosophy, Liberty Fund, Indianapolis, 1998

The post The Judaism-Zionism Bifurcation (Part 2): Tikkun Olam: Fixing The World, But For What, For Whom? appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

Is Zionism not, to some extent, an excrescence of Judaism? Why the near-religious divide between Zionism and Judaism? And, am I permitted at all even to ask? ~ilana

Pro-Palestine commentators and activists, Jews and non-Jews, are religious about maintaining a bifurcation—a divide—between Judaism and Zionism. Advocates of this duality portray Judaism as humanistic, universal and pastoral, and Zionism as its opposite. In the commingled rumble of commentary over Zionism; Arab commentators have been conditioned, by necessity, to internalize the split and the exact fissure-lines, as though mouthing these were a protective amulet, a matter of survival; theirs, ours. It is, in a sense.

Why this near-religious bifurcation between Zionism and Judaism? Is Zionism, to some extent, not an excrescence of Judaism?

Biblical Chosenness is certainly a facet of Judaism. Does it relate not at all to the Jewish supremacy that animates Jewish-Israeli expression and express action? Are these not connected? If so, should the question posed, then, really be a Jewish-Israeli question? Or, perhaps a Judaism Question is more apropos?

And, am I permitted at all to even ask?

Composer of some of the best, most exquisite English prose, with insight to match, was novelist Anita Brookner. Through her Jewish protagonist in the novel Making Things Better (2002, p 22), Ms. Brookner writes that the gentleman’s Jewish “ancestral religion,” which he did not practice, “seemed to him an affair of prohibitions, of righteous exclusiveness for which he could see no justification.”

Miss Brookner, a rare gem and a genius, was a secular, unaffiliated Jew like myself. “Although resolutely secular in outlook,” Ms. Brookner also conveyed what I have long-since felt. It is that “the mystery of the Holy Spirit,” expressed in good will, gratitude and graciousness, seems absent from the encounters we Jewish outsiders, lonely people, have had within our “ancestral religion.”  (Loneliness is the theme that threads Brookner’s novels.)

Like Brookner, I do not speak ex cathedra of the vexation that is Jewishness. It is indubitably a delicate matter. And, although knowledgeable, I am not an “expert.”  However, to deny that eddying around the Jewish child is a sense of, or talk of, Jewish specialness—this would be dishonest. Whether you choose to imbibe “Chosenness” or not—I chose not to—as a Jew, you are likely to have been raised hearing about “Chosenness.”

The supremacy fallacy, it would thus seem, issues surely not strictly from “Zionism,” but from “Chosenness.”

The Chosen-People belief is as old as the Hebrew Bible itself. It is thus in the “Chosen People’s” philosophical marrow. For what—pray tell?—are foundational, early teachings like Deuteronomy 14:2, if not a declaration of Jewish superiority for posterity?

For thou art an holy people unto the Lord thy God, and the Lord hath chosen thee to be a peculiar people unto himself, above all the nations that are upon the earth.

Alongside all the commentators and broadcasters who insist on upholding the division between Judaism and Zionism; I, too, very much hope that Zionism is not an instantiation or an extension, on some elemental level, of Judaism. I really do.

There are certainly universal elements in the Hebrew Testament. Deuteronomy, an early book, showcases an advanced concept of Jewish Social Justice, and is replete with instructions to protect the poor, the weak, the defenseless; the widows, the orphans, the aliens, even the animals who, as Deuteronomy 11:15 enjoined, must be fed first.

This ethical monotheism, developed centuries before classical Greek philosophy, was certainly expounded upon by the classical prophets, my own heroes. The Hebrew prophets railed against power and cultural corruption so very magnificently. Indeed, the Prophets of the Hebrew Testament are magnificent and munificent, heroes.  In speaking truth to power, Jesus followed in the footsteps of the classical prophets.

Yet how can one forget, if one is remotely “knowledgeable,” that, for their righteous, wrath-filled universal message, the Hebrew Prophets had consequently been hounded by The People—by עם ישאל—just as Jesus was persecuted and then crucified at the People’s behest. Did not the crowd cry out “Crucify Him!”? (Matthew 27:15–26)

No doubt, the hounding the classical Prophets had received was an “existential promotion” to crucifixion.

But today, for their words, the classical Hebrew Prophets and Christ would have been chased, excommunicated, throttled on social media, shadow-banned and subjected to death by algorithm—prosecuted legally, too, for “antisemitism”—at the behest of Israel and its Western lobbies and lickspittles. Like many of us who’ve been consistently both anti-woke and anti-war; dissidents since day one, the Hebrew Prophets would have had free speech, but no reach, to use Bassem Youssef’s aphorism.

Still, a faith is more than a doctrine; it is the manner in which the faithful act and speak. I want to believe in the strict bifurcation of Judaism and Zionism, in that magical division. All the same, from Jews, liberals for the most, I’ve always heard the Chosen People storyline. To wit, “The heart of Chosenness,” states one Rabbi Meir Soloveichick (eleven minutes into “Israel: The Narcissistic State”), during a “Jewish Review of Books” symposium, is that Jews are superior, having been chosen as “the eternal nation,” and having made a greater contribution to humanity than any others.

Soloveichik, who officiates on Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission, is wrong; his assertion is untrue on its face. Aristotle (384 BC) was not Jewish. Neither was Johann Sebastian Bach (1685). On the basis of my bias alone; I’d close the case right there. For the reader’s edification, I’ve shored-up my bias with the help of Charles Murray’s tome, Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 BC to 1950 (2003, HarperCollins Publishers Inc., NY).

Here are some of the “giants” who dragged their fellow men out of wattle-and-daub hovels, materially, spiritually and metaphysically:

The Buddha (563 BC)
Confucius (551 BC)
Euripides (480 BC)
Hippocrates (460 BC)
Aristotle (384 BC)
Euclid (300 BC)
Virgil (70 BC)
Al-Mutanabbi (915)
Thomas Aquinas (1225)
Zhao Mengfu (1254)
Dante (1265)
Sesshu (1420)
Leonardo da Vinci (1452)
Michaelangelo (1475)
Raphael (1483)
Titian (1485)
Galileo (1564)
Shakespeare (1564)
Rubens (1640)
Isaac Newton (1643)
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685)
Voltaire (1694)
Euler (1707)
James Watt (1736)
Goethe (1749)
Mozart (1756)
Beethoven (1770)
Louis Pasteur (1822)
Thomas Edison (1847)

There has been an attempt to claim for Pasteur and others a “Jewish connection,” but none was Jewish—not even Rubens. The reader who wants badly to see certain faces in the clouds is reminded to refrain from confusing charm and cleverness with transcendent greatness. As Joyce Carol Oats has quipped, “Charisma is just another word for bullshit.” (Fox, p. 387, Hogarth, NY, 2025.)

Part 2: “The Judaism-Zionism Bifurcation (Part 2): Tikkun Olam: Fixing The World, But For What, For Whom?” (May 30, 2026)
Part 3: “Two Genocides Down; Does Judaism Need A Reformation? And Is This Jew Allowed To Ask?” (June 25, 2026)

©2026 ILANA MERCER
The Unz Review, May 20
LewRockwell.com, May 20

Ilana Mercer, paleolibertarian author, essayist and theorist, has been writing up an anti-war, anti-woke storm since 1998, starting in Canada. On arriving in the US, in 2002, her weekly column was right away syndicated. Mercer’s national syndication fell through shortly after due to writing in strident opposition to the war in Iraq. ILANA is described as “a system-builder. Distilled, her modus operandi has been to methodically apply first principles to the day’s events.” She’s Jewish, grew up in Israel ages five to nineteen, and left, at 19, never to return. She had refused to serve in the IDF, Israel’s compulsory military. Ilana’s focus since October of 2023 has been the genocide. A war against civilians is a war on civilization.

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