If we in the West are the most propagandized people in the world; Gazans are the least propagandized. Outwardly captives, Gazans are liberated from the illiberal political propaganda that grips the West ~ilana

On … the malodorous cauldron of death and decadence that is the Israel Defense Forces. Or, perhaps the Israel Defense Feces is more apropos? Or, still better, the Excreta Defense Forces. ~ilana

* Warning: indelicate language.

WHAT has Israel been up to since March 18, 2025, which was when the “genocidal entity” formally broke the nominal ceasefire agreement in Gaza? Oracular insight is unnecessary.

Israel has been trampling underfoot everything decent and good.

Genocide is back. This time with President Trump in fawning agreement, playing procurer and pimp for the Israeli State, and subjecting ingrate Bibi Netanyahu to no more than a curt jerk of the leash. Just the same, during a press conference with the US president, on April 7, the Israeli prime minister’s face grew as dark as a thundercloud on mention of possible diplomacy with Iran.

Under such favorable circumstances, Israelis are louder and prouder about killing and destroying with monomaniacal diligence. Indifferently, and for the first time, Israel openly admitted to targeting journalist Hussam Shabat for “elimination,” in December of 2024, and executing the him on March 24. The sadistic serial killer stalked its prey, then pounced.

The predator has so far singled out and assassinated 232 other Palestinian journalists.

Shabat thus knew, as he put it, that “journalism meant Israel would kill him.” Only 23, so full of promise, Shabat wrote his epitaph in advance of his death. It read:

If you’re reading this, it means I have been killed — most likely targeted — by the Israeli occupation forces. … For [the] past 18 months, I have dedicated every moment of my life to my people. I documented the horrors in northern Gaza minute by minute, determined to show the world the truth they tried to bury.
I slept on pavements, in schools, in tents — anywhere I could. Each day was a battle for survival. I endured hunger for months, yet I never left my people’s side.
By God, I fulfilled my duty as a journalist. I risked everything to tell the truth, and now, at last, I have found rest—something I have not known for the past 18 months. I did this because I believe in the Palestinian cause, in our right to this land. The greatest honor of my life was to die defending it and serving its people.
I ask you now: Do not stop speaking about Gaza. Do not let the world look away. Keep fighting, keep telling our stories—until Palestine is free.

For the last time,
Hussam Shabat, from northern Gaza.

Trampling underfoot everything decent and good: Fatma Hassona was to be the subject of an upcoming documentary, “Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk,” to debut at the Cannes Film Festival. Israel could not allow that. So, Air Force Genocide bombed the 25-year-old Palestinian photojournalist, also murdering nine members of her family.

After a brief, relative lull, eighteen months into the genocide of the Palestinians of Gaza, Israel has resumed its slaughter of civilians at an average rate of 103 souls a day, with 223 individuals dealt life-altering injuries, also daily. Since March 18, reports Ha’aretz, Israel has killed 1,652 people and wounded 4,391 in strikes on Gaza. (Ha’aretz “Israel News” newsletter, Wednesday, 16.04.2025.) The number murdered now exceeds 2,000.

With 62,000 Palestinians missing, over 52,000 confirmed dead; and indirect deaths ranging from three to fifteen times the number of direct deaths, by the Lancet’s account—the fake, fossilized media should be obligated to report the official number of Palestinians dead by Israel as well over 100,000. That too is a vast undercount.

The mind is crowded. Palestinians murdered melt into a montage of faces. Yet remember we must men like Rifaat Radwan. Radwan was among fifteen medical and humanitarian workers who were summarily executed pointblank, on March 23, by the Israeli regime in Gaza.

The underworld that is the IDF (Israel Defense Forces)—the world criminals and lawbreakers inhabit—is premised upon lies. By now you know The Liar’s lines, as he drops American “earthquake bombs” on kids at community kitchens:

“Hamas. Terrorism. If Palestinians die; they needed killing.”

But Satan’s non sequiturs can’t conceal the truth—or silence the deeply felt devotionals of the righteous. As the SS IDF stood above him, riddling his colleagues and himself with thousands of bullets, Radwan, Palestinian Red Crescent Society medic, did not beg the agents of his demise. Instead, he recorded their crime for posterity while righteously reciting his last prayers. These are achingly beautiful:

“Oh Lord, accept us. Oh Lord, accept me as a martyr. Mother, forgive me. This is the path I chose … that I help people. … .” Until he expired.

As Monday of April 7 dawned, a Wi-Fi rigged world watched a funeral pyre of Palestinians, except that the people Israel lit up were alive. The IDF incinerated “a tent housing Palestinian journalists in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip.”

Late last year, when teenager Shaban al-Dalou smoldered alive, the presstitutes did what they always do: Fudge the English language in the service of Israel. To shore up this oppressive foreign regime, media deploy euphemisms and the passive voice; syntactic devices that mask the excruciating death of a boy kind, beautiful and bright, who was driven by devotion to kin and community.

“Killed in a fire,” media said about Shaban’s murder. The same fate has now befallen Helmi Al-Faqaawi, “a correspondent for Palestine Today News Agency, and Youssef Al-Khazandar, a civilian assisting the group of journalists.” Photojournalist Ahmed Mansour, seen in images engulfed in flames, is fighting for his life in Gaza.

Does Mansour have a fighting chance, what with the last barely functional hospital in the Strip having been obliterated by Israel? On the morning of Palm Sunday, IDF fiends flattened the Al-Ahli Arab Baptist Hospital, which had stood since 1882. “Burning a journalist alive in Gaza, exclaimed Lima Bustami, Euro-Med Monitor’s legal department director, “is not aimed at silencing the truth. Israel already relies on a far greater force: the world’s indifference to the truth.”

With a world of indifference as backdrop, Israel set ablaze yet more civilians in tents on April 17. (And still more again on April 21.) Seventeen Palestinian civilians, including nine children, were dispatched, apparently, dead by “waves of [some sort].” Yes, even Al Jazeera has caught the botched-English bug, writing that, on April 18, “a wave of Israeli air strikes” killed them.

Another trope of the malpracticing media is to qualify the daily carnage in Gaza with the clause, “mostly women and children.” Or, “Including many women and children.” As though Palestinian men were fare game.

This genocide exclusionary clause is pronounced among the vanishingly small number of conservative influencers who have registered their objection to Israel’s crimes. Out of Christian charity, these influencers allow that the murdered are “women and children,” for the most. Or, that among the murdered are Christians. This from creedal conservatives who otherwise champion the centrality of men and manliness in society. This from the same conservatives who must surely know that Jesus Christ stood not for sectarian favoritism, but for the universal value of all human beings.

“Meet the Palestinian men the media don’t want you to know exist,” narrates Lara Elborno, a Palestinian daughter, human-rights attorney and activist. This here is a woman who can speak both poignantly and with authority about Palestinian men. By now, so can we. And it is the men of Palestine whom we’ve watched on our screens first to the scenes of slaughter. They dig, carry, evacuate, comfort, perform religious rites of burial, and cry when lulls allow.

The contrast between Palestinian men and the IDF stares at you like blood on a Kaffan, the traditional Palestinian shroud.

At bottom, the most cowardly army known in military history doesn’t engage in battles. The IDF is an air force: It strafes civilians from above. Since it broke the ceasefire, Israel has conducted daily massacres by airstrikes, shelling, and drone strikes, reports Jon Elmer, military analyst for the Electronic Intifada. Well over 1000 such airstrikes—fifty a day—have seen nearly 600 children and babies blown to bits.

With every avenue of ingress and egress sealed off by the Israelis for the last six weeks, fuel to power earth-moving machinery is unavailable. So when, on April 10, thirty-five civilians were murdered and fifty injured by warplanes strafing a “densely populated residential block,” in a Shuja’iyya neighborhood—civil defense teams, Palestinians, were on the scene. They always are. How they do it nobody knows. They currently use trawls, spades, finger nails and faith to get at the trapped.

Ugly and evil seeks to eradicate its opposites. Be it reflexively or by design—the West’s brash, technocratic, atomistic and irreligious regimes aim to eradicate communities unlike their own.  Decadently woke and cruelly impersonal Gaza is not. Gaza, attests Zahad Rahman, an American nurse who volunteers in what remains of the enclave, is a community-centered, gracious society. Rahman is not a Palestinian. Israel has murdered more than 1,000 individuals like him—”members of the medical, defense and aid teams in Gaza,” confirms B’Tselem (an Israeli human rights organization). Despite the risk, like so many medical volunteers who go to Gaza, Rahman has found himself drawn back to people who will give you their shirt in zero weather.

In the Ramadan tradition of “cultivating empathy,” in the ruins, Gazans thus laid tables to celebrate. Eid al-Fitr, in particular, explains Imam Dr. Omar Suleiman, a scholar and theologian, “is meant to continue that empathy into our celebrations. On the morning of Eid, every Muslim is required to pay Zakat al-Fitr—a form of charity designed to ensure that no one is left out of the feast. It is a beautiful practice: a way of saying that joy is only complete when shared, that our celebration is meaningless if others are starving.”

Inescapably, Eid al-Fitr spirituality was shattered by Israeli barbarity.

On April 3, Israel murdered 92 worshippers. A volunteer doctor from Gaza Medic Voices spent Eid, which marks the conclusion of Ramadan, cutting away party clothes from the bodies of kids dressed to the nines for Eid. By day’s end, the number of human beings murdered had swelled. Little girls festively dressed were, instead, transported to the morgue, jewelry and finery shrouded in the garments of death.

While 100 Palestinian kids are now “killed or injured in Gaza every day,” since [genocide] resumed,” Israelis have gone and slapped a disability classification on “over 20,000” of their own safe and sated offspring. Victims of terror, claim the Israeli State’s mental-health mavens.

The Psychiatric Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is an ever-mutating manual, now in its fifth iteration. The criteria for manufacturing illness under the DSM, or similar industry-developed manuals, are malleable. In real life, no psychiatric manual required, tens of thousands of Palestinian children are being terrorized, are actually dead, mutilated, mentally scarred for life, orphaned without a soul in the world.

Still, one can well-understand why their Israeli adversaries—predators parading as prey—would want to tar even the Palestinian toddler as an irremediable terrorist-in-the-making. Like so many of their formative figures, Palestinian children are formidable, fierce.

Amid the worry and wear of finding food and staying alive, a slip of a girl composes and recites the poetry of resistance:

“I’m Palestinian and proud.”
“I’m proud because I’m the strong brave girl, the daughter of heroes.”
“The daughter of Gaza, the land of the free…”

And so she goes in modulated, melodic Arabic. Here another young Palestinian girl stops her idol, the late Mr. Shabat, aforementioned, to tell him of her admiration. When she grows up; she wants to be a brave journalist like her hero, since martyred. These are very centered children.

If we in the West are the most propagandized people in the world; Gazans are the least propagandized. Outwardly captives, Gazans are liberated from the illiberal political propaganda that grips the West.

And Gabi Siboni knows this. The former IDF colonel, now an unthinking member of Israel’s think-tank ranks, reflects Jewish-Israeli public and political discourse. For Gazans Siboni expresses genocidal contempt and intent—but also a warped understanding of Gazan ferocity about liberating their ancestral homeland. Said Siboni:

“Hamas is not the problem in Gaza. Hamas is a symptom of a bigger problem. The population in Gaza is a ‘barbaric mob.’ If we don’t wish to bleed our soldiers for decades—because in Gaza there will be Hamas B and C—the only solution is Trump’s ‘vision.'”

Sidoni is a lot more honest than the oleaginous Bernie Sanders, an unreconstructed liberal Zionist.

Gaza is no more because of a concerted campaign to wipe it out; because of extermination and depopulation; not because of “Israeli self-defense,” which is when one sovereign state wards off the armies of other sovereign nation-states. Yet “in the year 2025,” Sanders’ mass rallies are festooned with the line, “Israel has a right to defend itself.”

Bernie Sanders’ sophistry should explode the brain like an ammunition dump!

In international law, explains Philip Proudfoot, a British political scientist, “Occupation is temporary, imposing duties, not rights, upon the occupier. The Fourth Geneva Convention explicitly demands that an occupier safeguard civilian rights. Accordingly, Israel cannot resort to anything more than police powers to ‘defend itself.’”

Genocide is the acid test. Sanders’ insistence, well into genocide, that “Israel has a right to defend itself can only be interpreted as blatant genocide apologia,” propounds Caitlin Johnstone. Clearly an expert in untruths, Sanders, who oversaw the removal from his rallies of protesters and their Free Palestine flag, has further exposed himself as a slick establishment operative, who seeks to capture naïve, politically homeless Democrats.

Back to the malodorous cauldron of death and decadence that is the Israel Defense Forces. (Or, perhaps, the Israel Defense Feces?)

A new load of grief came, in March, to residents of the al-Faraa refugee camp in the foothills of the Jordan Valley, in the northern occupied West Bank. Slatternly IDF soldiers have a familiar signature. They leave behind human waste in the homes they wreck:

“Feces, urine and used condoms—these are just some of the things that Israeli soldiers left behind in these Palestinian homes during their 11-day assault [in March],” reports the Electronic Intifada.

That the IDF has such a documented “tradition” of defecating and urinating in the West Bank and Gazan homes they occupy and vandalize is backed by other reports, not least that of Philip Weiss’ Mondoweiss article, “S-it Israeli soldiers did in Gaza.” A 2014 account in the Guardian seconds the same: “Palestinians returning home find Israeli troops left feces and venomous graffiti.” As has the august author of Drinking the Sea At Gaza, Amira Hass of Ha’aretz, documented the defiling ways of the Israel Defense Feces.

Somebody should rub IDF noses in their own mess to teach them a lesson, once and for all. Nobody has.

Yes, Israel makes atrocities past and present look like sandbox play. Still, puzzling even to me is this recent account of used condoms left by the IDF in these West Bank homes. Why puzzling? We know that despite the feel-good official designation of some Israeli females as combat soldiers, the few women in combat roles “are not explicitly deployed into combat situations.” During these ostensible “military” raids, the IDF functions, I believe, as a male-only “fighting” force.

So, why the condoms left in defiled Palestinian homes, in the course of the IDF’s Dionysian bacchanalia in the West Bank? Whose are they, exactly?

Is this what Ha’aretz, Israel’s center-left paper of record, calls “the homoerotic side of Israeli army life”? Is “copulating” to be added to the documented IDF “tradition” of male soldiers defecating and urinating in Palestinian homes?

Ha’aretz, I’ve noticed, waters down debauchery—but not because it is concealing the truth for the “Fatherland.” They tell the truth but frame it differently. Thus, the debauchery of uniformed IDF doesn’t seem to be that big of a deal in the Israeli State. Israel doesn’t appear to share American sensibilities—at least so it seems to me, who has closely observed this society in the Hebrew, for eighteen ugly months.

Dare I say that American culture is quite prudish; Israel’s expressed aesthetic more pornographic? An example is the familiar images of IDF wearing or rummaging through the sexy lingerie of Palestinian women dead or dispossessed. You and I would consider these cross-dressing displays among uniformed military men as inappropriate, kinky.

Not Haaretz. Kinky acts of cowardice and sadism—invading Palestinian homes, looting, vandalizing and manhandling private effects—a writer at Ha’aretz is wont to label “Machismo”: The “Military machismo of Israeli soldiers in Gaza will rear its ugly head at home,” blared a January 2025 Ha’aretz headline.

I’m a subscriber. I read enough of Ha’aretz to get a sense that Israel has a different, un-American aesthetic. Take this depiction of Purim, which used to be celebrated, largely, as a children’s festival. To “a brief history of Purim, the Halloween of Jewish holidays,” Ha’aretz has appended an erotic image of men flirting and kissing deeply. Ha’aretz appears to consider this image to be Halloween/Purim-appropriate, wholesome.

The only reasonable, quality newspaper in Israel, Ha’aretz, also dishes a lot of bafflegab. The IDF has invaded large swathes of Syria, is bombing the place, annexing kilometers for a so-called buffer zone, and making overtures to certain cowed Syrian communities so as to further divide and rule that country.

An “overbearing embrace,” however, is how Ha’aretz has euphemized the violence of conquest and the breach of Syrian borders, in March of 2025: “Israel’s Overbearing Embrace Threatens Syria’s Druze at a Critical Juncture.

Utter opposites, too, are Palestinians. If Palestinians are united in the yen for freedom; Israeli circuitry is wired for cruelty.

Israel Katz, defense minister, stonily threatened all of Gaza’s civilians, on March 19, 2025. As a Twitter adage goes, “Translating an Israeli tweet from the Hebrew is like finding a lost page of Mein Kampf.” Listen to the “sound of impunity”—and for that matter, never believe any Hebrew-English translation come to you via Israeli officialdom.

These are Katz’ precise words translated from the Hebrew:

Residents of Gaza, this is the last warning. The first Sinwar destroyed Gaza. The second Sinwar will ruin her completely. The assault of the air force against the Hamas terrorists is just the first step. The rest will be many times harder, and you will pay the full price. Evacuations will soon start from areas of battle. If all the Israeli hostages are not released, and Hamas is not expelled from Gaza—Israel will act with the kind of force unfamiliar to you. Take the offer of the president of the US: return the hostages and expel ‘The Hamas,’ and other options will then open before you, including migration to other places across the world, for whomever wishes it. The alternative is destruction and complete ruin.

Defense Minister Katz further reiterated, on April 16, his policy of “halting the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza.” “The State of Israel’s policy is clear. No humanitarian aid will enter Gaza, as this is one of our main pressure tactics” with Hamas. Under the current reality, nobody intends to stray from the policy, barked Katz.

In an instant, Minister Katz had pacified the “Hostages and Missing Families Forum.” While “emphasizing that the release of the hostages and the continuation of the war cannot happen simultaneously,” the group had nonetheless condemned the Israeli government for “quietly preparing to reinstate humanitarian aid.” (Ha’aretz’s “Israel News” newsletter, Wednesday, 16.04.2025.)

On the whole, it has been well-established that from janitor to general, from soldiers to supreme court justices; in words and in deeds—Israeli society generally shares in the genocidal mindset. The exceptions are a few heavily proscribed, minuscule (“around 300 Israelis come to hold pictures of Gazan children”), pro-peace, Arab-Jewish groups. All told, Israelis speak of Palestinians as though they were sub-human, untouchables, unmentionable, lacking any say in how they live or die.

When I wrote, moreover, that “criminality is codified in Israeli law; that genocide, snuff films, extra-judicial assassinations and rape of Palestinians are de facto legal in Israel; I was not engaging in hyperbole. Systemic, societal criminality is regularly codified by the highest court in that land. Late in March came a ruling from the Israeli Supreme Court, “explicitly and directly legitimizing Israel’s illegal blockade of the Gaza Strip.”

Both asinine and depraved, the Israeli high court used, in support of its authoritative ruling for starvation, “the argument that the State of Israel is exempt from the obligations of belligerent occupation under international law in all cases pertaining to the Gaza Strip.”

Sure, you may subsume in logic, as the Israeli supreme court indirectly does, that you are not obligated to help dying human beings. But you cannot make a cogent, rational case for your right to stop others from feeding and healing dying human beings. This displays a defect in the faculty of reasoning, as well as a defect of character. By default, the outcome of the Israeli high court’s ruling is the death of the starved population—the process of mass murder will play out to its legislated conclusion.

The Israeli high court’s acts both defy explanation and demand an accounting. The fault for inaction now lies entirely with those who won’t act to save Gazans: The USA, Western European- and East European countries, East and West Asian governments.

The emanations from the minds of Israel’s Supreme Court are mind-numbingly boorish and banal. Most pertinent for our purposes here is that Israel does not enjoy an independent judiciary. Yet Israel regularly exploits the principle of complementarity in international law, according to which the International Criminal Court (ICC) shares legal jurisdiction with the democratic nation-state under investigation, provided the latter has an independent judiciary.

Beware! With chameleon alacrity, Israel typically scurries to “investigate” itself, and to exploit the principle of complementarity, when the world looks like it’s had enough. Legal investigations by Israel of its own crimes are part of the Israeli superstructure of deception. Nominal prosecutions, or ersatz investigations, by genocidal Israel of its crimes against Arabs must themselves be treated as part of Hasbara’s meta-chicanery, aimed at concealing the Israeli State’s transparently despotic tendencies.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump, like Joe Biden before him, has made Americans confederates in Israel’s crimes. A malign conjunction of events engineered by Trump has further positioned Israeli leadership to finalize its genocidal goal, as its lobby proxies and influencers stateside successfully silence us, and sunder our Bill of Rights protections, including the First Amendment right to think and speak freely.

The level of “state capture” by Israel, a small, oppressive foreign regime, is unprecedented, inveighs Craig Mokhiber, activist and scholar of international, humanitarian law. This is “state capture” at every level: foreign and domestic; federal, state, county and city. For Israel, law enforcement agencies under this and the previous government are willing to silence and disappear activists against genocide for exercising their American liberties.

Absurd, of course, but Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents had tweeted that their job is to stop illegal ideas at the U.S. border: “People, money, products, ideas. If it crosses the US border illegally, our job is to stop it.”

“An American-style Cultural Revolution” à la Mao Zedong? Not if we can help it.

©2025 ILANA MERCER
The Unz Review, April 23
LewRockwell.com, April 26
Mises Institute’s Power & Market, May 2 

*Embedded screen picture courtesy of Mondoweiss.

Ilana Mercer, paleolibertarian author, essayist and theorist, has been writing up an anti-war, anti-woke storm since 1998, starting in Canada. 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. New book: “The Paleolibertarian Guide To Deep Tech, Deep Pharma & The Aberrant Economy” (February 2024).

The post Genocide’s Back: Trump-Backed Israel Defense Feces (IDF) Gets Extra-Brutal appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

Without a doubt, The IDF (Israel Defense Forces) is the voice of the Jewish-Israeli commonwealth ~ilana

On the matter of the mass murder of the Palestinians of Gaza; Jewish-Israeli society does not stand apart from the Jewish State; it reflects it ~ilana

The IDF (Israel Defense Forces) continues to martyr the Palestinians, as it marches them up and down and across the Via Dolorosa that is the Gaza Strip.

By the time you read this—and as I write—the number of Palestinians murdered, maimed and displaced by The Devil’s agents will be, already is, out of date.

Jump a level of abstraction, from the torrid reality engulfing Palestinians, to meditate upon the meaning of what I just said.

On the meta level—the very act of updating the numbers of the dead and displaced in the narrow time-space of a topical essay is significant. It speaks to the industrial-levels and methods of murder adopted by the IDF. It speaks to a genocide, ethnocide and domicide to which we must bear witness as best we can, with the hope that the story of Palestinian travail will end in triumph.

RAFAH, RIP, SITS ON A CONTINUUM OF GENOCIDE

Like the numbers of Palestinians murdered and maimed, the debate over Rafah—to invade or not to invade—is already out-of-date or obsolete. Rafah was nothing but a fleeting and artificial demarcation, concocted reflexively by partners to genocide, Israel and America.

The reflexive instinct of Israel and its American cobelligerent, in my opinion, was to separate genocide before Rafah from genocide after the invasion of Rafah.

With so much fuss and feathers over Rafah-as-a-red-line; the complicit parties likely felt that the 35,091 Palestinians killed and the 78,827 injured before Rafah could be made to stick in the public’s head as somehow “lawful,” legitimate casualties of “war.”

While the contrived and cynical talking point was being “performed” in the media, by early May, the IDF dogs of war had already set upon Rafah, an urban setting ringed by the tents of refugees, with characteristic ferocity. The incessant, industrial-scale campaign of slaughter and starvation in Gaza, north, center and south, alas, exists on one craven continuum of evil. There is no qualitative difference between the IDFs actions in Gaza before the invasion of Rafah and after.

Having been corralled capriciously hither and yon; from the north down to the south, and up again; Gazans have now been shooed from Raffah, at the southern tip of The Strip, where the refugees had huddled helplessly, up to Al-Mawasi, and other barren coastal stretches, rendered barren because of prior IDF blitzkriegs.

There, these Palestinians many times displaced will await the next phase of Israel’s holocaustal war—an adjective used by American novelist John Updike, who wrote before the high-priests and elders of the Anti-Defamation League issued linguistic restrictions—and twisted psychological warfare against them.

By May 12, and in tandem with the assault on Rafah and the near-closing of that single humanitarian corridor—Israel’s serial killers had begun  “revisiting” Northen Gaza, starting with the bombing of Jabalia. However, and to be clear, tank shelling and aerial interdictions across the Gaza Strip, from Jabalia to Deir al Balah down to Rafah, have been a non-stop, continual reality for Gazans, courtesy of the gleeful IDF.

Keeping up with the number of casualties Palestinians sustain from hour to hour since the contrived, orchestrated debate over Rafah was begun is impossible.

Six-hundred thousand people, who were herded down to Rafah, are on the move, having since been uprooted again. Sixty people perished on May 9. (Democracy Now!) “Between the afternoons of 13 and 15 May … 142 Palestinians were killed and 314 were injured, including 60 killed and 80 injured in the last 24 hours,” reported the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). At least 1.7 million Palestinians have been displaced, and 1.1 million, mostly children, are starving. Quit the “food insecurity” euphemism. Israel is starving them.

As I said, no sooner does one jot the numbers down than they become obsolete, only ever accreting. In their cunning tradition of co-opting the language of human-rights law in order to violate it; the Israelis frame eviction as merciful evacuation. The number of evictions aforementioned (600,000) has now swelled since the previous paragraph. Eight-hundred thousand people have been displaced from Rafah in the last two weeks.

The American Idolaters are still claiming that all this is a tidy lie. Conditions in Gaza belie what our “lying eyes” tell us. I continue to recommend a variation on Richard Pryor’s wry wisdom about he who has been caught in flagrante delicto. The reader must believe his eyes, not the lying Israelis. Believe the evidence in front of your eyes. The Israelis and their Israel First American enablers are, plainly put, lying.

Since I updated the numbers above, a new chyron crawled across my mobile screen: 35,233 murdered; 79,141 maimed, in addition to the thousands who’ve been buried beneath tons of rubble—”37 million tons of bomb-filled debris that could take 14 years to clear.”

The numbers just jotted down above are already out-of-date. Today, May 18, 28 Palestinians perished. Add to the 28, nine more murdered since I completed the previous sentence. And ten more human beings in an IDF assault on the Kaman Adwan hospital (attacked before, in December of 2023). I cannot furnish you with confirmation for these last lives lost because international and American media, Israel idolaters all, do not report from within Gaza. And Google’s algorithms don’t facilitate the public propagation of information transmitted by heroic Palestinian reporters and humanitarian aid workers, whose lived experience this horror is.

While the Kerem Shalom Crossing “is [barely] operational,” the Israelis and their rampaging settlers—who’s truly ugly, Megyn Kelly? In and out?—are doing their utmost to logistically hamper “humanitarian aid deliveries at scale.”

Medics, American and other, are being denied access to adequate food, water and safe passage in and out of Gaza. Indeed, the Israelis have all but shuttered the last humanitarian corridor, the Rafah border crossing into Egypt, trapping many medics inside Gaza. There are many more entrances into Gaza, which Biden could easily order opened forthwith. But, but… if Biden and Blinken’s bosom buddies, the Israelis, close the last humanitarian corridor into Gaza, well then… Remind me how that saying, writ on the American heart, goes? “Israel shares our values.”

A ‘LUNATIC STATE’: THE BANALITY OF EVIL

Gaza, clearly, is an easy case in ethics. It’s not as though the genocide underway in Gaza could ever be finessed or gussied up. In teasing out right from wrong, discriminate we must between acts that are criminal only because The State has criminalized them (mala prohibita), as opposed to acts which are universally evil (malum in se). Israel’s sacking of Gaza is malum in se, universally evil.

Yet, from Israel’s public figures, we’ve come to expect only lower-order, undeveloped reasoning. In Israel, no atrocity perpetrated by the IDF is too conspicuous to ignore.

One of the foremost authorities on Gaza, Dr. Norman Finkelstein, calls Israel a Lunatic State. “It is certainly not a Jewish State,” he observes. “A murderous nation, a demonic nation,” roars Scott Ritter—legendary, larger-than-life American military expert, to whose predictive, reliable reports from theaters of war I’ve been referring since 2002.

Max Blumenthal, another younger, yet important authority on the topic, upends a delusion I had held as a youth growing up in Israel. The doves—as the Israeli “peace camp” was called in common parlance—(Shulamit Aloni and Peace Now were pioneers) had inspired me many decades back. Blumenthal, a guerrilla journalist who has done the shoe-leather inquiry into the occupation, chronicled the strategy of the “peace camp” in Goliath, Life and Loathing in the Greater Israel (2013).

The antitype to the Ugly Israeli are the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem and dedicated journalists such as Ha’aretz’ Amira Haas and Gideon Levi. But, as October 7 proved, the peaceniks, with these few exceptions, generally proceed from backing the Jewish State’s regular and murderous forays into the occupied territories, until the penny drops, or it becomes politically expedient to protest them. (See “Peace Now has not said ‘Ceasefire Now,’” Middle East Monitor, January 12, 2024.)

Even in protest, the Israeli “peace camp,” over the years, has generally been starkly utilitarian: pragmatic, not principled, objecting not to Palestinian “civilian casualties,” but to Israeli “strategic” blunders.

To wit, sensing that the country is in danger of approaching some sort of political precipice; 17 Israeli establishment public figures have, of late, urged the recognition of a Palestinian state. In the words of one Alon Liel they are worried about “Israel’s international [and regional] standing.” Could it be that what we have here is projection; fears for their own respectability in international circles?

That kind of thing: a position self-interested and pragmatic, seldom-principled. Certainly nothing anchored in first principles.

In contemplating the Jewish-Israeli me-only monomania; Lawrence Kohlberg’s stages of moral development come to mind.

The highest stage of thinking and functioning is “Stage Six,” in which the individual reasons and behaves in accordance with “universal ethical principles.” The highest moral development, reasoning from ethics, will forever evade most of humanity. Arrested in some early stage of development, Israel’s public personae reveal themselves as base, unimpressive individuals who’ve yet to attain the ability to reason from ethics.

The banality of evil, if you will.

PUBLIC PROTEST IN ISRAEL: ME-ME MORALITY

What, then, of the Jewish-Israeli anti-government protests now flooding the streets of metropolitan Israel?

In desperate search for a universal humanity—a transcendent moral sensibility—among the mass of Israelis protesting the State; I scoured many transcripts over seven months. I sat through volumes of video footage, searching as I was for mention, by Israeli protesters, of the war of extermination being waged in their name, on their Gazan neighbors. I found none.
Much to my astonishment, I failed to come across a single Israeli protester who cried for anyone but himself, his kin and countrymen, and their hostages. Israelis appear oblivious to the unutterable, irreversible, irremediable ruin adjacent.

Again: I found no transcendent humanity among Israeli protesters; no allusion to the universal moral order to which international humanitarian law, the natural law and the Sixth Commandment give expression. I found only endless iterations among Jewish-Israelis of their sectarian interests.

Protesters merely want regime change. They saddle Netanyahu solely with the responsibility for hostages entombed in Gaza, although, Benny Gantz (National Unity Party), ostensible rival to Bibi Netanyahu (Likud), and other War Cabinet members, are philosophically as one (Gantz had boasted, in 2014, that he would “send parts of Gaza back to the Stone Age”). With respect to the holocaustal war waged on Gaza, and spreading to the West Bank, there is no chasm between these and other squalid Jewish supremacists who make up “Israel’s wartime leadership.”

If you doubt my findings vis-à-vis the Israeli protesters, note the May 11 droning address of protester Na’ama Weinberg, who demanded a change of government. Weinberg condemned the invasion of Rafah and a lack of a political strategy as perils to both hostage- and national survival. She lamented the “unspeakable torture” faced by the hostages. When Weinberg mentioned “evacuees neglected,” I lit up. My hope was fleeting. It soon transpired that she meant citizens of Israeli border communities evacuated. That was the extent of Weinberg’s sympathies for the “slaughter house of civilians” down the road. Nothing but a lower-order sectarian sensibility.

The grim spareness of Israeli protester sentiment has been widely noticed.

Writing for Foreign Policy, an American mainstream magazine, Mairav Zonszein, scholar with the International Crisis Group, observes the following:

The thousands of Israelis who are once again turning out to march in the streets are not protesting the war. Except for a tiny handful of Israelis, Jews, and Palestinians, they are not calling for a cease-fire or an end to the war—or for peace. They are not protesting Israel’s killing of unprecedented numbers of Palestinians in Gaza or its restrictions on humanitarian aid that have led to mass starvation. (Some right-wing Israelis even go further by actively blocking aid from entering the strip.) They are certainly not invoking the need to end military occupation, now in its 57th year. They are primarily protesting Netanyahu’s refusal to step down and what they see as his reluctance to seal a hostage deal.

Public incitement continues apace. Genocidal statements saturate Israeli society. The “lovely” Itamar Ben Gvir has provided an update to his repertoire, the kind chronicled so well by the South Africans, this one included. (See “Hermetically Sealed Indictment Of The Jewish Taliban’s Mass Murder And Ethnic Cleansing In Gaza”).

On May 14, to the roar of the crowd, Israel’s national security minister urged anew that Palestinians be voluntarily encouraged to emigrate (as if anything that has befallen the Palestinians of Gaza, since October 7, has been “voluntary”). He was speaking at a settler rally on the northern border of Gaza, in which thousands of yahoos watched the “fireworks” on display over Gaza, and cheered for looting the land of the dead and dying there.

PRIVATE MEDIA IN ISRAEL: IDF EMBEDS

“The media, the media,” you’ll protest. “Israelis, like Americans, are merely brainwashed by their media.”

Inarguably, Israeli media—from Arutz 7, to Channel 12 (“[Gazans need] to die ‘hard and agonizing deaths’), to Israel Today, to Now 14 (“We will slaughter you and your supporters”), and the lowbrow, sub-intelligent vulgarians of i24—are a self-obsessed, energetic Idiocracy.

These media feature excitable sorts, volubly imparting their atavistic, primitive tribalism in ugly, anglicized, Pidgin Hebrew. And, each one of these specimen always has a “teoria”: a theory.
Naveh Dromi is a lot more appealing in visage and voice than i24’s anchor Benita Levin, a harsh and vinegary South African Kugel. Dromi is columnist for a Ha’aretz, the most highbrow of Israel’s (center-left) dailies. Ha’aretz once had intellectual ballast. In her impoverished Hebrew, Dromi has tweeted about her particular “teoria”: “a second Nakba” is a coming. Elsewhere she has rasped a-mile-a-minute about “the Palestinians as a redundant group.” Nothing crimsons her lovely cheeks.

Such statements of Jewish supremacy pervade Jewish-Israeli media. But, no; it’s not the Israeli media’s fault. The closing of the Israeli mind is entirely voluntary.

According to a paper from Oxford Scholarship Online, the “media landscape in Israel” evinces “healthy competition” and declining concentration. “[C]alculated on a per-capita basis,” “the number of media voices in Israel,” overall, “is near the top of the countries investigated.”
Israel has a robust, and privately owned media. These media cater to the Israeli public, which has a filial stake in lionizing the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), in which each and every son and daughter serve. For this reason, avers Ha’aretz’s Gideon Levi, in his many YouTube television interviews, the military is the country’s golden calf.

Mainstream public opinion, Levi insists, molds the media, not the obverse.

Levi attests that right-wing and left-wing media are as one when it comes to the subject of the IDF and the Palestinian People. And in this, Israeli media reflect mainstream public opinion. It is the public that wishes to see nothing of the suffering in Gaza, and takes care never to disparage or doubt the IDF. For their part, military journalists are no more than embeds, in bed with the military.

At least until now, Israelis have been largely indifferent to their army’s orgiastic, indiscriminate bloodletting in Gaza. Most were merely demanding a return of their hostages, and the continuance of the assault on Gazans, punctured by periodic cease fires.

IS JEWISH-ISRAELI SOCIETY SICK, TOO?

As uncomfortable as it is for the libertarian methodological individualist; the facts dictate, alas, that, on the matter of the mass murder of the Palestinians of Gaza; Jewish-Israeli society does not stand apart from the Jewish State; it reflects it.

When “88 percent of Jewish-Israeli interviewees” give “a positive assessment of the performance of the IDF in Gaza until now” (Tamar Hermann, “War in Gaza Survey 9,” Israel Democracy Institute, January 24, 2024), and “[a]n absolute majority (88%) also justifies the scope of casualties on the Palestinian side”; (Gershon H. Gordon, The Peace Index, January 2024, Faculty of Social Sciences, Tel Aviv University)—it is fair to conclude that the diabolical IDF is, for the most, the voice of the Jewish-Israeli commonwealth.

Consider: By January’s end, the Gaza Strip had, by and large, already been rendered uninhabitable, a moonscape. Nevertheless, 51 percent of Jewish-Israelis said they believed the IDF was using an appropriate amount (51%) or not enough force (43%) in Gaza. (Source: Jerusalem Post staff, “Jewish Israelis believe IDF is using appropriate force in Gaza,” January 26, 2024.)

Note: Polled opinion was not split between Israelis for genocide and Israelis against it. Rather, the division in Israeli society appeared to be between Jewish-Israelis for current levels of genocide versus those for greater industry in what were already industrial-levels and methods of murder.

Attitudes in Israel have only hardened since: By mid-February, 58 percent of this Jewish cohort was grumbling that not enough force had been deployed to date; and 68 percent did “not support the transfer of humanitarian aid to Gaza.” (Jerusalem Post Staff, “Majority of Jewish Israelis opposed to demilitarized Palestinian state,” February 21, 2024.)

Scrap the “hardened” verb. Attitudes in Jewish Israel have not merely hardened, but bear the hallmarks of societal sociopathy.

When asked, in particular, “to what extent should Israel take into consideration the suffering of the Palestinian population when planning the continuation of the fighting there,” Jewish-Israelis sampled have remained consistent through the months of the onslaught on Gaza, from late in October of 2023 to late in March of 2024. The Israel Democracy Institute, a polling organization, found that,

[D]espite the progress of the war in Gaza and the harsh criticism of Israel from the international community regarding the harm inflicted on the Palestinian population, there remains a very large majority of the Jewish public who think that Israel should not take into account the suffering of Palestinian civilians in planning the continuation of the fighting. By contrast, a similar majority of the Arab public in Israel take the opposite view, and think this suffering should be given due consideration. (Tamar Hermann, Yaron Kaplan, Dr. Lior Yohanani, “War in Gaza Survey 13,” Israel Democracy Institute, March 26, 2024.)

Large majorities of the Israeli Center (71 percent) and on the Right (90 percent) say that “Israel should only take into account the suffering of the Palestinian population to a small extent or should not do so at all.”

Let us, nevertheless, end this canvas with the “good” news: On the “bleeding heart” Israeli Left; “only” (I’m being cynical) 47 percent of a sample “think that Israel should not take into consideration the suffering of Palestinian civilians in Gaza or should do so only to a small extent, while 50 percent think it should consider their plight to a fairly large or very large extent.” (Ibid.)

In other words, the general run of the Jewish-Israeli Left tends to think that the plight of Gazans should be considered, but not necessarily ended.

On the facts, and, as I have had to, sadly, show here, both the Israeli state and civil society are driven by Jewish supremacy, the kind that sees little to no value in Palestinian lives and aspirations.

LIBERTARIAN METHODOLOGICAL INDIVIDUALISM

That the Jewish State is genocidal is not in dispute. But, commensurate with the surveys shared above, and as many have quite reasonably concluded, Jewish-Israeli civil society is sick, too.

But if such generalizations can be made; don’t they betray the libertarian fidelity to methodological individualism?

No. Stating statistical verities does not violate methodological individualism.

Methodological individualism does not mandate that aggregate group traits be denied. Rather, methodological individualism correctly practiced means that generalizations are to be considered, while each and every individual is treated on his merit, and not conflated with the group.

Provided they are substantiated by hard evidence, not hunches, generalizations are not incorrect. To the contrary: Science relies on the ability to generalize to the larger population observations drawn from representative samples.

Human action is governed by probabilities and generalities. People make prudent personal and economic decisions in their daily lives as to where scarce and precious resources—one’s life and property—are best invested. They do so based on reliable, aggregated data or on shared common-sense assessments.

When broad statements and assessments about aggregate group characteristic are both true and crucial to our understanding; libertarian methodological individualists needn’t demand that these be expunged from our formulations.

So, while we must take great care as libertarian methodological individualists to separate state from society, and each member of society from the next—treating each individual on his or her merit in our dealings—generalizations about certain group characteristics are, in aggregate, valid. They do not in any way flout the imperative to treat each and every individual as an individual.

We risk disarming ourselves of the firearm of truth, analytical and empirical, if we discard the aggregate group findings surveyed so far.

With shuddering clarity, I can say then, that, in symbiosis, Israel—state, society—and its Anglo-European sponsors share the blame for the sacking of Gaza. Israelis, by and large, have become a solipsistic sorority of Jewish supremacists. Palestinians have paid a terrible price for this systemic Israeli sociopathy.

My last dispatch here is yet a third update to the butcher’s bill: 35,303 Palestinians have now been reported killed, 79,261 injured. And 900,000 people, 40 percent of Gaza’s population, are now displaced.

Just remember that behind the swirl of statistics are human beings, a society of them.

©2024 ILANA MERCER
The Unz Review, May 21
The New American, April, 22
LewRockwell.com, May 24
Power & Market, at Mises.org, June 1 (“Is Israeli Society as Sick as the Regime?”)

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Ilana Mercer has been writing a weekly, paleolibertarian think piece since 1999. Her new book is ‘The Paleolibertarian Guide To Deep Tech, Deep Pharma & The Aberrant Economy’(February, 2024). She’s the author of “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa” (2011)), and other books. Mercer is described as “a system-builder. Distilled, her modus operandi has been to methodically apply first principles to the day’s events.”

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