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as I write—the number of Palestinians murdered, maimed and displaced by The Devil’s agents will be, already is, out of date.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Like the numbers of Palestinians murdered and maimed, the debate over Rafah—to invade or not to invade—is already out-of-date or obsolete.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.”

The post The Jewish State Is Genocidal, But Is Israeli Society Sick, Too? appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

To refuse to bear witness to the prosecution of Total Warfare against Gazans is to be inhuman, insane, incoherent. To the Greek philosophers, to be mired in such contradiction was to be less than human, less than coherent, less than sane ~ ilana (12/2023)

If you know in advance that your actions will cause the deaths of thousands-upon-thousands of civilians; attached to your criminal actions (actus reus) is a guilty mind (mens rea), which means malice aforethought, also known as intent, in Western jurisprudence and judicial philosophy ~ilana (11/2023)

For one thing, he who offends against innocents is responsible for his offenses; not a third party. For another, as I hope we have established here before, Whether it is committed by decree of the one or by the will of the many; by actors within or without The State; by the designated ‘good guys’ or by the ‘bad guys’—murder of innocents is still murder. Murder by ‘democratic’ approval is also still murder, however many approve of it ~ilana (1/2024)

Israel has rendered Gaza a “moonscape in war,” uninhabitable for years to come, reduced to rubble by “the most intense air campaigns in the modern record.” Not only is Israel murdering tens of thousands of Gaza’s civilians–25,700 Palestinians; an average of 200 to 300 souls a day–but it has gone and done a Taliban on the Gaza strip’s heritage sites, some dating back to antiquity.

Even the Wall Street Journal, in support of Israel’s “operation,” is now hip to the wanton death and destruction. Writes its Middle East correspondent:

By mid-December, Israel had dropped 29,000 bombs, munitions and shells on the strip. Nearly 70% of Gaza’s 439,000 homes and about half of its buildings have been damaged or destroyed. The bombing has damaged [and destroyed] Byzantine churches and ancient mosques, factories and apartment buildings, shopping malls and luxury hotels, theaters and schools. Much of the water, electrical, communications and healthcare infrastructure that made Gaza function is beyond repair. Most of the strip’s 36 hospitals are shut down, and only eight are accepting patients. Citrus trees, olive groves and greenhouses have been obliterated. More than two-thirds of its schools are damaged.

Glad as I am that the War Street Journal has awoken to this unbridled barbarism—there is so much more to add to the butcher’s bill.

By November, 2023, Gaza City was gone. Anshel Pfeffer, at a Ha’aretz, an Israeli national newspaper, believed that his gimlet eye alone had spied that, “The IDF now sits on top of a mound of ruins that was once Gaza City. … Cities have been destroyed before, in the Middle East and across the world, in both ancient and recent history. But when this happens, it is a seismic event for nations.”

What a load of self-important tosh, I thought at the time, to claim as an “insight” what was in plain sight. But Pfeffer was right: Gaza City, the largest Palestinian city, was gone and Israel’s lickspittle supporters stateside, and in the civilized world, had not noticed, much less protested, aside Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who threatened to raise an army on Israel.

So, the Devil rolled on. He, שטן, was loosed in Gaza.

The “Hamas Made Me Mass Murder” Argument

By December 3, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) was unleashing on the “safe” Southern Gaza, the enclave to which it had directed the refugees to flee. Those little grey donkeys, indubitably dropping dead, too, for lack of food and water—ostensibly carting their owners and their meager belongings to safety: They were going… nowhere.

Little donkeys dying in the rubble conjured Shai Agnon, Israel’s greatest writer, whose masterpiece novels I read and reread in the Hebrew, in thrall to the perfection of the writer’s sentences and the purity of his soul.

In his 1966 acceptance speech—Agnon, a devout Jew, won the Nobel Prize for literature when it was still worth something—this pious, humble, righteous soul (the term for his ilk in the Israel of my youth was “beautiful of soul,” יפה-נפש) paid spiritual tribute to the critters:

Lest I slight any creature, I must also mention the domestic animals, the beasts and birds from whom I have learned. Job said long ago (135:11): ‘Who teacheth us more than the beasts of the earth, And maketh us wiser than the fowls of heaven?’ Some of what I have learned from them I have written in my books, but I fear that I have not learned as much as I should have, for when I hear a dog bark, or a bird twitter, or a cock crow, I do not know whether they are thanking me for all I have told of them, or calling me to account.

In truth, Israel owns the killing field that is Gaza, circa 2023/2024. The offensive it has waged on Gaza is as close to Total Warfare (a term reserved for war against any and all), as modern war has gotten.

And war against civilians is war on civilization.

Yet, all Israel has to do to make world leaders turn tail is intone psychopathically that “Hamas made me do it. Hamas ate my homework; I mean my conscience.”

The “Hamas made me murder 25,700 souls (at least) and displace two million men, women and children” excuse-making “argument” will not wash as an argument for mass murder. For one thing, he who offends against innocents is responsible for his offenses; not a third party. For another, as I hope we have established here before, Whether it is committed by decree of the one or by the will of the many; by actors within or without The State; by the designated ‘good guys’ or by the ‘bad guys’—murder of innocents is still murder. Murder by “democratic” approval is also still murder, however many approve of it.

Besides, mass murder is never “unintentional” when you know it is inevitable and incidental to your “mission.”

Annoying as they are, neither do the pitiful caches of arms, ostensibly located in hospitals, begin to justify the grotesquely disproportionate sallies against Gaza’s Al Shifa Hospital and all other hospitals, murdering patients and refugees. A hospital should never be demolished.

Instead, demolish we must the demented “argument” that claims for Israel a right to drop dumb bombs, on Gaza’s doctors and patients. The former, apparently, are expected not only to palliate their imperiled patients, but also account for the Resistances’ whereabouts.

Ha’aretz (Israel News, Thursday, 14.12.2023) relays that, “Nearly half of the munitions Israel’s Air Force used in Gaza have been unguided, also known as ‘dumb bombs’ [imprecise], according to a new U.S. intel assessment.”

I said 25,700 souls murdered, “at least,” because many are still buried beneath the rubble. There are now over 1.9 million displaced persons in Gaza, reports Human Rights Watch. These include the littlest of children: Babies in incubators, their tiny bodies pierced by IV drips (which must be deftly inserted by dedicated healthcare providers), evacuated; shuttled from hospital to hospital, in constant peril. Some of Gaza’s  preemies were driven to Cairo, most without their parents for the babies may be orphans. Egyptian doctors were to try and stabilize these critically ill, malnourished neonatals who had been deprived systematically of oxygen, nutrients, and medicine.

By The Devil.

If murder of the unburn is evil, as we are frequently lectured, one might ask those who live by the light of truth, what about fully formed little people? Is it okay to make repeated attempts on the lives of Gaza’s babies?

No opinion poll poses direct questions. It is, however, becoming less difficult to divine what the Israeli public thinks of mass murder and displacement of civilians committed in its name. The gateway that is Google is in defend-Israel-at-all-costs mode, offering sparse information. It has, however, allowed into the “Israeli public support” search the fact that, “More than 90 percent of Jewish Israelis support the twin goals of crushing Hamas and saving the hostages.”

Combine that reasonable sentiment with the fact that fully 83 percent of a representative sample of Israelis replied favorably to this “Direct Polls” question: “To what degree do you support encouraging the voluntary emigration of Gaza Strip residents?” Since nothing that has befallen Gazans has been “voluntary”; the question is as cynical as the enthusiastically supportive answers are sincere.

By and large, Israelis are down with their leadership’s orgiastic, indiscriminate bloodletting in Gaza. Most are merely demanding a return of the hostages, and the continuance of the assault on Gazans, punctured by cease fires. Israelis appear oblivious to the unutterable, irreversible, irremediable ruin adjacent.

Israel In Which I Grew Up: Gone

The Israel of my formative years was no Eden before the Fall. But today’s Israel is qualitatively different from the Israel in which I spent formative years. Progressives dismiss any “back then” insights as nostalgia: Obsolete people making obsolete observations about a past long gone, they say.

Like left-liberals, lite libertarians (“The Kochtopus” now supporting Nikki Haley”) also seem to suggest that the past has nothing to offer, and all change is good, always. Memorably reviewed by libertarian philosopher Dr. David Gordon, Virginia Postrel’s book, The Future and its Enemies, fits this category. All that glitters is gold was the essence of Ms. Postrel’s second manifesto, The Substance of Style.

From a position on the opposing libertarian hard right, and as a reactionary, I see reactionaries as enlightened conservators. One of the advantages of age, then, is historic perspective, harking back to the past. There is value in looking back, even if it is only to lament what is no longer. Doesn’t the Left preach the merits of processing grief?

The country in which I was raised, Israel, is no longer. It is now “Little America on the Mediterranean.” By this moniker I mean to denote a country that is now run—and overrun—by diaspora-supported religious fanatics and neoconservatives, Jewish and gentile. A slick, monied American and immigrant Jewry and attendant gentile interests stateside have the run of the place, especially in the West Bank. ( See “More U.S. Jews Moved to West Bank Settlements in 2021…”.)

Little Jewish America lives on “beyond the Green Line.”

With plenty comes complacency. This is to be expected. Israel no longer has the pioneering spirit of its inception. Witness the lazy, lumbering, and late-to-the-rescue military. The IDF reflects the mindset that comes with development. Its failure on October 7 is, to an extent, an adjunct of affluence, the typical standing army of a regional, well-to-do power.

But there is more. The Israel in which I spent my formative years was led by the secular left, which had permeated early Israel’s institutions. The German Jews, the Yekkes, in particular. Religion was not taught or even alluded to in our public schools, unless one attended a private religious school. These were not genocide-preaching madrassas.

In my experience, Israel’s German Jews, especially, were not Jewish supremacists. Rather, they were influenced by the secular (Haskalah) השכלה , a Jewish Enlightenment. Of that formative generation of German Jews was Uri Avneri, an early ethical voice against Israeli state aggression and war.

Avneri, editor of the now defunct העולם הזה  (HaOlam HaZeh), was to later feature on America’s Antiwar.com website (where my work appeared, too). HaOlam HaZeh was  aptly described by the Financial Times as “oscillating between path-breaking investigations and scurrilous gossip, between the sensational and the salacious.” All true. The saucy pictures on the back cover were a magnet for most males. My father, who certainly qualified, had introduced me to Uri Avneri’s thinking.

Later in life, dad, of blessed memory, drifted into inchoate American neoconservatism, along with the rest of an Americanized world. Growing up in Israel, however, he was a man of the Old Left. Center-left Ha’aretz was thus a staple in my reading. Then the most highbrow of Israel’s dailies, Ha’aretz had intellectual ballast, and was known for its solid news reporting and exposes. The other two broadsheets, Maariv and Yediot, were markedly inferior. I don’t know if, in those days, there was anything as intellectually debased as “Israel Hayom,” because I was expected to read the aforementioned newspapers, in that order.

Grubbier than Fox News, if you can believe it, “Israel Hayom” was founded by American billionaire, gambling tycoon Sheldon Adelson, a big Bibi patron. The reader can see what I mean by “Little America on the Mediterranean,” but with a touch of Vegas.

For reading on the Right, I had sought out and read erudite thinkers like Menachem Begin, who brokered peace with Egypt’s Anwar Sadat, and Ze’ev Jabotinsky, a more Misesian classical liberal.

In time, this eclectic influence would smooth my transition into the Old American Right. The American Old and Only Valid Right—Murray N. Rothbard and Lew Rockwell leading the paleolibertarian flank; Russell Kirk at the helm of paleoconservatism—had rejected unjust war. The Old Right’s brief I see as very much congruent with the Biblical injunction of “Justice, and justice alone, you shall pursue” (Deuteronomy 16: 18-20).

Murder And Ethnic Cleansing Mainstreamed

These days, Israel’s political discourse is marred by the likes of Eliyahu Yossian, a mainstream opinionator. Listening as I did with difficulty to Yossian, I detect the delicate Iranian twang in his accent, although there is no sign of delicacy in this zealot’s worldview. Nothing authentically American, either. “Hamas is not the enemy,” he vociferates, “Gaza is. You level the area, and you kill the largest possible numbers, because the woman there is an enemy, the baby there is an enemy and the first grader is an enemy …and the pregnant woman is the enemy.” Yossian goes on to explain that Israel must not entertain “Western values” because these “blur basic logic.”

And so the IDF has done. Should you want proof that this man’s views have gone mainstream in Israel; look at Gaza. It’s a moonscape. What are your lying eyes telling you, to use Richard Pryor’s wry phrase for he who has been caught in flagrante delicto? As they were turning Gaza into Dresden on TV, before our very eyes, Israel’s quicksilver state propagandists were also telling us, their American funders, that “this is not happening.” Who are you going to believe? Democratic Israel, or your ‘lying eyes’?”

I believe my “lying eyes,” thank you very much. Those “lying eyes” speak to the scale of Israel’s depredations against Gazans. By any other name, this is evil incarnate. You cover up this truth at your peril—fail to bear witness to it; and your soul is doomed. Yet, many Christian Israel Firsters have turned away from those whom God commands them to succor. Some even proceeded to deny the Gaza holocaust as it was unfolding. The number of dead, via “the Hamas-controlled health ministry’s,” is suspect, I have been lectured.

Ha’aretz is Israel’s newspaper of record. Daily, they relay “the Hamas-controlled health ministry’s” numbers. Ha’aretz, which supports the war, would not be using these figures, were they not “broadly reliable,” a phrase used widely by reputable humanitarian, aid-rendering organizations worldwide.

“The numbers may not be perfectly accurate on a minute-to-minute basis,” said Michael Ryan, of the World Health Organization’s Health Emergencies Program. “But they largely reflect the level of death and injury.” (“What is Gaza’s Ministry of Health and how does it calculate the war’s death toll?”)

Essentially, believe your “lying eyes.”

Satellite-radar science certainly doesn’t lie. Satellite companies had restricted images of Gaza, reported SEMAFOR, effectively concealing crimes against humanity. My educated guess: They’re beholden to the clientèle, the military-industrial-complex, and the National Security Agency (NSA). The Top Dog client is the U.S. military. The client state is Israel’s defense force.

A counter—and a cause for patriotism—came via Scientific American: “Amid restrictions on optical satellite images, [American] researchers had developed a radar technique to gauge building damage in Gaza.” The charred smudges from space, where once the Gaza Strip was, are apocalyptic. Dystopian. Undeniable.

The science belied the holocaust denial, and other good souls bore witness to it too:

“We are no strangers to human suffering—to conflict, to natural disasters, to some of the world’s largest and gravest catastrophes—but we’ve seen nothing like the siege of Gaza”: So wrote leaders of some of the world’s top humanitarian organizations, in a New York Times op-ed on Tuesday, December 13. (Via Jake Johnson, of Common Dreams.)

You are what you do.

The IDF has hunted down and killed its own with the same zeal it has reserved for letting the blood of Gaza’s civilians. A preliminary IDF Report about those Israeli “hostages killed by soldiers, as they waved a white flag, and yelled for help in Hebrew,” revealed the following: “IDF soldiers had spotted a building two days prior with the inscription ‘SOS’ and ‘Help! Three hostages,’ inscribed on a wall.” (Ha’aretz, Sat., 16.12.023) On encounter, the three had indeed waved a white flag, and had stripped down to their skinny torsos. Still, the IDF opened-fire on them. The hostages were hunted down. They died running from the Jewish State’s soldiers.

The IDF’s appetite for destruction is worse than unwholesome. The near-gleeful chase and murder of hostages by IDF soldiers exists on a continuum of depravity. Extrapolate one can from this—the IDF’s killing of surrendered, manifestly unarmed men—to the IDF’s Rules of Engagement with Gaza’s civilians, evident in the orgiastic bloodletting and heartless ethnic cleansing winding to a close (as there are no more ethnic Gazans to uproot). Killing their own with such unexamined ease says something about this army’s Rules of Engagement with its prey, Gaza’s civilians.

Honest military experts, including Avner Gvaryahu, who heads “Breaking the Silence,” a whistleblower group that documents testimonies of former Israeli soldiers, concurred: “The army said this happened in violation of the rules of engagement. I’m skeptical of that, based on what we know of previous operations in Gaza,” he said.

More evidence that Eliyahu Yossian’s genocidal talk is normal currency in Israel was provided, in October, by a Netanyahu government policy paper. I read Israel’s population eviction document in Hebrew, in English, and in incredulity.

Where does The Devil wish Gaza’s two-million-plus displaced and hobbled civilians to go? Option C of the “Israeli Intelligence Ministry[’s] Policy Paper On Gaza’s Civilian Population, October 2023″ had spelled it out:

To the Sinai desert!  The “policy” paper expounds on, “The evacuation of the civilian population from Gaza to Sinai” and the creation of ערי-אוהלים  (“Arei Ohalim, “tent cities”), in the Sinai desert! It has since been “doctored,” denuded of the ערי-אוהלים  phrase pursuant to national and international grumbling.

From the vertiginous heights of his contempt-dripping arrogance, Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen has mock-asked that “countries interested in taking in Gazan refugees send his office an email, including ‘the address of the country.’” In the same vein, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, the leader of the far-right Religious Zionism party, has said that, “What needs to be done in the Gaza Strip is to encourage emigration.”

Point proven! QED! Quod erat demonstrandum, or משל, which is how my Russian-Israeli math teacher taught us to sign our mathematical proofs. There is good evidence to show that Eliyahu Yossian does not appear to be an outlier in Israeli civil and political discourse.

By contrast, many of the October 7 victims were lefties, peace activists, lovers not haters, nowhere as ideological as their West Bank counterparts and the illiterate bobble heads of Israeli TV.

I wonder, then: Were the Israeli communities in the South, victims of October 7, political outliers? Is it perhaps more than symbolic that forsaken by the Jewish State, on October 7, were poorer Israelis, politically less influential communities, who more resembled the Israel of Old to which I harken here?

Ehud Barak, a remnant of that older left, is a former prime minister, defense minister and decorated soldier. Parroting American constitutional and natural rights, he told a reporter that the pursuit of happiness is predicated on the right to life, which the IDF failed to uphold. It was worse than that: The rights to life of the Israelis on the southern front were treated as forfeit by the Jewish State.

The spectral IDF took nine hours to arrive on the scene, but just in time to rain indiscriminate helicopter Hellfire missiles on survivors (as יואב זיתון attested in a Ynet article, on 15.10.23), and count the dead. Israeli reservist pilot, Colonel Nof Erez—speaking in good Hebrew, not in the excitable, anglicized Pidgin Hebrew heard from most of the TV operatives out of Israel—described the Israeli army’s response to October 7 as “mass Hannibal.”

Again: after observing what has been done in Gaza—an obscene, operationally idiotic offensive, in which 70 percent of the casualties are women and children—almost anything appears possible. In conversation with broadcaster Aryeh Golan, Yasmin Porat, a survivor of October 7—quiet, calm, logical, she too orating in fine Hebrew, absent the ugly Anglicisms—attests to the same: IDF forces shot their own civilians. Listen.

Was a doctrine such as “Hannibal” still extant? God help Israel if this is so.

Fox News, War Porn Militarytainment

To explain their support for willy-nilly mass murder in Gaza, Israelis often send me articles from another country, America, in a language not their own, English. Their source, in particular, is the intellectually subpar Fox News, the war porn channel. The channel that produced the “Militarytainment” that accompanied Genghis Bush’s war against Iraqi civilians.

Back home, on Fox News, “Israelism” is the gospel which they never cease to proclaim. Everything Israel is papered over, excused, and finessed.

In Fox News’ neoconservative nirvana, the broads and their enablers are ever turned-on, tuned-out, and hot for war, inadvertently and reflexively. It’s the nature of the high-time-preference character. People who are in a constant state of heightened emotional arousal tend to want to remain that way; the emotions have a self-reinforcing urgency. War—for Bush or for Bibi—its propaganda and its prosecutors get the Foxettes hot. Perverted warpath patriotism gets these folks and their followers hot. The military-industrial-complex thrives when women on display, enabled by their male accomplices, shake their wares for war.

Not for naught do Fox types give frequent ode, as do all in the Israel First media, to the hotness of distaff IDF. It’s called war porn, and is a feature of the high-time-preference individual who follows, and performs on, Fox News in wartime.

The Antisemitism Libel 

Holding forth in favor of pulverizing the people of Gaza and their meager belongings is Fox News’ Tyrus (real name George Murdoch). Among his repertoire of factoids is a lot of belching about antisemitism, allegedly rife in America. This antisemitism nonsense is more offensive than Tyrus’ inked flesh, spilling over copiously into a studio armchair. Wailing about “antisemitism,” as perceived by the opposition’s speech or protest against Israel, is intended to silence opposition to mass murder and ethnic cleansing in Gaza.

The words people speak, write, tweet; the beliefs they are known to hold, the flags they fly or burn, the symbolic, non-violent ceremonies and rituals they enact, the insignia, paraphernalia, the goose-stepping, the Hitler salutes they muck around with—all that is protected speech. You may not like it; but it’s licit in natural law.

Again: The “antisemitism” claims-making is meant to silence and sunder free speech, one of the most cherished American (Voltairean) values, clearly not shared by our Israeli “democratic allies.”

Americans are hardly deficient in their solidarity for the Jewish State and for Jews, in general. American society is philosemitic, even Zionist.

The ILLOGIC Of The Justification

In sum, and quite simply, vis-à-vis Gaza, anyone born in His Image (b’tselem) בצלם, should be able to grasp these rules, instantiated in the Decalogue. In particular, by The Sixth Commandment, “Thou shall not murder.”

Often mistranslated, Exodus 20:13 enjoins against murder, not against righteous killing, as in the right of self-defense, instantiated in our Second Amendment. The biblical text reads לא תרצח (“Lo tirtzach!”), which means “do not murder.” In the original (unless mistranslated from the Hebrew), it does not say לא תהרוג (“Lo taharog”), which is “do not kill.” Big difference.

There is nothing righteous about Israel’s murder spree in Gaza.

If one is enjoined against aiding and abetting in the murder of a single innocent individual; by logical extension, we Americans should not knowingly aid and abet in the murder of the many. Not in our name.

“But what else could the Israelis have done,” asks reader Rich, a question posed to me by quite a few smart people. The question, “What else could the Israelis have done?”, is rooted in a logical fallacy. This is so, for the question sets up a false dichotomy or a false dilemma not in evidence, and is thus an error of reason.

The Hoover Institution’s Admiral James O. Ellis Jr. traces the contours of this illogic:

In classical logic, the false dichotomy, or false dilemma, is defined as an argument where only two choices are presented yet more exist, or a spectrum of possible choices exists between two extremes. False dilemmas are usually characterized by ‘either this or that’ language but can also be characterized by the omission of choices. This insidious tactic has the appearance of forming a logical argument, but under closer scrutiny it becomes evident that there are more possibilities than the either/or choice that is presented.

It’s too late, now, but “it was indeed possible to defeat culpable Hamas members and prevent the carnage in Gaza.”

The Israeli high court could have initiated criminal proceedings, engaging the International Criminal Court in issuing arrest warrants for all members of Hamas. It could have demanded that the civilized world refuse to succor or give them safe passage, arresting culpable Hamas members forthwith. Independent agencies would have easily been corralled to do the processing, as we know just how effective the Surveillance and Security State is, American and Israeli, in gathering intelligence on us, its law-abiding subjects.

Here’s an even more radical idea: Place the useless IDF and its celebrity generals on the border, before the citizens, not behind them. If the IDF practice enough, they can reach the kibbutzim and yishuvim they had abandoned, on October 7, in less than nine hours. With the best of its special-operations units, be it the “Golani” or “Sayeret Matkal,” Israel could then have conducted precision operations into Gaza’s tunnels. (But, as we’ve since learned, IDF are not brave.)

What world admiration would Israel have garnered. And how effective would the world have been in galvanizing on behalf of the stricken Jewish State. Instead, Jews in the diaspora have become targets; the Jewish State’s leaders rightly regarded as butchers of babies.

Jewish supremacism, like the American exceptionalism driving the United States’ foreign policy, breeds barbarism.

©2024 ILANA MERCER
The New American, January 4
The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, January 6
The Mises Institute, Power & Market, January 8
The Unz Review, January 25, 2024

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