Category Archives: GAZA

ESSAY & UPDATES (2/13/025) On BRICS And Pan-Arabism Revived To Tackle Israel, Militarily

America, Argument, Foreign Aid, Foreign Policy, GAZA, History, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, libertarianism, Middle East

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NEW ESSAY is “BRICS And Pan-Arabism Revived To Tackle Israel, Militarily.” It is currently featured on The Unz Review, home to dissidents, where it was a main feature, and on LewRockwell.com.

Now on IlanaMercer.com

Excerpt:

I grew up decades back in the Middle East, when the American Empire was still nascent. Backed by the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics), the Arab World was a formidable force. It was neither managed nor handled by the Soviet Union, but, rather, a partner with the USSR in an uneasy balancing act: maintaining the global balance of power.

In those days, it was not unusual for BBC World Service, radio then, to respectfully and professionally lead with news about this or the other Arab-bloc maneuver, in the service of pan-Arabic interests. These news Ledes were announcements—not imperial pronouncements, as they are today—about the Arab World as a global, oil-producing wielder of soft power.

OPEC Before AIPAC

Like Empire, the grubby influencers of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee were still on the ascendancy; AIPAC mattered far less than OPEC.    In fact, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, largely Arab, routinely and energetically acted to disabuse the Anglo-American Oligopoly of its dominance, in the interest of the oil-producing countries. Scholarly foreign-service Arabists—the likes of ambassador Chas J. Freeman—exerted influence in American and British statecraft.

Naturally, no free-market libertarian would ever argue, as a matter of economic theory, for a cartelized commodity market. This OPEC certainly was. Every half-decent libertarian would, however, champion Arab national sovereignty in the control of Arab resources, over American ownership of these means of production, invariably achieved through the unceasing carnage of regime-change political subterfuge and economic sanctions.

Another vestige of a proud Pan-Arabist impetus was the Arab League. All but neutered nowadays, the Arab League was founded in 1945, by Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Transjordan (now Jordan), Saudi Arabia, and Yemen, acting in unity of purpose to  “strengthen and coordinate the political, cultural, economic, and social programs of its members and to mediate disputes among them or between them and third parties.”

Other members are Libya (1953); Sudan (1956); Tunisia and Morocco (1958); Kuwait (1961); Algeria (1962); Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates (1971); Mauritania (1973); Somalia (1974);… Djibouti (1977); and Comoros (1993).

Count among them the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO; 1976), too. Different times, indeed.

In addition to economic cooperation among signatory states, a little-known fact is that the Arab League was bound by a NATO-like commitment, signed on April 13, 1950, to mount a joint coordinated military defense in the case of an attack on a member.

Structures and alliances that were once de rigueur in the Arab world now lie in ruins, nixed or neutered by Israel and America. The Israel-America menage (well, it’s as though Americans and Israelis share a household) is joined by that pathetic poodle, Perfidious Albion—reliving an imperial moment in the sun. In-tow are the genocidal German State, which has reverted to historic character, and other western European vassal countries.

Co-opted as well has been the organization for Arab Cooperation. Founded later, in 1989, it no longer rates a mention. By 1989, it is fair to say, Pan-Arabism had been subordinated to Tel Aviv and Washington, the latter acting chiefly to make the Middle East safe for Israel. Persian Gulf countries, especially, had become puppet states, in thrall to the Anglo-American-Israel axis.

The maelstrom of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the country’s vertiginous expansion across the Levant, and the generous forbearance the Global North continues to lavish on it, funding, exculpating, and encouraging Israel to expand its evil endeavor—this must lead to an inescapable conclusion:

The Western Woke State has entered a new phase: Humanity now faces an out, loud-and-proud Genocidal State, and the supra-state structures, financial and military, that underwrite it. It is not hyperbolic to argue that humanity, whatever race, age and ethnic origin, is existentially imperiled by the openly Genocidal Western State.

By the same token, the narrative talent of American foreign policy is such that people are persuaded by the strut of it. Exceptionalism asserted rather than enacted rubs off. Curiously—and considering the centrality of good-vs.-evil, of a values-based pretense in U.S. foreign policy—if ever a clear, moral case for American military intervention presented itself; it is on the side of the civilians of Gaza as against the Israelis, who are armed with Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD).

Yet Israeli mass murder has been fenced off from any outside intervention by no other than the United States of America, that global force for “good.” With American backing, Israel, you can say, has outwitted the world. Israelis continue to murder Arabs and destroy their lands and leaders as the fancy takes them.

Abandoned by Russia, parts of it purloined by the US and Türkiye, Syria has been practically annexed by Israel. ISIS-in-Syria, an internationalist group that has rebranded itself as Hay?at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), and the Israeli-Jewish Jihadis, had made common cause in Syria. While they are not exact avatars of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF)—the motley crew of militants based in Syria is informed by similar, illiberal habits of mind. The IDF and HTS are, moreover, also underwritten by the same regime-changing foreign interests. Washington and its Wahhabis, if you will.

With an assist from Türkiye and the US, Isra-ISIS has, for now, collapsed the genocide-fighting Axis of Resistance, the supply routes for which ran from Iran, through Syria, to Hizballah in southern Lebanon, and the Palestinian Resistance in Gaza and the West Bank.

Fifteen bloody months into a broadcasted genocide, in a markedly late, December 5, 2024 “landmark report”, Amnesty International has issued a ruling: It’s “genocide.”

Equally slow to gather seemingly hard-to-find “findings”; Human Rights Watch has also said “genocide,” and documented methods deliberate and systematic to dehydrate Gazans to death, namely to deprive them even further of potable water.

Human rights reports do not militate against murder ongoing. Day after day, the word from Gaza is the same. ….

 …. Unless stopped, Israel will continue to open up new fronts of evil. Emanations from the collective Israeli mind  flow as freely as an open sewer and are as septic. They’ll seep and spread everywhere. …

READ THE REST OF MY January, 2025 ESSAY: “BRICS And Pan-Arabism Revived To Tackle Israel, Militarily”

* Israel’s uglies via Zeteo

Now on IlanaMercer.com

UPDATE (2/13/025): Another excerpt from https://www.ilanamercer.com/2025/01/brics-pan-arabism-revived-tackle-israel-militarily/:

“Haunting is the lonely figure of the sainted Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya making his way through the ruins toward his Israeli tormentors. The bulk of an approaching tank is ahead.

The lecherous, licentiousness Israelis, ‘brothers in the breed of Cain,’ had tortured to death a colleague, renowned surgeon Dr. Adnan al Bursh, at Sde Teiman, Israel’s rectal-rape center.

Already a fabled figure, Dr. Abu Safiya had refused to abandon his patients at Kamal Adwan, North Gaza’s last, listing hospital.

His belief undiminished, at one stage in this man’s heroic resistance; Dr. Abu Safiya had performed the rites of burial over his young son, murdered by the IDF, before returning to his patients.

Now the director of Kamal Adwan has vanished into the maw of Israeli torture centers, from which proud #Palestinian men emerge small, bent, traumatized, deformed, disabled or dead. …

Enough….”

If King Abdullah had the backbone, this is what he and the Arab Leaders would do. READ THE REST:

“BRICS And Pan-Arabism Revived To Tackle Israel, Militarily”

NEW (UPDATED 3/25/025): SS IDF Is ‘Liquidating’ The North Gaza Ghetto

Anti-Semitism, GAZA, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Judaism & Jews, Middle East, Military, Palestinians, Propaganda, Pseudoscience, The West, War

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The IDF’s ‘Aktion’ in northern Gaza resembles nothing short of the ‘liquidation’ of the ghettos of East Europe ~ilana

1/5/025: Speech restrictions stateside in the form of the Antisemitism Awareness Act mirror the worst of British and western Europe’s anti-speech tribunals. Tabled by a Republican and a Democrat and passed by the Upper Chamber, S. 4127 would embed Israeli agitprop throughout American education. For posterity.

Aside being in violation of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, the Antisemitism Awareness Act would utterly enervate discourse in our country, and would actually criminalize tracts like my last:

“SS IDF Is ‘Liquidating’ The North Gaza Ghetto”

12/29/024: Emanations from the collective that is the Israeli mind continue to be as septic as an open sewer. The Church of Satan, IDF, sets up a spa-like facility on the northern coast of Gaza, stolen land. Breakfast, BBQ, mani-pedi and massages are on offer to the killing squads in the killing fields of Gaza.

There’s a lounge for treats, Belgian waffles and pretzels, there are also popcorn and cotton candy machines, as well as a barber and a pedicurist for the fighters.

Surrounded by synthetic grass, and the putrefying bodies of murdered Palestinians.

12/17/024: Yet even the solidarity camp has to keep intoning that Jews oppose the vampiric Zionists. Not quite.  

According to a 2024 Pew Research survey, which misleadingly labels the genocide in Gaza a “military operation,” “Opinion about Israel’s current military operation against Hamas,” reveal that, “Jewish Americans… are quite divided on this question:

28% say Israel’s military operation is going too far.
24% say it has not gone far enough.
32% say it is taking the right approach.
13% are unsure.

The Manhattan Institute polls Jews about a variety of anodyne issues, and buries this tidbit deep down:

“Across all of American Jewry, support for Israel is strong, consistent, and bipartisan (83% of Democratic Jews, 86% of Independents, and 94% of Republicans)”

A disgrace.

“A new ‘non-partisan’ survey by the Jewish Electorate Institute (JEI) released [before the election] shows very high levels of Jewish voters backing Kamala Harris and Democrats in the 2024 elections.”

Kamala Harris had never repudiated Genocide-Joe’s genocide, and had promised to continue doing what was in Israel’s interests. It is fair to deduce then, that genocide was not an overriding issue for Democrat-supporting Jews.

12/11/024: Israelis and their lickspittles pitch a fit when the language of the Nazi Holocaust is applied to the genocide Israel is perpetrating upon the Palestinians.

So I compare. Read. You’ll learn some history:

Newest round-ups for death marches toward the south, the Sinai desert:

NEW COLUMN IS “SS IDF Is ‘Liquidating’ The North Gaza Ghetto.” It was, on November 27, a main feature on The Unz Review. It was also featured on antiwar, anti-empire LewRockwell.com. And on the Mises Institute’s Power & Market.

You can read “SS IDF Is ‘Liquidating’ The North Gaza Ghetto,” now at IlanaMercer.com

Excerpt:

Israelis and their lickspittles pitch a fit when the language of the Nazi Holocaust is applied to the genocide Israel is perpetrating upon the Palestinians. So here goes:

The northern part of the Gaza Ghetto is being “liquidated” (as remarked on October 31).  Israel’s methodology there is that of the Nazi death squads, who were said to have “liquidated” the ghettos of Eastern Europe before transporting their involuntarily confined Jewish occupants to the extermination camps, in cattle cars.

Going up against ghettoized civilians were the soldiers of the Nazi Party, the SS, the toughest in the Wehrmacht. Like the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), the SS presided over a Kafkaesque apparatus of propaganda, intelligence, police and military bureaucracies.

Plainly put, the purpose of liquidation was deportation to the death camps for extermination. Israel, of course, has further streamlined and industrialized mass eviction and murder by collapsing liquidation and extermination into one. Duly, the IDF is currently attempting to shoo about 400,000 broken and starving human beings in the Strip’s northern most section toward a “safe zone,” the narrow midsection that is the Netzarim Corridor.

The IDF’s “safe zones” bafflegab is reminiscent of the upbeat postcards which deported Jews were urged to mail to their associates: From these condemned Jews, the Nazis, clever and coldhearted, had coerced messages of good cheer: reassuring postcards to folks back home from those who were never coming home. Don’t worry. We’re safe. We’re being ‘resettled’ in a wonderful place. (“Dear wife, I am healthy and I work as a tailor…”)

Since the Palestinians know all too well what is meant by “safe zones”; they are mostly standing their ground. Consequently, the SS IDF is slowly exterminating the residents of northern Gaza in-situ.

As the field monitors of Euro-Med Monitor reported, in the waning days of October, 2024, “Israel is systematically and extensively working to drive out the Palestinian population and forcibly displace them from their residential areas in the northern Gaza Strip.” To that end, they are “using massacres, mass killings, bombings of hospitals and shelters, and the destruction of [the little that remains of the] basic necessities of life.” ……

… Grossaktion Gaza is how the Nazis would have dubbed the SS IDF’s actions.

Aktion or Grossaktion is the term the Nazis used for their assorted ghetto-liquidation operations. Grossaktion Warsaw was the Nazi code name for the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto—again, deportation for the purpose of extermination.

The IDF’s Grossaktion Gaza resembles nothing short of the “liquidation” of the ghettos, as detailed by the National WWII Museum (carpeting your victims with bombs is Israel’s contribution to the annals of genocide):

“The liquidation of ghettos involved rounding up all Jewish inhabitants, shooting any resisters, deporting Jews to killing centers, and the physical destruction of the ghetto. Blanka Rothschild describes her memory of the liquidation of the Lodz Ghetto: ‘[When] came our time, we had to be taken out. The entire population of our [building] was walked to the place where the cattle cars were, and we were loaded. It was a horrible thing because people had to stand. There was no place to sit or squat. If somebody was sick or even dying, he died on his feet standing up. It was just unbearable.’ While some were able to escape or were transferred to forced labor camps, the vast majority of Jews who lived in ghettos in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe perished either from horrid conditions or mass deportations to extermination centers.”

Images are everywhere in Gaza, the north especially, of large groups of naked Palestinian men sitting amid the ruins. CNN had finally deigned to report and depict, on October 30, men old, frail and infirm, wilting out on Gaza’s ruined streets. These images had been uploaded by Satan’s army on earth, by the IDF itself. The separation of the men from the women on arrival: This, too, was a feature of the Nazi death camps. Stripping was the lot of all the condemned. …

…These days, Gaza looks worse than the Polish Kutno Ghetto of yesteryear, for example, depicted in Hugo Jaeger’s photography, curated by Time & Life. On the one hand are the heartbreaking images of the Polish shantytown, its many makeshift shelters, and its hopeless inmates amid the collapsing ruins. On the other are the nylon tents that have come to typify Gaza, set against a Hiroshima-like hellscape, from which all signs of collective Palestinian life have been erased. The similarities are too conspicuous to ignore. …

… READ THE REST. NEW COLUMN, “SS IDF Is ‘Liquidating’ The North Gaza Ghetto,” was, on November 27, a main feature on The Unz Review. It was also featured on antiwar, anti-empire LewRockwell.com, and on the Mises Institute’s Power & Market.

You can read “SS IDF Is ‘Liquidating’ The North Gaza Ghetto,” now at IlanaMercer.com

BREAKING (12/8): ASSAD. Amnesty International. Amsterdam Antisemitism Hoax. Grotesque IDF Grinning, Gyrating, Twerking, Howling Devotionals For Genocide

Anti-Semitism, Crime, Criminal Injustice, Foreign Policy, GAZA, Iran, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Media, Middle East, Military, Neoconservatism, War

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The media give us to understand that even in murder—nay, mid-murder—Israeli-Jews must be seen and described as mere victims.

DECEMBER 8: The ISRA-ISIS Axis of evil won in Syria. The ghouls on Israel’s sub-intelligent TV networks are celebrating the Jihadist victory; Netanyahu is taking credit for Regime Change by HTS, formerly known as ISIS in Syria.

American mainstream media morons just love the rebranding. McCain grins from grave.

Sad day for the Palestinians, because the Syrian part of the axis-of-resistances has fallen. McCain grinning from grave. He was a big fan of ISIS in Syria

See “Lies About Putin, Syria & The Alawite Alliance”

Palestinians are even more alone now. Supply chain of weapons from Iran via Syria, and on to Gaza and the West Bank is all but shut now.

The TRUTH: “Lies About Putin, Syria & The Alawite Alliance” Ilana Mercer, July 12, 2018

DECEMBER 5: Finally. “Amnesty International’s research has found sufficient basis to conclude that Israel has committed and is continuing to commit genocide against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip, the organization said in a landmark new report published today.”

That it took them so long—14 months into a genocide—only bolsters the contention that, together with the organs of international law—so too has the human rights community been compromised. The scholar Norman Finkelstein, author of the seminal Gaza, An Inquest Into Martyrdom (2018)—an exegesis of fact and law—has strongly suggested that this is the case. The report’s remarks concerning the Resistance are certainly proforma nonsense.

READ IT: “‘You Feel Like You Are Subhuman’: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza.”

NOVEMBER 16: Juxtapose the the ugly Israelis loosed in Amsterdam with this saint of a human being: “Surgeon Nizam Mamode broke down as he told the international development committee what he witnessed when working as a surgeon in Gaza.”

NOVEMBER 15, 2024:  Amsterdam Antisemitism Hoax. Israel is exporting auxiliaries of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF)—civilian terrorists—who’re still invited, disgustingly, to partake in European civil society, or what remains of it.
The best and most forensic anatomy of the antisemitism hoax, perpetrated in Amsterdam by Israeli psychopathic football hooligans and their willing enablers of the Western political and media class, is “EXPOSED: What REALLY Happened in Amsterdam,” published on 14 November 2024, by stellar truth-teller Richard Sanders, under the Double Down News auspices.

YouTube:

UPDATED:

“Consider this paradox,” writes Marc Owen Jones, an academic specializing in media disinformation: “The New York Times ran the headline, “Israeli soccer fans injured in attacks linked to antisemitism in Amsterdam,” but the body article contained only verified evidence of anti-Arab racism. Its lede emphasized antisemitic motivation, while the body of the article cited footage by Maccabi Tel Aviv fans chanting anti-Arab and racist slogans – footage that the New York Times had actually verified. The only basis at the time for claiming antisemitism came from a single tweet by the Dutch prime minister, while the linked Amsterdam police’s own statement made no such attribution (subsequent police statements did condemn ‘antisemitic behavior’).”

Despite no Israelis being killed, a media system loathe to use the term genocide to describe the deaths of over 43,000 Palestinians seemed happy to use terminology redolent of the Holocaust. Suddenly, incidents of soccer hooliganism and anti-Israeli violence seemingly provoked by anti-Arab racism were being reduced to antisemitic pogroms.
…Buried or omitted in most accounts was verified evidence of anti-Arab racism that had occurred prior to these events, including footage of Maccabi Tel Aviv fans tearing down Palestinian flags, attacking taxi drivers, and chanting explicitly racist slogans like “Death to the Arabs” and “Let the IDF fuck the Arabs.” (Marc Owen Jones)

Israelis should be excised like tumors from any state-organized affair the world over. Private institutions should also be encouraged to disgorge Israelis from their midst until they come clean, admit their prior support for genocide, not deny it, and promise to demand an end to the genocide, the occupation and the ongoing dispossession of Palestinians, in addition to convincingly demonstrating a commitment to pay reparations to Palestinians in perpetuity, when the Day of Judgement arrives.

NOVEMBER 3, 2024: This is now. The IDF is not tired of genocide; they are invigorated by it. These murderously grotesque IDF filmed this footage a few weeks ago, in the Zaitoun neighborhood of Gaza City.

Uploaded at 2:11 PM, October 9, 2024, the footage depicts the ecstatically distorted mugs of the IDF de Sade soldiers, resembling nothing so much as primates in heat—my profuse apologies to primates for the unflattering affiliation—after a day of genocide.

Israeli Defense Forces detritus, human waste by any other name, twerk their ugly tushes and groins, grinning and gyrating while yelling about their conquests.

Click the link, and log into X formerly known as Twatter, so as to view Israel’s finest. You see, Elon Musk, patron saint of human waste, has seen to it that the sharing code of all these kinds of videos on X is disabled.  I have this fact confirmed by an expert coder.

https://x.com/DoubleDownNews/status/1844371141487636620

In another vignette, a funeral for a member of Murder Inc, a family eulogizes Shuval ben Nathan with blood-curdling yelps. The recording website is Seventh Eye. It’s in Hebrew. The relatives of Shuval ben Nathan don’t “call for revenge,” as the article’s Hebrew indicates. Rather, they call for MORE revenge, and celebrate the revenge that has gone down, is going down, did go down under the watch of their dearly departed. “You went into Azza for revenge, the more the better: women, children, everything you saw, this is what you wanted.”

Western pro-genocide networks run morally reprehensible pieces such as, “He got out of Gaza, but Gaza did not get out of him’: Israeli soldiers returning from war struggle with trauma and suicide.” The likes of CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash—normalizers and backers of Israel’s genocide—are hard at work framing Israeli war criminals as victims, suffering Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and worthy of great empathy, not opprobrium. More so than the Abu Ghraib photographs, IDF malefactors, however, tell a tale, not of fleeting youthful indiscretion, but of abiding degeneracy in the military and the society.

The media give us to understand that even in murder—nay, mid-murder—Israeli-Jews must be seen and described as mere victims.

Nonsense on stilts.

The fact is, while Israeli Jews are conscripts and must enlist in the IDF—nobody, but nobody, is forced to do what we’ve seen IDF soldiers rejoice in doing. The military draft does not imply or mean the obligation to commit, chronicle and rejoice in war crimes. This joy has been entirely voluntary, prideful and organic to the wider-Jewish Israeli society’s tenor and project.

Some of the Israel Army’s body of work ongoing:

Real gutted and beheaded babies, piles-upon-piles of REAL, precious dead children, courtesy of the Demon State, Israhell. This, as opposed to the October 7 Atrocity Propaganda Israel deployed, shamelessly, to justify genocide. (Watch “Atrocity Propaganda: How Israel Sells Its Destruction of Gaza” by Max Blumenthal.)

https://x.com/DoubleDownNews/status/1844366940803887378

https://x.com/DoubleDownNews/status/1849712626378342445

Little Usamah and his love bird (parrot), both butchered by Murder Inc. https://x.com/asadabukhalil/status/1829581988329894346

Separating the men from the women, as in any concentration camp of yesteryear, and stripping them. https://x.com/RamAbdu/status/1850597799793918216  The Final Solution is underway in North Gaza.

Yesterday’s produce market massacre. A little donkey, too, is martyred by Murder Inc. (Where is PETA, this donor asks?) https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/29/world/video/gaza-city-airstrike-digvid

Remember, though, as grotesque as the IDF uglies are, grinning, gyrating, and twerking for genocide—they are always and everywhere THE TRUE VICTIMS HERE.

MORE:

https://www.ilanamercer.com/category/gaza/

https://barelyablog.com/

UPDATED (11/3): And Iranian woman strips to remind us what’s important in life—so much more important than solidarity with the Palestinians and against Genocide. The Axis of Genocide is elated. Regime change, baby.

ESSAY, Update (11/6): Genocide Is A Crime, Not A War Crime: Israel Is Waging Genocide, Not

Crime, Foreign Policy, GAZA, Israel, libertarianism, Middle East, Morality, War

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11/6/024: Humbled. Brilliant and brilliantly ethical Norman Finkelstein (@normfinkelstein), lodestar for me and millions more regarding Palestine and Gaza, explained to India Global Left, a podcast (@Indiagloballeft), https://x.com/ejmalrai/status/1854027558238441749, why the language of war does not apply to genocide, something approaching my own deduction in “Genocide Is A Crime, Not A War Crime: Israel Is Waging Genocide, Not War,” September 20, 2024.

“…Genocide is neither war nor war crime‘

Humbled to have approached the light in such dark days. To do my part.

9/23/024: Video of mangled Palestinian baby flesh and bone embedded in my latest essay, “Genocide’s A Crime, Not A War Crime: Israel Is Waging Genocide, Not War,” was removed by X. (The Platform formerly known as Twatter.)

You don’t have to go looking before clones of it, courtesy of the Vampire State, are shared on X:
https://x.com/Afcq1954/status/1837472434707902578

https://x.com/Afcq1954/status/1837472434707902578

https://x.com/MuhammadSmiry/status/1837455703104987502

NEW ESSAY (September 20, 2024) is “Genocide Is A Crime, Not A War Crime: Israel Is Waging Genocide, Not War.” It was a main feature on The Unz Review, and, titled “Israel’s Waging Genocide, Not War,” was featured on the Mises Institute’s Power & Market.

“Genocide Is A Crime, Not A War Crime: Israel Is Waging Genocide, Not War” can now be read at IlanaMercer.com.

Excerpt:

IF it is portrayed as a war crime; genocide—the methodical, malicious murder of the many—can be dismissed as incidental to battle; a mere case of, “Oops, bad things happen in war.” You hear the last phrase all the time from Israel’s supporters, as they gush their enthusiasm for the Jewish State’s crimes.

The genocide-as-a-war-crime conceptualization provides cover and lends imprimatur for criminals and criminality. You mitigate and minimize genocide when you call it a war crime.

This is precisely the point of Israel and its co-belligerents: The purpose of framing Israel’s ongoing extermination of Palestinian society in Gaza as a byproduct of war—the same having commenced in the West Bank and East Jerusalem—is to give the impression that industrial-scale mass murder is often incidental to war. Bad things happen in the butcher’s shop of war.

But genocide—legally and morally—is a stand-alone crime; it is not a crime attached to a set of mitigating or explanatory circumstances. The Jewish State, gleefully engaged in methodical, indiscriminate mass murder, is thus a criminal entity. Perhaps not a common criminal, but, nevertheless a criminal country, a threat to the comity of nations. It doesn’t take a Carl von Clausewitz, famed Prussian general and war theorist, to figure this out.

Disquieting though this is, a better source of metaphor for Israel than von Clausewitz is Truman Capote. He is the originator of the true-crime genre, in which a real event is treated with fictional techniques and turned into a literary work of art. That Capote’s In Cold Blood certainly is.

Israel, to commandeer and paraphrase Capote, is that “rarity, a natural killer—absolutely sane, but conscienceless, and capable of dealing, with or without motive, the coldest-blooded deathblows.”

In the crime he anatomized, Capote encountered the “single-killer concept” and “the double-killer concept.” Israel comes under the nation-killer concept, given that the nation, with thumping majorities, backed the killing of Gaza. Currently, it is by a preponderance of 71 percent that Israelis support a war on Lebanon.

In any event, because it is an indefensible crime for which there are no extenuating circumstances or traditional defenses—genocide is not a war crime.

The manifestly willful attempt to destroy a society and its people is a crime for which the death penalty—execution of those involved—has, historically, been meted. The exculpatory agents of Israel’s crimes against humanity are, alas, incapable of reasoning from fact, ethics and logic. Like programmed automatons, they therefore recite a counterfactual storyline, an ideological meme.

Israel’s odious excuse-making has come to be known as Hasbara. …

In Hebrew, hasbara is the name of the verb to explain (lehasbir). It means explanation. Exculpatory constructs, assorted Hasbara, serve to coat Israel’s corporeal crimes against humanity with ideological respectability, to give these some imagined purity of purpose.

Think of Hasbara as the steady supply of bogus constructs with which to rape reality.

The facts of mass murder have been undercounted so far in a 649-page list of every Palestinian recorded killed in Israeli attacks. Two hundred and twenty-six pages of these, list the names of children 18 years and younger, including 14 pages of newborns and babies under a year old. Each name corresponds to a body, identified and interred. The last 11 pages list Palestinian elders, ages 77- to 101-years-old, all older than the country that killed them. (Via The Electronic Intifada.)

This carnage is being dismissed as a byproduct of war, executed within the matrix of Israeli “self-defense,” as Hasbara has it.

Hasbara to what end? To propagandize international audiences into sympathizing exclusively with Israel and demonizing Arabs. (+972 Magazine.)

Hasbara to dress up tiny dismembered babies, courtesy of Israel’s American baby-busting bombs, as something other than a little torso, and a miniature groin, from which a floret of baby flesh protrudes, where once a chubby little leg kicked. Watch! (https://x.com/DaniMayakovski/status/1833695316165398763. ) I am told by an expert code writer that the embed code generation for these tweets of mangled baby flesh has been disabled. Censorship down to the code in the service of Hasbara. (https://x.com/Afcq1954/status/1837472434707902578).

Hasbara to frame the specter of baby flesh peeled away to expose gleaming white bone—little bodies and minds shattered for life should they live—as the doing of a third party. “I didn’t do it,” jokes Bart Simpson in that all-American parody, The Simpsons. Hamas made me do it. CNN’s Hasbara, which ascribes an almost-attractive raffishness to IDF criminals, has it that the Occupation made Israeli soldiers commit their crimes. …

…    Having figured out, over this pixelated page, that genocide must be addressed as a crime, not a war crime, I humbly discover that I stand on the shoulders of “Raphael Lemkin.

Lemkin was … first …to put forward the theory that genocide is not a war crime and that the immorality of a crime such as genocide should not be confused with the amorality of war.” Genocide is “the gravest and greatest of crimes,” and thus dubbed “a crime against humanity,” wrote Lemkin, a Polish, Jewish human rights lawyer.

“‘The term does not necessarily signify mass killings although it may mean that,’ Lemkin explained in a 1945 article. ‘More often it refers to a coordinated plan aimed at destruction of the essential foundations’—cultural institutions, physical structures, the economy—’of the life of national groups.” (Via Mother Jones.)

Much like any good libertarian, Lemkin was a natural-rights thinker, whose reasoning about genocide—the intentional murder of the many—was derived from reasoning about the crime of homicide. Mass murder, essentially, is when “the natural right of the individual to exist” has been sundered many times over.

As to the offender: If the individual may not gratuitously and serially kill people; neither may the collective, the state, exterminate a class of people. It should make no difference as to whether the felon is a lone criminal or the “common force,” to use Frédéric Bastiat’s natural-rights nomenclature. In The Law, Bastiat writes this:

“Since … force by an individual cannot legitimately be… used against the person, freedom, or property of another individual, by the same argument, the common force cannot legitimately be used to destroy the person, freedom, or property of either individuals or classes.” …

… The complete column, “Genocide’s A Crime, Not A War Crime: Israel’s Waging Genocide, Not War,” can be read at the Unz Review, and on the Mises Institute’s Power & Market, where the essay is titled, “Israel’s Waging Genocide, Not War.”

And now at IlanaMercer.com.