Category Archives: Judaism & Jews

NEW Essay: Oct. 7 Will Forever Mark Israel’s Big Reveal

Argument, Conservatism, Ethics, GAZA, Israel, Judaism & Jews, Justice, Kids, Middle East, Terrorism, War

NEW ESSAY is “Oct. 7 Forever Marks The Big Reveal: ‘We See You, Israel, We Revile You, We Reject You!’” You can read it now on The Unz Review, on LewRockwell.com, anti-war, anti-state, pro-market. Find it on ilanamercer’s FPV Resistance on Substack, where we can also chat.

And, shortly, on IlanaMercer.com.

Excerpt:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…READ THE REST on The Unz Review, on LewRockwell.com and on ilanamercer’s FPV Resistance on Substack

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

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

New PODCAST (Update 9/28/026): NAZA Documentary: Why Taking A Prize For Documenting IDF Exploits Was Wrong & What’s The RIGHT Thing To Do

Argument, Ethics, Etiquette, Film, GAZA, Hollywood, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Journalism, Judaism & Jews, Media, Middle East, Palestinians, Psychology & Pop-Psychology

ESSAY (June 2026): Two Genocides Down; Does Judaism Need A Reformation? And Is This Jew Allowed To Ask?

Christianity, GAZA, Hebrew Testament, Islam, Israel, Judaism & Jews, Lebanon, Middle East, Palestinians, Religion, Terrorism, War

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

NEW ESSAY IS “Two Genocides Down; Does Judaism Need A Reformation? And Is This Jew Allowed To Ask?” It is a feature on The Unz Review and on LewRockwell.com, as well as on Substack, where you can join me for conversation.

Excerpt:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

… READ THE REST, on The Unz Review, LewRockwell.com, as well as on Substack, where we can chat.

ESSAY: The Judaism-Zionism Bifurcation (Part 2): Tikkun Olam: Fixing The World, But For What, For Whom?

Anti-Semitism, Argument, Ethics, GAZA, Hebrew Testament, Iran, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Judaism & Jews, Middle East, Natural Law, War

2 Replies

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

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

NEW ESSAY, and part 2 in a series of 3, IS “The Judaism-Zionism Bifurcation (Part 2): Tikkun Olam: Fixing The World, But For What, For Whom?” It was, on May 31st, a feature essay on The Unz Review. And it led the page, June 1, at LewRockwell.com, anti-state, anti-war, pro-market.

https://www.unz.com/imercer/the-judaism-zionism-bifurcation-part-2-tikkun-olam-fixing-the-world-but-for-what-for-whom/

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2026/06/ilana-mercer/the-judaism-zionism-bifurcation-tikkun-olam-fixing-the-world-but-for-what-for-whom/

Comment here: https://www.unz.com/imercer/the-judaism-zionism-bifurcation-part-2-tikkun-olam-fixing-the-world-but-for-what-for-whom/#comments

https://www.unz.com/imercer/the-judaism-zionism-bifurcation-part-2-tikkun-olam-fixing-the-world-but-for-what-for-whom/

Part 1 is “The Judaism-Zionism Bifurcation: Chosenness (Part 1).”

Excerpt from, “The Judaism-Zionism Bifurcation (Part 2): Tikkun Olam: Fixing The World, But For What, For Whom?”:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Starting with the barefaced Thomas Friedman, a New York Times columnist, …

…THE REST. NEW ESSAY, and part 2 in a series of 3, IS “The Judaism-Zionism Bifurcation (Part 2): Tikkun Olam: Fixing The World, But For What, For Whom?” On The Unz Review. And at LewRockwell.com, anti-state, anti-war, pro-market.

Comment here: https://www.unz.com/imercer/the-judaism-zionism-bifurcation-part-2-tikkun-olam-fixing-the-world-but-for-what-for-whom/#comments

Part 1 is “The Judaism-Zionism Bifurcation: Chosenness (Part 1).“

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