Category Archives: Middle East

NEW ESSAY: 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.

NEW: 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

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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

 

The Judaism-Zionism Bifurcation: Chosenness (Part 1)

Ancient History, Anti-Semitism, Argument, Ethics, GAZA, Hebrew Testament, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Judaism & Jews, Justice, Literature, Middle East, Palestinians, Political Philosophy

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

NEW ESSAY IS “The Judaism-Zionism Bifurcation: Chosenness (Part 1).” It is a feature essay on The Unz Review (where readers can comment and debate) and has appeared on LewRockwell.com, anti-state, anti-war, pro-market. 

https://www.unz.com/imercer/the-judaism-zionism-bifurcation-chosenness-part-1/

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2026/05/ilana-mercer/the-judaism-zionism-bifurcation-chosenness/

Excerpt: 

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

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

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

And, am I permitted at all to even ask?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are certainly universal elements in the Hebrew Testament. Deuteronomy, an early book, showcases an advanced concept of Jewish Social Justice, and is replete with instructions to …

… READ THE REST.  “The Judaism-Zionism Bifurcation: Chosenness (Part 1)” is on The Unz Review (where readers can comment and debate) and LewRockwell.com .

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

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UPDATED (4/24): Team Netanyahu/Trump Sinks Iran Talks; Kushner Beefs Up Rap-Sheet

America, Donald Trump, Foreign Policy, GAZA, Iran, Israel, Middle East, Morality, Natural Law, Paleolibertarianism, Palestinians, Private Property, Propaganda, Terrorism, The West, War

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NEW ESSAY IS “Team Netanyahu/Trump Sinks Iran Talks; Kushner Beefs Up Rap-Sheet.” Read it now on The Unz Review and on LewRockwell.com.

It is now available on IlanaMercer.com: https://www.ilanamercer.com/2026/04/team-netanyahutrump-sinks-iran-talks-kushner-beefs-up-rap-sheet/

Excerpt:

We have a “good negotiating team, the best,” blathered Trump, with respect to the individuals he dispatched to the Pakistani capital of Islamabad, April 10, to dictate the terms of surrender to the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Team Trump was led by Israel firsters and Israeli assets like Jared Kushner, Steve Witkoaff (sic), and Vice President JD Vance, whose eyeliner only enhances the “degeneracy of manners and morals” he embodies and represents.

I’ll make this very simple. Against the Islamic Republic, victim of the US-Israel’s untrammeled criminality, the president’s men have committed the most egregious crime, the crime of aggression, categorized as such in international customary law—and in all systems of law, codified and uncodified.

By violating Iran’s territorial sovereignty and denying that country’s riparian rights in the waterways that abut its territory—by strafing Iranian cities, targeting life-sustaining infrastructure and industries; hospitals, healers and first responders.; historic sites and schools; wantonly murdering thousands of Iranian people, assassinating esteemed political and scientific leaders—Trump has demonstrated that he has assimilated Israel’s military doctrines. The president of the United States of America has Israelized the US Military and is ‘going Amalek’ on the Jewish State’s designated enemies.

The “accumulated evil,” another legal term invoked in international customary law with respect to the “supreme crime” of unprovoked aggression—this rot is evident in all Trump’s dealings and deeds. It is etched on his decaying Dorian Gray like countenance and is manifest in what is disgorged from the American president’s mouth.

By extension, it was quite clear what tone Trump’s team of choice would set for any and all “negotiation” proceedings with Iran.

Once the talks in Islamabad predictably collapsed, it transpired that Vance had likely been holding all information in reserve for Bibi Netanyahu’s edifications and approval.

Confirmed Netanyahu: “I spoke yesterday with Vice President J.D. Vance. He called me from his plane on his way back from Islamabad. He reported to me in detail, as this administration does every day, about the development of the negotiations.”

One wonders why Iran’s foreign minister, Seyed Abbas Araghchi, would sit down at the negotiating table with this coterie. After all, “in a phone call with his German counterpart, … Araghchi had proclaimed that Iran entered the failed April 10/12 talks in Islamabad with full distrust because of the US repeated breaches and betrayals of diplomacy.”

Foreign Minister Araghchi is certainly a class act. Team Trump/Netanyahu are class enemies. To wit, during the farcical negotiations, the US sneakily attempted to breach the Strait of Hurmuz, over which Iran has natural, riparian property rights. Simultaneously, the Washington Post ran an article by Marc Thiessen, a mediocre neoconservative, calling for the assassination of the Iranian negotiators if they refuse to submit.

Was it, then, prudent for Iran’s finest to grace with their presence such proven bad-faith actors? More important still, why trust Israel’s proxies—the detritus of humanity, human waste by any other name—with your life, Mr. Araghchi? Had not Mr. Araghchi’s predecessor, former Iranian foreign minister Kamal Kharazi and his wife, been murdered in “a targeted United States-Israeli strike on their Tehran home”? Indeed. So, too, is the supreme leader’s successor, Mojtaba Hosseini Khamenei, said to be languishing after wounds inflicted on him by this merged criminal cabal.

Just how duplicitous and vicious a people are we and our Israeli overlords?

A man is only as good as his word. Knowing that America’s word is shit, the Pakistan Air Force is purported to have “deployed an aerial shield” to escort the Iranian delegation, led by Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf,” safely into Pakistani airspace. On departure, their Pakistani hosts scrambled “advanced fighter jets” to protect the Iranians (to whom they had given a rock-star welcome).

True, one negotiates with foes, not with friends. Known, too, is the bravery and self-sacrifice of the Iranians and their leaders. Hours before his murder by Murder Inc., the equally impressive late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had stated that, as long as 90 million Iranians are without bomb-sheltering bunkers, so too will he, their spiritual leader, remain above ground, outside the shelter. He did. He died.

Iranians and their leaders seem to have so much more love and loyalty in them than their oppressors. But this does not mean you sacrifice your finest to Israel’s American idolaters. Trump and team are capable of surprising calculated, calibrated evil. Jared Kushner, in particular.

Behind Kushner’s sylphlike appearance is a boa constrictor anticipating its next meal. …

… Parenthetically, I’ll say that I’m sick of Gaza being reduced to no more than an ‘open-air concentration camp.’ Legally, this is true. But Gaza before the Holocaust was quite beautiful, certainly unique. It was a quaint community with a character and a history, some of it ancient. All of it well reflected in its public spaces. Gaza had nothing of the vulgar gilt of a Trump tower. To compare Gaza of yore to the Gaza dreamt up in the Kushner consortium’s Master Slave Plan for the Strip is like comparing a centuries-old church with the heavily adorned Trump White House and White House ballroom. …

…READ THE REST. “Team Netanyahu/Trump Sinks Iran Talks; Kushner Beefs Up Rap-Sheet” is on The Unz Review and on LewRockwell.com. 

And on IlanaMercer.com: https://www.ilanamercer.com/2026/04/team-netanyahutrump-sinks-iran-talks-kushner-beefs-up-rap-sheet/

UPDATE (4/23):  Genius Resistance Rap (via Dimitri Lascaris’ Reason2Resist).

 AI LEGO Strait Outta Iran

https://x.com/drew_ponder/status/2045183966848934021

UPDATE 4/24:  
Did I call it or not? Resistance Rap by young Iranian geniuses.

Lego Melania Trump: “I was Never on #Epstein’s Island. Full White House Speech.”

IRAN IS THE ‘IT’ COUNTRY. TOTALLY.
@AntiwarNews @dimitrilascaris #Lego #Iran @ExplosiveMediaa