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UPDATE VII (7/25): New Essay On Israel’s Performative Contradictions+NEWS: Ethnocide In The West Bank

Anti-Semitism, Argument, Crime, Ethics, Foreign Policy, GAZA, Individual Rights, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Justice, libertarianism, Logic, Middle East, Military, Morality, Natural Law, Political Philosophy, Terrorism, The West

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THE NEW ESSAY appeared on LewRockwell.com and The Unz Review, where it was the main feature, as well as at my home on The New American.  And on Power & Market at the Mises Institute, July 4.

You can now read “Defending Gaza (II): Israel Engaged In The Mother Of All Performative Contradictions: Denying Genocide, While Committing Genocide, Effectively Asserting A Right To Genocide” on IlanaMercer.com.

This new essay is Part II, and follows on, “Defending Gaza (Part I): Natural-Law Principles Vs. National-Interest Statism,” June 9, 2024

The essay was variously titled:

Defending Gaza (II): “‘Synagogue of Satan’ Denies Genocide While Committing Genocide, Effectively Asserting A Right To Genocide”

Defending Gaza (II): “Israel Engaged In The Mother Of All Performative Contradictions: Denying Genocide, While Committing Genocide”

Defending Gaza (II): “Israel Indicted, Palestinians Validated In Fact, Law & Hoppean Argumentation”

Explained in Part II, first, using Hoppean Argumentation, is why Israel is engaged in the mother of all performative contradictions: denying genocide, while committing genocide, all the while demanding the right to genocide. These tactics amount to ISRAEL, EFFECTIVELY, CLAIMING AUTHORITY TO COMMIT GENOCIDE.

Next, lest I be accused of arguing in circles, the concept of genocide is reasonably qualified and clarified. In particular, with reference to Article II of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. ISRAEL HAS ACED THE GENOCIDE BAR! I explained why the positive law’s definition of the systematic, methodical annihilation of a people is inoffensive to the natural-law libertarian.

The reason I then, and in most of my essays on Gaza, insist on CHRONICLING A DAY IN THE LIFE … of Gaza is this: We owe it to the holocaust survivors and their families, and to the historical record, which is vulnerable to the revisionism of Zionists. However insurmountable, and to bear witness to genocide, as we must—Gaza’s dead must be counted, recited and commemorated.

Showing how Israel CO-OPTS HUMAN-RIGHTS LAW—how Israelis cloak their murderous rampages on civilians in the raiment of human-rights nomenclature is essential. Of course, no matter who has committed a crime in my neighborhood or in its vicinity; Washington State has no right to turn me out of my home, which is mine, which I own. The state certainly has no right to pulverize my home because its agents believe outlaws hide in the neighborhood.

On to ISRAEL’S LAW OF RULE IN THE WEST BANK. Did you know that, “A combined ‘effort’ between IDF- and security force soldiers and settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem is responsible for pogroms in which over 528 Palestinians have been murdered since October 7, among whom were 126 children“? We ought to know this.

Finally, PALESTINIANS VALIDATED VIA ARGUMENTATION: The Hoppean principle applied in this essay’s opening is used in the coda to to validate the Palestinians’ reality, as they have been telling it to a mostly unbelieving universe (myself included) over decades.

The Hoppean proposition deployed to trace the contours of Israel’s reality is this: Israel can’t deny it is engaged in genocide as it enacts genocide. Since it does, it must be seen as performing a lie for which it deserves the contempt reserved for those who are mired in and embody lies and contradictions.

Using the same meta-principle, Israel’s televised genocide has corroborated the reality of the Palestinians—their reasons for resentment and resistance—as they’ve been telling it to the world.  Excerpt from the coda:

…Palestinians under Israel are perhaps the most imperiled people in the world. If the proponents of Israel’s genocide in Gaza were to deny this; they’d be living a lie. To expose the liar’s life of lies; the denier of the Palestinian reality ought to be compelled to live his own lie. How would our holocaust denier be forced into performing or living his lie?

Like this: The denier of the Palestinian holocaust would have to be parachuted into the midst of the living ghosts of Gaza. He would be filmed as he lives the life of a Palestinian, running hither and yon as the tanks advance on him, or ducking-and-diving during bombardments from above, as if one can escape the death radius of a 2000- or 500 pound, American-made bomb.

The denier of the Palestinian holocaust would be recorded scratching for scraps, lugging jerricans of brackish, contaminated drinking water back to his nylon dwelling, clambering over kilometers of decaying structures, through ruins and twisted metal. Our camera’s viewfinder will find the denier queuing with thousands to use a single functioning toilet, plumbing having been pulverized by the Israelis. He or she would be taped up-close in the throes of dysentery, sepsis, and starvation; intubated or cannulated or amputated or C-sectioned without narcotics, writhing on a hospital floor as slippery as an abattoir, listening to the incessant whirring above of Israel’s killer-cum-spy drones.

QED. Points proven.

…THE REST was on LewRockwell.com, The Unz Review & The New American. And Power & Market at the Mises Institute, July 4.

READ IT now on IlanaMercer.com.

The new essay, “Defending Gaza (II): Israel Engaged In The Mother Of All Performative Contradictions: Denying Genocide, While Committing Genocide, Effectively Asserting A Right To Genocide,” is Part II.  It follows on, “Defending Gaza (Part I): Natural-Law Principles Vs. National-Interest Statism,” June 9, 2024

The links are legion throughout; the logic unassailable.

UPDATE VIII (7/26): Ethnocide In The West Bank. If the West Bank is increasingly looking like Gaza, it’s because it and its people are being evicted and murdered, too. The great Peter Oborne (Unscripted), on “How Israel devastated refugee camps in the West Bank since 7 October.”

UPDATE VII (7/24): War Criminal In Congress. Patriot Scott Ritter, who has been fighting for his country for a lifetime: “I’d have tackled the SOB Bibi for launching a frontal assault on our people & on what makes America great: the Constitution, the 1st Amendment.” May the colluding quislings of Congress, bought and paid for by War Criminals, rot. WATCH.

UPDATE VI (July 23): LAVROV: Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov at a UN Security Council Open Debate on the Situation in the Middle East, including the Palestinian question, New York, July 17, 2024:

… Israel is waging jointly with its American allies …. Over the past 10 months or 300 days, nearly 40,000 Palestinian civilians have been killed and 90,000 wounded. The majority of them are children and women. This is twice as many as the number of civilian victims on both sides of the conflict in southeastern Ukraine over the past 10 years. The number of civilian victims [in Gaza] over the past 10 months is twice as large as the number of civilian victims in Ukraine over the past 10 years since the state coup in February 2014. According to the Independent International Commission of Inquiry that examines violations of international human rights law, Palestinians aged below 18 make up approximately half of Gaza’s population. It means that they were born and grew up in conditions of a total blockade. Apart from the current escalation of violence, they have seen other Israeli military operations, namely Summer Rains and Autumn Clouds in 2006, Hot Winter and Cast Lead in 2008-2009, Pillar of Defence in 2012, Protective Edge in 2014, and Guardian of the Walls in 2021.
Gaza is in ruins today. Residential buildings, schools and hospitals have been turned into rubble, and the critical civilian infrastructure facilities have been knocked out of service. There is an epidemic of infectious diseases and mass hunger there. It is a real humanitarian disaster. There is no safe and reliable access to the victims and those in need amid the ongoing hostilities.

UPDATE V (7/23). BUSTED: The International Court of Justice (ICJ) Issues Momentous Advisory Ruling AGAINST Israel’s Occupation, including how these rulings must be operationalized:

“Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem.”

Summary of the Advisory Opinion of 19 July 2024 is here.

Israel, moreover, is bound by this decision by virtue of being “party to several legal instruments containing human rights obligations, including the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination of 21 December 1965 (CERD), the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of 16 December 1966 (the ‘ICESCR’) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights of 19 December 1966 (the ‘ICCPR’).”

Some analysis is at Al Jazeera. I found Lamis Deek’s interview with George Galloway most excellent and compelling. WATCH.

(7/23/024): Palestinian beauty BELLA HADID has held strong against the genocidal forces of evil. Boycot Adidas, which caved to the Zionist lobby, which is responsible for throttling, banning, libeling and maligning all protest, written or enacted, against Israel’s genocide of Gazans.

UPDATE I: Funny tidbit regarding my essay on The Unz Review. I can’t post it on Twatter, or X, for you. The phrase used in the title, that of Jesus not mine, is considered hate speech on X. The X algorithm doesn’t discriminate between the naughty words of the putative Son Of God and those of other mortals. Banned.

UPDATE II (7/6): Categorically true. A philosopher, via Mondoweiss: “… if someone, after the horrific punishment meted out by Israel on Gaza, could still defend Israel, then this manifests a serious moral character flaw. … If you support Israel in the middle of a genocide, you’re an awful person.”

UPDATE III (7/8): IDF war criminals are trying to shed culpability. The English 972 article is milder, so I translate from the Hebrew version of the magazine, whose URL cannot be transposed here as it is in Hebrew: ‘We fired without discrimination. Often just for fun. We burned down homes. Every male between 16 and 50 was considered a terrorist, fair game. The bodies we bulldozed into ditches, so as to reduce visibility to service providers.’

UPDATE IV (7/10): The august British medical journal, The Lancet,
 has awoken to its obligation to Truth:

In recent conflicts, such indirect deaths range from three to 15 times the number of direct deaths. Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death to the 37,396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza. Using the 2022 Gaza Strip population estimate of 2,375,259, this would translate to 7-9% of the total population in the Gaza Strip. A report from Feb 7, 2024, at the time when the direct death toll was 28,000, estimated that without a ceasefire there would be between 58,260 deaths (without an epidemic or escalation) and 85,750 deaths (if both occurred) by Aug 6, 2024.

MORE.

ONLY-FOLLOWING-ORDERS DEFENSE. I’ve heard friendlies, righteous commentators, express sadness over the fact that IDF soldiers will invariably suffer from years of assorted Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders. Not so fast. With every Tik Tok upload, the IDF have proven themselves murderous and without morals. By the numbers. Here is the latest exemplar of the “most moral military in the world”:

No shortage of shameless IDF. The Nuremberg defense is invalid: “I was only following orders. I had been brainwashed.”

UPDATED (12/17): NEW COLUMN: Gaza Vs. Fallujah: Just How Vampiric Are The ‘Vaunted’ Israel Defense Forces?

America, Constitution, Ethics, Foreign Policy, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Just War, Middle East, Military, Propaganda, Terrorism, War

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Dead in the ruins of Gaza is the Israeli collective conscience—together with thousands-upon-thousands of Gaza’s civilians; dead or displaced for decades to come ~ilana

To refuse to bear witness to the war on Gazans—also the defining event of 2023 and the decade, twinned with COVID—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

NEW COLUMN IS “Gaza Vs. Fallujah: Barbaric Blitzkrieg Highlights US Marine’s Superiority“. Or, “Gaza Vs. Fallujah: Just How Vampiric Are The ‘Vaunted’ Israel Defense Forces?” It was featured on The New American, at The Ron Paul Institute For Peace and Prosperity,” and the Mises Institute’s Power & Market.

https://www.ilanamercer.com/2023/12/gaza-vs-fallujah-barbaric-blitzkrieg-highlights-u-s-marines-superiority/

I thank all my publishers.

I did some simple math—whose core truth obtains, although the numbers are already out of date, given the scale of the carnage. My editor provided another ratio, at the end, here  https://www.ilanamercer.com/2023/12/gaza-vs-fallujah-barbaric-blitzkrieg-highlights-u-s-marines-superiority/ , which speaks to the proportionality imperative of Just War Theory, sundered by Israel.

Please consider that my last four tracts on Gaza, and that scroll of a blog, “Constantly UPDATED (12/13): ‘Total Warfare’ On GAZA: War Against Civilians Is War On Civilization“—all anatomizing the war on Gazans: These are tremendously painful to write, as a Jew and a former fierce defender of Israel.

But to refuse to bear witness to the war on Gazans—also the defining event of 2023 and the decade, twinned with COVID—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.

Excerpt:

“… Force-fed the fiction of the IDF as the most ethical fighting force in the universe; I set about to conduct a proportional, if limited, comparison. I compare like with like, albeit in limited but significant theatres of war: Israel’s offensive in Gaza against “Hamas,” in late 2023, to America’s onslaught in Fallujah against the Iraqi resistance, in 2004.

The battle in Fallujah is considered “the deadliest battle involving U.S. Marines since Vietnam.” “Eighty-two U.S. servicemembers died during the street-by-street, house-by-house effort to clear Al Qaeda from the city.” Officially, it is described as a “battle to retake the key city of Fallujah from a violent insurgency that was taking root across Iraq after the U.S. ousted Saddam Hussein.”

Before the American invasion of Iraq, Fallujah was a compact city of about 400,000 people. “Around 700 Iraqi civilians were killed over the course of the 2004 fight for Fallujah.”

Gaza’s population is about 2.4 million strong. The administrative chaos in war-time Gaza would hamper accurate records-keeping. That considered—and not counting individuals buried beneath the rubble—approximately 15,000 Gazans have been killed by Israel. (Haaretz, Israel News, Friday, December 2, 2023)

Let’s extrapolate:

Were Fallujah as populated as Gaza (2.4 million), the United States Marines would have killed approximately 4,200 Iraqi souls. This is a far cry from the Israel Defense Forces’ butcher’s bill of 15,000 civilians dead in Gaza—and climbing.

Were Gaza as small as Fallujah (400,000); the Israelis, befitting their butcher’s bill so far, would still have killed at least 2,500 souls to our Marines’ 700. Ceteris paribus, naturally.

Let that sink in.

On the numbers, I have been exceedingly charitable to the Israelis, given that their victims, buried beneath the rubble, are still mostly unaccounted for, and considering that the IDF resumed hostilities against civilians on December 1.

Both the Israeli and the U.S. militaries come in here for rough treatment. The fulminations of the Israel Firsters stateside aside, however, some American patriotism is owed amid the sorrow over Israel’s barbaric blitzkrieg.

Damning with faint praise though this may be, Americans, in the persons of our U.S. Marines in Fallujah—in the dubious theater of another unjust war—were righteous, compared to the monstrous Israel Defense Forces in Gaza. …

… THE REST is here: “Gaza Vs. Fallujah: Barbaric Blitzkrieg Highlights US Marine’s Superiority.” Or, “Gaza Vs. Fallujah: Just How Vampiric Are The ‘Vaunted’ Israel Defense Forces?”

https://www.ilanamercer.com/2023/12/gaza-vs-fallujah-barbaric-blitzkrieg-highlights-u-s-marines-superiority/

The complete column is always posted eventually at IlanaMercer’s Weekly Column Archive.

UPDATE (December 17, 023):

These people at ZeroHedge, December 17, 2023, are, well, dishonest. https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/4th-generation-devastation-west-has-been-targeted-cowardly-globalist-mind-war

Over the pages of The New American, first, this column mocked the Fourth Generation Warfare categorization—and ostensible benevolence. On December 4, 2023, I applied this the 4th Generation Warfare vs. 3rd Generation Warfare analysis to the current global woke military.

In an intellectually honest America, my iteration of the idea would have been credited on Zero Hedge:

In their recent military campaigns, America and Israel have waged what to the inexpert, keen observer is largely old-fashioned, Third-Generation Warfare—a blitzkrieg, by any other name, against civilian populations.
The ostensible use of “tanks, mechanized infantry, and close air support” to “collapse an enemy’s defenses” are really unthinking, disproportionate shows of brute military force, reliant on massive amounts of materiel.
Yet when military mavens predicted and depicted the next form of warfare; it was the contours Fourth-Generation Warfare that they were tracing. Fourth-Generation Warfare was to be the distinguishing characteristic of the modern military. Boosted by technology, “advanced” armies would be relying on “small, highly mobile elements, composed of very intelligent soldiers, armed with high technology weapons.” These precision units and attendant weapons were expected “to range over wide areas seeking critical targets.”
In addition to technology; predicted and depicted was a military whose central impetus was augmented by ideas. In America, the controversial changing of hearts and minds, historically, has included fomenting coups around the world with the connivance afforded by psychological operations.
Near as I can tell, Fourth-Generation war was meant to be smart; to see Mind dominate and direct materiel.
What is underway in Gaza, at 2023’s end, however, is the very opposite. I see madness for what it is. Dead in the ruins of Gaza is the Israeli collective conscience—together with thousands-upon-thousands of Gaza’s civilians; dead or displaced for decades to come. The razing and ethnic cleansing of Gaza by Benjmain Netanyahu, abetted by Joe Biden, his Uniparty accomplices and a complicit West: This appears to capture the kind of Third-Gen “capability” delivered by the modern, standing, Woke military.

https://thenewamerican.com/opinion/gaza-vs-fallujah-barbaric-blitzkrieg-highlights-u-s-marines-superiority/  (December 4, 2023)

* Screen pic of Gazans reduced to pre-industrial life, scrounging.

October-7 Israeli Survivor Reports Deaths By ‘Friendly’ Fire

Crime, Criminal Injustice, Foreign Policy, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Middle East, Military, Terrorism, War

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The first October-7 survivor and eyewitness to confirm that IDF forces shot their civilians was Yasmin Porat, speaking to broadcaster Aryeh Golan. Porat is calm, rational and matter-of-fact.  (She speaks a fine Hebrew, too. None of those ugly, excitable Anglicisms.)

https://youtube.com/watch?v=rTQcjyhPOIk

Porat’s experience of hostages-dead-by-“friendly” (Israeli)-fire may have been more pervasive. This reality of such horror has now been floated by ZeroHedge, stateside.

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/israel-admits-it-killed-some-its-own-nova-music-festival

However, if some readers consider ZeroHedge to be suspect as a source; then Ha’aretz, a trusted mainstream Israeli newspaper, seconds this fact finding on their Hebrew website.  The graphic on this blog post, the one you are currently reading, is the title of the Ha’aretz article.

Translated from the Hebrew, this is what the last sentence in the Ha’aretz blurb says: “A military helicopter shooting at the terrorists likely hit some of the revelers.”

https://www.haaretz.co.il/news/politics/2023-11-18/ty-article/0000018b-e1a5-d168-a3ef-f5ff4d070000

Some of the hell raining down on the October-7 victims might have been Israeli helicopter hellfire. We don’t yet know just how much hellfire and how many dead by it.

GAZA CITY IS GONE: Yes, Ha’aretz; Americans See It. The World Sees It.

Criminal Injustice, Ethics, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Just War, Middle East, Terrorism, The West, War

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An Israeli op-ed scribbler asks readers to ponder the heft of an ‘insight,’ in plain sight, at which he alone has arrived ~ilana

Anshel Pfeffer, at a Ha’aretz—a national Israeli newspaper—appears to have stumbled upon a scoop.  Or, so he thinks.

“Somehow,” writes Pfeffer (on Nov 15, 2023 6:58 pm IST), “despite all the eyes of the world being on Gaza, this has … been missed.”

What is it that Pfeffer’s gimlet eye alone has spied? What is this big thing that we dull dolts of America and the World have missed? A truly Homeric “D’oh!” is here in order.

Wide swaths of the city [Gaza] and its surroundings have already been destroyed, and it’s only a matter of weeks before the largest Palestinian city is rendered totally uninhabitable. … 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…

An Israeli op-ed scribbler tells readers to ponder the heft of an ‘insight’—it’s in plain sight—at which he alone has arrived! Have you ever such solipsistic, self-important pomposity?

“We may be very near the point where there are more Israeli soldiers in Gaza City than Gazans, and the issue of trying to avoid more civilian casualties will no longer exist because all those who can will have left,” writes this obtuse individual.

Since Anshel believes he alone has stumbled on the ruins of Gaza City, circa November 2023; he wonders: “What will it mean to the world when it sees what happened?”

Gaza City is gone. And yes, Ha’aretz; the world has noticed. Americans have noticed. We see. You can’t gussy up what’s going on in Gaza

To wit, “U.S. support for Israel has declined in the month since Hamas’s incursion into Israel on October 7. The percentage of respondents who said that ‘the U.S. should support Israel’ when asked what role Washington should play in the war dropped from 41% in mid-October to 32% percent this week.” (Via Reuters/Ipsos)

*Screen pic courtesy Ha’artez