Deepest gratitude to our beloved Lew Rockwell, and to my good friend, Dr. Tom DiLorenzo, for inviting me here. I’m thrilled to be with you.
My topic is The Real Israel Versus Hasbara History. Hopefully some of you know what Hasbara is. When America’s regime historians reflect on history’s tragedies and travesties, they always praise Pax Americana. That is the idea that American empire, hegemony, brought peace to the world. Conveniently, they leave out the horrors of it.
Naturally, regime historians, the ones we are here to counter, speak a lot about Hitler. They hardly ever mention Hiroshima. Likewise, has Israel shaped its past, mixing some history with myth to render a myth history. The propaganda sustaining Israel’s counterfeit history is called Hasbara, which means explanation in Hebrew. Hasbara constructs serve to coat Israel’s real crimes against humanity with ideological respectability, to give them some purity of purpose.
Think of Hasbara as the steady supply of bogus artificial constructs to rape reality. Undeniably, compared to Hasbara, American foreign policy has a certain narrative talent. The injustices of imperial power notwithstanding, people are persuaded by the strut of it. Less obvious is the appeal of Israeli Hasbara and the Jewish supremacy that goes with it, and has seduced so many Christians into ignoring Christ’s teachings. Christ commands care, not for the oppressor and the predator, but for the poor and the oppressed.
Hasbara and official myth history aside, because of Gaza, you don’t have to know much history at all to arrive at the truth about Israel. Reality is truth. The reality of genocide gives rise to irrefutable truths. Because of Gazans, the living and the martyred, the truth about Israel is now ahistoric.
Shortly after October 7, with the commencement in Gaza of Israel’s Operation Swords of Iron, certain self-evident truths became crystal clear. By late October, Israel’s actions within and without Gaza had shown the world the absolute depravity of Israel, state and civil society.
One such emerged reality is that Palestinians, not Israeli Jews, as Hasbara teaches, are the most imperiled people in the world. Israelis, the most perilous. Another is that Israel, with overwhelming support from the Jewish Israeli public, has gleefully engaged in methodical, indiscriminate, industrial-scale murder and ethnic cleansing ongoing.
The Israel Defense Forces, IDF, were allowed to obliterate the fundamentals of physical, national, and economic life in Gaza, turning it into an uninhabitable post-apocalyptic wasteland. The strip has been reduced to its subsoil particulate elements only badly soiled. Gaza is now a mass grave along a small stretch of the Mediterranean Sea where living ghosts wander. Gaza’s soil is soaked through with a mix of millions of tons of building debris, the decaying bodies of tens of thousands of human beings, their pets, livestock, fauna and flora, all gone. An inferno of garbage, open sewage, and the byproducts and contaminants of munitions, like unexploded ordnance.
Said a scholar of the architecture of occupation: “Israel has stolen from Gaza’s Palestinians the very ability to produce food, or receive it, or use means of exchange to get it.” Banking was dismantled. Believe it or not, but under years of medieval blockade, Gaza’s farmers had, before October 7, fed a third of their people.
Indeed, Israel has systemized the mass murder and displacement of innocent Palestinian civilians, targeting them and their habitat for total warfare. Since war against civilians is a war on civilization, Israel, by extension, is the enemy of civilization.
Our ally Israel is a country in which genocide, snuff films, extrajudicial assassinations, rape, robbery, torture, and starvation of Palestinians are de facto legal. Israel is thus a criminal entity and a threat to the comity of nations. The indictment against Israel ought to have been hermetically sealed.
Israel’s ethnocide and genocide in Gaza is in violation of most systems of ethics known to man over intellectual history. It is in violation of God’s law, the Ten Commandments. These command not to covet, steal, or murder. It is in violation of libertarian law, the axiom of non-aggression. It is in violation of natural justice, the laws of war, although genocide is not war, as well as humanitarian law. And it is in violation of the systems of law within which the above is subsumed, the natural and the positive law.
Right and wrong are universal, not relative. The Sixth Commandment is neither opinion nor optional. Thou shalt not murder or mass murder is called a commandment for a reason. There is no tribal privilege clause attached to it. Like gentiles, Jews are enjoined against wanton murder. Yet Israelis now flout the Sixth Commandment with ugly audacity.
Over the months, I have closely observed Israel as it pulverizes population centers across the Levant. I’ve listened in Hebrew to Israeli Jewish public and political discourse. In Hebrew, the Jewish Israeli public personalities and the public express an impatient, snarling contempt for accusations of genocide, offering an unbroken stream of genocide justification Hasbara. It’s like Israeli Jews are yawning, waiting on the world to wake up to the fact that their lives do matter more, and that any aberrant action taken to make them feel safe must be allowed.
And it is allowed. Israel has played its genocide of the Palestinians of Gaza to a packed house, to the world. Israeli Jews don’t lack for facts, but most appear without the analytical and ethical faculties to examine their actions. They lead the unexamined lives of self-anointed superior beings. Societally, majorities appear to project the sense that their sectarian supremacy transcends the universal moral order to which international law, the natural law, and the Decalogue give expression.
The natural law is a system of ethics knowable through reason, revelation, and experience, whichever floats your boat. Because it’s anchored in the very existential nature of man and reality, the natural law is the highest law known to man and is therefore deductively true and just. An example is the libertarian non-aggression axiom. For reasons obvious, there should be no difference between how classical liberals or anarchists understand the non-aggression axiom, which is the organizing principle of libertarianism. Minarchist, anarchist, or statist, genocide is forbidden.
The positive law, on the other hand, is the creation of the state. Legal positivism equates justice with the law of the state. In teasing out right from wrong, we discriminate between acts that are criminal because the state has criminalized them as opposed to acts which are universally criminal. Most civilizing systems of ethics stipulate that no one has a right to kill a single innocent human being, let alone hundreds of thousands of members of a group. There again, Israel’s sacking of Gaza is universally evil.
Lest I be accused of arguing in circles around the definition of genocide, I’ll briefly mention genocide in the context of international versus the natural law. Israel has aced the genocide bar, namely the prohibitions in Article II of the Genocide Convention on destroying a group in whole or in part and/or making life unbearable for that group. Mens rea, intent in Western jurisprudence and judicial philosophy is a component of genocide.
If Palestinians were accorded equality before the law, any law, national or international, then by 2023’s end, logically and perhaps legally Israelis would have been seen as having both spoken their guilty minds and acted out their genocidal intent on the ground. Mass murder is never unintentional when you know it is inevitable and incidental to your mission. If you know in advance that your actions will cause the deaths of thousands upon thousands of innocents, attached to your criminal actions is a guilty mind, mens rea.
America shares in Israel’s genocidal guilty mind. The U.S. regime has been a worshipful partner in Israel’s vice. It has supplied munitions for mass murder. It has provided diplomatic cover. It has issued seven vetoes and abstentions in the UN Security Council to enable Israel’s continued atrocities. America has menaced countries, legal organs, and American residents for wanting to expel, arrest, protest, or boycott Israelis.
America’s helped Israeli Hasbara in asserting self-defense to justify collective punishment, and America has helped Israel to frame state terrorism as self-defense, normalizing the structural violence that is the state of Israel. The genocide of Gazans was happily and willingly underwritten by the United States government, the American political class, and its Julius Streicher media, which even mid-murder, describe Israelis as victims.
On the matter of industrial-scale mass murder, international law is not at odds with the natural law or the libertarian law. Such is the case of Article Two of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. It articulates mostly a set of negative rights. Their enforcement imposes no burden on anybody but the sadistic, sociopathic serial killers under discussion.
Most libertarians would concede that the state now acts extrajudicially, and that any remnants of the natural law once embedded in the US Constitution have long since been buried beneath the rubble of legislation and statute. Let us say then that to the extent that law, local, international, tribal, upholds no more than natural rights, law is okay. To the extent that law violates the rights to life, liberty, and property, law is bad. To the extent state law agrees with the natural law, to that extent it’s inoffensive. By extension, it matters not who upholds the rights of Palestinians to life and land, just so long as someone does. It matters not which state, which federal official, or international organization, or which platoon, Hezbollah or the Houthis, just so long as someone does.
In America, federalism means divided sovereignty, which if we are to take James Madison seriously, should make it difficult for states to begin executing their residents. Why would it be a matter of respect for a country’s sovereignty to allow Israel to systematically occupy and subjugate a population on the off-chance that they eliminate some terrorists, whom by now most consider resistance fighters? Most should.
Make no mistake, in human rights law, there is a responsibility to protect a community that is being evicted and eradicated. There’s a right to resist, under the Hague regulations on belligerent occupation. Neither offends the natural law. Resistance fighters argue that they are heeding this calling, the responsibility to protect. Israel ought to have been forcibly stopped, its innocent victims protected. You don’t placate a John Wayne Gacy and a Jeffrey Dahmer. You stop them, but not as the axis of genocide sees it.
The Arab societies are non-woke societies. The fact that Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, and Yemen were and are largely traditional societies, not co-opted woke societies, has certainly helped the West justify their mistreatment. You see, the woke masters of the Western universe consider non-woke societies as without the natural right of resistance. Their resistance we call terrorism.
Given that nobody has effectively upheld the legal responsibility to protect Palestinians, all but the spirit of Gaza is gone.
Consider the great Palestinian return to Northern Gaza in January of 2025. The erasure of over 2,000 Gazan bloodlines, family trees gone. An epic event took place despite that erasure. Processions of Palestinians in their thousands returned to their ruined homes in Northern Gaza. You see, the land is central to Palestinian identity. What greater proof is there of the ancestral homesteader claims that Palestinians have to Palestine than this devotion, this resilience?
Contrast this Palestinian rootedness and resilience with Israel’s squirrelly northern and southern sett- settler populations. Israeli Jews have not returned to towns in Israel’s north or south. Rather, their love of the land is predicated on its ethnic cleansing. Only if their army obliterates even the slightest danger posed by their indigenous neighbors would Israeli settlers return.
For yet more of a contrast, look too at the repulsive levels of Israeli environmental destruction in Gaza. This speaks among many other things to Israel’s profound alienation from an ecosystem it shares and claims to care about. Israeli Jews have a greed for the land, not a love of it.
Back to our nemesis, the state.
What about the moral authority of a democratic state? Surely our ally Israel shares our democratic values, or so we are lectured. Well, murder with majority approval is still murder, whomever the perpetrator. Whether it is committed by the decree of the one dictator or the will of the many, by actors within or without the state, by the designated good guys or by the bad guys, murder of innocents is always murder.
You would be correct to conclude, however, that this 21st century holocaust is popular.
Thumping majorities across Israel’s public and private sectors have throughout justified, finessed, and fibbed about their army’s AI high-tech-driven depopulation and extermination orgy in Gaza. Eager to write the Palestinian obituary as late in the genocide as February of 2025, 80% of Jewish Israelis signaled their support for Trump’s plan for Gaza. Only 3% thought it immoral.
Trump’s plan is an extension and completion of Joe Biden’s genocide, which included the internal displacement, depopulation, and large-scale extermination of the Strip and its people. First, Donald Trump has proposed to cover up Israel’s crime of genocide, removing the pitiful exhibits from the scene of the crime. Next, he planned to conclude Joe’s genocide by scattering the survivors across the Middle East. Israel will have been rescued. Gazans would have ceased to exist as a nation. The liquidation and extermination campaign in the Gaza ghetto would have been completed.
Debating and committing genocidal violence, forcibly displacing millions, starving a subjugated population, all this many of Trump backers called out-of-the-box thinking. Who said crime doesn’t pay? When the superpower inverts the moral order of the universe, the crime of all crime pays and then some.
In any case, genocide has won a plebiscite in Israel. No surprise. Remember, the IDF is Israel. It’s a citizen army in which every Israeli must serve. It’s the voice of the Jewish Israeli commonwealth. Israel’s sons and daughters are the stars in the country’s genocide constellation. We’ve watched them level Gaza, vaporize young men picking their way through rubble as though in a video game, mock the victims, snipe their kids, rape their men, rob their businesses, rummage through the intimate effects of people dead and dispossessed, invade and explode entire residential buildings. True, all Israeli Jews are conscripted and must enlist in this army. However, the military draft does not compel a conscript to commit, chronicle, and crow over what is institutionalized, legalized serial-killer-type crime. The pride and joy seen, recorded, and then transmitted to the world from thousands of IDF mobile phones over months has been voluntary, spontaneous, and organic to Israeli society’s tenor and project.
So please let us hear no Nuremberg defense. “I was only following orders” must not be tolerated in mitigation of the IDF. The evidence is conclusive, idea of shoot, loot, and bomb for fun. No doubt the Israeli state is genocidal, but by the numbers and by their statements, Israeli society is as sociopathic. From janitor to general, from soldiers to Supreme Court justices. As uncomfortable as this is for us, for the libertarian individualist, the facts are clear. On the matter of the genocide of the Palestinians of Gaza, Israeli Jews, Israeli Jewish society does not stand apart from the Jewish state.
Throughout, polled opinion in Israel was not split between Jewish Israelis for mass murder versus Israelis against mass murder and ethnic cleansing. No. The division in Israeli society has been between Jewish Israelis for current levels of violence against Gazans versus those for greater or lesser industry in what were already industrial levels and methods of murder.
By the polls, nothing outside their self-righteous and self-obsessed selves mattered to a preponderance of Jewish Israelis. Israeli Jews, by and large, have become a sorority of Jewish supremacists, and Palestinians have paid a terrible price for Israel’s systemic societal sociopathy.
Ask Israelis about Palestinian babies shredded to bits, real beheadings, and they’ll dish Hasbara. “It’s all in self-defense, and it’s all the doing of a third party.” Guess who made them do the genocide? Hamas. “It’s not me,” says the criminal. “Hamas ate my homework.” “I mean my… I mean my conscience.” This is Israel’s third-party theory of culpability. Israel vomits it up, the West laps it up.
The Hamas made me mass murder non sequitur exposes Israel’s Hasbara for its irrationality. Since when do you blame a third party for your ongoing crimes in real time?
Put it this way, the state in which you live has no right to evict you from your home and bomb your neighborhood because its agents believe outlaws hide in your neighborhood. The crime of passion defense is bad enough. The third-party theory of culpability must never bolster it. The crime of passion defense we associate with a single event, not with sadistic serial killer… Serial killers loosed for months on end on millions of innocents across the Via Dolorosa that is Gaza.
Yes, Israel has an historic passion, all right, but for methodical mass murder. See, the idea of… It’s not a fighting force, it’s an air force. Judged from its actions over time, this air force’s objectives are not to defeat a regular army, but to pound population centers into submission in Gaza, across the Levant, and beyond. What other country has not only had killer practices codified in law, but also named… The Dahiya Doctrine is named after the southern suburbs of Beirut, upon whose Shia civilians the Israeli Air Force has perfected its predation. Mowing the lawn. That’s the term used across Israel to signal murder sprees periodical against Palestinian civilians to keep populations subdued.
Fans of true crime TV, me, will remember the Highway I-5 serial killer. Imagine his killer craft being dubbed the I-5 Doctrine, and Wikipedia describing this infamous serial killer murderer of women as an originator of the I-5 Doctrine.
Without a doubt, public protest too in Israel has followed a strictly “me, me” solipsistic self-interest. There was little transcendent humanity whatsoever in Israeli hostage protests. Remember this. By the numbers and by their own words, most Israeli Jews were simply demanding a return of their hostages. Said one Israeli pundit, “Israeli wants… want… Israelis want their hostages back. They don’t want Gaza back.”
If the Israeli state is a criminal entity, what then can be said about the US? Israel’s war on Gaza, the West Bank, and the Greater Levant is America’s war. Like it or not, Gaza is a genocide. We hear disinterested mumblings about the national interest, uh, “Don’t talk to me about Gaza. It’s of no national interest to the United States of America.” I’m afraid it’s too late for the national interest dodge. The US is an interventionist hegemon. It has aided, abetted, and partaken in via reconnaissance an extermination campaign in Gaza.
Besides often being immoral, the national interest argument is a form of statism. The premise of national interest political pragmatism leads to this perverse logic. If enabling the slaughter of Gazans and Iraqis happen to be in the American national interest, then those endeavors would have been justified in accordance with the national interest standards. In other words, if the US government considered genocide in the national interest, then genocide it is. America should act as the divine… on the… as… on its divine rights as global judge, jury, and executioner. No, genocide is not a foreign policy matter, it is a moral matter.
And the United States’ energetic support for the Gaza holocaust is a defining event in the annals of American foreign policy aberrations, and in the national life. While American foreign policy is a museum of horrors, Gaza is now the main exhibit.
Why is Gaza qualitatively different from foreign policy deformities that went before? Here’s why, in my opinion. So far, America’s foreign policy has been largely focused on regime change program where collateral damage is largely concealed but framed as incidental to a political program. Again and again, the American masters of the universe have gone to war to make the world woke. Namely, make it over in America’s image, as well as make the world safe for Israel, of course. Mass murder within the American foreign policy framework has generally been secondary to a program of warring to make the world work. Crudely put, “Be like us or we’ll kill you.”
In Gaza, however, America’s participated in mass murder for the sake of murder. In Gaza, Uncle Sam has finally achieved an official or formal inversion of all universal values.
What the US has approved and assisted in Gaza is a primetime 21st-century holocaust. In a sense, Israel has affected a radical ethical inversion in America. Sects of Christianity can no longer distinguish Satan from God, mutually exclusive categories. They favor apex edicts over the commandment of the prince of peace. But you are what you do. The Israeli state is genocidal, not by virtue of its actions and the declared intent accompanying these actions, not because it has been denounced as genocidal by so-called anti-Semites and terrorist sympathizers. Said Jesus, “Therefore, by their fruits, you will know them.”
Another of Hasbarah’s aims is to frame IDF’s ongoing extermination campaign against the population of cornered civilians in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem as byproducts of war, as incidental to a just war prosecuted by brave fighters.
If it’s portrayed as a war crime, genocide can be dismissed as no more than a case of, “Oops, bad things happen in the butcher shop of war.” In Gaza, however, Israel has waged genocide, not war. Dressing up a canned hunt as a war is pure Hasbarah. Genocide is not a war. The genocide-as-war-crime conceptualization provides cover and lends authority to criminals and criminality. You mitigate and minimize genocide when you call it a war crime. You see, genocide is not a war crime to which a set of mitigating and explanatory legal defenses can attach. Genocide is a standalone, indefensible crime of all crimes for which there are no legal or moral defenses. There are no extenuating circumstances, historical, legal, or other, for genocide.
True, Israel’s genocide has been disrupted by asymmetric warfare from non-state Palestinian resistance fighters, but there is an enormous power differential between occupier and occupied.
That the serial killers encounter organized regional resistance does not make genocide a war.
So far, I’ve anatomized what Israel state and society has done to the Gaza Strip and its people since October 7, but what have Gazans, the living and the martyred, accomplished? A great deal.
Outwardly captives, Palestinians are truly liberated from the liberal political propaganda that grips the West. They have made us see Israel as an irreparably corrupt force, morally and militarily. The genocide of Gaza has very plainly invalidated Israel and validated the Palestinian cause.
A moral, sentient human being need know nothing much about the history of the region to arrive at this conclusion. Here’s why. You’ve seen Israel for the contradiction it is. Israel astonishingly has engaged in the mother of all performative contradictions, denying genocide while publicly committing genocide, effectively asserting a birthright to do genocide. Israel demands to exist as a privileged protected aberration, carrying out satanic deeds with universal blessings and absolution. Think about it. Caught in the protracted planful act of committing genocide, the guilty party, Israel, persist in claiming for itself the right to kill and deceive without being considered and treated as a killer and con artist. The chutzpah.
To no avail, human action, as Mises taught us, is the undeniable key to man-made reality. Israel and the US have acted. They’ve been exposed. Ethnocide, depopulation, and domicide are never justified and can never be exculpated. To assert that you are just and justified as you carry out that which cannot be just or justified, this is to embody the most grotesque contradiction and to be less than human, less than coherent. At minimum, Israel deserves the revulsion and isolation reserved for entities whose existence is a confidence trick and a fraud upon us all.
The same ahistoric Hoppean argumentation, God bless Hoppe, applied to invalidate Israel will serve here to validate the Palestinians’ reality as they have been telling it over decades. Israel’s televised genocide has corroborated the reality of the Palestinians, their reason for rage, and their rights to resistance and recompense.
Palestinians have been telling us for decades that they have been set upon by murderers and thieves. Palestinians have told us they are being killed and robbed as a matter of course. Their reality has been irrefutably affirmed since October 7. Now, if supporters of Israel’s genocide in Gaza deny this, they too would be fraudsters living a lie. The liar’s life of lies we expose by compelling the denier of the Palestinian holocaust to live his own lie.
Deniers of the Palestinian reality, Ben Shapiro, Bari Weiss, Biden, Bibi, Blinken, Douglas Murray, Dennis Prager, would be parachuted into occupied Gaza. Genocide would become their lived reality, not their rhetorical reality.
Running here and there as tanks advance on the denier, ducking and diving bombardments from above, as if you can escape the death radius of American-made 2,500-pound bombs. These Holocaust deniers would be recorded scratching for scraps, carrying jerricans of contaminated drinking water back to nylon dwellings, climbing over kilometers of decaying structures through ruins and twisted metal. Our camera will find these Holocaust deniers queuing with thousands to use a single functioning toilet, plumbing having been destroyed by the Israelis. The denier of the Palestinian holocaust would be filmed up close, suffering dysentery, sepsis, and starvation, intubated, amputated, or C-sectioned without narcotics. Twisting on a hospital floor smeared by blood and waste. Listening to the incessant whirring above of Israel’s quadcopter killer drones. The Holocaust denier will therefore live this absolute truth, the ontological truth of Israel’s final solution to its Palestinian problem.
The nature of Palestinian reality is, as they’ve been telling it, QED proposition proven.
In conclusion, books are now being written more about Israeli and Jewish anguish than about the victims. Being Jewish after Gaza is one.
Israel’s theocracy, Israel’s moral and military degeneration, Israel’s looming collapse. When did it begin? Right wing, left wing? Why? Why? Why? Everyone is beating on breast about Israel.
An apt response are the words of a character from Southern literature, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”
And neither should you worry about the perpetrators of genocide only to the extent that punishment is exacted upon Israel for what it has done to the Palestinians, that reparations and restitution are extracted from Israel in perpetuity for the Palestinians. Thank you.
