As that most American of crime writers, Raymond Chandler, counselled, ‘It never pays to let the enemy make all the rules.’ And Israel is the enemy, the enemy of humanity.
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 ascendency; 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.
Coopted 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 Hayʼat 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.
The Martyrs
“The scale of the destruction in Gaza” is already well “beyond the World War II bombings of Hamburg, Cologne, and Dresden,” Scientists for Global Responsibility told us way back. This puts the “total bomb tonnages” dropped by Israel in the first year at least at 75,000.
Close on forty-six thousand murdered men, women and children have been identified. The rest, thousands-upon-thousands of so-called excess deaths, are being brought about by the IDF’s criminal actions (actus reus), attached to which is a guilty Israeli mind (mens rea). Many guilty minds.
Gaza sports the highest number of child amputees per capita in the world, including limbless babies (behold!). When they are not set ablaze by Satan-on-earth; infants regularly freeze to death in porous tents. Close to two million people, 90 percent of the population, are internally displaced, chased by Israel’s WMD up and down and across the Strip.
One looks not only at the erasure of the social, political and cultural fabric of that part of Palestine, of the “ungrounding” of the people of Gaza; but to the roiling of its soil. From Gaza’s Palestinians, the Israelis have “stolen the ability to produce food,” fumes Eyal Weizman, an architect who studies the architecture of Occupation, in conversation with Palestine Deep Dive. Israel has returned the Gaza Strip to its sub-soil, particulate elements.
To ensure the utter “erasure” of that society; demented IDF demons continue to cull as many Palestinian professionals—moral, intellectual, community and spiritual leaders—as possible. (How achingly beautiful is the tribute to the regular “Palestinian Man The Media Doesn’t Want You To Know Exists,” by “Gaza Girl,” a human-rights lawyer and Palestinian exile.)
Gaza’s healthcare system has been bombed to bits. Satan’s emissaries, who persist in “aerial, land and maritime bombardments,” have moved in to finish-off the heroic healthcare workers of the Kamal Adwan Hospital, whose indomitable spirit has been unbreakable.
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.
The world has built up a head of steam over Israel. Yet at no time has anyone offered a military plan of action—even though genocide is criminalized by the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG), or the Genocide Convention; even though this international treaty “obligates state parties to pursue the enforcement of its prohibition”.
“Everyone is condemning; nobody is doing anything,” lambasted Palestinian author Shereen Malherrbe, whose family and friends are under perpetual assault in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Words are not enough, lamented Spanish lawmaker Jorge Pueyo. But neither is the insipid hunger strike, in support of Palestine, on which he commenced on November 27, 2024.
Military Moves
Libertarians worth their salt, the true kind, will apply to the collective the same moral code applied to the individual. If a lone serial killer and home invader must not be left to continue on his merry spree of murder and theft; neither may a band of killers armed with WMD do the same. If a lone serial killer must be hunted down by good men and women, cuffed, incarcerated and tried; so too must a gang engaged in high-tech, AI-assisted mass murder. That is the simple meaning and application of the libertarian axiom of non-aggression.
A commitment was consecrated among civilized nations, following the Nazi Holocaust, that never again was the world going to permit the industrial-scale mass murder and displacement of another people. Yet, here we are again.
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.
“If you want Israel to stop the genocide—do something about it,” implored Gideon Levi, veteran dissident journalist at Ha’aretz, in candid conversation with Current Affairs’ Nathan J. Robinson. Levi knows his people well.
Israelis lead unexamined lives.
To “most Israelis … allegations of genocide [are] an example of global bias against Israel and … a new form of antisemitism,” writes Arie Perliger, a veteran student of Israeli politics. They might dislike Netanyahu, but do not object to what has been done to Gaza and its people. The people of Israel want their hostages back, but do not want Gaza back.
We want Gaza back! Good people who are in solidarity with the Palestinians want Gaza made whole. We’ve done paroxysms of outrage, necessary but not sufficient. It’s time to cobble together a response that better fits the crime, even if it’s at the eleventh hour. Every Palestinian life saved matters.
As that most American of crime writers, Raimond Chandler, counselled, “It never pays to let the enemy make all the rules.” And Israel is the enemy, the enemy of humanity.
A large-scale regional military intervention could have been mounted.
Right now, the Arab people wish to act in support of their brethren butchered in Palestine—and Lebanon. Conversely, their governments refuse, bought and paid for as they are by the US, whose foreign policy is centered on what Israel wants.
Even more extraordinary: Israel is funded by America, yet it does exactly what it likes and to hell with America. The two propositions don’t seem to be mutually exclusive. Like Israel, the Arab nations who receive subventions from America should take a leaf from Israel’s book and quit cowering. Do what their people want them to do.
Contrary to the swindlers of the corporate western media; Turkish youth, for example, and its people at large, oppose the game of footsie Erdogan plays with Israel, while pretending to oppose it. Prime Minster Recep Tayyip Erdogan has extended his country’s military role in the Levant, realizing his neo-Ottoman impulses in Syria in ways harmful to the Palestinian Resistance.
ORDER IT NOW
At the same time, Erdogan has limited himself to being merely “rhetorically strong” about Israel’s genocide, as Lebanese journalist Rania Khalek has observed, on September 8. The people of Türkiye, by contrast, continue to protest vessels such as the US aircraft carrier USS Wasp, docking in Izmir, en route to assist Israel in dropping ordnance on impoverished people, penned in a deathcamp. Risking the Empire’s wrath, Erdogan, on the other hand, had in fact hosted the beleaguered Hamas
I venture that Türkiye’s subterfuge in the Middle East is so baffling that nobody would be surprised if Erdogan, forever unpredictable, out-of-the-blue, scrambled fighter jets to establish a No-Fly Zone over Gaza and the West Bank, which are occupied, not Israeli, territory!
With a No Fly Zone; Türkiye’s fighter pilots will not be initiating hostilities, but establishing a dome of protection over civilians, whose tiny enclaves in Gaza had been hit, come November of 2023, with the equivalent of two nuclear bombs, prompting Hiroshima, a civilized city of peacemakers, to beg Israel to cease its murder spree.
Prime Minster Erdogan would do well to heed his people. In the long run, this is wise for political stability.
Likewise is the Egyptian military fuming over their country’s leaders’ failure to help Gaza, and their inaction with respect to Israeli atrocities. From the Egyptian Ground Forces, which corrupt Egyptian leaders have historically feared, rose Gamal Abdel Nasser, a revered leader of Egyptian pan-Arabist nationalism.
“Conscripts at the Sinai-Gaza border” have decried the Sisi government’s silence over the killing by the Israelis, their putative allies, of comrades-in-arms during Israel’s annexation of the Philadelphi corridor. These Egyptian military men are eager to act. Who other than the Axis of Genocide would object to Egypt reclaiming the Philadelphi Corridor, illegally annexed by Israel, and opening its side of the Rafah border, to flood the zone to its north with aid trucks under heavy military escort!
Despite broad public anger over Israel’s crimes in Gaza, Jordan’s King Abdullah has helped Israel fend off Iran’s drone reprisal. The Jordanian people protesting Israel feel betrayed, reports Deutsche Welle, a German broadcaster.
By Laith Marouf’s telling—he is a regional geopolitical analyst—there are caveats. Jordanians are as mesmerized by their royal family as are the Britons by the Windsors. Like the Windsors, the Hashemites’ allegiances are to the Western Super Powers, and not to their tribal peoples. Marouf is entirely correct when he points out that, with exceptions like Türkiye, Egypt and Iran, the region’s principalities had been fabricated by imperial decree, and are thus artificial aberrations of history and geography. Recent elections, however, have seen considerable gains in the Jordanian parliament for the Islamic Action Front, due in large part to “its stance on the ‘war’ in Gaza.”
Because of the Hashemite monarchy’s close ties to and assistance to Israel; revolution is simmering in Jordan, whose people are of Palestinian ancestry. In fact, “the Hashemite monarchy, which has ruled Jordan for its entire history, fears a Palestinian takeover of the country.” Abdullah, king of Jordan, would reduce chances of revolution in the Kingdom were he, at least, to stop assisting the Israelis. Scrambling the Royal Jordanian Air Force to enforce a No-Fly Zone over the occupied neighboring territories would vastly strengthen Abdullah’s position domestically.
A meek adjunct though it may be, let the Spanish Armada set sail for Gaza’s seafront. Whatever naval assets can be mustered by other Palestine-supporting countries—Norway, Ireland and Belgium—ought to provide amphibious support to brave No Fly Zone fighter pilots crisscrossing Gaza and the West Bank.
I bet dollars to doughnuts that the Axis of Genocide, challenged for the very first time, will be cowed. Bullies are cowards.
Lawfare
South Africa, which has been admirable in doing intellectual and moral battle for Gaza, has vowed to arrest any individual citizen of its country who travels to Israel, dons IDF fatigues and takes up arms to partake in the genocide in Gaza and the West Bank. Emulate my birthplace of South Africa! Put an end to dual loyalties on the battle field. Outlaw the mercenary armies of the West.
Craig Mokhiber, QC, posits that “dual Israeli nationals who shuttle back and forth to participate in the killing” are obviously complicit in genocide, and could be found liable under international law. The Hind Rajab Foundation “has filed a complaint against 1,000 Israeli soldiers, many, no doubt, are dual nationals. Supported by upward of 8,000 pieces of evidence, this case is a game changer in the efforts to end Israeli impunity and in achieving justice for Gaza.”
Members of the legal community must flood the courts with briefs demanding that dual-nationals who’ve rushed to Gaza be prosecuted for partaking in genocide. Or, at the very least, be deported and disabused of their European citizenships. Canadian human rights attorney-cum-journalist Dimitry Laskaris and colleagues have led the way , demanding that leaders obey the laws of their land where these prohibit their citizens from fighting for a foreign country.
All should go beyond progressive preening and put protest for Palestine into action.
For the duration of the genocide, Arab, Muslim leaders have “called for… called for… called for.” For once, for their own longevity, the quisling Arab regimes, the once vaunted Arab League, ought to be brave, bow to their own people’s demands, and guarantee the safety of Palestinians with naval and air-assets.
And with BRICS nations at the ready. There is no better a coming-out party for BRICS than a show of force against genocide. BRICS, named for founding countries Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, was supposed to be the star in the firmament. BRICS is part of a historic economic and political liberation movement of sorts, that seeks to peacefully negotiate into being a multipolar world, to serve as a counterweight to the hegemonic, global, Law of Rule instituted by the United State of America and its stooges, all under the sway of Israel and its western lobbies.
ORDER IT NOW
It is nearly impossible to overstate the Empire’s program of primary and secondary sanctions meted against the disobedient—from capping commodity profits, to barring access to the international SWIFT payment system, to seizing central-bank assets, to banning trading partners. All BRICS nations fear penury and economic depression by America. To reduce exposure, some countries like China have been aggressively selling US treasury bonds. The collective GDP of the BRICS nations, moreover, is nearing that of the G7 nations.
“Beyond a certain point all dangers are equal,” business writer Walter Bagehot is purported to have said. Gaza has reached this point. BRICS has. The Arabs have.
“If not now, then when,” urged Rabbi Hillel. A “Jewish scholar and theologian (30 BC – 9 AD),” in a pithy aphorism:
If I am not for myself, who will be for me?
If I am only for myself, what am I?
And if not now, then when?
Israel—state and a preponderance of civil society, if to judge by polls—remains united in violation of the comity of nations doctrine, in letter and spirit. The Israeli State can no longer be cocooned in its Aryan-like arrogance.
Gazans must not be consigned to the fate Israel has mapped for them. These Palestinians, in their unflinching independence and resistance, have fought long enough in what is a canned hunt. The situation in Gaza has long surpassed May Day. And while the acronym S.O.S is no more than morse code; it stands for, well, nothing—I like that poetic license, over time, has draped the S.O.S acronym with more meaning:
Save Our Souls we must.
Ilana Mercer is paleolibertarian author, essayist and theorist. Her new book is “The Paleolibertarian Guide To Deep Tech, Deep Pharma & The Aberrant Economy” (February 2024). Mercer 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 and grew up in Israel from which she fled, aged 19, never to return.
