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

Israel is engaged in the mother of all performative contradictions: denying genocide, while committing genocide, all the while demanding the right to genocide.

The Jewish State is genocidal not because it has been denounced as “genocidal” by ostensible “antisemites” and “terrorist sympathizers,” but by virtue of its actions. Israel is genocidal by virtue of what it has done to Gaza, the people and their land.

Shortly after October 7, 2023, conceptions of vice and virtue were crystalized like never before. It was then that certain self-evident truths became crystal clear. For you are what you do. Israel’s actions within Gaza and without it have shown the world—myself, a former supporter of Israel included—in cruel relief the barbarity of Israeli state and civil society.

By closely observing Israel in action over nine months, in Gaza and beyond, and then, as closely, listening to and chronicling Israeli and Jewish leaders, stateside and in Israel, as they walked the walk—immutable truths about the Jewish State were easily deduced commensurate with Israel’s invasion of Gaza.

Thumping majorities across Israel’s public sector, private sector and “third sector,” you name them—have been justifying, finessing and fibbing about their army’s “high-tech murder spree” in Gaza, a campaign that Israel and its American underwriters have taken to the West Bank, and are poised to continue in Lebanon, if allowed.

Thus, the labels “antisemite” and “terrorist sympathizer” amount to a blood libel leveled at millions, perhaps billions, in the Global South, in particular—although the wholesale slaughter carried out by Israel in Gaza has stirred hearts across the world.

So far, the watching world has been peacefully protesting genocide through the written and spoken word, or by marching and voting.

Caught in the act, the guilty party, Israel, has continued to demand cavalierly the right to kill and deceive. The world is instructed to, first deny Israel’s genocide, then justify it or risk defenestration.

To no avail.

“Just as you can identify a tree by its fruit, so you can identify people by their actions,” said Jesus (New Living Translation). Verbatim, Matthew 7:20 reads: “Therefore by their fruits you will know them.”

In pointing to human action as the undeniable key to man-made reality—Dr. Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s Ethics of Argumentation go even further than did Jesus in Matthew 7:20.

ISRAEL, EFFECTIVELY, CLAIMING AUTHORITY TO COMMIT GENOCIDE

Our overlords who art in D.C. and their overlords in Tel Aviv strive to condition us, at once, to watch Palestinians die daily en masse, and either justify or deny the holocaust visited on them by the Jewish State.

Countering this parallel universe being enforced by the Axis of Genocide are Dr. Hans-Hermann Hope’s Ethics of Argumentation. Particularly handy here is “the legal theory of ‘estoppel,’” attributed by Dr. Hoppe to Stephan Kinsella, a libertarian legal theorist. It is “the legal principle that bars a party from denying or alleging a certain fact owing to that party’s previous conduct, allegation, or denial.” (Emphasis added.)

I’d venture that still stronger than legal estoppel apparently allows is the fact that Israel is denying current and ongoing genocidal acts at the very same time it is committing them! Israel is engaged in the mother of all performative contradictions: denying genocide while committing genocide.

It is a performative contradiction, then, for Israel and its backers to dispute that the Jewish State is committing genocide at the very same time that the Jewish State is carrying out the denied deeds.

Genocide, ethnocide and domicide are, obviously, never justified and can never be exculpated. Therefore, to assert that you are just and justified as you carry out the manifest genocide, ethnocide and domicide of a people; is to not only perform a contradiction, but to embody one, all the while demanding the unique authority to carry out all of the above. 

To be mired in such grotesqueries, as Israelis indubitably are, is to be less than human, less than coherent, less than sane. The Greek philosophers would have concurred.

ISRAEL HAS ACED THE GENOCIDE BAR

Laws against genocide impose no burden whatsoever on anybody other than on the sadistic, sociopathic serial killer.

Lest we be accused of arguing in circles, the concept of genocide must be reasonably qualified and clarified. And, in particular, the reference here to the positive law’s definition of the systematic, methodical annihilation of a people.

Natural-rights libertarians are seldom enamored of legal positivism, which generally conflates justice with the law of The State. Our all-too-small cohort is, for the most, wedded to the natural law, a higher law—a system of ethics knowable through reason, revelation and common sense.

“By natural law,” propounded the great Southern constitutional scholar James McClellan, in Liberty, Order, And Justice, “we mean those principles which are inherent in man’s nature as a rational, moral, and social being, and which cannot be casually ignored.” 

I would further argue that even as he is mired in evil—as Israelis certainly are—man knows right from wrong full-well. He knows he is perpetrating evil even as he does so.

Since it is anchored in the very nature of man, the Natural Law is the highest law known to man, and is therefore a priori just. More often than not, any vestiges of natural law still present in the positive law have been buried under the rubble of legislation and statute.

So, while it is a rare occasion when natural-rights libertarians defer to the positive law in a positive way; it can and does happen that this or the other state law is inoffensive in that it does nothing to undermine the natural rights of man—those to his life, his liberty and his property.

To the extent that the positive law comports with the natural law—to that extent it is inoffensive. Such is the case of Article II of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which articulates, mostly, a set of negative rights, whose enforcement imposes no burden whatsoever on anybody other than on the sadistic, sociopathic serial killer.

To Israel’s beefy genocide rap sheet one can now add another qualification: The Article II injunction that enjoins against the imposition of “measures intended to prevent births within the group.”

There are no maternal facilities left in Gaza.

It’s now well-nigh impossible to give birth safely in Gaza—unless genocide adjudicator Jake Sullivan, the U.S. national security adviser, thinks that, under her own power, a woman and her newborn can survive squatting within a spitting distance from a sewage ditch to expel that baby. Or, having her abdomen opened without anesthesia to extricate the neonate. Or trusting her preemie’s life to the oxygen “supplied” by Israel and staving off post-operative septicemia, also under her own power. Sullivan was the US point person who unveiled a dodgy dossier that commanded fusspots to quit the fuss and feathers over Israeli genocide. There is none.

Standing in for a complicit America, the dissembling Sullivan has denied that anything our Israeli “friends” have done or are doing is perpetrated “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”

You be the judge, dear reader. These are the four genocidal actions that preceded Israel’s last:

* “Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

* Killing members of the group.

* Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group.

* Direct and public incitement to commit genocide. (https://www.hrw.org/reports/2004/ij/ictr/3.htm#_Toc62641378)

On top of this, holocaust denial at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has, too, devolved into a grotesque burlesque. In its May 24 order to Israel to “immediately halt military operations in the governorate of Rafah”; the ICJ appeared to bolster the bogus demarcation between carpet-bombing Rafah and carpet-bombing the Greater Gaza.

With particular relish, Israel has continued carpet-bombing both Rafah and the Greater Gaza. Why, then, did the ICJ’s order single out the attack on Rafah alone, as “an underlying act of genocide”? Hasn’t Israel’s ongoing onslaught on the Gaza Strip in its entirety “pos[ed] … irreparable risk to the rights of the Palestinian people to be protected under the Genocide Convention and further threaten[ed] their physical destruction in whole or in part”? 

There is no qualitative difference between the IDFs actions in Gaza before the invasion of Rafah and after. The incessant, industrial-scale campaign of slaughter and starvation in Gaza, north, center and south, exists on one craven continuum of crime against humanity.

What, then, was the thinking behind Rafah-as-a-red-line? The ICJ’s attempt to manufacture an imaginary line between mass murder in Rafah and genocide in the Greater Gaza is perplexing.

Reading between the lines of Washington’s pretense is hard, but I suspect the reflexive impulse in Washington was to separate genocide before Rafah from genocide after the invasion of Rafah with the aim of counting the 113,918 Palestinians murdered and maimed before Rafah as somehow “lawful,” legitimate casualties of a just war.

Washington’s attempted connivance was not reciprocated by its clients, the ingrate Israelis. The line the assassin’s sponsors had attempted to draw between murder before Rafah and murder after its invasion, soon vanished in the blood-soaked sand of the Strip’s southernmost tip. That line itself was blurred… by blood shed by Israel.

CHRONICLNG A DAY IN THE LIFE …

We owe it to the holocaust survivors and their families, and to the historical record, which is vulnerable to the revisionism of Zionists.

Without let, then, the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) continues to martyr, maim and displace Palestinians up and down and across the Via Dolorosa that is the Gaza Strip.

However insurmountable, and to bear witness to genocide, as we must—Gaza’s dead must be counted, recited and commemorated. We owe it to the survivors and their families, and to the historical record, which is vulnerable to the revisionism of Zionists.

Selfless angel that she is, Nurse Johnston had flown to Gaza on a medical mission of mercy organized by the Palestinian American Medical Association. Back at home, in northeast Portland, after three weeks in Rafah, she wept for Gaza:

“People have explosive injuries, and we are giving them Tylenol, we’re giving them Ibuprofen for an arm that’s been blown off or burns on 30 percent of their body. We went to find there was no soap, no hand sanitizer, no linens to put your patients on. So, we would come into the ICU and find patients on these plastic sheets that are degrading, lying in a pool of blood and fluids and nothing to change them on. …We can see off to our left side a puff of smoke. We can hear all the rounds of artillery and knowing we had to drive parallel to that. …Will I make it the rest of the way?”

Still in Gaza, Dr. Dorotea Gucciardo of Glia had reported three weeks back that healthcare workers are now prohibited from running to the rescue without a … permit. Healers are not only being targeted, in what remains of Gaza’s systematically sundered hospitals—but they are being hampered by bureaucracy, by the Arendtian “banality of evil.”

They wait on the signature of an Eichman.

By the time you read this—and as I write—the already underestimated number of Palestinians murdered (37,084+), maimed (84,494) and displaced (1.7 million) by The Devil’s agents will be, and is as I write, out of date. The previous sentence is already obsolete: Please substitute these updated figures of upwards of 37,396 murdered, 85,523 maimed.

Beneath Gaza’s surface lie many thousands more, buried under over 37 million tons of debris. Scrap that. Since the above sentence was penned; the figure has been updated. As of June 18, an “initial assessment” is that, “After eight months … Gaza is littered with more than 39 million tons of debris.” The debris is replete with 800,000 tons of asbestos and assorted contaminants, including 7,500 tons of unexploded ordnance (Wikipedia). It could take 14 years to clear rubble generated by the equivalent of more than three Hiroshima-strength bombs, dropped on a strip of land 25 miles long, and 3.7 to 7.5 miles wide. The time-table estimate was made in the “distant” past, January of 2024. 

Notwithstanding the Israeli army’s declared “tactical pause,” the IDF wiped out 17 people on June 18. By the end of the first week of June, approximately 800 Palestinians lay dead and over 2,400 had been afflicted with life-altering injuries.

According to reports by Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), those admitted to the MSF-supported Nasser and Al-Aqsa Hospitals “bore the hallmarks of intense strikes: dismemberment, severe trauma, burns, and open fractures.”

‘These attacks are the latest in a broad litany of atrocities and illustrate the type of war that Israel is fighting. Israel and its allies have repeatedly shown that there is no watershed moment or red line in this violence. The attacks now known as the flour massacre and the tent massacre—as well as the killing of aid workers and their families and the annihilation of hospitals and the health system more generally—have led to no more than weak diplomatic posturing, empty words, and staggering inaction.’

Before that, on Thursday, May 23, the Al-Aqsa Hospital treated dozens of Palestinians injured in an Israeli shelling on a welfare ministry site. Twelve people were killed in that attack. According to Dr. Khalil al-Degran, “Most of the bodies [recovered] were burnt.”

After that, between the afternoons of May 25 and May 26, more than 80 Palestinians were murdered in the span of 24 hours. Make that 81, says an updated dispatch. As I said, no sooner does one frantically jot down the numbers, than these figures become obsolete, only ever accreting.

Also on May 26, 30 people were butchered in a tent city, designated a “safe zone,” West of Rafah, close to the UNWRA headquarters. So reported the Middle East Eye.

The following day came the Rafah camp massacre. By the 27th, the butcher’s bill had soared some more: Forty five human beings were executed by the Israelis. Among their human remains were a “headless child and charred bodies.”

Two minutes and 55 seconds into a May 9 report curtesy of “Democracy Now,” a small Ghazzawi child cries: “We were baking bread… My friend died. They picked him up in pieces. Everything is in pieces.” (“Aid Worker in Gaza: ‘To Say There’s Not an Incursion in Rafah Right Now Is Patently False.”)

Behind the swirl of statistics are human beings, whose lives are grieved and whose untrammeled resilience is celebrated not by the loutish Jake Tapper or Erin Burnett or Dana Bash or Wolf Blitzer of CNN; not by BBC News, nor Sky, or MSNBC, or foofy French TV, or Fox News, or Newsmax bobbleheads. For these louts, the value of Palestinian life just doesn’t rate a mention compared to Jewish life.

On June 8, Israel, aided by the media mafia across the Global North, confirmed that over seventy Palestinians were murdered for every one of the four Israeli hostages retrieved in an American-supported raid on the Nuseirat refugee camp, in central Gaza.

During that massacre, described by the same media as a rescue, Israeli commando perfidiously, and thus illegally, used humanitarian relief vehicles as cover. This too is in character: Earlier in their genocide program, Israeli coward commando had committed a massacre in the Ibn Sina hospital in Jenin, dressed in scrubs.

Among the 274 displaced people robbed of their lives at Nuseirat were “at least 64 children.” Upwards of 700 people were wounded. “Children were shot dead. Elderly people were shot dead. Women were shot dead,” reported Gaza-based journalist Akram al-Satarri, who was at the Nuseirat refugee camp that Saturday.

Two days prior, on June 6th, the IDF had warmed up with slaughter at a United Nations-linked school, also in the Nuseirat refugee camp, killing at least 40 displaced Palestinians, among whom were 14 children, and injuring dozens more, according to officials and local media” (Al Jazeera & EI). On June 16, 41 Palestinians were killed in assorted IDF attacks.

Everything I just told you is old news. On June 23, Israeli forces hit yet another UNRWA center serving Palestinian refugees. They killed at least eight people. This murder of people queuing for food coupons followed a previous tent-city terrorist attack by Israel in Mawasi, on June 21, where 25 displaced Palestinians were killed and 50 wounded.

A new news crawl alerts me to an updated butcher’s bill: 37,598 souls have been slain since October 7; 86,032 maimed.

Scrap the above. For the fourth time within the temporal confines of this essay, I update the number of Palestinians murdered (37,626) and maimed (86,098).

One of Israel’s latest victims is Hani al-Jafarawi, a healer, the director of ambulance and emergency services in Gaza. On June 24, Israel murdered him. Rage from the heavens, Hani.

IDF war criminals appear to be programed much like their companion, Artificial Intelligence, auto-kill computer systems. Known as “Lavender,” the killer code has been applied to Gaza at large. “Lavender” is the brainchild of Israel’s notorious Unit 8200, which is comprised of a select group of mama’s boys (and a few girls), groomed to snoop, hack, and assassin in code. (Regularly recruited to Silicon Valley, to Boston’s high-tech corridor, and, presumably, to Washington State’s techno-town; these characters could be coming to a community near you, near me.)

“... I know the blasphemy of those who say they are Jews and are not, but are a synagogue of Satan,” said Jesus to John in his vision at the beginning of the Book of Revelation (2:9). This “Synagogue of Satan” (Jesus’ phrase, not mine) makes up its own law of war. So long as the IDF can claim they are targeting a “Hamas fighter,” all the more so a senior Hamas resistance fighter—they, with the imprimatur of their “judiciary,” allow themselves to murder up to 100 Palestinian civilians.  

As astounding and courageous as the efforts of volunteers like Nurse Johnston, her Palestinian and American team members, and UN workers have been; they pale in comparison to what Gaza’s own healthcare worker do and endure daily.

Gaza’s doctors and nurses are no longer being paid. Most are homeless, hungry and dehydrated. Many walk miles a day to tend to their patients in what remains of the teaching hospitals in which they once proudly practiced first-world medicine.

Hors de combat? Not on your life. Gaza’s healers should be out of action. They are not. On these remarkable people soldier. Salute their fallen, salute their spirit.

CO-OPTING HUMAN-RIGHTS LAW

Eviction notices floating down on Gaza are framed as merciful Evacuation notices, the obligation of ‘a moral military’ discharged.

With increasing regularity, the “use of air power” has been extended to the West Bank, “regardless of the collateral damage to children and other civilians caught in the blasts,” reports the Intercept.

Under all sorts of diabolical legal lies and loopholes—such as that the West Bank is, too, a theater of war and that Israel is true to the international laws of war—Israel’s legal institutions, its Supreme Court included, are inclined, invariably, to exonerate the Israeli occupation forces of their crimes.

For instance, in 2006, and after making all the appropriate noises about Israel’s legal obligation to protect civilians under customary international law, the highest court concluded that it would not outlaw “targeted executions,” as the petitioning party requested, because international law was too murky about the concept and the practice.

Israel’s Supreme Court of the Non Sequitur ruled that the “lawfulness of such killings, according to the court, was to be determined according to the particular circumstances of each case.” (“The Public Committee against Torture in Israel et al. v. The Government of Israel et al., Supreme Court of Israel, 14 December 2006.”)

Israel’s systemically slippery approach to Customary International Humanitarian Law is illustrated in the “Anatomy of a Genocide” by Francesca Albanese. This UN special rapporteur on the human-rights dispensation in the West Bank and Gaza had analytically and quite brilliantly illustrated how the Israelis cloak their murderous rampages on civilians in the raiment of human-rights nomenclature.

Essentially, whoever gets hit in Gaza is forfeit by default. After all, has not the IDF, “the most moral military force in the world,” showered Gaza with Kafkaesque leaflets, sending Gazans scampering hither and yon? Has not this force for evil droned and drowned Gazans with information on how to save their sorry selves? Of course it has! Ergo, if Gazans die by US-supplied high-payload munitions; it’s on them.

Cunning without courage: This is how knaves, for the Israelis I’ve observed so far are shifty, not clever, co-opt human-rights law language to execute innocent human beings.

Or evict them. Think about it: Eviction notices floating down on Gaza are framed as merciful evacuation notices, the obligation of “a moral military” discharged.

Nonsense on stilts.

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.

As to the mercy of eviction-cum-evacuation à la Israel: Gazans, one million of them, as detailed already, had been shooed from Raffah, up to Al-Mawasi, and other barren coastal stretches, rendered barren because of prior IDF blitzkriegs. There, these Palestinians many times displaced were supposed to “safely” await the next phase of Israel’s holocaustal war and twisted psychological warfare against them. A merciful evacuation, promised the sadists. “By the book,” The Torturers told the tortured.

I’m sad but not surprised to report that Al-Mawasi, “designated a humanitarian safe zone, was bombed on May the 28th. Twenty-one displaced people were murdered in their tents; “64 people were injured, including 10” with life-altering injuries. 

ISRAEL’S LAW OF RULE IN THE WEST BANK

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.

By their lonesome, the soldier-supported West Bank settlers have murdered ten Palestinians in the territory in this time. No arrests are made. Israeli “lawlessness has become the law” in the West Bank, concedes the New York Times (NYT).

The NYT has facilitated Israel’s October 7 hoaxes of mass, systemic rape, butchered bellies and beheaded babies—“atrocity propaganda” originally debunked by the Gray Zone, the Electronic Intifada and zei_squirrel, then seconded, belatedly, by the Times of London. A small concession though it was; the NYT has seen fit to excoriate the settlers, dubbing them “The Unpunished.”

The Washington Post has also deigned to document the “Israeli settler rampage” against Palestinians whose “homes are burned and animals killed” across the West Bank. (April 16, 2024.) “[I]t is in the West Bank [that] the corrosive long-term effects of the occupation on Israeli law … are most apparent,” write New York Times magazine correspondents Ronen Bergman and Mark Mazzetti. “The long arc of harassment, assault and murder of Palestinians by Jewish settlers is twinned with a shadow history, one of silence, avoidance and abetment by Israeli officials.” (“The Unpunished: How Extremists Took Over Israel,” May 16, 2024.)

In all the West Bank cases examined by the Times’ authors, “involving [settler] misdeeds as diverse as stealing livestock and assault and arson, not a single suspect was charged with a crime; in one case, a settler shot a Palestinian in the stomach while an Israel Defense Forces soldier looked on, yet the police questioned the shooter for only 20 minutes, and never as a criminal suspect, according to an internal Israeli military memo.” (Ibid)

Strictly sectarian, the sensibility instantiated in Israeli law is this: “If a Jew is killed, that’s terrible. If an Arab is killed, that’s not good, but it’s not the end of the world.”

Adjacent, in the Negev, Bedouin homes are demolished, too, and hundreds evicted, their land grabbed. Eviction or demolition: Fear of the same is part of Palestinian life in the West Bank and beyond.

Palestinian farmers and the sheepherders of the South Hebron Hills live in daily fear for their lives and the lives of families and livestock. Spite and sadism drive settlers to slaughter these helpless creatures with biblical cruelty. (Proud members and donors would like to hear PETA say/do something about saving animals dying alongside their owners in Gaza and the West Bank.)

It is said that serial killers start with animals. Animals and children: For Israeli soldiers and settlers, assaults on the most vulnerable of living beings is all in a day’s work. 

PALESTINIANS VALIDATED VIA ARGUMENTATION

The Hoppean principle applied in this essay’s opening catches Israel in the act of denying genocide while committing genocide. The same argumentation serves, in our coda, 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.

Palestinians have told us they’re being killed and robbed as a matter of course. Their reality has been irrefutably affirmed since October 7.

Gaza is a desert of the dead and the dying. It has been rendered thus by Israel’s unrelenting, methodical extermination operations carried out against the people of Gaza, against the infrastructure and against the verdant land that had supported the Strip’s people.

Differently put: 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.

Over nine months, in real time, Gazans have been worn to a shadow before our eyes. We thus know the ontological truth about Palestinian plight under Israeli occupation. It is as they have been telling it.

QED. Points proven.

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