The Real Israel vs. Hasbara History
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 prohib
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LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.
