Trump-Backed Israeli Genocide

LewRockwell.com | Ilana Mercer

If we in the West are the most propagandized people in the world; Gazans are the least propagandized. Outwardly captives, Gazans are liberated from the illiberal political propaganda that grips the West

WHAT has Israel been up to since March 18, 2025, which was when the “genocidal entity” formally broke the nominal ceasefire agreement in Gaza? Oracular insight here is unnecessary.

Israel has been trampling underfoot everything decent and good.

Genocide is back. This time with President Trump in fawning agreement, playing procurer and pimp for the Israeli State, and subjecting ingrate Bibi Netanyahu to no more than a curt jerk of the leash: During a press conference with the US president, on April 7, the Israeli prime minister’s face, nevertheless, grew as dark as a thundercloud on mention of possible diplomacy with Iran.

Under such favorable circumstances, Israelis are louder and prouder about killing and destroying with monomaniacal diligence. Indifferently, and for the first time, Israel openly admitted to targeting journalist Hussam Shabat for “elimination,” in December of 2024, and executing the him on March 24. The sadistic serial killer stalked its prey, then pounced.

The predator has so far singled out and assassinated 232 other Palestinian journalists.

Shabat thus knew, as he put it, that “journalism meant Israel would kill him.” Only 23, so full of promise, Shabat wrote his epitaph in advance of his death. It read:

“If you’re reading this, it means I have been killed — most likely targeted — by the Israeli occupation forces. … For [the] past 18 months, I have dedicated every moment of my life to my people. I documented the horrors in northern Gaza minute by minute, determined to show the world the truth they tried to bury.

I slept on pavements, in schools, in tents — anywhere I could. Each day was a battle for survival. I endured hunger for months, yet I never left my people’s side.”

By God, I fulfilled my duty as a journalist. I risked everything to tell the truth, and now, at last, I have found rest—something I have not known for the past 18 months. I did this because I believe in the Palestinian cause, in our right to this land. The greatest honor of my life was to die defending it and serving its people.

I ask you now: Do not stop speaking about Gaza. Do not let the world look away. Keep fighting, keep telling our stories—until Palestine is free.

For the last time,

Hussam Shabat, from northern Gaza.”

Trampling underfoot everything decent and good: Fatma Hassona was to be the subject of an upcoming documentary, “Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk,” to debut at the Cannes Film Festival. Israel could not allow that. So, Air Force Genocide bombed the 25-year-old Palestinian photojournalist, also murdering nine members of her family.

After a brief, relative lull, eighteen months into the genocide of the Palestinians of Gaza, Israel has resumed its slaughter of civilians at an average rate of 103 souls a day, with 223 individuals dealt life-altering injuries, also daily. Since March 18, reports Ha’aretz, Israel has killed 1,652 people and wounded 4,391 in strikes on Gaza. (Ha’aretz “Israel News” newsletter, Wednesday, 16.04.2025.) The number murdered now approaches 2,000.

With 62,000 Palestinians missing, over 52,000 confirmed dead; and indirect deaths ranging from three to fifteen times the number of direct deaths, by the Lancet’s account—the fake, fossilized media should be obligated to report the official number of Palestinians dead by Israel as well over 100,000. That too is a vast undercount.

The mind is crowded. Palestinians murdered melt into a montage of faces. Yet remember we must men like Rifaat Radwan. Radwan was among fifteen medical and humanitarian workers who were summarily executed pointblank, on March 23, by the Israeli regime in Gaza.

The underworld that is the IDF (Israel Defense Forces)—the world criminals and lawbreakers inhabit—is premised upon lies. By now you know The Liar’s lines, as he drops American “earthquake bombs” on kids at community kitchens:

“Hamas. Terrorism. If Palestinians die; they needed killing.”

But Satan’s non sequiturs can’t conceal the truth—or silence the deeply felt devotionals of the righteous. As the SS IDF stood above him, riddling his colleagues and himself with thousands of bullets, Radwan, Palestinian Red Crescent Society medic, did not beg the agents of his demise. Instead, he recorded their crime for posterity while righteously reciting his last prayers. These are achingly beautiful:

“Oh Lord, accept us. Oh Lord, accept me as a martyr. Mother, forgive me. This is the path I chose … that I help people. … .” Until he expired.

As Monday of April 7 dawned, a Wi-Fi rigged world watched a funeral pyre of Palestinians, except that the people Israel lit up were alive. The IDF incinerated “a tent housing Palestinian journalists in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip.”

Late last year, when teenager Shaban al-Dalou smoldered alive, the presstitutes did what they always do: Fudge the English language in the service of Israel. To shore up this oppressive foreign regime, media deploy euphemisms and the passive voice; syntactic devices that mask the excruciating death of a boy kind, beautiful and bright, who was driven by devotion to kin and community.

“Killed in a fire,” media said about Shaban’s murder. The same fate has now befallen Helmi Al-Faqaawi, “a correspondent for Palestine Today News Agency, and Youssef Al-Khazandar, a civilian assisting the group of journalists.” Photojournalist Ahmed Mansour, seen in images engulfed in flames, is fighting for his life in Gaza.

Does Mansour have a fighting chance, what with the last barely functional hospital in the Strip having been obliterated by Israel? On the morning of Palm Sunday, IDF fiends flattened the Al-Ahli Arab Baptist Hospital, which had stood since 1882. “Burning a journalist alive in Gaza, exclaimed Lima Bustami, Euro-Med Monitor’s legal department director, “is not aimed at silencing the truth. Israel already relies on a far greater force: the world’s indifference to the truth.”

With a world of indifference as backdrop, Israel set ablaze yet more civilians in tents on April 17. (And still more again on April 21.) Seventeen Palestinian civilians, including nine children, were dispatched, apparently, dead by “waves of [some sort].” Yes, even Al Jazeera has caught the botched-English bug, writing that, on April 18, “a wave of Israeli air strikes” killed them.

Another trope of the malpracticing media is to qualify the daily carnage in Gaza with the clause, “mostly women and children.” Or, “Including many women and children.” As though Palestinian men were fare game.

This genocide exclusionary clause is pronounced among the vanishingly small number of conservative influencers who have registered their objection to Israel’s crimes. Out of Christian charity, these influencers allow that the murdered are “women and children,” for the most. Or, that among the murdered are Christians. This from creedal conservatives who otherwise champion the centrality of men and manliness in society.

This from the same conservatives who must surely know that Jesus Christ stood not for sectarian favoritism, but for the universal value of all human beings.

“Meet the Palestinian men the media don’t want you to know exist,” narrates Lara Elborno, a Palestinian daughter, human-rights attorney and activist. This here is a woman who can speakboth poignantly and with authority about Palestinian men. By now, so can we. And it is the men of Palestine whom we’ve watched on our screens first to the scenes of slaughter. They dig, carry, evacuate, comfort, perform religious rites of burial, and cry when lulls allow.

The contrast between Palestinian men and the IDF stares at you like blood on a Kaffan, the traditional Palestinian shroud.

At bottom, the most cowardly army known in military history doesn’t engage in battles. The IDF is an air force: It strafes civilians from above. Since it broke the ceasefire, Israel has conducted daily massacres by airstrikes, shelling, and drone strikes, reports Jon Elmer, military analyst for the Electronic Intifada. Well over 1000 such airstrikes—fifty a day—have seen nearly 600 children and babies blown to bits.

With every avenue of ingress and egress sealed off by the Israelis for the last six weeks, fuel to power earth-moving machinery is unavailable. So when, on April 10, thirty-five civilians were murdered and fifty injured by warplanes strafing a “densely populated residential block,” in a Shuja’iyya neighborhood—civil defense teams, Palestinians, were on the scene. They always are. How they do it nobody knows. They currently use trawls, spades, finger nails and faith to get at the trapped.

Ugly and evil seeks to eradicate its opposites. Reflexively do the West’s brash, technocratic, atomistic and irreligious societies aim to eradicate communities unlike their own. Decadently woke and cruelly impersonal Gaza is not. Gaza, attests Zahad Rahman, an American nurse who volunteers in what remains of the enclave, is a community-centered, gracious society. Rahman is not a Palestinian. Israel has murdered more than 1,000 individuals like him—”members of the medical, defense and aid teams in Gaza,” confirms B’Tselem (an Israeli human rights organization). Despite the risk, like so many medical volunteers who go to Gaza, Rahman has found himself drawn back to people who will give you their shirt in zero weather.

In the Ramadan tradition of “cultivating empathy,” in the ruins, Gazans thus laid tables to celebrate. Eid al-Fitr, in particular, explains Imam Dr. Omar Suleiman, a scholar and theologian, “is meant to continue that empathy into our celebrations. On the morning of Eid, every Muslim is required to pay Zakat al-Fitr—a form of charity designed to ensure that no one is left out of the feast. It is a beautiful practice: a way of saying that joy is only complete when shared, that our celebration is meaningless if others are starving.”

Inescapably, Eid al-Fitr spirituality was shattered by Israeli barbarity.

On April 3, Israel murdered 92 worshippers. A volunteer doctor from Gaza Medic Voices spent Eid, which marks the conclusion of Ramadan, cutting away party clothes from the bodies of kidsdressed to the nines for Eid. By day’s end, the number of human beings murdered had swelled. Little girls festively dressed were, instead, transported to the morgue, jewelry and finery shroudedin the garments of death.

While 100 Palestinian kids are now “killed or injured in Gaza every day,” since [genocide] resumed,” Israelis have gone and slapped a disability classification on “over 20,000” of their own safe and sated offspring. Victims of terror, claim the Israeli State’s mental-health mavens.

The Psychiatric Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is an ever-mutating manual, now in its fifth iteration. The criteria for manufacturing illness under the DSM, or similar industry-developed manuals, are malleable. In real life, no psychiatric manual required, tens of thousands of Palestinian children are being terrorized, are actually dead, mutilated, mentally scarred for life, orphaned without a soul in the world.

Still, one can well-understand why their Israeli adversaries—predators parading as prey—would want to tar even the Palestinian toddler as an irremediable terrorist-in-the-making. Like so many of their formative figures, Palestinian children are formidable, fierce.

Amid the worry and wear of finding food and staying alive, a slip of a girl composes and recites the poetry of resistance:

“I’m Palestinian and proud.”

“I’m proud because I’m the strong brave girl, the daughter of heroes.”

“The daughter of Gaza, the land of the free…”

And so she goes in modulated, melodic Arabic. Here another young Palestinian girl stops her idol, the late Mr. Shabat, aforementioned, to tell him of her admiration. When she grows up; she wants to be a brave journalist like her hero, since martyred. These are very centered children.

If we in the West are the most propagandized people in the world; Gazans are the least propagandized. Outwardly captives, Gazans are liberated from the illiberal political propaganda that grips the West.

And Gabi Siboni knows this. The former IDF colonel, now an unthinking member of Israel’s think-tank ranks, reflects Jewish-Israeli public and political discourse. For Gazans Siboni expresses genocidal contempt and intent—but also a warped understanding of Gazan ferocity about liberating their ancestral homeland. Said Siboni:

“Hamas is not the problem in Gaza. Hamas is a symptom of a bigger problem. The population in Gaza is a ‘barbaric mob.’ If we don’t wish to bleed our soldiers for decades—because in Gaza there will be Hamas B and C—the only solution is Trump’s ‘vision.'”

Sidoni is a lot more honest, and only a tad less subtle, than the oleaginous Bernie Sanders, an unreconstructed liberal Zionist.

Gaza is no more because of a concerted campaign to wipe it out; because of extermination and depopulation; not because of “Israeli self-defense,” which is when one sovereign state wards off the armies of other sovereign nation-states. Yet “in the year 2025,” Sanders’ mass rallies are festooned with the line, “Israel has a right to defend itself.”

Bernie Sanders’ sophistry should explode the brain like an ammunition dump!

In international law, explains Philip Proudfoot, a British political scientist, “Occupation is temporary, imposing duties, not rights, upon the occupier. The Fourth Geneva Convention explicitly demands that an occupier safeguard civilian rights. Accordingly, Israel cannot resort to anything more than police powers to ‘defend itself.’”

Genocide is the acid test. Sanders’ insistence, well into genocide, that “Israel has a right to defend itself can only be interpreted as blatant genocide apologia,” propounds Caitlin Johnstone. Clearly an expert in untruths, Sanders, who oversaw the removal from his rallies of protesters and their Free Palestine flag, has further exposed himself as a slick establishment operative, who seeks to capture naïve, politically homeless Democrats.

Back to the malodorous cauldron of death and decadence that is the Israel Defense Forces. (Or perhaps the Israel Defense Feces?)

A new load of grief came, in March, to residents of the al-Faraa refugee camp in the foothills of the Jordan Valley, in the northern occupied West Bank. Slatternly IDF soldiers have a familiar signature. They leave behind human waste in the homes they wreck:

“Feces, urine and used condoms—these are just some of the things that Israeli soldiers left behind in these Palestinian homes during their 11-day assault [in March],” reports the Electronic Intifada. 

That the IDF has a documented “tradition” of defecating and urinating in the West Bank and Gazan homes they occupy and vandalize is seconded by a 2014 account in the Guardian: “Palestinians returning home find Israeli troops left feces and venomous graffiti.”

Somebody should rub IDF noses in their own mess to teach them a lesson, once and for all. Nobody has.

Yes, Israel makes atrocities past and present look like sandbox play. Still, puzzling even to me is this recent account of used condoms left by the IDF in these West Bank homes. Why puzzling? We know that despite the feel-good official designation of some Israeli females as combat soldiers, the few women in combat roles “are not explicitly deployed into combat situations.” During these ostensible “military” raids, the IDF functions, I believe, as a male-only “fighting” force.

So, why the condoms left in vandalized Palestinian homes, in the course of the IDF’s Dionysian bacchanalia in the West Bank? Whose are they, exactly?

Is this what Ha’aretz, Israel’s center-liberal paper of record, calls “the homoerotic side of Israeli army life”? Is “copulating” to be added to the documented IDF “tradition” of male soldiers defecating and urinating in Palestinian homes?

Ha’aretz, I’ve noticed, waters down debauchery—but not because it is concealing the truth for the “Fatherland.” They tell the truth but frame it differently. Thus, the debauchery of uniformed IDF doesn’t seem to be that big of a deal in the Israeli State. Israel doesn’t appear to share American sensibilities—at least so it seems to me, who has closely observed this society in the Hebrew, for eighteen ugly months.

American culture is quite prudish; Israel’s expressed aesthetic is more pornographic. An example is the familiar images of IDF wearing or rummaging through the sexy lingerie of Palestinian women dead or dispossessed. You and I would consider these cross-dressing displays among uniformed men as inappropriate, kinky.

Not Haaretz. Kinky acts of cowardice and sadism—invading Palestinian homes, looting, vandalizing and manhandling private effects—a writer at Ha’aretz is wont to label “Machismo”: The “Military machismo of Israeli soldiers in Gaza will rear its ugly head at home,” blared a January 2025 Ha’aretz headline.

I’m a subscriber. I read enough of Ha’aretz to get a sense that Israel has a different, un-American aesthetic. Take this depiction of Purim, which used to be celebrated, largely, as a children’s festival. To “a brief history of Purim, the Halloween of Jewish holidays,” Ha’aretz has appended an erotic image of men flirting and kissing deeply. Ha’aretz appears to consider this image to be Halloween/Purim-appropriate, wholesome.

The only reasonable, quality newspaper in Israel, Ha’aretz, also dishes a lot of bafflegab. The IDF has invaded large swathes of Syria, is bombing the place, annexing kilometers for a so-called buffer zone, and making overtures to certain cowed Syrian communities so as to further divide and rule that country.

An “overbearing embrace,” however, is how Ha’aretz has euphemized the violence of conquest and the breach of Syrian borders, in March of 2025: “Israel’s Overbearing Embrace Threatens Syria’s Druze at a Critical Juncture.

Utter opposites, too, are Palestinians. If Palestinians are united in the yen for freedom; Israeli circuitry is wired for cruelty.

Israel Katz, defense minister, stonily threatened all of Gaza’s civilians, on March 19, 2025. As a Twitter adage goes, “Translating an Israeli tweet from the Hebrew is like finding a lost page of Mein Kampf.” Listen to the “sound of impunity”—and for that matter, never believe any Hebrew-English translation come to you via Israeli officialdom.

These are Katz’ precise words translated from the Hebrew:

“Residents of Gaza, this is the last warning. The first Sinwar destroyed Gaza. The second Sinwar will ruin her completely. The assault of the air force against the Hamas terrorists is just the first step. The rest will be many times harder, and you will pay the full price. Evacuations will soon start from areas of battle. If all the Israeli hostages are not released, and Hamas is not expelled from Gaza—Israel will act with the kind of force unfamiliar to you. Take the offer of the president of the US: return the hostages and expel ‘The Hamas,’ and other options will then open before you, including migration to other places across the world, for whomever wishes it. The alternative is destruction and complete ruin.”

Defense Minister Katz further reiterated, on April 16, his policy of “halting the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza.” “The State of Israel’s policy is clear. No humanitarian aid will enter Gaza, as this is one of our main pressure tactics” with Hamas. Under the current reality, nobody intends to stray from the policy, barked Katz.

In an instant, Minister Katz had pacified the “Hostages and Missing Families Forum.” While “emphasizing that the release of the hostages and the continuation of the war cannot happen simultaneously,” the group had nonetheless condemned the Israeli government for “quietly preparing to reinstate humanitarian aid.” (Ha’aretz’s “Israel News” newsletter, Wednesday, 16.04.2025.)

On the whole, it has been well-established that from janitor to general, from soldiers to supreme court justices; in words and in deeds—Israeli society generally shares in the genocidal mindset. The exceptions are a few heavily proscribed, miniscule (“around 300 Israelis come to hold pictures of Gazan children”), pro-peace, Arab-Jewish groups. All told, Israelis speak of Palestinians as though they were sub-humans, untouchables, unmentionable, lacking any say in how they live or die.

When I wrote, moreover, that “criminality is codified in Israeli law; that genocide, snuff films, extra-judicial assassinations and rape of Palestinians are de facto legal in Israel; I was not engaging in hyperbole. Systemic, societal criminality is regularly codified by the highest court in that land. Late in March came a ruling from the Israeli Supreme Court, “explicitly and directly legitimizing Israel’s illegal blockade of the Gaza Strip.”

Both asinine and depraved, the Israeli high court used, in support of its authoritative ruling for starvation, “the argument that the State of Israel is exempt from the obligations of belligerent occupation under international law in all cases pertaining to the Gaza Strip.”

Sure, you may subsume in logic, as the Israeli supreme court indirectly does, that you are not obligated to help dying human beings. But you cannot make a cogent, rational case for your right to stop others from feeding and healing dying human beings. This displays a defect in the faculty of reasoning, as well as a defect of character. By default, the outcome of the Israeli high court’s ruling is the death of the starved population—the process of mass murder will play out to its legislated conclusion.

The fault for inaction lies now entirely with those who won’t act to save Gazans: The USA, Western European- and East European countries, East and West Asian governments.

The emanations from the minds of Israel’s Supreme Court are mind-numbingly boorish and banal. Most pertinent for our purposes here is that Israel does not enjoy an independent judiciary. Yet Israel regularly exploits the principle of complementarity in international law, according to which the International Criminal Court (ICC) shares legal jurisdiction with the democratic nation-state under investigation, provided the latter has an independent judiciary.

Beware! With chameleon alacrity, Israel typically scurries to “investigate” itself, and to exploit the principle of complementarity, when the world looks like it’s had enough. Legal investigations by Israel of its own crimes are part of the Israeli superstructure of deception. Nominal prosecutions, or ersatz investigations, by genocidal Israel of its crimes against Arabs must themselves be treated as part of Hasbara’s meta-chicanery, aimed at concealing the Israeli State’s transparently despotic tendencies.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump, like Joe Biden before him, has made Americans confederates in Israel’s crimes. A malign conjunction of events engineered by Trump has further positioned Israeli leadership to finalize its genocidal goal, as its lobby proxies and influencers stateside successfully silence us, and sunder our Bill of Rights protections, including the First Amendment right to think and speak freely.

The level of “state capture” by Israel, a small, oppressive foreign regime, is unprecedented, inveighs Craig Mokhiber, activist and scholar of international, humanitarian law. This is “state capture” at every level: foreign and domestic, federal, state, county and city. For Israel, law enforcement agencies under this and the previous government are willing to silence and disappear activists against genocide for exercising our American liberties.

Absurd, of course, but Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents had tweeted that their job is to stop illegal ideas at the U.S. border: “People, money, products, ideas. If it crosses the US border illegally, our job is to stop it.”

“An American-style Cultural Revolution” à la Mao Zedong.

Image: Source

Original Article: https://www.lewrockwell.com/2025/04/ilana-mercer/genocides-back-trump-backed-israeli-brutality/