Defending Gaza (Part I): Natural-law Principles vs. National-interest Statism

The individual’s natural right to life antedates the state apparatus.…

Let us not commit the Sin of Abstraction — the sin of escaping into theory, and in so doing, avoiding reality — the reality of Israel’s real sins, real crimes, the crime of all crimes.

When Americans reflect on history’s tragedies and travesties, they habitually extol the virtue of Pax Americana, but never the horrors of it. Having shaped the annals of the past, regime historians, naturally, speak a great deal about Hitler, but hardly at all about Hiroshima.

With regard to the historic retrospective on the American-enabled genocide in Gaza — you know, when the agile liars who monopolize the discourse plead their case — the Electronic Intifada’s director, Ali Abunimah, renders his verdict on humanity’s inaction in response to Israel’s barbarity.

Abunimah gets to the quick of the human experience, and I paraphrase:

If you did nothing and said nothing during the genocide of the Gazans, we know exactly what you would have done during the genocide of the Jews.

Nothing.

With the exception of countless, selfless healers and humanitarians, heroes all, humanity has, by and large, abandoned the Palestinians of Gaza. This collective silence must not be forgiven nor forgotten, seconds Dr. Tarek Loubani, a physician, and the medical director of the Glia project, currently operating with great difficulty in Gaza.

“When I was in Ukraine,” attested Dr. Loubani, who had brought his medical team to that battle theater, too, “I never worried that the Russians would bomb me.” The Russians absolutely obey the imperative to protect and respect medical teams. In Gaza, all medical teams are forfeit, fair targets for extermination by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

On that grim score, “More than 685 health workers have been killed and 900 wounded during attacks on medical facilities and medical transport” in the course of Israel’s onslaught. This last Wikipedia account is likely, you guessed it, already outdated. How many more of Gaza’s healers have disappeared into the maw of the Israeli Security State? Many hundreds, reports The Intercept, an influential American news site.

Speaking to the Electronic Intifada, Dr. Loubani gave one of the most lucid renderings of the unremitting acts of a “genocidal, maniacal army in Gaza,” operating unhindered. Like Abunimah, he spoke emphatically to the imperative not to forgive those who’ve done nothing and said nothing, conveniently, until now.

If you have been silent so far — or, enveloped by the warm smell of a growing herd, are conveniently piping up eight months into the sacking of Gaza — you must not be forgiven.

Historically, Abunimah’s aphorism tracks with the manner in which most of conservatism’s celebrity pundits had comported themselves during the ramp-up to the war on Iraq, for that war’s duration, and with how most have been conducting themselves in the course of Israel’s unimpeded genocide against Gazans (the Ghazzawi?).

Kelly Conservatives (Bonus Material & Background)

I am not here speaking of unserious conservatives, such as podcaster Megyn Kelly, for example, who deserves mention if only because, dear reader, you deserve some levity and laughter occasionally.

If nothing else, it is amusing to hear the Kelly vanity production call out America’s campus kids, selfless souls protesting a holocaust, for being unattractive, ugly. To an empty vessel, there is nothing worse than forgetting your facial fillers and falsies.

Myself, I think that Mohammad Khatami, a software engineer arrested at the sit-in at Google’s office in New York, is beatifically beautiful. Techie Ray Westrick, arrested in California, also in protest of Project Nimbus — some kind of killer-Cloud-AI collaboration with Israel — is supermodel lovely.

Still on the topic of the Kelly conservatives who missionize for mass-murder: I have to wonder who’s truly ugly deep down, Megyn?

How about the pampered LA Zionist thugs who took metal rods to the sculls of peaceful encampment protesters? How about those doing their evil utmost to logistically hamper “humanitarian aid deliveries at scale” to Gaza? How about the sated Jewish settlers and their doughy offspring, fat families, instructing their larded young on how to help starve other human beings? How about the observant IDF soldier, tooting, during a telephone interview, his religious platoon’s acts of murder and torture in Gaza, all in fluid, contempt-dripping, American-accented English?

Bombastic without and barren within: The IDF collective might wear fatigues, but it does nothing to camouflage its libertine, licentious, sexually depraved, pornographic culture.

The culture comes from the top:

His flesh softer than sin, Rabbi Col. Eyal Karim, the head of the military rabbinate of the Israel Defense Forces, had indicated, in 2016, that “as part of maintaining fitness for the army and the soldiers’ morale during fighting, it is permitted to … satisfy the evil inclination by lying with attractive Gentile women against their will.” News of the rabbinical rape-injunction came courtesy of Israel’s YnetNews.com.

Similarly, before it discovered that the “Goyim” were repulsed — the “Most Moral Army in the World” had been operating an “exclusive-content” “channel to share the gruesome killing of Palestinians.” This IDF-run public war-porn channel, out of Israel, served up content in which murder was sauced-up or overlaid by sex talk.

Such patterns of arousal — the comingling of serial killing and sex — are associated with psychopathy. The psychopathic fusion of lust and murder appears endemic among IDF soldiers. The channel, which catered to Israeli audiences, was called “72 Virgins – Uncensored.” How cruel. The revelation comes via Ha’aretz, an august Israeli news source.

National-interest Pragmatism

Back to the point: To the extent they oppose the genocide in Gaza, conservatives, some with enormous populist and political sway, have confined themselves to disinterested mumblings about the national interest: Gaza is of no national interest to the United States of America. Bye-bye. Off to distract the masses with prattle about the wokerati.

This is how podcaster Matt Walsh obtained absolution from Pope Ben Shapiro, who declared Walsh kosher to continue “creating” content on Shapiro’s Israel First, talentless platform. Walsh is purported to have told Grand Inquisitor Shapiro that supporting a war on Gazans isn’t in the United States’ interest. Since he did not say that Total War on Palestinian civilians is wicked and wrong, Walsh was good to go.

The only inquiry this national-interest pragmatism permits is a cost-benefit calculus: Will this or the other assassination or military maneuver pay strategic dividends for America or Israel in the long run — although even then, the benefits of so-called national-interest military interventions redound to special interests, not to constituents.

For many reasons, such stark, statist utilitarianism is “the lazy man’s dodge” (to use a phrase by Jeffrey Sach, a prince among intellectual and moral scullions). I need not remind media conservatives that the United States is already an interventionist hegemon, and is now aiding and abetting a war of extermination in Gaza.

The premise of pure, national-interest political pragmatism, moreover, leads to the following, perverse conclusions:

If enabling the slaughter of Gazans and the murder and displacement of Iraqis happened to be in the American national interest, then those “endeavors” would have been — are — justified, in accordance with national-interest standards. What a way to let the regime wriggle out of responsibility for wanton killing and perpetrate more: “It was good for the country. USA. USA.”

I’m well-aware that the killer conclusion does indeed follow logically from the national-interest premise. Behold Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where mass murder was calculated by American leaders to be in the “national interest,” and was, consequently, deemed legitimate. Their logical consistency aside, both premise and conclusion are, nevertheless, perverse in the extreme.

National-interest utilitarianism is thus not wrong in logic, but it is often wrong in ethics.

Natural-law Principles

Whereas the paleolibertarian’s fidelity is to natural-law principles anchored in thinking as ancient and as true as Cicero’s, the foreign policy of the conservative hard right is largely a reductive, national-interest-focused statism.

By virtue of its crass pragmatism, the national-interest camp only ever debates whether the U.S. government or Israel should or shouldn’t act on their divine rights as judge, jury, and executioner. It is never over what’s right, what’s wrong, and what’s plain wicked.

To be fair, many good, conservative-minded individuals abhor Israel’s deeds, but have an issue with restraining the mass-murdering Jewish Taliban through UN mechanisms such as the Security Council, the International Criminal Court (ICC), and the International Court of Justice (ICJ). They are opposed to U.S. membership in the UN on sovereignty grounds and do not recognize or support UN Security Council actions or those of the ICC/ICJ.

Let me try and help dispel this mindset with an example.

A Palestinian woman is being raped by IDF in the Occupied Territories, where the rabbinical injunction on rape, handed down by Rabbi Col. Eyal Karim, aforementioned, obtains. (The evidence for sexual violence in Gaza is credible, says the UN special rapporteur on violence against women and girls.)

A UN trooper passes by on patrol. What shall he do? He calls his paymaster, an American conservative, a strict ideologue who opposes the UN and thinks Israel hung the moon. This conservative confuses levels of abstraction — reality vs. ideology. Since our conservative lives in the arid arena of pure thought — he tells the soldier, “Oh no. You work for an organization my group hates. We refuse to deploy a UN soldier to rescue the woman. Walk away.”

Those of us who live in the here-and-now, and refuse to levitate between “what is” and “what ought-to-be,” say the following:

“Never mind who you work for, sir. Quit dawdling. Rescue the woman. Apprehend the rapist.” The means of administering a modicum of justice here are immaterial. You take what you’ve got. Better that the UN soldier does something, than not one person does a thing.

The Sin of Abstraction

In other words, the opposition among the national-interest camp to the only flaccid response mounted against Israel’s actions rests on theoretical abstractions.

The confused camp commits the Sin of Abstraction — the sin of escaping into theory, and, in so doing, avoiding reality, the reality of Israel’s real sins, real crimes, the crime of all crimes.

The idea, moreover, that upholding the negative rights of a butchered, stateless people is tantamount to calling for foreign intervention in the affairs of a sovereign state, Israel, is, if not problematic, certainly open to debate.

Is not the concept of national sovereignty bounded by the idea of The State? Is the paleolibertarian a fan of the State? No, he isn’t.

Theoretically, at least, many libertarians do not recognize The State. Certainly most libertarians would concede that The State now acts extra-judicially, and that any vestiges of the natural law once embedded in the U.S. Constitution have long-since been buried beneath the rubble of legislation and statute.

Why, then, would libertarians lay off a State, Israel, that uses its military might to pulverize population centers and has systematized the mass-murder of innocent Palestinian civilians as targets for Total War?

One can say, then, that to the extent the law, most law — local or international or tribal — upholds no more than natural rights, the law is good. To the extent it violates the right to life, liberty, and property — the law is bad. In the matter of Israel’s genocidal program against the Palestinians of Gaza, it is my position that it matters not who upholds Gazans’ inalienable right to life, liberty, and property, just so long as someone does.

For no one has the right to kill an innocent human being, let alone tens of thousands of them, without let. (June 8: 210 Palestinians have been murdered and more than 400 wounded in Israel’s latest massacre, this time at the Nuseirat refugee camp, in central Gaza.)

By logical extension, it matters not who saves innocent human beings — which state, which federal official or international organization, or which quixotic private platoon — just so long as someone does.

In America, federalism means “divided sovereignty,” which, if we are to take James Madison seriously, ought to make it difficult for states to begin executing their citizens. Why would it be a matter of respect for a country’s “sovereignty” to allow Israel to systematically execute its subjugated populations?