Two Genocides Down; Does Judaism Need A Reformation? And Is This Jew Allowed To Ask?

Inescapably, it is not Muslims of the Ummah, in the name of Islam, who have committed the Twenty-First Century’s two Holocausts—in Gaza and Southern Lebanon …~ilana

In examining the causal factors in the criminal psychopathy on display in contemporary Israel, I have questioned “The Judaism-Zionism Bifurcation,” namely the convention, accepted among solidarity commentators and activists, Jews and non-Jews, that there is a strict divide between Judaism and Zionism.

Advocates of this duality portray Judaism as a faith largely beyond reproach—humanistic, universal, and peaceful; Zionism as its opposite. In this asserted split, it is assumed that Judaism is naturally antagonistic to Zionism and always arrayed against Israel.

The zealotry with which our camp, in solidarity with the Palestinians, adheres to the Judaism-Zionism divide can’t but catch one’s attention. It is as though mouthing these platitudes was The Charm, a protective amulet of sorts.

Contrary to this conventional wisdom, I noted that the idée fixe of “The Chosen People” goes a long way to account for the unwarranted sense of supremacy that animates Jewish Israelis. A biblical aspect of Judaism such as “Chosenness” appears to have encouraged, animated and privileged a factional preference among Jews, to the near exclusion of universal fellow-feeling.

Biblically based Chosenness and the corresponding supremacy certainly help explain the indelible reservoir of evil, a bottomless pit of it, expressed and acted out by the Jewish Israeli commonwealth’s most faithful representatives: The People’s army, the IDF, or the Israel Defense Forces.

There is no grimness in the IDF’s approach to the “mission” of mass murder. Undaunted, they go about their “business” with barbaric gaiety. (Remember, I watch the Hebrew-language tv channels. No filters there.) This Israeli “citizen army” is on its second genocide, uninterrupted.

From Gaza, to the West Bank, to Southern Lebanon; from sun-up to sun-down—Israel continues its genocidal deformation of the Levant’s landscape and its people. Now, generations of Lebanese agrarians—food producers, their well-appointed residences, built to blend into, not lord over, the undulating hills—the very means of production: wiped out. Ancient religious heritage sites, Muslim and Christian, gone (although it should be noted that the magnificently spirited Shia community is the prime target of the Terrorist State and its American enabler). Over a million people displaced. Upwards of 4100 murdered. Israel is not on a killing spree; it’s in a comfortable groove, a second-nature killing groove. Jewish Israel is flying close to the sun, and nobody dares to swat it down.

In marked contrast, Haaretz columnist Gideon Levi and the inimitable Norman Finkelstein were quick to implicate “Chosenness” in the psychopathy on display in contemporary Israel. In August of 2024, in conversation with Current Affairs’ editor Nathan J. Robinson, Levi, a veteran dissident journalist, had been commenting about the unexamined lives Israelis lead. Although he has since vacillated; in his better days, alluded to here, Levy had also remarked in anguish that Jewish-Israel shapes its genocidal media, not vice versa. In other words, genocide is market-driven. The general average of Jewish Israelis throughout the country knows and likes what’s going on.

Or, as Levi put it, “They couldn’t be bothered.”

It makes sense that Jewish supremacists—a term I deployed as early as March 31, 2024, in the essay, “ISRAEL: In Violation Of God’s Law, Natural Justice, The Laws Of War, And All Customary International Humanitarian Law”—would lead unexamined lives. They believe they are divinely-anointed superior beings in whom a birthright to commit genocide is inherent.

Lone Israeli voices like Levi and Amira Haas, another Haaretz pro-Palestine columnist, would be first to tell you that, in Israel, “they represent absolutely nobody,” confirmed Norman Finkelstein, also to Current Affairs’ editor on June 6, 2026.

With similar certainty, Dr. Finkelstein has ventured that Jewish supremacy is augmented by economic success. It’s “because Jews are rich,” qualified Finkelstein: They are the wealthiest religious ethnic group in the US. “The Jewish supremacist billionaire class”—Finkelstein’s coinage—is exerting its power. This class is behind the clamp-down on anti-Israel demonstrations and on American constitutional freedoms. “You can’t say anything now critical of Israel,” inveighed Dr. Finkelstein, to podcaster Robinson Erhardt.

Finkelstein has declared “the Jewish supremacist billionaire class” and their proxies as his inveterate enemies, promising that he’ll never ascent to their demands. The upbeat doctrine that these “Jewish supremacist billionaires” have enforced in American campuses is the requirement that everybody be “inclusive and pluralistic toward Israeli students,” or else. Finkelstein, in his inimitable fashion, declared he would never become “inclusive and pluralistic” toward child killers. May they burn in hell, he added.

Over and above the concentration of wealth in Jewish hands, Finkelstein further fingered, on December 12, 2025, a penchant for community organizing and networking among Jews, as well as the impunity that has come with the weaponization of the Holocaust in forming a “lethal combination.” He was speaking to Double Down News. (“Norman Finkelstein Exposes Israel’s Darkest Secret.”)

So, before the curtain falls on this informal inquiry of mine; I’ll ask again: The bloodiest era in Israeli criminal annals—are they not an organic extension of some biblically based, base, atavistic, shared Jewish superiority, grown more regressive, more savage with time and impunity?

The late great exegete Pope Benedict XVI of the brilliant mind and beatific smile delivered an address, in 2006, to the students at the University of Regensburg, in which he worried out loud that Islam may be a closed system, impermeable to reform.

I now believe the Holy See was wrong, possibly swayed, like the rest of the world, by osmotic Hasbara.

Pope Benedict’s opinion, however, has always been wildly popular in the West, having been propagated by a contingent of ersatz experts, which, it so happens, were also ardently Zionist. Arab scholars attempted, respectfully, as is their wont, to counter. “What is aggravating is that the pope has been free with assumptions, and liberal with its first cousin, innuendo.” In vain. It didn’t help Muslims.

In the address aforementioned, nevertheless, the Holy Father spoke of reason as integral to the Christian faith. He went on to recount how the university formed a “universe of reason,” in which, through rational inquiry, even the existence of God was questioned. Had not the “erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus,” in his exchange with his Persian interlocutor, circa 1391, counsel that, “Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats”? Indeed.

Observed Pope Benedict: “The decisive statement in [the Paleologus] argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature.”

Inescapably, it is not Muslims of the Ummah, in the name of Islam, who have acted out “contrary to God’s nature.”

It is not members of the Ummah who have committed the Twenty-First Century’s two Holocausts—in Gaza and Southern Lebanon both in progress. It is, rather, a cohort of Jews, not insubstantial, who purported to do so in supplication to their faith.

I ask, then:

If it was acceptable for the Pontiff to have tried to puncture the pieties of one of the three major religions, why is it that another faith—the one into which I was born—may not be poked and probed as well?

Is the question, then, purely a Jewish-Israeli question, or is it perhaps a Judaism question?

Could it be that Judaism is in need of a Reformation? And is this Jew, myself, even permitted to ask?

*****

Part 1: The Judaism-Zionism Bifurcation: Chosenness
Part 2: The Judaism-Zionism Bifurcation: Tikkun Olam

©2026 ILANA MERCER
The Unz Review, June 25
LewRockwell.com, June 25

Ilana Mercer, paleolibertarian author, essayist and theorist, has been writing up an anti-war, anti-woke storm since 1998, starting in Canada. On arriving in the US, in 2002, her weekly column was right away syndicated. Mercer’s national syndication fell through shortly after due to writing in strident opposition to the war in Iraq. ILANA 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, grew up in Israel ages five to nineteen, and left, at 19, never to return. She had refused to serve in the IDF, Israel’s compulsory military. Ilana’s focus since October of 2023 has been the genocide. A war against civilians is a war on civilization.