Chris Hedges "The Death of Israel: How a Settler Colonial State Destroyed Itself"
Chris Hedges at his best on what and how Zionism has turned in on itself by extending its natural progression as an "ultra-nationalist" movement.
The following is my transcription of a speech that Chris Hedges delivered at the Islamic Society of Central New Jersey on January 18, 2024.
This is Chris Hedges at his very best on a subject not only dear to his heart and soul but a subject much of his life has been centered on.
6:30
I know there are people in this room who have family and friends in Gaza as I do and the last contact I've been able to have with people I know in Gaza three or four weeks ago I don't know if they're alive or dead or and all of us who spent significant time in Gaza I think every waking moment is colored by this almost unfathomable Slaughter and whatever I feel is a pale reflection of what many of you in this room are enduring but I want you to know that there are many of us that are doing everything humanly possible to fight back.
7:38
Israel's Lebensraum master plan for Gaza borrowed from the Nazis’ depopulation of Jewish ghettos is clear. Destroy infrastructure, medical facilities and sanitation including access to clean water, block shipments of food and fuel, impose telecommunications blackouts. Unleash indiscriminate industrial violence to kill and wound hundreds a day let starvation and epidemics of infectious diseases along with the daily massacres and the displacement of Palestinians from their homes turn Gaza into a mortuary.
8:28
Israel has killed or seriously wounded close to 100,000 Palestinians in Gaza almost one in every 20 inhabitants. It has destroyed or damaged 60% of the housing. The safe areas to which some 2 million Gazans were instructed to flee in the South have been relentlessly bombed with thousands of casualties. Palestinians in Gaza now make up 80% of all the people facing famine or catastrophic hunger worldwide according to the UN.
9:09
Every person in Gaza is hungry a quarter of the population are starving and struggling to find food and drinkable water. Famine is imminent. The 335,000 children under the age of five are at high risk of malnutrition the some 50,000 pregnant women lack health care and adequate nutrition. Infants are dying in droves.
9:41
Israeli political and military officials of the South African jurist documented at the International Court of Justice make no secret of their genocidal intent nor of their vision of what comes next. In September, before the incursion into Israel by Hamas and other resistance Fighters Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu displayed a map of what he called The New Middle East at a UN General Assembly meeting. Gaza the West Bank and East Jerusalem had all been incorporated into a greater Israel. Palestine had ceased to exist.
10:28
The Palestinians are being forced to choose between death from bombs, disease exposure, or starvation, or being driven from their Homeland. There will soon reach a point where death will be so ubiquitous that deportation for those who want to live will be the only option. Israel is lobbying countries in Latin America and Africa to accept Palestinian refugees.
10:58
Israeli leaders are calling this deportation “Voluntary Migration”. Voluntary Migration is not a new concept in the annals of genocide. In the Warsaw Ghetto the Nazis handed out three kilograms of bread and one kilogram of marmalade to anyone who voluntarily registered for deportation. There were times when hundreds of people had to wait in line for several hours to be deported.
11:34
Marek Edelman the only surviving “commander of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising writes in his book the The Ghetto Fights “The number of people anxious to obtain three kilos of bread was such that the transports now leaving twice daily with 12,000 people could not accommodate them all.” And, Edelman by the way repeatedly condemned the Zionist state of Israel calling it unviable and supported Palestinian resistance including armed resistance.
12:10
The Nazis shipped their victims to death camps the Israelis will ship their victims to squalled refugee camps in countries outside of Israel. This is the plan no one, especially the Biden Administration, intends to stop it. The most disturbing lesson I learned while covering armed conflicts for two decades is that we all have the capacity with little prodding to become willing executioners. The line between the victim and the victimizer is razor thin.
12:51
The dark lusts of racial and ethnic supremacy, of vengeance and hate, of the eradication of those we condemn as embodying evil are poisons that are not circumscribed by race, nationality, ethnicity, or religion. We can all become Nazis. It takes very little and if we do not stand in eternal vigilance over evil, our evil, we become like those carrying out the mass killing in Gaza—MONSTERS.
13:33
Perhaps the saddest irony is that a people once in need of protection from genocide now commit it. The cries of those expiring under the rubble in Gaza are the cries of the boys and men executed by the Bosnian Serbs at Srebrenica, the over 1.5 million Cambodians killed by the Khmer Rouge, the thousands of Tootsie families burned alive in churches and the tens of thousands of Jews executed by the Einsatzgruppen at Babi Yar in Ukraine. The genocide carried out during the Holocaust is not an historical relic. It lives lurking in the shadows waiting to ignite its vicious contagion.
14:30
But, this truth is bitter and hard to confront. We prefer the myth. We prefer to see in our own kind, our own race, our own ethnicity, our own Nation, our own religion… Superior virtues. We prefer to sanctify our hatred. The German playwright and revolutionary Ernst Toller, unable to rouse an indifferent world to assist victims and refugees from the Spanish Civil War hanged himself in 1939 in a room at the Mayflower Hotel in New York City. On his hotel desk were photos of dead Spanish children.
15:14
“Most people have no imagination,” he wrote, “If they could imagine the sufferings of others they would not make them suffer so. What separated a German mother from a French mother slogans which deafened us so that we could not hear the truth. Primo Levy who survived the death camps railed against the false morally uplifting narrative of the Holocaust that culminates in the creation of the State of Israel. A narrative embraced by the Holocaust Museum, Washington, DC.
15:53
“The contemporary history of the Third Reich,” he writes, “Could be reread as a war against memory. An Orwellian falsification of memory, falsification of reality, negation of reality,” he wonders, “If we who have returned have been able to understand and make others understand our experience.
16:17
We all inhabit a Morally Gray Zone. We all can be induced to become part of the apparatus of death often for trivial reasons and paltry rewards. This is the terrifying truth of the Holocaust and the Israelis are no exception. One month into the genocide according to a poll in Time Magazine 57% of Israelis believed Israel was not using enough force in Gaza. These Israelis saw the same images you and I see the children with amputated limbs; the chalky lifeless bodies lifted out from under the rubble; the long trenches filled with corpses wrapped in white shrouds; the screams of the Wounded in the hospital corridors.
17:16
Only 2% of Israelis said Israel was using too much force. The South African lawyers at The Hague who compared Israel's crimes with those carried out by the apartheid regime in South Africa showed the court a video of Israeli soldiers celebrating and calling for the death of Palestinians. They sang, as they danced, “there are no uninvolved civilians.” As evidence that genocidal intent descends from the top to the bottom of the Israeli War Machine and political system. Racism an attribute of all Colonial-Settler Societies, whether the British colonists in India and Kenya or the French in Algeria pervades Israeli Society.
18:03
Palestinians are seen as Vermin to be controlled or exterminated. It is very hard not to be cynical about the plethora of university courses about the Holocaust given the censorship and banning of groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voices for Peace. What is the point of studying the Holocaust if you do not understand its fundamental lesson. When you have the capacity to stop genocide and you do not you are culpable.
18:49
It is hard not to be cynical about the humanitarian interventionists: Barack Obama, Tony Blair, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Samantha Power who talk in sanctimonious rhymes about the responsibility to protect, but are silent about war crimes when speaking out would threaten their status and careers. None of the humanitarian interventions they championed Bosnia, Darfur, Libya came close to replicating the suffering and Slaughter in Gaza but there is a cost to defending Palestinians. A cost they do not intend to pay.
19:32
The moral Universe has now been turned upside down those of us who oppose genocide are accused of advocating it. Those who carry out genocide are said to have the right to defend themselves, vetoing ceasefires, and providing 2,000-lb bombs to Israel that throw out out metal fragments for thousands of feet in densely packed refugee camps is the road to peace.
20:06
Refusing to negotiate—will free the hostages. Bombing hospitals, schools, mosques, churches, ambulances, and refugee camps, obliterating families are routine acts of War. Carrying out genocide in Gaza is a way to de-radicalize Palestinians. Attacking Houthi bases in Yemen will de-escalate a regional conflict and remember it is not only Israel which has abandoned its citizens held hostage in Gaza.
20:39
There are hundreds of Palestinians who are US citizens or permanent residents trapped in Gaza and the Biden Administration is making no discernible effort, as demanded by US law, to secure their safety. None of this makes sense as protesters around the world realize if the genocide in Gaza is not halted it will presage a new world order—a world where the old rules more honored in the breach than the observants no longer matter. It will be a world where nations with vast bureaucratic structures and technologically advanced military systems carry out in public view massive killing projects.
21:28
The industrialized nations weakened, fearful of global chaos are sending an ominous message to the global South and anyone who might think of revolt, “We will kill you without restraint and no one will stop us. One day you will all be Palestinians.” I fear that we live in a world in which war and racism are ubiquitous in which the powers of government mobilization and legitimization are powerful and increasing in which a sense of personal responsibility is increasingly attenuated by specialization and bureaucratization in which the peer group exerts tremendous pressure on behavior and sets moral Norms.
22:14
Christopher Browning writes in Ordinary Men about a German reserve police battalion in World War II that was ultimately responsible for the murder of 83,000 Jews. In such a world I fear modern governments that wish to commit mass murder will seldom fail in their efforts for being unable to induce Ordinary Men to become their Willing Executioners. Evil is protean; it mutates; it finds new forms and expressions; it changes its face, but not its Essence.
22:52
Germany orchestrated the murder of 6 million Jews as well as over 6 million gypsies, Poles, homosexuals, Communists, Jehovah Witnesses, Freemason, artists, journalists, Soviet prisoners of War, people with physical and intellectual disabilities and political opponents.
23:12
It immediately set out after the war to expiate itself for its crimes. It deftly transferred its racism and demonization to Muslims… with Racial Supremacy remaining firmly rooted in the German Psyche. At the same time Germany and the US rehabilitated thousands of former Nazis especially from the intelligence services and the scientific community and did little to prosecute those who directed Nazi War Crimes. Germany today is Israel's second largest arms supplier following the US.
23:50
The supposed campaign in the US and Germany against anti-Semitism interpreted as any statement that is critical of the state of Israel or denounces the genocide is the Latest Subterfuge to Champion White Power. It is why Germany and the US which have effectively criminalized support for Palestinians and the most retrograde White Supremacists including Philo-Semitists such as John Hagee or Marjorie Taylor Greene fervently back Israel.
24:24
The Israeli historian, Ilan Pappé, writes that “Germany's unequivocal support for Israel is a form of blackmail. The argument for a Jewish State as compensation for the Holocaust was a powerful argument so powerful that nobody listened to the outright rejection of the UN Solution by the overwhelming majority of the people of Palestine,” Pappé writes. “What comes out clearly is a European wish to atone. The basic and natural rights of the Palestinians should be sidelined dwarfed and forgotten all together for the sake of the Forgiveness that Europe was seeking from the newly formed Jewish state. It was much easier to rectify the Nazi evil vis a vis Zionist movement than facing the Jews of the world, in general. It was less complex. and more, importantly. it did not involve facing the victims of the Holocaust themselves but rather a state that claimed to represent them. The price for this more convenient atonement was robbing the Palestinians of every basic and natural right they had, and allowing the Zionist movement to ethnically cleanse them, without fear of any rebuke or condemnation.”
25:49
I knew Dr. Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi the co-founder of Hamas along with Sheikh Yassin. al-Rantisi's family were expelled to the Gaza Strip by Zionist militias from historic Palestine during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. He did not fit the demonized image of a Hamas leader. He was a soft-spoken articulate and highly educated pediatrician who had graduated first in his class at Egypt's Alexandria University.
26:30
As a 9-year-old boy he had witnessed in Khan Yunis the executions of 275 Palestinian men and boys, including his uncle, when Israel briefly occupied the Gaza Strip in 1956, the subject of Joe Sako's magisterial book Footnotes In Gaza. Scores of Palestinians were also executed by Israeli soldiers in the neighboring town of Rafah, where today hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have been forced to flee now that Khan Yunis is under attack. I still remember “the wailing and the tears of my father over his brother al-Rantisi,” told me. “I couldn't sleep for many months after that. It left a wound in my heart that can never heal. I'm telling you a story and I'm almost crying this sort of action can never be forgotten. They planted hatred in our hearts.
27:35
He knew he could never trust the Israelis. He knew that the goal of the Zionist state was the occupation of all of historic Palestine. And, Israel would go on to seize Gaza and the West Bank in 1967 along with Syria's Golan Heights and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula. And, he knew the Eternal Subjugation or Extermination of the Palestinian people was the goal of the Zionist movement. Al-Rantisi and Yassin were assassinated in 2004 by Israel. Al-Rantisi's Widow Jamila Abdallah Taha al-Shanti had a doctorate in English and taught at the Islamic University in Gaza. The couple had six children one of whom was killed along with his father. The family's home where I visited them was bombed and destroyed during the 2014 Israeli assault on Gaza known as Operation Protective Edge.
28:48
Jamila was killed by Israel on October 19th of this year. Israel's genocide is rearing a new generation of enraged traumatized and dispossessed Palestinians who have lost family members, friends, homes, communities, and any hope of living ordinary lives. And, they too will seek retribution. Their small acts of terrorism will counter Israel's State Terror. They will hate as they have been hated and this lust for vengeance is universal.
29:26
After world War II, a clandestine unit of Jews who served in the Jewish Brigade of the British army hunted down former Nazis and assassinated them. To understand is not to condone but we must understand if this cycle of violence is to be stopped. I and the public know what all school children learn W H Odin wrote, “Those to whom evil is done do evil in return.” The Palestinian attacks of October 7th which left some 1,200 Israelis dead feeds this lust within Israel just as Israel's 17-year Siege and obliteration of Gaza feeds this lust among Palestinians. There is little discussion in the Israeli media of the slaughter in Gaza or the suffering of Palestinians some two million of whom have been driven from their homes.
30:30
But, a constant repetition of the stories of Israeli suffering, death and heroism: Only our victims matter. The shooting dead of the three Israeli hostages who apparently escaped their captors and approached Israeli forces with their shirts off waving a white flag and calling out for help in Hebrew is not only tragic but a glimpse of Israel's Rules of Engagement in Gaza. These rules are kill anything that moves. Israel may appear triumphant after it finishes its genocidal campaign in Gaza and increasingly the West Bank.
31:14
It may achieve its demented goal. Its murderous Rampages and genocidal violence may exterminate or ethnically cleanse Palestinians. Its dream of a state exclusively for Jews with any Palestinians who remain stripped of their basic rights may be realized. At that point, it will revel in its blood soaked victory; it will celebrate its war criminals. Its genocide will be erased from public consciousness and tossed into Israel's huge black hole of historical Amnesia and those with a conscience in Israel will be silenced and persecuted.
31:56
But, by the time Israel achieves its decimation of Gaza (and Israel is talking about months of warfare), It will have signed its own death sentence. Its Façade of Civility, its supposed vaunted respect for the rule of law and democracy, its mythical story of the courageous Israeli military and miraculous birth of the Jewish Nation will lie in ash-heaps. Israel's Social Capital will be spent liberal Zionism, always an oxymoron, since Israelis never intended to give equal rights to Palestinians has already been replaced by religious Zionism. Religious Zionism gives Divine Sanction to an ugly repressive hate-filled apartheid regime deeply alienated. Alienating younger generations of Americans, including Jews. Its Patron the United States as new generations come to power will distance itself from Israel and Religious Zionism the way it is distancing itself from Ukraine.
33:05
Israel's support will come from America's Christianized Fascists who see Israel's domination of ancient Biblical land as a harbinger of the second coming and in its subjugation of Arabs a kindred racism. Despotisms can exist long after their past due, but they are terminal. You don't have to be a Biblical scholar to see that Israel's Lust For Rivers of Blood is antithetical to the core values of Judaism.
33:38
The cynical weaponization of the Holocaust including branding Palestinians as Nazis has little efficacy when you carry out a live-streamed genocide against 2.3 million people trapped in a concentration camp. Nations need more than Force to survive. They need a Mystique. This Mystique provides purpose, Civility and even nobility to inspire citizens to sacrifice for the nation. This Mystique offers much of it once embodied in Liberal Zionism hope for the future.
34:15
It provides meaning it provides national identity. When Mystiques implode when they are exposed as lies—a Central Foundation of state power collapses. I reported on the death of the Communist Mystiques in 1989 during the Revolutions in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania. The police and the military decided there was nothing left to defend. Israel's Decay will engender the same lassitude and apathy. It will become harder and harder to recruit indigenous collaborators such as Mahmoud Abbas and The Palestinian Authority, reviled by most Palestinians, to do the bidding of the colonizers.
35:03
All Israel has left is escalating violence including the widespread use of torture which accelerates the decline. The whole sale violence works in the short term, as it did in the war waged by the French and Algeria, The Dirty War waged by Argentina's military dictatorship, and during Britain's conflict in Kenya and Northern Ireland. But in the long term it is suicidal. Israel may wipe out the current Hamas leadership but the past and current assassinations of scores of Palestinian leaders has done little to blunt resistance. The Siege and genocide in Gaza has produced a new generation prepared to take the place of martyred leaders. Israel has sent the stock of its adversary into the stratosphere.
35:57
Israel was already at war with itself before October 7th. Israelis were protesting to prevent Netanyahu's abolition of Judicial Independence. The religious bigots and Zionist Fanatics currently in power had mounted a determined attack on secularism. Israel's Unity since the attack is precarious. It is a negative Unity. It is held together by hatred, and even this hatred is not enough to keep protesters from decrying the government's abandonment of Israeli hostages in Gaza. Hatred is a dangerous political commodity. Once finished with one enemy, those who stoke hatred go in search of another. The Palestinian, “Human animals when eradicated or subdued will be replaced by disloyal Palestinians with Israeli citizenship already targeted by a series of discriminatory laws along with Jewish apostates and traitors.
37:01
The demonized group can never be redeemed or cured. A politics of hatred creates a permanent instability that is exploited by those seeking the destruction of Civil Society. The Israeli scholar Yeshayahu Leibowitz who Isaiah Berlin called “The conscience of Israel” warned, “That quote if Israel did not separate church and state it would give rise to a corrupt a corrupt Rabbinet that would warp Judaism into a fascistic cult. Religious nationalism is to religion what ‘National Socialism’ was to socialism,” warned Leibowitz who died in 1994.
37:44
He understood that “The blind veneration of the military, especially after the 1967 war, was dangerous and will lead to the ultimate destruction of democracy. Our situation will deteriorate to that of a second Vietnam. To a war and constant escalation without Prospect of ultimate resolution,” he wrote. He foresaw that the Arabs would be the working people and the Jews the administrators, inspectors, officials, and police mainly (secret police). A state ruling a hostile population of 1.5 million to 2 million foreigners would necessarily become a secret police state with all that implies for education, free speech, and democratic institutions. The corruption characteristic of every Colonial regime would also Prevail in the state of Israel. The administration would have to suppress Arab Insurgency, on the one hand and acquire Arab quislings, on the other. There is, also, good reason to fear that the Israel Defense Force which has been until now a People's Army would (as a result of being transformed into an army of occupation to generate and its commanders) become military Governors and would resemble their colleagues in other nations.
39:04
He saw the rise of virulent racism that would consume Israeli Society. He knew that prolonged occupation of the Palestinians would spawn, in his words, concentration camps for the occupied and as he wrote, “Israel would not deserve to exist and it would not be worthwhile to preserve it.” Jews he understood can also become Pharaoh. The decision to obliterate Gaza has long been the dream of Israeli Fanatics—Heirs of the Fascistic Movement led by the extremist Meir Kahana (who I knew and covered) who was barred from running for office and whose party was outlawed in 1994 and declared a terrorist organization by Israel and the United States.
39:52
They Champion the iconography and language of their their homegrown fascism. Jewish identity and Jewish nationalism are the Zionist versions of “Blood and Soil” (The Nazi doctrine of Aryan Supremacy/Supermen/Übermenschen: note by RM). Jewish Supremacy is Sanctified by God as is the slaughter of the Palestinians who are compared to the biblical Amalekites massacred by the Israelis. Enemies usually Muslims slated for extinction are subhuman (untermenschen). Violence and the threat of violence are the only forms of communication those outside the magic circle of Jewish Nationalism understand.
40:33
Millions of Muslims and Christians including those with Israeli citizenship are to be purged. The Biden presidency which ironically may have signed its own political death certificate is tethered to Israel's genocide. It tries to distance itself rhetorically but at the same time it funnels the billions of dollars of weapons demanded by Israel including 14.3 billion in supplemental military aid to augment the 3.8 billion in annual “Aid to Finish the job”. It is a full partner in Israel's genocidal project. There is no way to deny the courage of the Armed Palestinian resistance whether you accept their ideology or not as they face down one of the most Advanced Military Machines on the planet with little more than small arms but there are also other forms of resistance that to me are as important.
41:36
Writers poets journalists and photographers, many of whom have been targeted and killed by Israel affirm the belief, that one day, a day the writers journalists and photographers may never see, the words and images will provoke empathy, understanding, outrage, and provide wisdom. They Chronicle, not only the facts, although, the facts are important, but the texture, sacredness and grief of lives and communities lost. They tell the world—what this genocide is like how those caught in its (inaudible) of death endure, how there are those who sacrifice for others, and those who do not, what fear and hunger are like, what death is like. They transmit the cries of the children, the wails of grief of the mothers.
42:31
The daily struggle in the face of savage industrial violence, the triumph of their Humanity through filth, sickness, humiliation, and fear. This is why writers photographers and journalists are targeted by aggressors in war, including the Israelis.
42:51
They stand as witnesses to evil and evil the aggressors want buried and forgotten. They expose the lies. They condemn even from the grave their killers. Israel has killed at least 13 Palestinian poets and writers along with over 83 journalists and media workers in Gaza and three in Lebanon since October 7th. I experienced futility and outrage when I covered Wars for two decades in Central America the Middle East Africa and the Balkans. I wondered if I had done enough or if it was even worth the risk, but you go on because to do nothing is to be complicit. You report because you care. You make it hard for the killers to deny their crimes.
The following is a stark and brutal portrayal of what is happening in Gaza. I’ve read it three times and each time, if it is possible, has been harder than the time before. Some of you may wish to skip to the Questions and Answers sections, but Let me encourage you to read on as it is as stark a portrayal of what Palestinians in Gaza are living, not daily, nor hourly, but moment by moment. If, by reading this you gain a deeper understanding of what we are struggling to stop and end and finish that would be a good thing, wouldn’t it?
43:46
This brings me to the Palestinian novelist and playwright Atef Abu Saif. He and his 15-year-old son, Yasser, who live in the occupied West Bank were visiting family in Gaza where he was born when Israel began its scorched Earth campaign. Atef is no stranger to the violence of the Israeli occupiers. He was two months old during the 1973 war and writes, “I've been living through wars ever since. Just as life is a pause between two deaths, Palestine as a place, and, as an idea, is a timeout in the middle of many wars.” During operation castled the 2008-2009 Israeli assault on Gaza, I sheltered in the corridor of his Gaza family home for 22 nights with his wife Hana and two children while Israel bombed and shelled.
44:43
His book The Drone Eats With Me: Diaries From A City Under Fire is an account of Operation Protective Edge, the 2014 Israeli assault on Gaza that killed 1,523 Palestinian civilians including 519 children. “Memories of War can be strangely positive because to have them, at all, means you must have survived,” he notes sardonically. He did what writers, do including the Professor and Poet Refaat Alareer, who was killed along with Refaat's brother, sister, and her four children in an air strike on his sister's apartment in Gaza on December 7th. Atef once again finding himself living amid the explosions and carnage from Israeli shells and bombs doggedly publishes his Observations and Reflections.
45:45
His accounts are often difficult to transmit because of Israel's blockage of Internet and phone service. On the first day of the Israeli bombardment a friend, a young poet and musician Omar Abu Shawish is killed. Apparently an Israeli Naval bombardment, though later reports would say he was killed in an air strike, as he was walking to work Atef wonders about the Israeli soldiers watching him and his family with their infrared lenses and satellite photography “Can they count the loaves of bread in my basket or the number of Falafel balls on my plate?” he wonders. He watches the crowds of dazed and confused families: their homes in rubble, carrying mattresses, bags of clothes, food, and drink.
46:33
He stands mutely before the supermarket, the “bureau de change” the Falafel shop, the fruit stalls, the perfume parlor, the Sweet Shop, the toy shop—all burned. “Blood was everywhere along with bits of kids toys, cans from the supermarket, smashed fruit, broken bicycles, and shattered perfume bottles he writes the place looked like a charcoal drawing of a town scorched by a dragon. I went to the Press house where journalists were frantically downloading images and writing reports for their agencies. I was sitting with Belal, the Press house manager, when an explosion shook the building windows shattered and the ceiling collapsed onto us in chunks. We ran toward the central hall: one of the journalists was bleeding, having been hit by flying glass after 20 minutes. We ventured out to inspect the damage I noticed that Ramadan decorations were still hanging in the street. The city has become a wasteland of rubble and debris.”
47:39
Atef who has been the Palestinian authorities minister of culture since 2019 writes in the early days of the Israeli shelling “Beautiful buildings fall like Columns of smoke.” I often think about the time I was shot as a kid during the First Intifada and how my mother told me I actually died for a few minutes before being brought back to life. Maybe I can do the same this time, I think.
48:06
He leaves his teenage son with family members. The Palestinian logic is that in wartime we should all sleep in different places so that if part of the family is killed another part lives. He writes, “The UN schools are getting more crowded with displaced families—the hope is that the UN flag will save them though in previous Wars this hasn't been the case.” On Tuesday, October 17th he writes, “I see death approaching, hear its steps growing louder. ‘Just to be done with it’” I think. “It's the 11th day of the conflict but all the days have merged into one the same bombardment, the same fear, the same smell.” On the news I read the names of the dead on the ticker at the bottom of the screen. I wait for my name to appear. In the morning my phone rang. It was Rula, a relative in the West Bank, telling me she had heard there had been an air strike at Tel al-Hawa, a neighborhood on the south side of Gaza City, where my cousin Hatm lives. Hatm is married to Huda, my wife's only sister, he lives in a four-story building that houses his mother and brothers and their families. I called around but no one's phone was working. I walked to al-Shifa hospital to read the names. Lists of the dead are pinned up daily outside a makeshift morgue I could barely approach the building. Thousands of Gazans had made the hospital their home. Its Gardens, its hallways, every empty space, or spare Corner had a family in it. I gave up and headed toward Hatm’s. 30 minutes later I was on his street. Rula had been right. Huda and Hatm's building had been hit only an hour earlier. The bodies of their daughter and grandchild had already been retrieved. The only known Survivor was Wism, one of their other daughters, who had been taken to the ICU.
50:11
Wism had gone straight into surgery where both of her legs and her right hand had been amputated. Her graduation ceremony from art college had taken place only the day before. She has to spend the rest of her life without legs with one hand. What about the others I asked someone, “We can't find them,” came the reply amid the rubble. We shouted, “Hello, can anyone hear us?” We called out the names of those still missing hoping some might still be alive. By the end of the day we managed to find five bodies including that of a three-month-old. We went to the cemetery to bury them them. In the evening I went to see Wism in the hospital. She was barely awake.
51:01
After half an hour she asked me, “Uncle, I'm Dreaming, right?” I said. “We are all in a dream.” “My dream is terrifying, why?” “All our dreams are terrifying.” After 10 minutes of silence, she said, “Don't lie to me, Uncle, in my dream I don't have legs. It's true isn't it? I have no legs. but you said, ‘it's a dream,’ I don't like this dream, Uncle.”
51:33
I had to leave for a long 10 minutes I cried and cried overwhelmed by the horrors of the past few days. I walked out of the hospital and found myself wandering the streets. I thought idly, “We could turn this city into a film set for war movies. Second World War films and end of the world movies. We could hire it out to the best Hollywood directors, ‘doomsday on demand’”. Who could have the courage to tell Hana, so far away, in Ramalah that her only sister had been killed. That her family had been killed. I phoned my colleague Manar and asked her to go to our house with a couple of friends and try to delay the news from getting to her. “Lie to her,” I told Manar. Say, “The building was attacked by F-16s but the neighbors think Huda and Hatm were out at the time,” any lie that could help.
52:33
Leaflets and Arabic dropped by Israeli helicopters float down from the sky they announce that anyone who remains north of the Wadi Waterway will be considered a partner to terrorism—meaning Atef writes, “The Israelis can shoot on site.” The electricity is cut, food, fuel, and water run out. The wounded are operated on without anesthesia. There are no painkillers or sedatives. He visits his niece Wism racked with pain in al-Shifa Hospital who asks him for a lethal injection. She says, “Allah will forgive her.” But, he will not forgive me Wism, “I'm going to ask him to, on your behalf,” she says. After air strikes he joins the rescue teams under the cricket-like hum of drones we couldn't see in the sky. A line from T S Elliot a heap of broken images runs through his head. The injured and the dead are transported on three-wheeled bicycles or dragged along in carts by animals. “We picked up pieces of mutilated bodies and gathered them on a blanket. You find a leg here a hand there while the rest looks like minced meat,” he writes.
53:48
In the past week many Gazans have started writing their names on their hands and legs in pen or permanent marker so they can be identified when death comes. This might seem macabre but it makes perfect sense, “We want to be remembered. We want our stories to be told. We seek dignity. At the very least, our names will be on our Graves.”
54:13
The smell of unretrieved bodies under the ruins of a house hit last week remains in the air the more time passes the stronger the smell. The scenes around him become surreal on November 19th day, the 44th of the assault he writes, “A man rides a horse toward me with a body of a dead teenager slung over the saddle in front. It seems it's his son perhaps it looks like a scene from a historical movie only the horse is weak and barely able to move he is back from no battle he is no Knight his eyes are full of tears as he holds the little riding crop in one hand and the Bridal in the other. I have an Impulse to photograph him but then feel suddenly sick at the idea he salutes no one he barely looks up he's too consumed with his own loss. Most people are using the Camp's old Cemetery it's the safest and although it is technically long since full they have started digging shallower Graves and burying the dead on top of the old keeping families together, of course.”
55:26
“On November 21st after constant tank shelling he decides to flee the Jabalia neighborhood in the north of Gaza for the South with his son and mother-in-law who is in a wheelchair. They must pass through Israeli checkpoints where soldiers randomly select men and boys from the line for detention. Scores of bodies are strewn along both sides of the road he writes rotting it seems into the ground the smell is horrendous. A hand reach reaches out toward us from the window of a burned out car as if asking for something for me specifically I see what looks like two headless bodies in a car Limbs and precarious body parts just thrown away and left to fester he tells his son Yasser, ‘Don't look. Just keep walking, son.’”
56:15
In early December, his family home is destroyed in an air strike the house, a rider… a writer grows up in is a well from which to draw material in which of each of my novels whenever I wanted to depict a typical house in the camp I conjured ours I'd move the furniture around a bit change the name of the alley but who was I kidding it was always our house. All the houses in Jabalia are small they're built randomly haphazardly and they're not made to last these houses replace the tents that Palestinians like my grandmother Aisha lived in after the displacements of 1948. Those who built them always thought they'd soon be returning to the beautiful spacious homes they left behind in the towns and Villages of Historic Palestine.
57:07
That return never happened despite our many rituals of Hope like safeguarding the key to the old family home the future keeps betraying us but the past is ours. Though I've lived in many cities around the world and visited many more that tiny ramshackle abode was the only place I ever felt at home he goes on friends and colleagues always asked why don't you live in Europe or America you have the opportunity. My students chimed in why did you return to Gaza my answer was always the same, “Because in Gaza, in an Alleyway, in the Safah neighborhood of Jabalia there stands a little house that cannot be found anywhere else in the world if on doomsday God were to ask me where I would like to be sent I wasn't wouldn't hesitate in saying home. “Now, there is no home.”
58:07
Atef, as I write, is trapped in southern Gaza with his son. His niece was transferred to a hospital in Egypt and Atef continues to write, “We are called as Believers—Muslims, Christians, and Jews to stand with the oppressed. We are called to defy malignant power.” Atef, Refaat and those like them who speak to us at the risk of death remind us of this injunction they speak so we will not be silent they speak so we will take these words and images and hold them up to the principalities of the world, the media politicians diplomats universities the wealthy and privileged the weapons manufacturers, the Pentagon, and the Israel Lobby and demand that this genocide cease.
59:14
The Biden Administration is playing a very cynical game. It insists it is trying to halt, what's by its own mission is Israel's indiscriminate bombing of Palestinians, while bypassing Congress to speed up the supply of weapons to Israel including dumb bombs. It insists it wants the fighting in Gaza to end while it vetoes ceasefire resolutions at the UN. It insists it upholds the rule of law while it subverts the legal mechanism at the International Court of Justice that can halt the genocide. Cynicism pervades every word Biden, Blinkin, Jake Sullivan, and Brett McGurk, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse who support this genocide utter.
1:00:04
This cynicism extends to us our revulsion for Donald Trump, the Biden White House believes, will impel us to keep Biden in office. On any other issue, this might be the case, but it cannot be the case with genocide. Genocide is not a political problem. It is a moral one. We cannot, no matter what the cost, support those who commit, or are accomplice to genocide, even, if it means we are forced to endure the dreaded return of Trump. Genocide is the crime of all crimes. It is the purest expression of evil. We must stand, unequivocally with the Palestinians. We must demand “Justice”. We must hold Biden accountable if we do not we join the long list of those, who for expediency or because of indifference, have sold out the Palestinians and sold out all of the oppressed.
1:01:03
I read from the Hadith collection of Imam al-Bukari he writes, “The prophet peace be upon him once said to us, help your brother, the oppressor and the oppressed, we asked, Oh Messenger of God, We understand how we can help one oppressed, but how should we help one who is oppressing? By stopping him from oppressing others, he replied.”
Evil has not changed down the millenniums but neither has goodness, thank you.
Audience Q&A moderated by Saffet Catovic
QUESTION:
1:02:17
Once again this is questions from the audience and we'll try to get through as many of them as possible first question and I don't I didn't put this at the top it sort of just came there what can we learn from the Bosnian war in terms of the changing changing political action and public sentiment to end the genocide in Gaza?
CHRIS HEDGES:
1:02:36
Well, we can learn, first of all indifference, because that genocide lasted three years before there was a reaction and the only reason there was a reaction is not because there was any kind of moral calculation by the Clinton Administration but because with the overrunning of the safe areas in Srebrenica and Zepa and the massacre (which I mentioned in my talk). At Srebrenica the UN peacekeeping force disintegrated, proved ineffective that there were Dutch peacekeepers in Srebrenica. They were unable to protect those who were in this supposed safe area.
1:03:25
And, the Clinton administration had made a promise with the UN that should the peacekeeping forces be overrun they would intervene. So, Clinton's hand was forced he did not want US troops on the ground and so he launched a bombing campaign. And, I think the lesson is the Deep cynicism. (I think all of us who reported overseas whether it was now Salvador Gaza or Bosnia or anyone else the Deep cynicism by the United States, by Washington, and by Europe.) And, we are watching this cynicism express itself during the genocide in Gaza where, on the one hand, they speak, of course, in minimizing civilian casualties, and, on the other hand, they're making sure the military supply chain to Israel is not only continued but even ramped-up.
1:04:24
Remember, especially with things like tank shells, if… We have the capacity to stop this now because so much of the munitions that Israel is using, which they're running out of, come directly from the US. I mean, I've been in Gaza when it was bombed by Israeli Jets and picked up pieces of metal that say made in Dayton Ohio. I also just want to draw if you're talking about Bosnia… I was in Sarajevo during the war we were hit with 300 to 400 shells a day I was three to four dead a day maybe four to five dead a day and about two dozen wounded a day and I don't want to minimize what took place in Sarajevo. 30 years later I still have nightmares about it. But, that's nothing compared to what's happening in Gaza—where you have hundreds of dead a day. So, I think, for those of us who have been under siege, it's driven home to us the intensity, the kind of carpet bombing, that Israel is carrying out remember Gaza is a tiny place it's 20 miles long and five miles wide so yeah those would be the lessons. So, yes, those would be the lessons.
QUESTION:
1:05:44
Thank you, what steps must be taken for the a “New Oslo Accord” and “Regional Perspective for Economic Development”—the foundation for lasting peace and I guess if you can speak about a little bit else if you can about the old Oslo Accord for those of us who may not be up to speed on that.
CHRIS HEDGES:
1:05:57
So, I covered Oslo and I knew Yitzhak Rabin. I knew Yasser Arafat quite well I even knew Abu Jihad. So, what? Oslo was never going to work. Rabin (to his credit) understood that the occupation was poisoning his country. And, that's why I quoted from the great Israeli scholar Yeshayahu Leibowitz who saw it all coming. But, his solution was to withdraw Israeli forces and create a colonial police force, i.e. the PA, which Abbas does. I mean, he has no credibility left even in the West Bank. The interesting thing about Arafat is that Arafat drew a line. He just wasn't going to be a complete puppet for the Israelis. Which is why, I think, most of us who covered Arafat believe he was poisoned by the Israelis. And, there's very strong evidence behind that. So, Oslo was an attempt for Israel to find a solution because (remember Israel would still control the borders) that was never going to Grant the Palestinian a state. At this point, Israel, especially with the occupation of the West Bank, it controls 60% of the West Bank has made the two-state solution impossible. Israel did it. And, now the only solution is From The River To The Sea a secular Palestinian maybe it has another name state where Palestinians, Jews everyone has equal rights that is the only route left. [applause]
QUESTION:
1:07:40
Do you think the ground swell of people coming together in protest—powered by social media makes any difference as compared to other and early genocides?
CHRIS HEDGES:
1:07:58
It always makes a difference. It may not end the genocide… but it calls out the hypocrisy of the ruling class and it scares them. And, anecdotally, I was very involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement in Zuccotti Park and, at the same time, a faction of my family, unfortunately, works on Wall Street, my cousins. They were terrified of Occupy. I know this from them. They were getting hourly updates.
1:08:38
Now, Occupy was one of the most benign, peaceful—Quakers and sandals kind of movement—but they're marching down Bond Street. They have a big puppet of a squid. They wouldn't even go out to the restaurants. They brought paper bag lunches to eat in their offices. So, the fact is… this is a whole other discussion on the destruction of American democracy (which I've written extensively on) but, in many ways the Ruling Oligarchic Corporate Class that has seized political power and, of course, the media… we can get into how the media is illegitimate and, it knows it. So, when people go out in the street it scares them, and, in the end, politics is a game of fear. That's what it is.
1:09:38
I did cover the Revolutions in Eastern Europe. I was in the “Magic Lantern Theater” every night with Václav Havel, the Prague playwright. And, these despotisms (and I think this is what's happened in Israel) devour themselves so you can't underestimate how important it is to get out and to protest. But, I would, also, say it's important… terribly important for the Palestinians who feel often forgotten and erased.
1:10:14
I didn't go to journalism school. I graduated from Harvard Divinity School. I come out of a religious tradition and I look at that kind of resistance as a moral imperative that it's not whether we're going to win. That's the wrong question! The right question is that it's where we have to be and where so many, especially young… you go to the protests in DC and it's really encouraging because they're young, they're smart, they're articulate, and that is where we have to be. I'm not going to guarantee that we're going to win but…
I don't fight fascists because I'm going to win—I fight fascists because they're fascists. [Applause]
(and an amen to)
QUESTION:
1:11:15
Another question, I understand the absolute importance of stopping oppression both to the oppressed and the oppressors alike, but how is this possible when we have such a minimal role in society. The protests have been enormous in changing public opinion of genocide but they have not yet to change the opinions of politicians in charge of the decision making. What is our role in stopping the oppressors as bystanders in America?
CHRIS HEDGES:
1:11:44
I think there has to be a line at which (and I am as terrified of a Trump presidency as probably many in this room) but there has to be a line that we draw that you can't cross. And, I think the problem is especially with the Democratic party we have never put that line in place. And, so what we've watched since the Clinton Administration is the Democratic Party transform itself into the Republican Party and the Republican Party goes so far to the right that it became insane.
1:12:18
But the Democratic Party, in Europe, would be a right-wing party. And, I think, that you know I was Ralph Nader's speech writer (and let me just put a plug for Ralph the most important most important Arab American political leader of our time who speaks fluent Arabic. I was in a restaurant with him, and, I speak Arabic. I'm trying to resurrect it because… I hope you've all read Joe Sako's great works Palestine and his Masterpiece Footnotes in Gaza. Footnotes in Gaza came because he and I went and spent 10 Days in… (actually I was so frustrated by the New York Times coverage of Gaza that I used my vacation time to go to Gaza) and spend 10 days in Khan Yunis and write this magazine piece for Harper called a Gaza Diary in which, at one point, they still had the Jewish settlements—we heard over the loudspeakers when the kids were coming out of school (unintelligible) and then we heard all sorts of words I'm not going to repeat but they were baiting these 10, 11 year old kids to throw rocks. And, then, when they threw rocks they shot them—in some cases kill them.
1:13:33
So, by the way, after publishing that piece the New York Times informed me that I would never report from the Middle East again but in that in those interviews in Khan Yunis we interviewed older residents who told us about the massacres of 1956. And, Harper's cut it out and Joe was so upset that he spent the next six years shuttling back and forth to Khan Yunis interviewing every eyewitness and survivor that he could find and did his book Footnotes in Gaza—which I have to admit even though I knew the story when I read it I at the end I was just weeping.
1:14:12
And, Joe and I, we've been working in Gaza for years and he called me up and he said and we're old men now you know he said, “We got to go back our next book is Gaza.” And, I said okay and I've already spoken to Simon and Schuster my publisher they will take it we don't know what it's going to look like because we don't know how far the Israelis are going to go. But, there are two forms of therapy that I have for Gaza one is attending the protests, and the other I found because I left the Middle East a long time ago my Arabic is really deteriorated but I'm taking classes three days a week and what in my other therapy is is studying my Arabic. [Applause]
QUESTION:
1:15:04
Last question—because we're coming close to the time we're going to have the congregational prayer for the Muslim Community.
Should the ICJ find the state of Israel guilty of of possessing the intent to commit genocide what are some of the penalties and sanctions that could be laid out. And, additionally, do you believe the International Community would actually act in order to carry out the sentencing or would geopolitical factors lead to a lack of legitimate action from the International Community.
CHRIS HEDGES:
1:15:43
So, the ICJ is a UN body, and whatever finding or whatever ruling it makes, even on a temporary injunction, saying there's enough evidence that Israel should… it has to be approved by the security Council and the US will veto it.. so it's moot. On the other hand, and let's just by the way honor South Africa. [Applause] They have stood with the Palestinians for decades. And, if the core (and you can be sure there will be heavy pressure from the US) One, not to issue in essence a temporary injunction saying there's enough evidence… they won't rule at first in two to three weeks on whether there's genocide… they'll just say there's enough evidence to bring the case therefore should stop.
1:16:53
We know there will be heavy, heavy pressure because under International Law if there is a ruling that Israel is committing genocide the United States is guilty as an accomplice which it is guilty of accomplice to genocide and Israel desperately wants to stop this. Because its whole justification for its Colonial-Settler project is rooted in the genocide carried out against the Jews. And, if they become or are found guilty of genocide, as they should be, then that kind of moral veneer, that ability of the Israel Lobby to essentially be immune from any kind of criticism. All of that collapses. It has deep existential… there deep existential issues for Israel.
1:17:55
So, again it's important because, I think and especially if you read the brief the 83 page brief, it's an educational… it's almost impossible to deny what's happening. The same way, and I speak at a lot of colleges with Students for Justice in Palestine, I don't know any any of I and I'm a strong supporter of the Boycott Investment and Sanction Movement, of course, the I don't no Universities have embraced BDS but the result of the movement is that it's educated an entire generation of young kids about Palestine.
1:18:35
And, that's why Israel spends so much energy and time to trying to defeat it. So, even though the ultimate goal we have, which is of course halting the genocide, may not be achieved by standing up and fighting against what I would call “radical evil” there are all sorts of victories that chip away at the foundations of power. And, in the end you know that is where we have to be. There was a great Jewish Rabbi Abraham Heschel who marched with Martin Luther King and he was criticized by other Rabbis for marching on the Sabbath and Abraham Heschel told the rabbis, “I pray with my feet.”