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A Genocide Foretold: Reporting on Survival and Resistance in Occupied Palestine
A Genocide Foretold confronts the stark realities of life under siege in Gaza and the heroic effort ordinary Palestinians are waging to resist and survive. Weaving together personal stories, historical context, and unflinching journalism, Chris Hedges provides an intimate portrait of systemic oppression, occupation, and violence. The book includes chapters
● What life is like in Gaza City and Ramallah in the midst of approaching bombs and gunfire.
● The history of the dispossession of Palestinians of their land in relation to the ideology of Zionism.
● A portrait of Amr, a seventeen-year-old high school student who is forced to evacuate his village with his family.
● Psychoanalysis of the state of permanent war that has led to the destruction of hospitals, telecommunications centers, governmental buildings, roads, homes universities, schools, and libraries and archaeological and heritage sites in Gaza.
● The ways in which the collective retribution against innocents is a familiar tactic employed by colonial rulers.
● A heartbreaking final chapter called "Letter to the Children of Gaza."
● What life is like in Gaza City and Ramallah in the midst of approaching bombs and gunfire.
● The history of the dispossession of Palestinians of their land in relation to the ideology of Zionism.
● A portrait of Amr, a seventeen-year-old high school student who is forced to evacuate his village with his family.
● Psychoanalysis of the state of permanent war that has led to the destruction of hospitals, telecommunications centers, governmental buildings, roads, homes universities, schools, and libraries and archaeological and heritage sites in Gaza.
● The ways in which the collective retribution against innocents is a familiar tactic employed by colonial rulers.
● A heartbreaking final chapter called "Letter to the Children of Gaza."
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First published April 8, 2025
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About the author
Chris Hedges
59 books1,925 followersChristopher Lynn Hedges is an American journalist, author, and war correspondent, specializing in American and Middle Eastern politics and societies.
Hedges is known as the best-selling author of War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction.
Chris Hedges is currently a senior fellow at The Nation Institute in New York City.
Hedges is known as the best-selling author of War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction.
Chris Hedges is currently a senior fellow at The Nation Institute in New York City.
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April 21, 2025
“To do nothing is to be complicit.” Instead, “You make it hard for the killers to deny their crimes.” One guy tells Chris, “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.” “Satellite imagery indicates that the Israeli military has, since October 7, built roads and military bases in over 26 percent of Gaza, suggesting a permanent presence.” “If Israel can empty Gaza, the West Bank will be next.” “The ultimate goal is the annexation of the West Bank.” “Israel has ordered the largest West Bank land seizure in more than three decades, confiscating vast tracts of land northeast of Ramallah.” “The secular Palestinian Authority, which nominally governs the West Bank, is a hated colonial police force.” It “prohibits demonstrations and protests.”
Hamas was created in 1987 and didn’t have a military element (Qassam Brigades) until 1992. Just like “the Jewish militias that created the state of Israel” “it uses terrorism as a tactic.” Palestinians “hate as they have been hated.” As famed poet W.H. Auden wrote, “I and the public know, what all schoolchildren learn, those to whom evil is done, do evil in return.” “Zionism is the engine behind a century of Palestinians and Arab rage.” “Resistance movements are built on the blood of martyrs; Israel ensures a continual supply.”
AIPAC spent over $8 million to beat Cori Bush, and over $15 million to beat Jamal Bowman. Their crime? Calling for a halt in the genocide. Zionist Hasbara recast Jewish Voice for Peace as “Jewish Voice for Hamas” [but Hasbara won’t tell you why Netanyahu funded that same Hamas for over a decade – see Times of Israel and NYT articles]. There are thousands of people who immediately follow the acts of anti-Zionists; in one case “Boycott Israel” was seen on billboards yet “in a few hours our systems and analysts could find the exact organization, and even their names (to personally smear them), and where they live”. Three days later those billboards were gone. This system finds anti-Zionist campus or Facebook events within a minute, and “deals” with it. These days calling for everyone in Palestine and Israel to merely have equal rights is seen as an attack on Jews. How dare you want us to be fair? Zionists are deeply aware that the younger you are, the more likely these days you are to be sympathetic to Palestinians. Zionists often create an anonymous Zionist website; time then spent attacking it by anti-Zionists is time they can’t spent attacking Israel. One Zionist admitted of the technique, “That’s incredibly effective.” When in doubt Zionists call anything anti-Zionist a “hate group.” Note that Israel often does not deform the truth but inverts it: “We are the victim, not them”. “They are the aggressor, not us.” “We never target civilians, only THEY do”. “They use human shields, we don’t.” “They rape, we don’t.”
Between October 7 and September 22, 2024, Israel dropped more bombs (83,000 tons of explosives) than all the bombs dropped on Dresden, Hamburg and London combined during WWII. One Palestinian girl Hind Rajab was killed by 355 bullets after pleading for help for hours; that will teach young Palestinians not to ask for help. How dare she? The UN Special Rapporteur said post-October 7, “70% of recorded deaths have consistently been women and children.”
“By the time Israel achieves its decimation of Gaza, it will have signed its own death sentence.” Imagine wanting to remove your crumbling façade of civility and all your social capital. It’s like Jeffrey Epstein wanting one last party on Little Saint James Island. How big do your balls have to be to calmly finish the world’s first live-streamed genocide “against 2.3 million people trapped in a concentration camp”?
Fun Facts: The US recognized Israel in 1948 a mere eleven minutes after it declared itself a state. Germany provides around 30% of Israel’s military imports since October 7th. Such restraint by Germany not also sending Israel left-over Zyklon B stock. From 10/2023 to 7/2024, the US sent Israel 52,229 imprecise artillery rounds, and a whole bunch of other killing stuff including 75 fighter jets. How does a fast-moving fighter jet ensure the safety of an Israeli hostage? I’m asking for a friend. Present concern of NON-Zionist Women’s Rights Supporters: “Some 180 Palestinian women are giving birth daily amidst this chaos.” “The Israeli siege of Gaza resembles the Wehrmacht’s assault on Stalingrad, where over 90% of the city’s buildings were destroyed.” “Years ago, when Ehud Barak was asked how he would behave if he were a Palestinian, he said, ‘I would join a terrorist organization’.” Israel sells its weapons of death to around 130 nations (for a total of $13 billion in just 2023). Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said the opposite of good is not evil, but indifference. “From October 7, 2023, until the end of that month, 370,000 Israelis left, and a further 139,839 left the following month.” [Haaretz recently ran an article entitled, “Why 70 Percent of Israeli Scientists Abroad Don’t Return”].
Resistance: The only leader of the Warsaw Uprising who survived the war was Marek Edelman. But don’t expect ANY Zionist to ever mention him because he “condemned Zionist as a racist ideology used to justify the theft of Palestinian land, supported their armed resistance, and met frequently with Palestinian leaders.” This most heroic Jew was revered by fellow Jews, but to Zionists, he was a pariah. He famously said, “To be a Jew means always being with the oppressed and never the oppressors.” Amen… Famed Zionist Jabotinsky wrote, “Every native population in the world resists colonizers as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonized. That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary speck of hope.” Netanyahu’s job is to remove even that solitary speck of hope, while Zionist Quislings Cory Booker and Michael Rapport applaud. Zionism is the “last dying breath of imperialism. They’re trying to hold onto it. That’s why it’s so scary.” “Palestinian liberation is the cause of human liberation.”
Chris says, when things for the non-billionaires get much worse, “one day we will all be Palestinians.” He adds, “The slaughter – let’s stop pretending this is a war – is empowering an array of radical Islamists.” “The public debate about the Gaza slaughter engages in the absurd pretense that it is Israel, not the Palestinians, whose security and dignity are being threatened.” “Israelis, as a whole, cannot put themselves in the shoes of others.”
Collective retribution (punishing the masses) is not an Israeli invention: The US used it in the Philippines and Vietnam. The Germans used it in in Namibia, the Brits used it in Kenya and Malaya, the Nazis were big fans as well. It happens when you have a heartless unchecked occupier. Resistance comes when the occupied are no longer allowed to choose how they will live, and so some will choose how they will die.
Don’t expect US university presidents to denounce Israel’s behavior. Thus far, Chris writes, not one university president has called for a ceasefire, uttered the words “apartheid” or “genocide”, or called for sanctions or divestment. When I was at Sarah Lawrence College hanging frequently with its president Charles DeCarlo, his sole focus was in bringing in more money. – not the quality of education. I was taught what to think, not how to think. Critical thought and moral outrage began after I graduated. This is why Columbia University’s endowment is a whopping $13.64 billion and is nearly $90,000 a year to attend. If a student at Columbia objects their $ is going to support a genocide, chances are they’ll be called anti-Semitic or a terrorism supporter, get assaulted or jailed.
As one Jewish person told Chris Hedges about Israel, “It makes no sense to have a place for Jewish people that requires other people to suffer and die.” What a great book by Chris. I’ve read all of his books and not one isn’t great; they all push the boundaries that Rachel Maddow and Heather Cox Richardson will NEVER push – going beyond the comically narrow corporate-approved Blue vs Red debate into challenging what neither party intend to do for us taxpayers – free healthcare, end bipartisan permanent war and neoliberalism, or recommend structural change in the face of corporate fueled climate change, looming collapse and extinction.
Hamas was created in 1987 and didn’t have a military element (Qassam Brigades) until 1992. Just like “the Jewish militias that created the state of Israel” “it uses terrorism as a tactic.” Palestinians “hate as they have been hated.” As famed poet W.H. Auden wrote, “I and the public know, what all schoolchildren learn, those to whom evil is done, do evil in return.” “Zionism is the engine behind a century of Palestinians and Arab rage.” “Resistance movements are built on the blood of martyrs; Israel ensures a continual supply.”
AIPAC spent over $8 million to beat Cori Bush, and over $15 million to beat Jamal Bowman. Their crime? Calling for a halt in the genocide. Zionist Hasbara recast Jewish Voice for Peace as “Jewish Voice for Hamas” [but Hasbara won’t tell you why Netanyahu funded that same Hamas for over a decade – see Times of Israel and NYT articles]. There are thousands of people who immediately follow the acts of anti-Zionists; in one case “Boycott Israel” was seen on billboards yet “in a few hours our systems and analysts could find the exact organization, and even their names (to personally smear them), and where they live”. Three days later those billboards were gone. This system finds anti-Zionist campus or Facebook events within a minute, and “deals” with it. These days calling for everyone in Palestine and Israel to merely have equal rights is seen as an attack on Jews. How dare you want us to be fair? Zionists are deeply aware that the younger you are, the more likely these days you are to be sympathetic to Palestinians. Zionists often create an anonymous Zionist website; time then spent attacking it by anti-Zionists is time they can’t spent attacking Israel. One Zionist admitted of the technique, “That’s incredibly effective.” When in doubt Zionists call anything anti-Zionist a “hate group.” Note that Israel often does not deform the truth but inverts it: “We are the victim, not them”. “They are the aggressor, not us.” “We never target civilians, only THEY do”. “They use human shields, we don’t.” “They rape, we don’t.”
Between October 7 and September 22, 2024, Israel dropped more bombs (83,000 tons of explosives) than all the bombs dropped on Dresden, Hamburg and London combined during WWII. One Palestinian girl Hind Rajab was killed by 355 bullets after pleading for help for hours; that will teach young Palestinians not to ask for help. How dare she? The UN Special Rapporteur said post-October 7, “70% of recorded deaths have consistently been women and children.”
“By the time Israel achieves its decimation of Gaza, it will have signed its own death sentence.” Imagine wanting to remove your crumbling façade of civility and all your social capital. It’s like Jeffrey Epstein wanting one last party on Little Saint James Island. How big do your balls have to be to calmly finish the world’s first live-streamed genocide “against 2.3 million people trapped in a concentration camp”?
Fun Facts: The US recognized Israel in 1948 a mere eleven minutes after it declared itself a state. Germany provides around 30% of Israel’s military imports since October 7th. Such restraint by Germany not also sending Israel left-over Zyklon B stock. From 10/2023 to 7/2024, the US sent Israel 52,229 imprecise artillery rounds, and a whole bunch of other killing stuff including 75 fighter jets. How does a fast-moving fighter jet ensure the safety of an Israeli hostage? I’m asking for a friend. Present concern of NON-Zionist Women’s Rights Supporters: “Some 180 Palestinian women are giving birth daily amidst this chaos.” “The Israeli siege of Gaza resembles the Wehrmacht’s assault on Stalingrad, where over 90% of the city’s buildings were destroyed.” “Years ago, when Ehud Barak was asked how he would behave if he were a Palestinian, he said, ‘I would join a terrorist organization’.” Israel sells its weapons of death to around 130 nations (for a total of $13 billion in just 2023). Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said the opposite of good is not evil, but indifference. “From October 7, 2023, until the end of that month, 370,000 Israelis left, and a further 139,839 left the following month.” [Haaretz recently ran an article entitled, “Why 70 Percent of Israeli Scientists Abroad Don’t Return”].
Resistance: The only leader of the Warsaw Uprising who survived the war was Marek Edelman. But don’t expect ANY Zionist to ever mention him because he “condemned Zionist as a racist ideology used to justify the theft of Palestinian land, supported their armed resistance, and met frequently with Palestinian leaders.” This most heroic Jew was revered by fellow Jews, but to Zionists, he was a pariah. He famously said, “To be a Jew means always being with the oppressed and never the oppressors.” Amen… Famed Zionist Jabotinsky wrote, “Every native population in the world resists colonizers as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonized. That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary speck of hope.” Netanyahu’s job is to remove even that solitary speck of hope, while Zionist Quislings Cory Booker and Michael Rapport applaud. Zionism is the “last dying breath of imperialism. They’re trying to hold onto it. That’s why it’s so scary.” “Palestinian liberation is the cause of human liberation.”
Chris says, when things for the non-billionaires get much worse, “one day we will all be Palestinians.” He adds, “The slaughter – let’s stop pretending this is a war – is empowering an array of radical Islamists.” “The public debate about the Gaza slaughter engages in the absurd pretense that it is Israel, not the Palestinians, whose security and dignity are being threatened.” “Israelis, as a whole, cannot put themselves in the shoes of others.”
Collective retribution (punishing the masses) is not an Israeli invention: The US used it in the Philippines and Vietnam. The Germans used it in in Namibia, the Brits used it in Kenya and Malaya, the Nazis were big fans as well. It happens when you have a heartless unchecked occupier. Resistance comes when the occupied are no longer allowed to choose how they will live, and so some will choose how they will die.
Don’t expect US university presidents to denounce Israel’s behavior. Thus far, Chris writes, not one university president has called for a ceasefire, uttered the words “apartheid” or “genocide”, or called for sanctions or divestment. When I was at Sarah Lawrence College hanging frequently with its president Charles DeCarlo, his sole focus was in bringing in more money. – not the quality of education. I was taught what to think, not how to think. Critical thought and moral outrage began after I graduated. This is why Columbia University’s endowment is a whopping $13.64 billion and is nearly $90,000 a year to attend. If a student at Columbia objects their $ is going to support a genocide, chances are they’ll be called anti-Semitic or a terrorism supporter, get assaulted or jailed.
As one Jewish person told Chris Hedges about Israel, “It makes no sense to have a place for Jewish people that requires other people to suffer and die.” What a great book by Chris. I’ve read all of his books and not one isn’t great; they all push the boundaries that Rachel Maddow and Heather Cox Richardson will NEVER push – going beyond the comically narrow corporate-approved Blue vs Red debate into challenging what neither party intend to do for us taxpayers – free healthcare, end bipartisan permanent war and neoliberalism, or recommend structural change in the face of corporate fueled climate change, looming collapse and extinction.
April 23, 2025
O how this book's dark antisemitic narrative corrupts truth with venom'd tongue! With scorching rhetoric and history's cherry-picked remains, it paints Israel as monster incarnate, genocidal beast. Yet what malignant blindness fails to see the storm-tossed ship beset on every side! Israel stands not as conqueror but as promise fulfilled—the ancient covenant of a people's right to breathe free air upon ancestral soil, sanctioned by nations gathered, blessed by law's decree.
Have they not eyes to see the Arab citizens who walk Jerusalem's streets, who sit in judgment halls and healing chambers? Who cast their votes and raise their voices in the Knesset's halls? What genocide is this that grants its "victims" equal voice in governance? What ethnic cleansing leaves its targets prospering in the very heart it supposedly wishes purged?
The whiny Philistines' plight—tragic indeed—yet whose hands bear the stain? Those leaders who rejected peace when offered, who answered outstretched hands with bombs and knives! How many times must Israel drink from hope's cup only to find it poisoned by rejectionist fury? While children huddle in bomb shelters, what hypocrisy to condemn the walls that keep death's merchants at bay! Hamas inscribes Israel's destruction in its founding breath—yet Israel bears the blame when it defends its children's right to live?
Israel stands alone, a flowering democracy amid desert sands of tyranny. Its courts challenge prime ministers, its press speaks truth to power, its people argue fiercely in the public square—what other nation in that troubled region can claim such liberty? The accusation that global powers blindly champion Israeli misdeeds insults reason itself! Has any nation been more scrutinized, more investigated, more willing to bleed for peace while surrounded by those who pray for its destruction?
No! This is not "lawless barbarism" but civilization's desperate stand against those who would drag humanity back to darker ages. Israel represents not oppression but the inextinguishable light of human dignity—that same light that guided Whittier's pen against slavery's chains, that same fierce determination that justice shall prevail though earth's foundations shake!
Garbage victimhood falsity that's available on TikTok from morally-certain caricatures all day. Don't bother.
Have they not eyes to see the Arab citizens who walk Jerusalem's streets, who sit in judgment halls and healing chambers? Who cast their votes and raise their voices in the Knesset's halls? What genocide is this that grants its "victims" equal voice in governance? What ethnic cleansing leaves its targets prospering in the very heart it supposedly wishes purged?
The whiny Philistines' plight—tragic indeed—yet whose hands bear the stain? Those leaders who rejected peace when offered, who answered outstretched hands with bombs and knives! How many times must Israel drink from hope's cup only to find it poisoned by rejectionist fury? While children huddle in bomb shelters, what hypocrisy to condemn the walls that keep death's merchants at bay! Hamas inscribes Israel's destruction in its founding breath—yet Israel bears the blame when it defends its children's right to live?
Israel stands alone, a flowering democracy amid desert sands of tyranny. Its courts challenge prime ministers, its press speaks truth to power, its people argue fiercely in the public square—what other nation in that troubled region can claim such liberty? The accusation that global powers blindly champion Israeli misdeeds insults reason itself! Has any nation been more scrutinized, more investigated, more willing to bleed for peace while surrounded by those who pray for its destruction?
No! This is not "lawless barbarism" but civilization's desperate stand against those who would drag humanity back to darker ages. Israel represents not oppression but the inextinguishable light of human dignity—that same light that guided Whittier's pen against slavery's chains, that same fierce determination that justice shall prevail though earth's foundations shake!
Garbage victimhood falsity that's available on TikTok from morally-certain caricatures all day. Don't bother.
March 28, 2025
Previously only read one of Chris Hedges’ books but goodness gracious this one blew me away. Stunning absolutely stunning. Nothing else to say but #FreePalestine 🇵🇸♥️🕊️
June 18, 2025
It wouldn’t be yet another classic Hedges piece without the obligatory Reinhold Niebuhr reference and quotes (see Chomsky’s critique in his Masters of Mankind). Hedges’ book will be eye opening and maddening for anyone new to this topic. I plan to send a copy to my mom, who has recently come around after reading The Hundred Years' War on Palestine, which she picked up of her own accord.
The reader is provided with numerous dark and odious depictions of Israeli state crimes, current and historical, which go so far beyond a proportional response that one becomes dizzy, nauseated, and enraged over and over. Hedges’ descriptions gets us as close to the snuff clips foisted upon us on social media daily. In less than two years Israel has bombarded and invaded Gaza, Lebanon and Syria, while bombing Yemen and Iran. Its aggressions are only possible via a symbiotic relationship with U.S. imperialism. At present it seems the world’s countries remain incapable of halting this ghastly duo.
No amount of reading about the violence inflicted upon Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank will alter the course of events. Israel and the U.S. will continue to wage and manage their war on Gaza. At present, they are in the midst of expanding the war, targeting Iran with deception and attempted regime change, further destabilizing Western Asia yet again. These brutal policies are generally at odds with a significant percentage of U.S. public opinion, yet the gap between the policies desired by the populace and the policies prerogatives carried out in our names remains a yawning chasm, for which no effective strategy from below has yet been deployed to bring our politicians back into alignment with public demands. If it wasn’t already, this book will leave the reader with the children, women, and men whose lives remain in the balance between the hopefully crumbling vestiges of Western settler colonial and imperial legacies.
Palestine, Gaza, and its people forever in our minds.
The reader is provided with numerous dark and odious depictions of Israeli state crimes, current and historical, which go so far beyond a proportional response that one becomes dizzy, nauseated, and enraged over and over. Hedges’ descriptions gets us as close to the snuff clips foisted upon us on social media daily. In less than two years Israel has bombarded and invaded Gaza, Lebanon and Syria, while bombing Yemen and Iran. Its aggressions are only possible via a symbiotic relationship with U.S. imperialism. At present it seems the world’s countries remain incapable of halting this ghastly duo.
No amount of reading about the violence inflicted upon Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank will alter the course of events. Israel and the U.S. will continue to wage and manage their war on Gaza. At present, they are in the midst of expanding the war, targeting Iran with deception and attempted regime change, further destabilizing Western Asia yet again. These brutal policies are generally at odds with a significant percentage of U.S. public opinion, yet the gap between the policies desired by the populace and the policies prerogatives carried out in our names remains a yawning chasm, for which no effective strategy from below has yet been deployed to bring our politicians back into alignment with public demands. If it wasn’t already, this book will leave the reader with the children, women, and men whose lives remain in the balance between the hopefully crumbling vestiges of Western settler colonial and imperial legacies.
Palestine, Gaza, and its people forever in our minds.
September 1, 2025
"There are no surprises in Gaza. Every horrifying act of Israel's genocide has been telegraphed in advance. It has been for decades. The dispossession of Palestinians of their land is the beating heart of Israel's settler Colonial project. This dispossession has had traumatic historical moments. 1948 and 1967, when huge parts of historic Palestine were seized and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were ethnically cleansed. Dispossession has also occurred in increments. The slow motion theft of land and steady ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem."
"The genocide says something not only about Israel, but about us, about Western Civilization, about who we are as a people, where we came from and what defines us. It says that all our vaunted morality and respect for human rights is a lie. It says that people of color, especially when they are poor and vulnerable, do not count. It says their hopes, dreams, dignity and aspirations for freedom are worthless. It says we will ensure global domination through racialized violence. This lie, that Western Civilization is predicated on values such as respect for human rights and the rule of law, is one that Palestinians and all those in the global South, as well as native and black and brown Americans, have known for centuries."
Chris Hedges
"The genocide says something not only about Israel, but about us, about Western Civilization, about who we are as a people, where we came from and what defines us. It says that all our vaunted morality and respect for human rights is a lie. It says that people of color, especially when they are poor and vulnerable, do not count. It says their hopes, dreams, dignity and aspirations for freedom are worthless. It says we will ensure global domination through racialized violence. This lie, that Western Civilization is predicated on values such as respect for human rights and the rule of law, is one that Palestinians and all those in the global South, as well as native and black and brown Americans, have known for centuries."
Chris Hedges
June 22, 2025
Palestinians want their land back. Then they will talk of peace. The Israelis want peace, but demand Palestinian land. And that, in three short sentences, is the intractable nature of this conflict. -page 21
To understand Gaza is to stand at the crossroads of collective trauma and impossible resilience; to witness how human beings persist when the world has agreed, tacitly, that their suffering does not matter.
What strikes me is not the scale of the violence (history has shown us that cruelty needs no introduction) but the precision of its erasure. The way hospitals, universities, and entire bloodlines vanish beneath the rhetoric of "military necessity," as if a child’s death can ever be necessary. The siege is not just an attack on bodies, but on memory itself: it’s a calculated unraveling of Palestinian identity, brick by brick, life by life.
There is a terrible arithmetic to oppression, an equation where power holds all the variables, and the oppressed are left to count their dead. Colonial projects are never static; they mutate like viruses, adapting their rhetoric to the times while preserving the same old hunger for land and erasure. They speak of "peace" while bulldozing homes, of "security" while snipping the threads of a people’s history. It is a magic trick of the cruelest kind; the illusion of morality draped over the machinery of conquest.
When those who are occupied refuse to submit, when they continue to resist, we drop all pretense of our “civilizing“ mission and unleash, as in Gaza, an orgy of slaughter and destruction. We become drunk on violence. This violence makes us insane. We kill with reckless ferocity. We become the beast we accuse the oppressed of being. We expose the lie of our wanted moral superiority. We expose the fundamental truth about Western civilization: we are the most ruthless and efficient killers on the planet. This alone ensures our domination. It has nothing to do with democracy or freedom or liberty. These are rights we never intend to grant to the oppressed. -page 85
And yet, there is the stubbornness of survival. Parents who whisper lullabies to children in bomb shelters. Doctors operating by flashlight. The graffiti on shattered walls that still reads WE WILL NOT LEAVE. Their resistance is not measured in victories, how could it be, when the scales were rigged from the start? but in the sheer act of remaining. This is the paradox of the human spirit; the more you try to extinguish it, the more fiercely it burns in the dark.
The Jewish settler-colonial project is protean. It changes its shape but not its essence. Its tactics vary. Its intensity comes in waves of severe repression and less repression. Its rhetoric about peace masks its intent. It grinds forward with a deadly, perverted, racist logic. And yet, the Palestinians endure, refusing to submit, resisting despite the overwhelming odds, grasping at tiny kernels of hope from bottomless wells of despair. There is a word for this. Heroic. -page 25
What is heroism if not this? Not the grand, cinematic charge against injustice, but the daily refusal to vanish. Not the luxury of hope, but the grit to fish for its faint glimmer in waters poisoned by despair.
The Big Lie is designed to send a chilling message to Gaza’s Palestinians. It makes it clear to the Palestinians that Israel will continue to wage a campaign of state terror, and will never admit to its atrocities or its intentions. The vast disparity between what Israel says, and what Israel does tells the Palestinians that there is no hope. Israel will do and say whatever it wants. The truth is irrelevant. International law is irrelevant. The Palestinians are meant to understand there will never be acknowledgment of reality by Israel. -page 66-67
The Big Lie (Große Lüge—the lie favored by tyrants) does not merely distort, it destroys. It reduces all conflict to brute force, ensuring that the cycle of violence persists, unchallenged by truth, unbroken by reason. And in that darkness, the dignity of both thought and action is lost forever. When reality is erased, oppression speaks in force, and the oppressed, left with no other language, will respond in kind.
The international community’s failure is not ignorance, but knowing and looking away. We have built a taxonomy of grief that ranks some tears more worthy than others. A Palestinian father’s anguish is politicized; an Israeli father’s anguish is universalized. This is not empathy’s failure, but empathy’s betrayal.
We’ll call this “collateral damage” today, security measures” tomorrow, and “an unfortunate historical episode” in ten years. By then, the textbooks will have trimmed the corpses down to footnotes, the arms dealers will have upgraded their yachts, and Gaza’s children (those that remain) will be offered “thoughts and prayers”, the cheapest currency in the moral marketplace.
The deepest question Gaza forces us to confront is not How can this happen? but Why do we allow it? The answer, I fear, lies in our willingness to treat certain lives as collateral in the grand narrative of power.
However, there is another story here; quieter but unyielding. It is the story of Gazans who plant olive trees in war’s shadow, who teach their children poetry beneath drone skies. Their defiance is not just resistance; it is a reclamation of dignity in a world that has tried to deny them even that.
In the end, Gaza’s lesson is this: We do not get to choose whose pain moves us. Morality is not a buffet. Either we stand for the sanctity of all lives, or we admit that our compassion is conditional, and in that admission, we lose something far more precious than land. We lose our humanity.
The Palestinian resistance is our resistance. The Palestinian struggle for dignity, freedom, and independence is our struggle. The Palestinian cause is our cause. For, as history has also shown, those who were Nero’s guests, soon became Nero’s victims. -page 113
July 12, 2025
Chris Hedges has a particular way of writing history as it happens making it appear as if you’re already looking back on events we continue to see in the present. That perspective is particularly haunting and carries with it the feeling that we are simply not doing enough. Considering that the genocide in Palestine is only escalating this is obvious, but more extreme measure are necessary. What else will stop this?
As stated by Hedges, by the UN special Rapporteur for the Occupied Territories, Francesca Albanese and most importantly by international law, occupied populations have a right to resist by any means necessary. The Occupation of Palestine by the zionist regime was (finally) declared an illegal apartheid by the ICJ almost exactly a year ago. Granted it only took 8 decades but it is now the law for whatever worth that still holds. Violent resistance is not likely to be effective in and of itself considering the massive technology at the hands of the zionist oppressors. This further places the responsibility on those of us on the outside to continue the pressure, particularly in the form of sanctions and pressure against sending arms to the Israeli regime. Only this will stop what’s happening, which is so clear in intent after 2 years and 8 decades to be beyond dispute: it meets all the requirements of genocide. All the evidence you’d ever need is not only on your phone daily but compiled in this book in detail.
The atrocities have been so overwhelming in frequency and human psychology so brutal in its sensitization that the review Hedges provides here will re-ignite your anger. Speaking for myself, much of this from October 7, 2023 will slip our memory if we are not careful, replaced by a new daily litany of horrors. That also is a psyop of genocidal action. Taken together there is no doubt what is happening and what has already happened for the past century. What are we going to do about it? The pressure must stay constant - do not become desensitized. Continue to protest, continue to find like minded people and network, continue to pressure politicians, continue to speak out in whatever way you can. Free Palestine.
As stated by Hedges, by the UN special Rapporteur for the Occupied Territories, Francesca Albanese and most importantly by international law, occupied populations have a right to resist by any means necessary. The Occupation of Palestine by the zionist regime was (finally) declared an illegal apartheid by the ICJ almost exactly a year ago. Granted it only took 8 decades but it is now the law for whatever worth that still holds. Violent resistance is not likely to be effective in and of itself considering the massive technology at the hands of the zionist oppressors. This further places the responsibility on those of us on the outside to continue the pressure, particularly in the form of sanctions and pressure against sending arms to the Israeli regime. Only this will stop what’s happening, which is so clear in intent after 2 years and 8 decades to be beyond dispute: it meets all the requirements of genocide. All the evidence you’d ever need is not only on your phone daily but compiled in this book in detail.
The atrocities have been so overwhelming in frequency and human psychology so brutal in its sensitization that the review Hedges provides here will re-ignite your anger. Speaking for myself, much of this from October 7, 2023 will slip our memory if we are not careful, replaced by a new daily litany of horrors. That also is a psyop of genocidal action. Taken together there is no doubt what is happening and what has already happened for the past century. What are we going to do about it? The pressure must stay constant - do not become desensitized. Continue to protest, continue to find like minded people and network, continue to pressure politicians, continue to speak out in whatever way you can. Free Palestine.
May 23, 2025
overwhelming and devastating. don’t read this before bed for 2 nights straight as i did. only chris hedges knows how to capture darkness as soberly as this.
Read
August 13, 2025A real page-turner, I couldn't put it down!
April 26, 2025
J’accuse - the 2025 Indictment of Zionism is in This Book.
Everything done by the Zionists/Mossad/Shin Bet against the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank and against those around the world protesting the Zionist genocide is in this book. I suggest only more clarity on the Hannibal Directive as being responsible for most of the Israelis murdered on October 7th - not Hamas by any means - and more focus on the bribery and blackmail (and so-called anti-Semitism attacks) practised by Mossad and AIPAC and the ADL in the US and similarly in other lands - The UK, Australia, Germany especially - in corralling politicians and university chancellors and the nonsensical push to adopt the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism. Excellent book.
Everything done by the Zionists/Mossad/Shin Bet against the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank and against those around the world protesting the Zionist genocide is in this book. I suggest only more clarity on the Hannibal Directive as being responsible for most of the Israelis murdered on October 7th - not Hamas by any means - and more focus on the bribery and blackmail (and so-called anti-Semitism attacks) practised by Mossad and AIPAC and the ADL in the US and similarly in other lands - The UK, Australia, Germany especially - in corralling politicians and university chancellors and the nonsensical push to adopt the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism. Excellent book.
August 10, 2025
Good book, heard some stories about this guy tho lol
April 1, 2025
An indictment of our obsequious obedience to present day genocides while studying and memorializing past genocides which is apparent in the speech of protesters like Aaron Bushnell’s screaming free Palestine as he burned for what our ruling class makes normal; using local sources like Afef Abu Saif and past protests like Primo Levi and Daniel Berrigan.
August 22, 2025
"Many of us ask ourselves...'what would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?' The answer is, you're doing it. Right now."
"When you've seen an injustice occur, you should try to change it with your hands. If you can't change it with your hands, then you should try to adjust it with your tongue. You should speak out about it. If you can't do that, you should at least feel the injustice in your heart."
"When you've seen an injustice occur, you should try to change it with your hands. If you can't change it with your hands, then you should try to adjust it with your tongue. You should speak out about it. If you can't do that, you should at least feel the injustice in your heart."
Read
August 8, 2025Chris has my undying respect. With 40 pages of references and a 10 page index with a list of the victim names, truly want to read all of this books because he puts himself on the front lines as a journalist to tell these stories.
The “Letter to the Children of Gaza” was heart wrenching. So horrific and heartbreaking what is going on in this world.. Also has no idea the oppression of Palestine supporter’s at Columbia and Princeton university?? Sooo infuriating
The “Letter to the Children of Gaza” was heart wrenching. So horrific and heartbreaking what is going on in this world.. Also has no idea the oppression of Palestine supporter’s at Columbia and Princeton university?? Sooo infuriating
March 17, 2025
Listened to this audio book! I think I may need to re listen or read next time. But very illuminating. Stepped away with more knowledge of the strategic abuse and genocide committed against Palestinians. My heart goes out to them.
May 3, 2025
Oof. Heavy one. Hard to read at times. Great reporting and story telling. A reminder for me of the importance of journalism in areas of conflict.
November 9, 2025
As a long-time listener of ABC’s nighttime radio show, Late Night Live (LNL), I knew I had to read this book immediately after hearing David Marr’s repugnant interview with journalist Chris Hedges. The interview link is here: https://www.abc.net.au/listen/program...
Marr has usually been fine when interviewing journalists or academics who appear on the show to speak about their pro-Palestinian work or advocacy. LNL have invited some of my favourite voices in Palestinian discourse, including Antony Loewenstein, Samah Jabr, Saree Makdisi, Peter Beinart, Francesca Albanese, Fintan O’Toole, and Ilan Pappé, on national radio. But I was shocked by this particular interview and can’t understand why Marr took the approach he did. He became an irritable interviewer, seemingly intent on catching Hedges out with “gotcha” questions. At one point, Marr asked Hedges when he was last in Gaza. It had been decades but that’s beside the point. Hedges witnessed similar atrocities against Palestinians long before October 7, and, more importantly, Israel has refused to allow other journalists into Gaza.
The brave and extraordinary journalists who remain with their communities in Gaza continue to report under the most harrowing conditions, amid constant bombings and mass starvation. They stay because of their fierce commitment to documenting Israel’s war crimes and the resilience of the Palestinian people. This is one of the central points Hedges makes in his book.
Hedges’ outrage is palpable throughout. He doesn’t offer much hope and I, too, feel less hopeful when world leaders continue to do nothing substantial to condemn a genocidal state. The influence of lobbying groups like AIPAC continues to inject Zionism into politics to the point where they often determine the success of Democratic candidates in American elections. Zionist lobbying groups also continue to undermine the support of the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions (BDS) movement on university campuses, going to great lengths to ruin the careers of university graduates for their pro-Palestinian advocacy. How disgusting. But the pressure must continue. I will be at the protests. I will keep reading and engaging.
I sorely miss the previous host, Phillip Adams. I also think LNL's new intro song is shit. Free Palestine.
Marr has usually been fine when interviewing journalists or academics who appear on the show to speak about their pro-Palestinian work or advocacy. LNL have invited some of my favourite voices in Palestinian discourse, including Antony Loewenstein, Samah Jabr, Saree Makdisi, Peter Beinart, Francesca Albanese, Fintan O’Toole, and Ilan Pappé, on national radio. But I was shocked by this particular interview and can’t understand why Marr took the approach he did. He became an irritable interviewer, seemingly intent on catching Hedges out with “gotcha” questions. At one point, Marr asked Hedges when he was last in Gaza. It had been decades but that’s beside the point. Hedges witnessed similar atrocities against Palestinians long before October 7, and, more importantly, Israel has refused to allow other journalists into Gaza.
The brave and extraordinary journalists who remain with their communities in Gaza continue to report under the most harrowing conditions, amid constant bombings and mass starvation. They stay because of their fierce commitment to documenting Israel’s war crimes and the resilience of the Palestinian people. This is one of the central points Hedges makes in his book.
Hedges’ outrage is palpable throughout. He doesn’t offer much hope and I, too, feel less hopeful when world leaders continue to do nothing substantial to condemn a genocidal state. The influence of lobbying groups like AIPAC continues to inject Zionism into politics to the point where they often determine the success of Democratic candidates in American elections. Zionist lobbying groups also continue to undermine the support of the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions (BDS) movement on university campuses, going to great lengths to ruin the careers of university graduates for their pro-Palestinian advocacy. How disgusting. But the pressure must continue. I will be at the protests. I will keep reading and engaging.
I sorely miss the previous host, Phillip Adams. I also think LNL's new intro song is shit. Free Palestine.
October 16, 2025
Super interesting to learn more about the genocide of Palestinians by the State of Israel. The book was from a journalistic perspective, incorporating political, historical and legal analysis as well as providing a platform for the experiences of Palestinians themselves and what the plight of their people means to them. I wish it gave more of a historical chronology of the State of Israel’s inception and construction and the previous genocides and wars of 1948 and 1967. Otherwise, I thought it gave a really good account of the current political tensions at play between the world’s growing political consciousness and corporate and state actors arming, funding and supporting of Israel’s violence, and the contradictions and hypocrisies of Israel’s political doctrine and claims. ⭐️⭐️ 4.5/5
October 2, 2025
“Profound, honest, painful, moving, and real… the book takes us through history, geography, politics, and news, and helps us better understand the Zionist occupation. We cannot escape after learning about it! Chris is telling us: now you know.” Atef Abu Saif
Absolutely shocking. Horrifying. Heart-wrenching. Humanity has failed the Palestinian people. Our generation has failed the Palestinian people.
After the Holocaust in Europe—how could we, as a global community, allow this to happen again?
Absolutely shocking. Horrifying. Heart-wrenching. Humanity has failed the Palestinian people. Our generation has failed the Palestinian people.
After the Holocaust in Europe—how could we, as a global community, allow this to happen again?
October 19, 2025
We should never be forgiven for the crimes we committed, whether actively or passively, against the Palestinian people. May the world one day speak the truth of what happened here.
September 17, 2025
Harrowing, but indispensable.
September 23, 2025
Disclaimer: not a beach read
A harrowing explanation of the 1st year of Israel's genocide in Palestine from firsthand accounts of citizens and journalists, as well as an overview of the factors behind the US's support (e.g., Israel lobby). I know everything is kind of absurd in America rn, but goddamn is the mainstream medias rhetoric around Israel completely backwards
Couple good quotes:
"As climate change imperils survival, as resources become scarce, as migration becomes an imperative for millions, as agricultural yields decline, as coastal areas are flooded, as droughts and wild fires proliferate, as states fail, as armed resistance movements rise to battle their oppressors along with their proxies, genocide will not be an anomaly. It will be the norm"
"There are no surprises in Gaza. Every horrifying act of Israel's genocide has been telegraphed in advance. It has been for decades. The dispossession of Palestinians of their land is the beating heart of Israel's settler Colonial project.
This dispossession has had traumatic historical moments. 1948 and 1967, when huge parts of historic Palestine were seized and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were ethnically cleansed. Dispossession has also occurred in increments. The slow motion theft of land and steady ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem."
"When oppressed people are addressed only through violence, they will answer with violence"
A harrowing explanation of the 1st year of Israel's genocide in Palestine from firsthand accounts of citizens and journalists, as well as an overview of the factors behind the US's support (e.g., Israel lobby). I know everything is kind of absurd in America rn, but goddamn is the mainstream medias rhetoric around Israel completely backwards
Couple good quotes:
"As climate change imperils survival, as resources become scarce, as migration becomes an imperative for millions, as agricultural yields decline, as coastal areas are flooded, as droughts and wild fires proliferate, as states fail, as armed resistance movements rise to battle their oppressors along with their proxies, genocide will not be an anomaly. It will be the norm"
"There are no surprises in Gaza. Every horrifying act of Israel's genocide has been telegraphed in advance. It has been for decades. The dispossession of Palestinians of their land is the beating heart of Israel's settler Colonial project.
This dispossession has had traumatic historical moments. 1948 and 1967, when huge parts of historic Palestine were seized and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were ethnically cleansed. Dispossession has also occurred in increments. The slow motion theft of land and steady ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem."
"When oppressed people are addressed only through violence, they will answer with violence"
June 3, 2025
Argh, I wrote a long review about how this book provides reportage and bears witness to Israel's war crimes, genocide, ethnic cleansing, and atrocities too numerous to list here, and then I mistakenly deleted that review... sigh. So I'll keep this brief and can state simply - this is a quality overview of what has been transporting trusted to Israel and Gaza, in particular as it relates to Oct 7th and thereafter. I especially appreciated the sections related to student activists, surveillance, media manipulation and control of narrative by Israel. This is not a history book, though it does provide an historical overview of key events that occurred prior to Oct 7th. This book focuses on the last two years and it's one of the best out there.
That's all I have the energy to rewrite...
That's all I have the energy to rewrite...
June 9, 2025
"Fear, trauma, and, hatred are the primary commodities imparted by the colonizers to the colonized."
"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."
"The death mask of colonialism-too often of European extraction-does not change. Nor does the godlike authority of colonists who look at the colonized as vermin, who take a perverse delight in their humiliation and suffering, and who kill them with impunity."
"The Palestinians want their land back. Then they will talk of peace. The Israelis want peace, but demand Palestinian land. And that, in three short sentences, is the intractable nature of this conflict."
"Every new war drags us back to basics. It destroys our houses, our institutions, our mosques, and our churches. It razes our gardens and parks. Every war takes years to recover from, and before we've recovered, a new war arrives. There are no warning sirens, no messages sent to our phones. War just arrives."
"Hamas, like all resistance groups, from the African National Congress to the Irish Republican Army, is as demonized as it is misunderstood. Hamas is a religious, nationalist liberation movement. While it has carried out indiscriminate suicide bombings against Israeli civilians, while its incursion into Israel on October 7 included atrocities, and while its 1988 founding charter calls for Israel's destruction, Hamas is not, despite what Israel and Washington say, a terrorist organization. Hamas was founded as a civil society and political movement during the First Intifada in 1987. It didn't establish its military wing-the Qassam Brigades-until 1992. It gained widespread support among Palestinians in Gaza by establishing schools, summer camps, food banks, and medical clinics."
"The genocide says something not only about Israel, but about us, about Western civilization, about who we are as a people, where we came from and what defines us. It says that all our vaunted morality and respect for human rights is a lie. It says that people of color, especially when they are poor and vulnerable, do not count. It says their hopes, dreams, dignity, ad aspirations for freedom are worthless. It says we will ensure global domination through racialized violence."
"Israel was founded on lies. The lie that Palestinian land was largely unoccupied. The lie that Palestinians fled their homes and villages during their ethnic cleansing by Zionist militias in 1948 because they were told to do so by Arab leaders. The lie that it was Arab armies that started the 1948 was that saw Israel seize seventy-eight percent of historic Palestine. The lie that Israel faced annihilation in 1967, forcing it to invade and occupy the remaining twenty-two percent of Palestine, as well as land belonging to Egypt and Syria."
"Settler colonialism is built on the scaffolding of racism. Israel will become synonymous with its victims the way Turks are synonymous with the Armenians, Germans are with the Namibians and later the Jews, and Serbs are with the Bosniaks. Israel's cultural, artistic, Journalistic, and intellectual life will atrophy and die. Once its mass slaughter is complete, Israel will be a despotism, a stagnant nation where religious fanatics and bigots dominate public life. It will join the club of the globe's most retrograde and despised regimes."
"Israel seeks to erase not only the Palestinians as a people, but the idea of Palestine. And like other perpetrators of genocide, Israel intends to keep it hidden."
"Israel, which is not a signatory of the Arms Trade Treaty, has long supplied some of the most heinous regimes on the planet with weaponry, including the apartheid governments of South Africa and Myanmar. India is Israel's largest purchaser of military drones."
"The more violence the colonizer expends to subdue the occupied, the more it transforms itself into a monster. This is as true in Gaza as it was in Warsaw."
"The Zionists and their supporters may have mouthed slogans such as "a land without a people for a people without a land" in speaking of Palestine, but, as Hannah Arendt observed, European powers were attempting to deal with the crime carried out against Jews in Europe by committing another crime against Palestinians. It was a recipe for endless conflict."
"..."once colonialism took on a bad odor in the post-World War II era of decolonization, the colonial origins and practice of Zionism and Israel were whitewashed and conveniently forgotten is Israel and the West. In fact, Zionism-for two decades the coddled step-child of British colonialism-rebranded itself as an anticolonial movement."
"The Palestinians have long been betrayed, not only by us in the Global North, but by most of the governments in the Muslim world. We stand passive in the face of the crime of crimes. History will judge Israel for this genocide. But it will also judge us. It will ask why we did not do more, why we did not serve all agreements, all trade deals, all accords, and all cooperation with the apartheid state, why we did not halt weapons shipments to Israel, why we did not recall our ambassadors, why when the maritime trade in the Red Sea was disrupted by Yemen, an alternative overland route into Israel was set up by Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Jordan, and why we did not do everything in our power to end the slaughter."
"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."
"Germany's long relationship with Israel, including paying over $90 billion since 1945 in reparations to Holocaust survivors and their heirs, is not about atonements, as Ilan Pappe explains, but blackmail."
"Divine violence terrifies a corrupt and discredited ruling class. It exposes their depravity. It illustrates that not everyone is paralyzed by fear. It is a siren call to battle radical evil."
"Columbia University, with an endowment of $13.46 billion, charges students nearly $90,000 a year to attend. But students are not allowed to object when their tax and tuition money funds genocide, or when their tuition payments are used to see them, along with faculty supporters, assaulted and sent to jai."
"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."
"The death mask of colonialism-too often of European extraction-does not change. Nor does the godlike authority of colonists who look at the colonized as vermin, who take a perverse delight in their humiliation and suffering, and who kill them with impunity."
"The Palestinians want their land back. Then they will talk of peace. The Israelis want peace, but demand Palestinian land. And that, in three short sentences, is the intractable nature of this conflict."
"Every new war drags us back to basics. It destroys our houses, our institutions, our mosques, and our churches. It razes our gardens and parks. Every war takes years to recover from, and before we've recovered, a new war arrives. There are no warning sirens, no messages sent to our phones. War just arrives."
"Hamas, like all resistance groups, from the African National Congress to the Irish Republican Army, is as demonized as it is misunderstood. Hamas is a religious, nationalist liberation movement. While it has carried out indiscriminate suicide bombings against Israeli civilians, while its incursion into Israel on October 7 included atrocities, and while its 1988 founding charter calls for Israel's destruction, Hamas is not, despite what Israel and Washington say, a terrorist organization. Hamas was founded as a civil society and political movement during the First Intifada in 1987. It didn't establish its military wing-the Qassam Brigades-until 1992. It gained widespread support among Palestinians in Gaza by establishing schools, summer camps, food banks, and medical clinics."
"The genocide says something not only about Israel, but about us, about Western civilization, about who we are as a people, where we came from and what defines us. It says that all our vaunted morality and respect for human rights is a lie. It says that people of color, especially when they are poor and vulnerable, do not count. It says their hopes, dreams, dignity, ad aspirations for freedom are worthless. It says we will ensure global domination through racialized violence."
"Israel was founded on lies. The lie that Palestinian land was largely unoccupied. The lie that Palestinians fled their homes and villages during their ethnic cleansing by Zionist militias in 1948 because they were told to do so by Arab leaders. The lie that it was Arab armies that started the 1948 was that saw Israel seize seventy-eight percent of historic Palestine. The lie that Israel faced annihilation in 1967, forcing it to invade and occupy the remaining twenty-two percent of Palestine, as well as land belonging to Egypt and Syria."
"Settler colonialism is built on the scaffolding of racism. Israel will become synonymous with its victims the way Turks are synonymous with the Armenians, Germans are with the Namibians and later the Jews, and Serbs are with the Bosniaks. Israel's cultural, artistic, Journalistic, and intellectual life will atrophy and die. Once its mass slaughter is complete, Israel will be a despotism, a stagnant nation where religious fanatics and bigots dominate public life. It will join the club of the globe's most retrograde and despised regimes."
"Israel seeks to erase not only the Palestinians as a people, but the idea of Palestine. And like other perpetrators of genocide, Israel intends to keep it hidden."
"Israel, which is not a signatory of the Arms Trade Treaty, has long supplied some of the most heinous regimes on the planet with weaponry, including the apartheid governments of South Africa and Myanmar. India is Israel's largest purchaser of military drones."
"The more violence the colonizer expends to subdue the occupied, the more it transforms itself into a monster. This is as true in Gaza as it was in Warsaw."
"The Zionists and their supporters may have mouthed slogans such as "a land without a people for a people without a land" in speaking of Palestine, but, as Hannah Arendt observed, European powers were attempting to deal with the crime carried out against Jews in Europe by committing another crime against Palestinians. It was a recipe for endless conflict."
"..."once colonialism took on a bad odor in the post-World War II era of decolonization, the colonial origins and practice of Zionism and Israel were whitewashed and conveniently forgotten is Israel and the West. In fact, Zionism-for two decades the coddled step-child of British colonialism-rebranded itself as an anticolonial movement."
"The Palestinians have long been betrayed, not only by us in the Global North, but by most of the governments in the Muslim world. We stand passive in the face of the crime of crimes. History will judge Israel for this genocide. But it will also judge us. It will ask why we did not do more, why we did not serve all agreements, all trade deals, all accords, and all cooperation with the apartheid state, why we did not halt weapons shipments to Israel, why we did not recall our ambassadors, why when the maritime trade in the Red Sea was disrupted by Yemen, an alternative overland route into Israel was set up by Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Jordan, and why we did not do everything in our power to end the slaughter."
"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."
"Germany's long relationship with Israel, including paying over $90 billion since 1945 in reparations to Holocaust survivors and their heirs, is not about atonements, as Ilan Pappe explains, but blackmail."
"Divine violence terrifies a corrupt and discredited ruling class. It exposes their depravity. It illustrates that not everyone is paralyzed by fear. It is a siren call to battle radical evil."
"Columbia University, with an endowment of $13.46 billion, charges students nearly $90,000 a year to attend. But students are not allowed to object when their tax and tuition money funds genocide, or when their tuition payments are used to see them, along with faculty supporters, assaulted and sent to jai."
September 20, 2025
I picked this one up with some trepidation, as Hedges has not minced words in his vitriolic condemnation of Israel in the previous books of his that I've read. But he is a good writer and an experienced war correspondent, and in my continuing quest to better understand the situation I try to listen to a variety of viewpoints on all sides. But even expecting to disagree with a lot of what he was going to say, I was still shocked by the unhinged unabashed straight up blood libel.
It's one thing to provide historical and political context to explain the unprecedented October 7 attack, the rise and popularity of Hamas, or even the allure and twisted logic of suicide bombers. But to glorify and justify these heinous crimes and deny that Hamas is a terrorist organisation is beyond reasonable. In this twisted worldview, Hamas is a social organization that uses terrorism as a tactic in their "war of liberation" to "battle radical evil," i.e. Israel. And by extension, Jews everywhere, as he blames Israel and "the Israel lobby" for everything from the 2003 Iraq war, anti-American terrorism, and even police brutality in the US.
There is of course plenty of legitimate that can be leveled at Israel. The current government is particularly odious, and there is no question that insufficient care has been taken by the IDF to limit civilian casualties in Gaza. Or to reign in the violent zealots in the West Bank. Or that several incidents potentially qualify as war crimes. But the fact remains that this is a war, despite Hedges refusal to categorize it as such, and war is by nature messy and destructive. The lines are often blurry, and there is absolutely room for debate over which actions are justified, and whether there is a better way to handle issues such as maintaining safe and consistent civilian access to basic needs such as food, clean water, shelter, medical services, etc. But in doing so, it must be acknowledged that is being done in the middle of an incredibly dangerous active war zone, largely in densely populated urban areas, with a ruthless enemy deeply entrenched in, under, and around the civilian population.
Of course it's a lot easier to simply dismiss all of that as "The Big Lie" perpetuated by Israel and repeated by its puppets in the US and other Western governments. In this view there is no precipitating Palestinian violence, only occupation, "systems of oppression", ethnic cleansing, and genocide, all perpetrated by the "settler colonial project of the apartheid state." The logical extension of such reasoning is to "bless and revere" the student protestors as they harass and blame Jewish students, even as they culminate in antisemitic attacks.
Aside from the blatant anti-Zionism (disagreeable but not necessarily morally repugnant) and the disgusting antisemitism, the basic arguments don't even hold up logically. He refers to the Israeli settlements in the West Bank as "illegal colonies" which implies that similar towns in Israel proper are legitimate. But he considers the current war in Gaza just the continuation of the ongoing Nachba that began in 1948. And goes further back in time to highlight the inherent racism of Jabotinsky's revisionist Zionism, and further back to dismiss the Balfour Declaration and even Herzl's late 19th century Zionism as European imperialism. He acknowledged that after the Holocaust there were hundreds of thousands of Jews with nowhere else to go, and hundreds of thousands more Jews who were expelled from their homes in Northern Africa and the Middle East, but dismisses their validity because of the Sykes-Picot Agreement (which preceded those events by decades). He stresses the point that Israel has one of the world's most sophisticated militaries, but that was hardly the case in 1948, 1956, and arguable in 1967 and 1973. The current military supremacy is a result of those wars, not the cause of them, and he ignores the fact that they were intended as wars of eradication, to wipe the stain of the Jews from the land.
There is certainly much to lament in the plight of the Palestinians. They've been used and abused, ignored and persecuted. But reducing them to mere victims also takes away their agency. Denying that they never made any mistakes or had any hand in the ongoing violence doesn't help their cause, it just perpetuates the hate and pushes the chance for any sort of peaceful resolution further into the distance. But it's clear that peace is not what Hedges is after, rather he is calling for the obliteration of Israel as the autonomous nation of the Jewish people, cost be damned.
It's one thing to provide historical and political context to explain the unprecedented October 7 attack, the rise and popularity of Hamas, or even the allure and twisted logic of suicide bombers. But to glorify and justify these heinous crimes and deny that Hamas is a terrorist organisation is beyond reasonable. In this twisted worldview, Hamas is a social organization that uses terrorism as a tactic in their "war of liberation" to "battle radical evil," i.e. Israel. And by extension, Jews everywhere, as he blames Israel and "the Israel lobby" for everything from the 2003 Iraq war, anti-American terrorism, and even police brutality in the US.
There is of course plenty of legitimate that can be leveled at Israel. The current government is particularly odious, and there is no question that insufficient care has been taken by the IDF to limit civilian casualties in Gaza. Or to reign in the violent zealots in the West Bank. Or that several incidents potentially qualify as war crimes. But the fact remains that this is a war, despite Hedges refusal to categorize it as such, and war is by nature messy and destructive. The lines are often blurry, and there is absolutely room for debate over which actions are justified, and whether there is a better way to handle issues such as maintaining safe and consistent civilian access to basic needs such as food, clean water, shelter, medical services, etc. But in doing so, it must be acknowledged that is being done in the middle of an incredibly dangerous active war zone, largely in densely populated urban areas, with a ruthless enemy deeply entrenched in, under, and around the civilian population.
Of course it's a lot easier to simply dismiss all of that as "The Big Lie" perpetuated by Israel and repeated by its puppets in the US and other Western governments. In this view there is no precipitating Palestinian violence, only occupation, "systems of oppression", ethnic cleansing, and genocide, all perpetrated by the "settler colonial project of the apartheid state." The logical extension of such reasoning is to "bless and revere" the student protestors as they harass and blame Jewish students, even as they culminate in antisemitic attacks.
Aside from the blatant anti-Zionism (disagreeable but not necessarily morally repugnant) and the disgusting antisemitism, the basic arguments don't even hold up logically. He refers to the Israeli settlements in the West Bank as "illegal colonies" which implies that similar towns in Israel proper are legitimate. But he considers the current war in Gaza just the continuation of the ongoing Nachba that began in 1948. And goes further back in time to highlight the inherent racism of Jabotinsky's revisionist Zionism, and further back to dismiss the Balfour Declaration and even Herzl's late 19th century Zionism as European imperialism. He acknowledged that after the Holocaust there were hundreds of thousands of Jews with nowhere else to go, and hundreds of thousands more Jews who were expelled from their homes in Northern Africa and the Middle East, but dismisses their validity because of the Sykes-Picot Agreement (which preceded those events by decades). He stresses the point that Israel has one of the world's most sophisticated militaries, but that was hardly the case in 1948, 1956, and arguable in 1967 and 1973. The current military supremacy is a result of those wars, not the cause of them, and he ignores the fact that they were intended as wars of eradication, to wipe the stain of the Jews from the land.
There is certainly much to lament in the plight of the Palestinians. They've been used and abused, ignored and persecuted. But reducing them to mere victims also takes away their agency. Denying that they never made any mistakes or had any hand in the ongoing violence doesn't help their cause, it just perpetuates the hate and pushes the chance for any sort of peaceful resolution further into the distance. But it's clear that peace is not what Hedges is after, rather he is calling for the obliteration of Israel as the autonomous nation of the Jewish people, cost be damned.
August 30, 2025
With his usual eloquence and moral clarity, Chris Hedges reports and reflects on the barbaric brutality inflicted upon the Palestinians by the Zionist regime and its Western patrons.
It’s not merely a testimony of the zenith of the decades long extermination campaign—this near 2-years and ongoing genocide, but also intimate accounts of personal experiences that oft left out of the news coverages; an interrogation of the pathology of imperialism and colonization, the universality of indigenous resistance and rebellion against such oppression; and most importantly, a probe to the depth of human nature, the depravity, resiliance and solidarity.
What I found most valuable in this slim volume, compared to many other analyses on this subject, are the historical parallels to the Palestinian resistance movements, e.g. Warsaw Uprising against the Nazis, revolts of Nat Turner and John Brown against U.S slavery, etc. People like to believe the sanitized fairy tales of the many resistance movements against colonialism and racism as “non-violent”, unaware that those are the versions deliberately disseminated and reinforced by the dominant class and their progeny to depoliticize and de-radicalize regular people in order to prevent future uprisings, so as to ensure their permanent dominance.
This isn’t to whitewash crimes that occurred during such armed struggles, but to put a stop to the knee-jerk reaction of condemning the resistance forces before uttering any criticism of the real villains. Would you condemn the actions of the Jews from the Warsaw ghetto before saying anything about the Nazis? If not, think twice before you reflexively point a finger at the Palestinian freedom fighters, especially if you aren’t doing everything you can to oppose the genocide backed by your own government.
This leads to another crucial point Hedges elaborates on in the book, our collective moral obligation. Sure, it’s easy to decry the degeneration of those who are directly committing and perpetuating the crime of crimes, but what about the responsibility of all of us? He reflects on the “divine violence” carried out by ordinary people throughout history, including Aaron Bushnell’s self-sacrifice to shake us from our complacency. Less extreme but still compelling are the Gaza encampments that mushroomed on campuses around the country. Many students and faculty who participated in those peaceful protests have been harassed, intimidated, arrested and expelled. Although due to the moral corruption of the ruling class, such sacrifices so far have achieved few of their intended goals, as Hedges rightfully notes: “History will not be kind to most of us. But it will bless and revere these students.”
There are certain examples in this book I take issue with, given the historical complexity and more recent revelations that Hedges might not be aware of, such as in the cases of the Srebrenica massacre and protests in Tibet.
Nonetheless, it's one of the best journalistic accounts I've read so far on the Holocaust of our time, a far more lucid and powerful call to action than, say, Pankaj Mishra's lugubrious soul-searching on the same subject. It's also perhaps the most emotional book Hedges has written, although I've not read them all. The last chapter, "Letter to the Children of Gaza", had me pause every other sentence simply because I couldn't stop crying.
Like Hedges, and billions around the world, I hope the day comes soon for the indigenous people of the land of Palestine to be liberated and safe from colonialism, rascism and psychopathic annihilation.
It’s not merely a testimony of the zenith of the decades long extermination campaign—this near 2-years and ongoing genocide, but also intimate accounts of personal experiences that oft left out of the news coverages; an interrogation of the pathology of imperialism and colonization, the universality of indigenous resistance and rebellion against such oppression; and most importantly, a probe to the depth of human nature, the depravity, resiliance and solidarity.
What I found most valuable in this slim volume, compared to many other analyses on this subject, are the historical parallels to the Palestinian resistance movements, e.g. Warsaw Uprising against the Nazis, revolts of Nat Turner and John Brown against U.S slavery, etc. People like to believe the sanitized fairy tales of the many resistance movements against colonialism and racism as “non-violent”, unaware that those are the versions deliberately disseminated and reinforced by the dominant class and their progeny to depoliticize and de-radicalize regular people in order to prevent future uprisings, so as to ensure their permanent dominance.
This isn’t to whitewash crimes that occurred during such armed struggles, but to put a stop to the knee-jerk reaction of condemning the resistance forces before uttering any criticism of the real villains. Would you condemn the actions of the Jews from the Warsaw ghetto before saying anything about the Nazis? If not, think twice before you reflexively point a finger at the Palestinian freedom fighters, especially if you aren’t doing everything you can to oppose the genocide backed by your own government.
This leads to another crucial point Hedges elaborates on in the book, our collective moral obligation. Sure, it’s easy to decry the degeneration of those who are directly committing and perpetuating the crime of crimes, but what about the responsibility of all of us? He reflects on the “divine violence” carried out by ordinary people throughout history, including Aaron Bushnell’s self-sacrifice to shake us from our complacency. Less extreme but still compelling are the Gaza encampments that mushroomed on campuses around the country. Many students and faculty who participated in those peaceful protests have been harassed, intimidated, arrested and expelled. Although due to the moral corruption of the ruling class, such sacrifices so far have achieved few of their intended goals, as Hedges rightfully notes: “History will not be kind to most of us. But it will bless and revere these students.”
There are certain examples in this book I take issue with, given the historical complexity and more recent revelations that Hedges might not be aware of, such as in the cases of the Srebrenica massacre and protests in Tibet.
Nonetheless, it's one of the best journalistic accounts I've read so far on the Holocaust of our time, a far more lucid and powerful call to action than, say, Pankaj Mishra's lugubrious soul-searching on the same subject. It's also perhaps the most emotional book Hedges has written, although I've not read them all. The last chapter, "Letter to the Children of Gaza", had me pause every other sentence simply because I couldn't stop crying.
Like Hedges, and billions around the world, I hope the day comes soon for the indigenous people of the land of Palestine to be liberated and safe from colonialism, rascism and psychopathic annihilation.
November 29, 2025
I know it's an unpopular opinion - but I just didn't think this book was all that. This isn't because the book goes against my personal morals and politics. Quite the opposite in fact. I just don't think there was enough information here to be a book. It's really more of a collection of articles - and fully 20% of the book is actually the contents of the UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese's report from March 2024.
I suppose if I had read this in 2024, it might have felt more impactful. In 2024, fewer people were crying "genocide". Fewer people were acknowledging the US's involvement. Student censorship (illegal evictions) from US college campuses were mostly hidden from those of us who weren't in the area(s). Trump hadn't yet been elected for his second term, and in the US we were all focused on said election and not on what was going on even while the supposed "good guy" was still in office.
What I wanted out of this book, and what I had come to expect from other books on genocide that I read this year, was a more (political) scientific analysis. More history, more cause and effect, more facts. Instead, this book focuses on the shock - its main purpose is to reveal atrocities and label them as such, not tell us why it's happening and what we can do about it as regular civilians.
There *is* some history in the book - in a few different places Hedges alludes to the creation of this genocide (and the perpetuation of it) out of the Holocaust. He briefly discusses the creation of the state of Israel, and he names a few policies and alliances (particularly the US) that have enabled it. But I was hoping for a more nuanced description of all the ethnic motivations at play here, sort of like what I got in "We Wish to Inform You" - and instead there is more time spent on the atrocities. On the stories of hospitals being bombed, families dying while trying to break their Ramadan fast, students being handcuffed and jailed for peacefully hunger striking on US campuses.
I'm not saying I didn't learn anything, but the organization of the book made it very difficult to understand why we were being told something. To understand timeline, and how a particular vignette fit into the larger picture. I read this to learn rather than to feel, but this book is made for the opposite. (Note - having read quite a bit on genocide in the last century now, I do understand that labeling something as "genocide" is politically fraught, and that journalists are directly targeted by regimes like Israel. Perhaps formatting these sketches into a book was the only way Hedges felt even remotely safe getting these stories out into the world. Perhaps major journals and other publications were afraid to print this. Perhaps I'm doing him a disservice with my lackluster reception. I don't know. But I will continue my search for a more in-depth report for 2025-2026.)
I suppose if I had read this in 2024, it might have felt more impactful. In 2024, fewer people were crying "genocide". Fewer people were acknowledging the US's involvement. Student censorship (illegal evictions) from US college campuses were mostly hidden from those of us who weren't in the area(s). Trump hadn't yet been elected for his second term, and in the US we were all focused on said election and not on what was going on even while the supposed "good guy" was still in office.
What I wanted out of this book, and what I had come to expect from other books on genocide that I read this year, was a more (political) scientific analysis. More history, more cause and effect, more facts. Instead, this book focuses on the shock - its main purpose is to reveal atrocities and label them as such, not tell us why it's happening and what we can do about it as regular civilians.
There *is* some history in the book - in a few different places Hedges alludes to the creation of this genocide (and the perpetuation of it) out of the Holocaust. He briefly discusses the creation of the state of Israel, and he names a few policies and alliances (particularly the US) that have enabled it. But I was hoping for a more nuanced description of all the ethnic motivations at play here, sort of like what I got in "We Wish to Inform You" - and instead there is more time spent on the atrocities. On the stories of hospitals being bombed, families dying while trying to break their Ramadan fast, students being handcuffed and jailed for peacefully hunger striking on US campuses.
I'm not saying I didn't learn anything, but the organization of the book made it very difficult to understand why we were being told something. To understand timeline, and how a particular vignette fit into the larger picture. I read this to learn rather than to feel, but this book is made for the opposite. (Note - having read quite a bit on genocide in the last century now, I do understand that labeling something as "genocide" is politically fraught, and that journalists are directly targeted by regimes like Israel. Perhaps formatting these sketches into a book was the only way Hedges felt even remotely safe getting these stories out into the world. Perhaps major journals and other publications were afraid to print this. Perhaps I'm doing him a disservice with my lackluster reception. I don't know. But I will continue my search for a more in-depth report for 2025-2026.)
September 11, 2025
"Lo Stato di Israele si fonda sull'obiettivo della cancellazione palestinese; il suo intero sistema politico è orientato verso questo obiettivo. Strutture dello Stato hanno storicamente architettato l'oppressione dei palestinesi; adesso le sue istituzioni, anziché fungere da freno, stanno accelerando l'andamento dell'attuale catastrofe".
dal rapporto della relatrice speciale sulla situazione dei diritti umani nei territori palestinesi occupati dal 1967, Francesca Albanese.
Chris Hedges è un giornalista, scrittore, inviato speciale in zone di guerra, premio Pulitzer e pastore presbiteriano. Il suo libro è il risultato di più di 7 anni di reportage dalla Palestina occupata e da Gaza. Il libro è fondamentalmente una finestra aperta sulla quantità di menzogne indecenti che circondano israele da prima della sua fondazione, avvenuta nel 1948, a scapito della popolazione ivi residente da secoli, i palestinesi.
Come disse Edward Said: " Quello a cui siamo stati sottoposti è un colonialismo unico, dove non sanno cosa farsene di noi. Il palestinese migliore per loro è quello morto o sparito. Non è un discorso di volerci sfruttare né di avere bisogno di noi come una sottoclasse alla maniera di Algeria o Sudafrica".
In appendice al libro è riportata la versione integrale del rapporto di Francesca Albanese alle Nazioni Unite.
"Scritto con urgenza morale e una prosa tagliente, questo libro è un'agghiacciante denuncia delle incessanti atrocità commesse da israele contro i palestinesi. Chris Hedges attinge alla sua vasta esperienza come corrispondente di guerra e conoscitore della lingua araba per intrecciare racconti di prima mano, storie umane intime, contesto storico e un'acuta analisi politica, muovendo una dura accusa al progetto coloniale sionista e alla complicità delle potenze globali nell'annientamento della popolazione indigena palestinese. Questo libro non è semplicemente una cronaca della sofferenza dei palestinesi, ma un appello alla coscienza che invita i lettori a confrontarsi con i fallimenti morali del nostro tempo".
Susan Abulhawa.
"Hedges narra con compassione e maestria gli effetti concreti e devastanti di una guerra che dura ormai da quasi ottant'anni. Una guerra che sta lentamente, ma inesorabilmente, dissolvendo un popolo di "vittime delle vittime", la cui unica "colpa" era ed è di vivere su un territorio che deliranti fondamentalisti sionisti reclamano tutto e solo per sé , e rifiutano di condividere con loro".
dalla prefazione di Piergiorgio Odifreddi
dal rapporto della relatrice speciale sulla situazione dei diritti umani nei territori palestinesi occupati dal 1967, Francesca Albanese.
Chris Hedges è un giornalista, scrittore, inviato speciale in zone di guerra, premio Pulitzer e pastore presbiteriano. Il suo libro è il risultato di più di 7 anni di reportage dalla Palestina occupata e da Gaza. Il libro è fondamentalmente una finestra aperta sulla quantità di menzogne indecenti che circondano israele da prima della sua fondazione, avvenuta nel 1948, a scapito della popolazione ivi residente da secoli, i palestinesi.
Come disse Edward Said: " Quello a cui siamo stati sottoposti è un colonialismo unico, dove non sanno cosa farsene di noi. Il palestinese migliore per loro è quello morto o sparito. Non è un discorso di volerci sfruttare né di avere bisogno di noi come una sottoclasse alla maniera di Algeria o Sudafrica".
In appendice al libro è riportata la versione integrale del rapporto di Francesca Albanese alle Nazioni Unite.
"Scritto con urgenza morale e una prosa tagliente, questo libro è un'agghiacciante denuncia delle incessanti atrocità commesse da israele contro i palestinesi. Chris Hedges attinge alla sua vasta esperienza come corrispondente di guerra e conoscitore della lingua araba per intrecciare racconti di prima mano, storie umane intime, contesto storico e un'acuta analisi politica, muovendo una dura accusa al progetto coloniale sionista e alla complicità delle potenze globali nell'annientamento della popolazione indigena palestinese. Questo libro non è semplicemente una cronaca della sofferenza dei palestinesi, ma un appello alla coscienza che invita i lettori a confrontarsi con i fallimenti morali del nostro tempo".
Susan Abulhawa.
"Hedges narra con compassione e maestria gli effetti concreti e devastanti di una guerra che dura ormai da quasi ottant'anni. Una guerra che sta lentamente, ma inesorabilmente, dissolvendo un popolo di "vittime delle vittime", la cui unica "colpa" era ed è di vivere su un territorio che deliranti fondamentalisti sionisti reclamano tutto e solo per sé , e rifiutano di condividere con loro".
dalla prefazione di Piergiorgio Odifreddi
November 12, 2025
Of all the post-Oct 7th ‘Western journalist writes a book about Palestine for a Western audience’ books I’ve read**
This is the best one.
It’s not even close.
For one reason: Chris Hedges writes about Palestinians like he thinks they’re people. It’s that simple 🤷🏻♀️
Hedges has lived in both Gaza and the West Bank, as a part of his decades-long pro-Palestinian journalism. He speaks Arabic. He’s been an on-the-ground war correspondent for decades. He’s even reported, on location, about genocide before (Bosnia, 1995).
He knows Gazans. His friends are among the dead and the missing. He quotes and discusses Palestinian activists as well-rounded, complex people. Not as perfect victims. Not as dead bodies to be mourned in their passivity, but as people to be admired for their activism and the difficult choices we force them to make.
So of course, he doesn’t call it “a war” (looking at you, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza by Peter Beinart 👀). He calls it “a genocide.” He even includes Francesca Albanese’s UN Report on Genocide in Gaza as an appendix to the book.
He doesn’t “vigorously condemn Hamas” (looking at you, One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad👀). He says, “Hamas is not a terrorist organization.”
He doesn’t say ‘one day we’ll have always been against this’ from the safety of our imperial bubble. He says, “One day we will all be Palestinians” because he understands imperial boomerang and the importance of collective liberation.
He speaks in plain language—clear enough for anyone new to pro-Palestinian nonfiction. Yet he’s radically pro-Palestinian. And I just think he’s Based. GOATED. Whatever the kids are saying these days. He’s just the best.
This is my top recommendation for a book about Palestine by a Western journalist. 10/10 would recommend.
**the other Western journalist books about Palestine I’ve read are:
▪️ The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates ⭐️⭐️⭐️
▪️ Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza by Peter Beinart ⭐️⭐️⭐️
▪️ One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad ⭐️⭐️
This is the best one.
It’s not even close.
For one reason: Chris Hedges writes about Palestinians like he thinks they’re people. It’s that simple 🤷🏻♀️
Hedges has lived in both Gaza and the West Bank, as a part of his decades-long pro-Palestinian journalism. He speaks Arabic. He’s been an on-the-ground war correspondent for decades. He’s even reported, on location, about genocide before (Bosnia, 1995).
He knows Gazans. His friends are among the dead and the missing. He quotes and discusses Palestinian activists as well-rounded, complex people. Not as perfect victims. Not as dead bodies to be mourned in their passivity, but as people to be admired for their activism and the difficult choices we force them to make.
So of course, he doesn’t call it “a war” (looking at you, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza by Peter Beinart 👀). He calls it “a genocide.” He even includes Francesca Albanese’s UN Report on Genocide in Gaza as an appendix to the book.
He doesn’t “vigorously condemn Hamas” (looking at you, One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad👀). He says, “Hamas is not a terrorist organization.”
He doesn’t say ‘one day we’ll have always been against this’ from the safety of our imperial bubble. He says, “One day we will all be Palestinians” because he understands imperial boomerang and the importance of collective liberation.
He speaks in plain language—clear enough for anyone new to pro-Palestinian nonfiction. Yet he’s radically pro-Palestinian. And I just think he’s Based. GOATED. Whatever the kids are saying these days. He’s just the best.
This is my top recommendation for a book about Palestine by a Western journalist. 10/10 would recommend.
**the other Western journalist books about Palestine I’ve read are:
▪️ The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates ⭐️⭐️⭐️
▪️ Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza by Peter Beinart ⭐️⭐️⭐️
▪️ One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad ⭐️⭐️
August 4, 2025
"We are Nero's guests"
Sobering indictment of not only the Israeli state's on-going genocide in Gaza, but also of the support network for said genocide that exists in the United States, the UK and Germany. Defense, software, consulting and other industries are all tied together in support of these crimes and Hedges lays it all out clearly.
Indeed, he doesn't have to dig that hard, as many of the ghouls involved are proud of their work and don't even try to hide it.
Hedges also gives a good account of the student protests at the big universities. The humanity of it all always shines though, and his accounts are focused and polished.
With Herbert Backe smiling up from Hell as the current iteration of his Hunger Plan being rolled out in Gaza, this book takes on more urgency as the systems that support Israel are doubling down, instead of shirking. Look at how the GHF is staffed with ex-servicemen and how their actions are an escalation of the violence.
He ultimately does not find much hope, and neither do I. They will get away with this, and at best, blame it on Netanyahu instead of their whole ethno-religious ideology.
sucks!
Sobering indictment of not only the Israeli state's on-going genocide in Gaza, but also of the support network for said genocide that exists in the United States, the UK and Germany. Defense, software, consulting and other industries are all tied together in support of these crimes and Hedges lays it all out clearly.
Indeed, he doesn't have to dig that hard, as many of the ghouls involved are proud of their work and don't even try to hide it.
Hedges also gives a good account of the student protests at the big universities. The humanity of it all always shines though, and his accounts are focused and polished.
With Herbert Backe smiling up from Hell as the current iteration of his Hunger Plan being rolled out in Gaza, this book takes on more urgency as the systems that support Israel are doubling down, instead of shirking. Look at how the GHF is staffed with ex-servicemen and how their actions are an escalation of the violence.
He ultimately does not find much hope, and neither do I. They will get away with this, and at best, blame it on Netanyahu instead of their whole ethno-religious ideology.
sucks!
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