Chris Hedges - The Genocide in Gaza (2023)

Chris Hedges: The skies over Gaza are filled with projectiles of death. Attack helicopters, drones, artillery shells, tank shells, mortars, bombs, missiles. Gaza is a cacophony of explosions and forlorn screams and cries for help beneath collapsed buildings. Fear after the seven-day truce is coiling itself again around every heart in the Gazan concentration camp. Over 16,000 Palestinians in Gaza, including over 6,000 children, have been killed since October 7th, with another 42,000 wounded. More than 1.8 million people, over 80% of Gaza's population, have been driven from their homes. Thousands are missing, buried under the rubble. More than 300 families have lost 10 or more members. Nearly 300 Palestinians at the same time have been killed in the West Bank and over 3,000 wounded. Israel will not be deterred. It plans to finish the job, to obliterate what is left in the north of Gaza and decimate what remains in the south. to render Gaza uninhabitable, to see its 2.3 million people driven out in a massive campaign of ethnic cleansing via starvation, terror, slaughter, and infectious diseases. The aid convoys bring in token amounts of food and medicine, the first batch during the pause or shrouds and coronavirus tests. The Biden administration refuses to set conditions that will disrupt the $3.8 billion Israel receives in annual military assistance and the $14.3 billion in supplemental aid. It mutters useless bromides about surgical strikes while Israel spins its roulette wheel of death. By the time Israel is done, the 1948 Nakba, or catastrophe, where thousands of Palestinians were massacred in dozens of villages and 750,000 were ethnically cleansed by Zionist militias, will look like a quaint relic of a more civilized era. Nothing is off limits. hospitals, ambulances, mosques, churches, homes, apartment blocks, refugee camps, schools, universities, media offices, sewer systems, telecommunications, infrastructure, water treatment plants, libraries, wheat mills, bakeries, markets, entire neighborhoods. Israel's intent is to destroy Gaza's infrastructure, to make Gaza a wasteland, a dead zone that will be incapable of sustaining life. A leaked 10-page document from the Israeli Ministry of Intelligence dated October 13, 2013, calls for the forcible and permanent transfer of the Gaza's 2.3 million Palestinian residents to Egypt's Sinai Peninsula. Once Palestinians cross the border into Egypt, which the Egyptian government and Arab leaders are seeking to prevent despite pressure from the US, Palestinians will never return. This is not a war against Hamas. It is a war against Palestinians. Israeli strikes are generated at a dizzying rate, many of them from a system called Habsara, the gospel, which is built on artificial intelligence that selects 100 targets a day. The AI system is described on the Israeli site's PLOS 972 magazine and local call as facilitating, I quote, a mass assassination factory. Israel, once it locates what it assumes to be a Hamas operative from a cell phone, for example, bombs and shells a wide area around the target, killing and wounding dozens, sometimes hundreds of people. Israel has abandoned its tactic of roof knocking, where a rocket without a warhead lands on top of a building to warn those inside to evacuate. It has also ended its phone calls warning of an impending attack. Now dozens of families in an apartment block or a neighborhood are killed without notice. During the siege in Sarajevo, when I was reporting for the New York Times, We never endured the level of saturation bombing and near total blockage of food, water, fuel, and medicine that Israel has imposed on Gaza. We never endured hundreds of dead a day and wounded a day. We never endured the complicity of the international community in the Serbian campaign of genocide. We never endured Washington intervening to block a ceasefire resolution. We never endured massive arms shipments from the US and other Western countries to sustain the siege. We never endured press reports from Sarajevo that were routinely discredited and dismissed by the international community, although 25 journalists were killed in the war by the besieging Serbian forces. We never endured Western governments justifying the siege as the right of the Serbs to defend themselves. Although UN peacekeepers sent to Bosnia were largely a public relations gesture, ineffective in halting the slaughter, until forced to respond following the massacres of 8,000 Bosniak men and boys at Srebrenica. I don't mean to minimize the horror of the siege in Sarajevo. which gives me nightmares nearly three decades later. But what we suffered, three to 400 shells a day, four to five dead a day, two dozen wounded a day, is a tiny fraction of the wholesale death and destruction in Gaza. The Israeli siege of Gaza more resembles the Wehrmacht's assault on Stalingrad, where over 90% of the city's buildings were destroyed than Sarajevo. Israel's goal is to erase not only a people, but the idea of Palestine. It is a carbon copy of the massive campaigns of racialized slaughter by other settler colonial projects that believe that indiscriminate and wholesale violence could make the aspirations of an oppressed people, whose land they stole, go away. And like other perpetrators of genocide, Israel intends to keep it hidden, locking out foreign reporters and photographers, cutting phone and internet service, and it has targeted Palestinian reporters, my colleagues, for assassination, killing over 50. Israel has dropped more than 25,000 tons of explosives on Gaza, nearly the equivalent of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Gaza, by the end of Israel's scorched earth campaign, will be uninhabitable, a tactic the Nazis regularly employed when facing armed resistance, including in the Warsaw Ghetto and later Warsaw itself. Gaza, or at least Gaza as we knew it, will not exist. Not only are the tactics the same, but so is the rhetoric. Palestinians are referred to as animals, beasts. They have no right to exist. Their children have no right to exist. They must be cleansed from the earth. The extermination of those whose land we steal, whose resources we plunder, and whose labor we exploit is coded within the DNA of industrialized nations. Ask Native Americans. Ask Indians. Ask the Congolese. Ask the Kikuyu in Kenya. Ask the Herero in Namibia, who, like the Palestinians in Gaza, were gunned down and driven into desert concentration camps where they died of starvation and disease. 80,000 of them. Ask Iraqis, ask Afghans, ask Syrians, ask Kurds, ask Libyans, ask indigenous peoples across the globe. They know who we are. Israel's distorted, settler, colonial visage is our own. We pretend otherwise. We ascribe to ourselves virtues and civilizing qualities that are, as in Israel, flimsy justifications for stripping an occupied and besieged people of their rights, seizing their land, and using prolonged imprisonment, torture, humiliation, and forced poverty and murder to keep them subjugated. Our past, including our recent past in the Middle East, is built on the idea of subduing or wiping out the inferior races of the earth. We give these inferior races names that embody evil, ISIS, Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas. We used racist slurs to dehumanize them, haji, sand, the n-word, camel jockey, Ali Baba, dung shoveler. And then, because they embody evil, because they are less than human, we feel licensed, as Nisam Faturi, a member of the Israeli parliament for the ruling Likud party, said to erase the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth. Natali Bennett, Israel's former prime minister, said, quote, we're fighting Nazis. In other words, absolute evil. Not to be outdone, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described Hamas in a press conference with the German chancellor as the new Nazis. Think about that. A people imprisoned in the world's largest concentration camp for 16 years. denied food, water, fuel, and medicine, lacking an army, air force, navy, mechanized units, artillery, command and control, and missile batteries is being butchered and starved by one of the most advanced militaries on the planet, and they are the Nazis. There is an historical analogy here. But it is not one that Bennett, Netanyahu, or any other Israeli leader wants to acknowledge. 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. We kill with reckless ferocity. We become the beasts. We accuse the oppressed of being. We expose the lie of our vaunted moral superiority. We expose the fundamental truth about Western civilization. We are the most ruthless and efficient killers on the planet. This alone is why we dominate the wretched of the earth. It has nothing to do with democracy or freedom or liberty. These are rights we never intend to grant to the oppressed. Honor, justice, compassion, and freedom are ideas that have no converts, Joseph Conrad reminds us. There are only people without knowing, understanding, or feelings who intoxicate themselves with words, repeat words, shout them out, imagining they believe them, without believing in anything else but profit, personal advantage, and their own satisfaction. Genocide lies at the core of Western imperialism. It is not unique to Israel. It is not unique to the Nazis. It is the building block of Western domination. The humanitarian interventionists who insist we should bomb and occupy other nations because we embody goodness, although they promote military intervention only when it is perceived to be in our national interest, are the useful idiots of the war machine and global imperialists. They live in an Alice in Wonderland fairy tale where the rivers of blood we spawn make the world a happier and better place. They are the smiley faces of genocide. You can watch them on your screens, you can listen to them spout their pseudo morality in the White House and in Congress. They are always wrong and they never go away. Israel, like all settler colonial projects, including our own, was founded on lies. The lie that Palestinian land was unoccupied. The lie that 750,000 Palestinians fled their homes and villages during the ethnic cleansing by Zionist militias in 1948 because they were told to do so by their leaders. The lie that it was Arab armies that started the 1948 war. that saw Israel seize 78% of historic Palestine, the lie that Israel faced annihilation in 1967, forcing it to invade and occupy the remaining 22% of Palestine, as well as land belonging to Egypt and Syria. Israel is sustained by lies. The lie that Israel wants a just and equitable peace and will support an independent Palestinian state. The lie that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. The lie that Israel is an outpost of Western civilization in a sea of barbarism. The lie that Israel respects the rule of law and human rights. The brazenness of Israeli lies stunned those of us who reported from Gaza. It did not matter if we had seen the Israeli attack, including the shooting of unarmed Palestinians. It did not matter how many witnesses we interviewed. It did not matter what photographic and forensic evidence we obtained. Israel lied, small lies, big lies, huge lies. These lies came reflexively and instantly from the Israeli military, Israeli politicians, and Israeli media. They were amplified by Israel's well-oiled propaganda machine and repeated with a cloying sincerity on international news outlets. Israel engages in the kinds of jaw-dropping lies that characterize despotic regimes. It does not deform the truth. It inverts it. It paints a picture that is diametrically opposed to reality. Those of us who have covered the occupied territories have run into Israel's Alice in Wonderland narratives, which we dutifully insert into our stories required under the rules of American journalism, although we know they are untrue. Israel has invented an Orwellian lexicon. Children killed by Israelis become children caught in the crossfire. The bombing of residential districts with dozens of dead and wounded becomes a surgical strike on a bomb-making factory. The destruction of Palestinian homes becomes the demolition of the homes of terrorists. The big lie feeds the two reactions Israel seeks to elicit. Racism among its supporters and terror among its victims. The Big Lie fosters the myth of a clash of civilizations, a war between democracy, decency, and honor on one side, and Islamic terrorism, barbarism, and medievalism on the other. The Big Lie abolishes nuances, ambiguities, and contradictions that can plague conscience. It is designed to create cognitive dissonance. It permits no gray zones. The world is black and white, good and evil, righteous and unrighteous. The Big Lie allows believers to take comfort, a comfort they are desperately seeking, in their own moral superiority. It feeds what Edward Bernays called the logic-proof compartment of dogmatic adherence. All effective propaganda, Bernays writes, targets and builds upon these irrational psychological habits. Israel's supporters do not want to know the truth. The truth would force them to examine their racism, self-delusion, and complicity in oppression, murder, and genocide." Most important, the Big Lie sends an ominous message to the Palestinians. The Big Lie states that Israel will wage a campaign of mass terror and genocide and never take responsibility for its crimes. The Big Lie obliterates the truth. It obliterates the dignity of human thought and human action. It obliterates facts. It obliterates history. It obliterates comprehension. It obliterates hope. It reduces all communication to the language of violence. When oppressors speak to the oppressed exclusively through indiscriminate violence, the oppressed answer through indiscriminate violence. I and the public know what all schoolchildren learn, W.H. Auden wrote. Those to whom evil is done do evil in return. The cartoonist Joe Sacco and I watched Israeli soldiers taunt and shoot small boys and in Gaza. We interviewed the boys and their parents afterwards in the hospital. In a few cases, we attended the funerals. We had their names. We had the dates. We had the locations of the shootings. Israel's response was to say that we were not in Gaza. We had made it up. The Israeli prime minister, foreign minister, defense minister, and IDF spokesman immediately blamed the killing of my Al Jazeera colleague, Shirin Abu Akleh, in 2022 on Palestinian gunmen. Israel disseminated footage of a Palestinian fighter they said shot and killed the journalist, who was wearing a flak jacket and helmet marked press. The lie was peddled until video footage examined by B'Tselem, the Israeli Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, identified the location of the Palestinian gunman depicted in the video. The video the human rights organization found was taken in a different location from where Shireen was killed. When Israel is caught lying as it was with the murder of Shireen, it promises an investigation. But these investigations are a sham. Impartial investigations into the thousands of killings by soldiers and Jewish settlers of Palestinians are rarely carried out. Perpetrators are almost never brought to trial or held accountable. The pattern of Israeli obfuscation is predictable, and so is the collusion of nearly all the corporate media, along with Republican and Democratic politicians. US politicians decried the murder of Shireen and dutifully repeated the old mantra, calling for a thorough investigation by the army that carried out the crime. A few months later, Israel admitted that there was a, quote, high possibility that an Israeli soldier killed Shireen by accident. But by then, the eruption of street protests in the West Bank and rage over the killing of the journalist was over and her murder largely forgotten. There is dramatic footage captured in September 2000 at the Netzerim Junction in Gaza. where I saw a 19-year-old boy shot and killed by an Israeli sniper, by France Du, of a father trying to shield his traumatized 12-year-old son, Mohamed Aldara, from Israeli gunfire that ultimately killed him. The killing of the boy resulted in the typical propaganda campaign by Israel. Israeli officials spent years lying about the killing, first blaming the Palestinians for the shooting, later suggesting the scene was faked, and finally insisting the boy was still alive. When an Israeli soldier in 2003 murdered the 23-year-old student and American activist Rachel Corey by crushing her to death with a bulldozer as she tried to prevent the illegal demolition of a Palestinian doctor's home, the Israeli army said it was an accident for which Corrine was responsible. Israel blocks the work of independent human rights organizations into atrocities and war crimes it commits. in Gaza and the West Bank. It refuses to cooperate with the International Criminal Court. It does not cooperate with the UN Human Rights Council. It prohibits the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Palestinian territories occupied from 1967 from entering the country. Israel revoked the work permit for Omar Shakir, the director of Human Rights Watch in 2018, and expelled him. In May 2018, Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs and Public Diplomacy published a report calling on the European Union and European states to halt their direct and indirect financial support and funding to Palestinian and international human rights organizations that, quote, have ties to terror and promote boycotts against Israel. And Israel refused a few days ago to renew a visa for Lynn Hastings, the top UN humanitarian aid official for Gaza and the West Bank. The longer the genocide continues, the more absurd the lies become. There are big lies, the obliteration of Gaza and wanton killing of thousands of Palestinians. Israel insists it's a targeted effort to get rid of Hamas. And there are small lies. 40 beheaded babies. Al-Shifa Hospital is a Hamas command center. A calendar in Arabic on the wall, according to the IDF spokesman, is a guard list where every terrorist writes his name and every terrorist has his own shift guarding the people that were here. An Israeli actor dressed up as a nurse and speaking heavily accented Arabic claims to be a Palestinian. and to have seen Hamas use civilians as human shields. She says of Hamas that they attacked al-Shifa hospital and stole the fuel and medicine. Palestinian militants rather than Israeli tanks, Israel claims, are responsible for the shelling of al-Shifa. An Israeli car, or Israel struck a car full of terrorists in southern Lebanon, terrorists who turned out to be three girls, their mother and grandmother. The explosion at Al-Ahly Hospital was the result of an errant rocket fired by the Palestinians, a claim even the New York Times questioned when it discredited the video based on an analysis of its timestamp. Israel said it responded to the request of the director of Shifa Hospital to allow Gazan citizens who were sheltering in the hospital in a wish to evacuate from Shifa Hospital towards the humanitarian crossing in Gaza Strip via a secure access. This was a statement that Mohammad Zakut, the director of the hospitals in Gaza, said was categorically false, adding, quote, we were forced to leave by gunpoint. The lies will be written into Israeli school books. The lies will be repeated by Israeli politicians, historians, and journalists. The lies will be told on Israeli television and in Israeli films and books. Israelis are the eternal victims. Palestinians are absolute evil. There was no genocide. Turkey, a century later, still denies what happened to the Armenians. The lies create cognitive dissonance where fact becomes fiction, fiction becomes truth. The lies make any discussion of genocide and ultimately reconciliation impossible. And Israel, like the perpetrators of past genocides, will pretend it never happened. But the lies used by Israel to absolve itself of responsibility will eat away at Israeli society. They will corrode its moral, religious, civic, intellectual, and political life. The lies will elevate war criminals to heroic status and demonize those with a conscience. Israel's genocide, as with the 1965 mass killings in Indonesia, will be mythologized, an epic battle against the forces of evil, just as we mythologize the genocide of Native Americans and turn our own settlers and murderous cavalry units into heroes. I covered the birth of Jewish fascism in Israel. I reported on the extremist Meir Kahane, who was barred from running for office and whose Koch party was outlawed in 1994 and declared a terrorist organization by Israel and the United States. I attended political rallies by Netanyahu, who received lavish funding from right-wing Americans when he ran against Yitzhak Rabin, who was negotiating a peace settlement with the Palestinians. Netanyahu's supporters chanted, death to Rabin. They burned an effigy of Rabin, dressed in a Nazi uniform. Netanyahu marched in front of a mock funeral for Rabin. Rabin was assassinated on November 4, 1995, by a Jewish fanatic. And Rabin's widow, Leah, blamed Netanyahu and his supporters for her husband's murder. Netanyahu, who first became prime minister in 1996, has spent his political career nurturing Jewish extremists, including Avidor Lieberman, Gideon Saar, Naftali Bennett, Netanyahu's father, Ben-Zion, who worked as an assistant to the Zionist pioneer Vladimir Jabotinsky, who Benito Mussolini referred to as a good fascist, was a leader in the Herod party that called on the Jewish state to seize all the land of historic Palestine. Many of those who formed the Herod party carried out terrorist attacks during the 1948 war that established the state of Israel. Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Sidney Hook, and other Jewish intellectuals described the Herod party in a statement published in the New York Times as, quote, a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy, and social appeal to Nazi and fascist parties. There has always been a strain of Jewish fascism within the Zionist project. Now it has taken control of the state of Israel. The left is no longer capable of overcoming the toxic ultra-nationalism that has evolved here. Zev Sternhill, a Holocaust survivor and Israel's foremost authority on fascism, warned in 2018, the kind whose European strain almost wiped out a majority of the Jewish people. Sternhill added, We see not just a growing Israeli fascism, but racism akin to Nazism in its early stages. The decision to obliterate Gaza has long been the dream of Israel's crypto-fascist heirs of Kahane's movement. They champion the iconography and language of their homegrown fascism. Jewish identity and Jewish nationalism are the Zionist versions of blood and soil. Jewish supremacy is sanctified by God, as is the slaughter of Palestinians who Netanyahu compared to the biblical Ammonites massacred by the Israelites. It is a grave mistake not to take the blood-curdling calls for the wholesale eradication and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians seriously. This rhetoric is not hyperbolic. It is a literal prescription. Palestinians for the Israeli state function as little more than human laboratory rats. the Israeli military, intelligence services, arms, and technology industries, And Israel's drones and surveillance technology, including spyware, facial recognition, software, biometric gathering infrastructure, along with smart fences, experimental bombs, AI-controlled machine guns, they're all tried out on the captive population in Gaza, often with lethal results. These weapons and technologies are then certified as, quote, battle-tested and sold around the world. Israel is the 10th biggest arms dealer on the planet, It sells its technology and weapons to an estimated 130 nations, including military dictatorships in Asia and Latin America. Israeli weapons sales total $12.5 billion last year. Its close relationship with these military internal security surveillance and intelligence gathering and law enforcement agencies explains the fulsome support Israel's allies give to the genocide in Gaza. When Colombian President Gustavo Petro refused to condemn the October 7 attack by Palestinian resistance groups as a terrorist attack and said, quote, terrorism is killing innocent children in Palestine, Israel immediately halted all sales of defense and security equipment to Colombia. This global cabal, dedicated to permanent war and keeping its populations monitored and controlled, has hundreds of billions of dollars a year in sales. These technologies are cementing into place a supra-national corporate totalitarianism, a world where populations are enslaved in ways that past totalitarian regimes could only imagine. The genocide in Gaza is another chapter in the century-long ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians by the Israeli settler colonial project. It is accompanied, as is true for all settler colonial projects, by the theft of natural resources, land, water, and the natural gas in the Gaza marine fields 20 nautical miles off the coast of Gaza. which could contain up to 1 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. In a world of diminishing resources, especially water in the Middle East, and the dislocations caused by the climate crisis, Gaza is the prelude to a frightening new world order. As democracies wither and die, as economic inequality expands, as poverty and desperation mounts, the global ruling class will increasingly do to us, once we become restive, or attempt to rebel what they are doing to the Palestinians. It is not a far cry from Gaza to the camps and detention centers set up for migrants fleeing to Europe, from Africa and the Middle East, or from the Global South to the United States. It is not a far cry from the carpet bombing in Gaza to the endless wars in the Middle East and the Global South. It is not a far cry from the anti-terrorism laws used to criminalize dissent in Israel to the anti-terrorism laws introduced in Europe and the US. Israel has long supplied some of the most heinous regimes on the planet with weaponry, including the apartheid government of South Africa and Myanmar. India is Israel's largest purchaser of military drones. Israel provided UAVs, missiles, and mortars to Azerbaijan for its invasion and occupation of Nagorno-Karabakh, which displaced 100,000 people, more than 80% of the enclave's ethnic Armenians. Israel sold napalm and weapons to the Salvadoran military, as well as the murderous regime of Rios Montt in Guatemala when I covered the wars in the 1980s in Central America. Israeli-made Uzi submachine guns were the weapons of choice for Central American death squads. Israel also sold weapons to the Bosnian Serbs, despite international sanctions, when I covered the war in Bosnia in the 1990s. Elbit Systems, Israel's largest private weapons firm, supplies US Customs and Border Protection with high-tech surveillance towers, which it uses along the border with Mexico. It also supplied the CBP with its Hermes drones in 2004 in order to test the feasibility of using them on the border with Mexico. Pegasus, a phone hacking tool produced by the Israeli NSO group, a cyber intelligence agency, has been used by Mexican drug cartels to target journalists and track down the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was a friend of mine, And then it was killed and dismembered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October 2018. Pegasus transforms a cellular phone into a mobile surveillance device, with microphones and cameras activated without the user's knowledge. Skunk water, a putrid-smelling liquid, was tested on Palestinians, often with Israeli film crews, recording the attacks to show potential clients, including US police departments, the effectiveness of the chemical. Israel created a sophisticated facial recognition system, Red Wolf, to document every Palestinian in the occupied territories. Israel trains and equips U.S. police forces, teaching aggressive tactics backed up by heavy military hardware and vehicles, which were used in Ferguson and Atlanta during the police confrontations with activists who were protesting Cobb City. This new world begins in Gaza. But it ends at home. The zealots in power in Israel could have exchanged the hostages held by Hamas for the thousands of Palestinian hostages held in Israeli prisons, which is why the Israeli hostages were seized. And there is evidence that in the chaotic fighting that took place once Hamas militants entered Israel, the Israeli military decided to target not only Hamas fighters, but the Israeli captives with them. Several new testimonies by Israeli witnesses to the October 7 Hamas attack on southern Israel adds to the growing evidence that the Israeli military killed its own citizens as they fought to neutralize Palestinian gunmen, Max Blumenthal writes in The Gray Zone. Tuval Eskapa, a member of the security team for Kibbutz Beria, set up a hotline to coordinate between Kibbutz residents and the Israeli army. He told the Israeli newspaper Arez that his desperation began to set in, quote, the commanders in the field made difficult decisions, including shelling houses on their occupants in order to eliminate the terrorists along with the hostages. The newspaper reported that Israeli commanders were, quote, compelled to request an airstrike against its own facility inside the areas crossing to Gaza, quote, in order to repulse the terrorists who had seized control. The base housed Israeli civil administration officers and soldiers. Israel in 1986 introduced a military policy called the Hannibal Directive, apparently named for the Carthaginian general who poisoned himself rather than be captured by the Romans. Following the capture of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah, the directive is designed to prevent Israeli troops from falling into enemy hands through the maximum use of force, even at the cost of killing the captured soldiers and civilians. The directive was executed during the 2014 Israeli assault on Gaza, known as Operation Protective Edge. Hamas fighters, on August 1, 2014, captured an Israeli officer, Lieutenant Hadar Golden. In response, Israel dropped more than 2,000 bombs, missiles, and shells on the area where he was being held. Golden was killed, along with over 100 Palestinian civilians. The directive was supposedly rescinded in 2016, but I'm nearly certain it is being applied to the 138 remaining Israeli hostages in Gaza. I returned a few days ago from Egypt. On the flight, I wrote a letter to the children of Gaza, and I would like to close my talk with this letter. Dear child, it is past midnight. I'm flying at hundreds of miles an hour in the darkness, thousands of feet over the Atlantic Ocean. I'm traveling to Egypt. I will go to the border of Gaza and Rafah. I go because of you. You have never been in a plane. You have never left Gaza. You know only the densely packed streets and alleys, the concrete hovels. You know only the security barriers and fences patrolled by soldiers that surround Gaza. Planes for you are terrifying. Fighter jets, attack helicopters, drones. They circle above you. They drop missiles and bombs, deafening explosions. The ground shakes. Buildings fall. The dead. The screams. The muffled calls for help from beneath the rubble. It does not stop. Night and day. Trapped under the piles of smashed concrete, your playmates, your schoolmates, your neighbors, gone in seconds. You see the chalky faces and limp bodies when they are dug out. I am a reporter. It is my job to see this. You are a child. You should never see this. the stench of death, rotting corpses under the broken concrete. You hold your breath. You cover your mouth with a cloth. You walk faster. Your neighborhood has become a graveyard. All that was familiar is gone. You stare in amazement. You wonder where you are. You are afraid. Explosion after explosion. You cry. You cling to your mother or father. You cover your ears. You see the white light of the missile and wait for the blast. Why do they kill children? What did you do? Why can't anyone protect you? Will you be wounded? Will you lose a leg or an arm? Will you go blind or be in a wheelchair? Why were you born? Was it for something good? Or was it for this? Will you grow up? Will you be happy? What will it be like without your friends? Who will die next? Your mother? Your father? Your brothers and sisters? Someone you know will be injured soon. Someone you know will die soon. At night, you lie in the dark on the cold cement floor. The phones are cut. The internet is off. You do not know what is happening. There are flashes of light. There are waves of blast concussions. There are screams. It does not stop. When your father or mother hunts for food or water, you wait. That terrible feeling in your stomach. Will they come back? Will you see them again? Will your tiny home be next? Will the bombs find you? Are these your last moments on Earth? You drink salty, dirty water. It makes you very sick. Your stomach hurts. You are hungry. The bakeries are destroyed. There is no bread. You eat one meal a day, pasta, a cucumber. Soon, this will seem like a feast. You do not play with your soccer ball made of rags. You do not fly your kite. made from old newspapers. You have seen foreign reporters. We wear flak jackets with the word press written on them. We have helmets. We have cameras. We drive Jeeps. We appear after a bombing or a shooting. We sit over a coffee for a long time and talk to the adults. Then we disappear. We do not usually interview children. But I have done interviews when groups of you crowded around us, laughing, pointing, asking us to take your picture. I have been bombed by jets in Gaza. I have been bombed in other wars, wars that happened before you were born. I too was very, very scared. I still have dreams about it. When I see the pictures of Gaza, these wars return to me with a force of thunder and lightning. I think of you. All of us who've been to war hate war most of all because of what it does to children. I tried to tell your story. I tried to tell the world that when you are cruel to people, Week after week, month after month, year after year, decade after decade, when you deny people freedom and dignity, when you humiliate and trap them in an open-air prison, when you kill them as if they were beasts, they become very angry. They do to others what was done to them. I told it over and over. I told it for seven years. Few listened. And now this. There are very brave Palestinian journalists. 50 of them have been killed since this bombing began. They are heroes. So are the doctors and nurses in your hospitals. So are the UN workers, almost 100 of whom have been killed. So are the ambulance drivers and medics. So are the rescue parties that lift up the slabs of concrete with their hands. So are the mothers and fathers who shield you from the bombs. But we are not there. Not this time. We cannot get in. We are locked out. Reporters from all over the world are going to the border crossing at Rafah. We are going because we cannot watch this slaughter and do nothing. We are going because hundreds of people are dying a day, including over 100 children. We are going because this genocide must stop. We are going because we have children like you, precious, innocent, loved. We are going because we want you to live. I hope one day we will meet. You will be an adult. I will be an old man, although to you I am already very old. In my dream for you, I will find you free and safe and happy. No one will be trying to kill you. You will fly in airplanes filled with people, not bombs. You will not be trapped in a concentration camp. You will see the world. You will grow up and have children. You will become old. You will remember this suffering. But you will know it means you must help others who suffer. This is my hope, my prayer. We have failed you. This is the awful guilt we carry. We tried, but we did not try hard enough. It will go to Rafa, many of us reporters, who will stand outside the border with Gaza in protest. We will write and film. This is what we do. It is not much, but it is something. It will tell your story again. Maybe it will be enough to earn the right to ask for your forgiveness. Thank you.

Eleanor Stein: I want to thank you on behalf of all of us. It was deeply moving and profoundly revealing. And to look at not only what Israel is doing in Palestine, but to expose the global network that's at work and understand the consequences for our own lives. So here's a question. I'll summarize it. The bottom line is, did Netanyahu at all allow this to happen, October 7? There were news reports stated that Egypt had warned Israel that something was going to happen. This combined with recent New York Times articles about Israeli intelligence having observed and reported on Hamas training exercises begs the question, did Netanyahu and the government allow this to happen?

Chris Hedges: I don't think Netanyahu allowed it to happen because it's political death for Netanyahu. Once the war is over, I don't see him continuing in power. I think it was like 9-11. and intelligence failure. We also had pretty serious warnings. I covered, after 9-11, I covered al-Qaeda for the New York Times based in Paris in the Middle East and Europe, but I think it was a glaring intelligence failure. Remember, the Israeli political situation has not been stable. Netanyahu is up for three counts of corruption, and I just think they weren't obviously heating, there were several warnings, including the women who were spotters seeing activity. As the New York Times, you said that they had a blueprint, published a story that they had a blueprint. You're right that the Egyptian intelligence, which is no friend of Hamas, warned Israel, but I think it was a failure of the Netanyahu government is pretty incompetent.

Eleanor Stein: Thank you. Thank you. Can you explain or unpack the syndrome or interest sets that have so many of our leaders refusing to support, of all things, a ceasefire?

Chris Hedges: Yeah. It's because we live in a system where I'm actually teaching Democracy Incorporated in my prison class. I teach through the degree program Rutgers offers in the New Jersey prison system. And so Sheldon Golan describes our system as inverted totalitarianism, where you have the facade of a democracy, but internally... the oligarchs corporations essentially hold all of the levers of power. So you have this bizarre moment where I think it's what, 80% or something of Democrats want a ceasefire or something like that. And not only is Netanyahu, not Netanyahu, Biden, not feeling that he has to respond, but they're actually insulting And in the case of Jewish Voices for Peace, a fantastic group which I admire very much, when they were protesting outside the DNC, they were using violence against them. So it's because we don't count. We don't matter. What matters are the people with the money. And AIPAC has a lot of money. and I think it also is the fact, as I mentioned in my talk, that Israel is deeply embedded in this global cabal of surveillance and arms manufacturing. And those are the new Mandarins. Those are the people who... are inheriting power at our expense. So they're not beholden to us. They're utterly tone deaf. The super, APAC's not allowed to give money to campaigns, but it has a PAC, and the report is that it's gonna spend $100 million to take down AOC and the other, especially Rashida Tlaib, who has spoken quite courageously on this issue. But it's really, you know, we live in a system of legalized bribery. And whatever issue it is, we don't matter.

Eleanor Stein: I'm grouping some of these questions. Is the UN powerless? Will the recent invocation of Article 99 make any difference?

Chris Hedges: Yeah, I think it's important what the Secretary General is doing. I think it's important that voices are raised. But Israel is not going to, you hear The Biden administration and Blinken, they want more surgical strikes. They want protection of civilians. But there's no red line. They're never going to hold Israel to account. And I covered the war in Lebanon. And Israel promised the United States they wouldn't bomb West Beirut. And then they bombed West Beirut into rubble. The relationship between Israel and the United States is one where the Israeli government can really operate with impunity because of the Israel lobby. If you have not seen the lobby, the documentary by Al Jazeera, the... The heavy pressure was put on Al Jazeera not to broadcast. They broadcast the portion in the UK, but not the one that was done in the US. And it was a Jewish kid from Oxford undercover with a hidden camera and mic that went inside the lobby groups. It's quite revealing. So, I mean, you saw Netanyahu defy Obama when Obama was trying to do the Iran nuclear deal, which Netanyahu tried to sabotage. He bypassed the White House, went and addressed Congress, and denounced the president's policy. Biden, when he was vice president, was in Jerusalem, and the U.S. had called for limiting settlement development in the West Bank. And the day Biden was in Jerusalem, just to humiliate him, they announced an expansion of settlement buildings. So Israel is... because of the power of the Israel lobby, is able, essentially both political parties are completely captive. I mean, I think there is a difference between Biden and Trump in the sense that, in terms of if you're Palestinian, there's no difference, but the difference is rhetorical, where Trump would have full-throated, bloodthirsty calls to kill. Biden is essentially talking about protecting civilians but doing the same thing. It's a difference of rhetoric, not policy.

Eleanor Stein: So I have several questions about the rest of the Arab world. Do you think other Arab governments, UAE, Saudi, Egypt, are encouraging Israel to finish Hamas off? That's in quotes. I've seen that reported.

Chris Hedges: So I just came from Egypt. No, the Sisi government, which hates Hamas, because Hamas is born out of the Muslim Brotherhood, and Sisi overthrew a Muslim Brotherhood government. But Egypt's big fear is that eventually the humanitarian crisis will become so extreme that Palestinians are pushed over the border of Rafah into... the Egyptian Sinai. Now, that creates tremendous problems for Egypt, not only in terms of the logistics of having to care for a refugee population of that size, but also because inevitably there would be cross-border incursions. I mean, you have now created in a whole new generation of brutalized, traumatized young Palestinians who are going to react the way any of us would if we were brutalized and traumatized like that. So they don't want cross-border raids by Israel. you know, jet strike, they understand. They're fighting very hard to stop that from happening. Israel is pushing very hard to make it happen. There have been reports that Israel may, you know, they've cut off, like, there's no water. There's no, it's, the situation is becoming truly catastrophic. Cholera will start whipping through. These people are living out in the open with no sanitation. So there's reports that Israel may just put an armada of boats and put them on boats. There's a bill before Congress by Israel supporters saying that foreign aid in the Arab world will depend on the relocation of Palestinian refugees who've been ethnically cleansed. They actually have numbers, one million in Egypt, I don't know, 700,000 in Iraq, whatever it is. So We know what Israel's intent is. That's not in dispute. What they can achieve, because there is, remember Blinken, on his first trip to the Middle East, was essentially trying to get lobbying Arab governments to take Palestinians. And they all shut the door on his face. But Egypt's economy is a disaster. I think they're $161 billion in debt. They can hold all sorts of incentives. But that's the goal. Where it goes, I think at this stage, we can say that clearly what they're creating in Southern Gaza, remember Gaza's only 20 miles long and five miles wide, it's tiny, is a humanitarian crisis where soon more people will begin to die of infectious diseases than from the bombs, which is quite a bit. And that's being orchestrated by Israel in an intentional crisis. which they hope will put leverage or pressure on the rest of the world to push the Palestinians out. What happens, I don't know, but that's what they're trying to do.

Eleanor Stein: I have several other questions about other countries in the Middle East, but I think that you've responded to them. So here's a broader question. With Zionism being born out of colonialism, looking at how it obliterated its native populations, is the darkness going to be long with essentially countries like India following a similar hyper-nationalist approach?

Chris Hedges: Yes. So what you're seeing is an alliance of Netanyahu. Some of these people, like Orban, are rabid anti-Semites. The Christian right, they're all anti-Semites here. I wrote a book about them called American Fascists, the Christian Right and the War in America. I was trying to reach out to them. But they have built an alliance built, I think, around this common ideology, this common crypto-fascism. That's the commonality. And so Netanyahu has stated that he doesn't see the world, and he's probably right, as moving towards democracy and liberty and freedom, but one that is moving towards a kind of species of totalitarianism and that he sees Israel for that reason in the mainstream.

Eleanor Stein: Here's a great question. Do the people of Gaza know that millions of people on the ground throughout the world support them and are trying to stop Israeli genocide?

Chris Hedges: Yes.

Eleanor Stein: Do they know about the demonstrations of hundreds of thousands?

Chris Hedges: Yes, and it is so important to them. So don't ever think that what you do, and I know there are people here, does not matter. It matters so much. because these people feel forgotten and erased. And every time they see you blocking an entrance, holding up a Palestinian flag, fighting for their human rights, it gives them hope. It is so important what you do. And I salute everyone in this room who has stood up for the Palestinians.

Eleanor Stein: Well, these are follow-up questions. Chris, thank you for coming. What can we do to make real meaningful change happen? Thank you.

Chris Hedges: I think they're doing it. I mean, I went to the demonstration in Washington, and what was so heartening about it was that they were all young. So I've done a lot of the anti-war stuff, and everyone's my age or older. But these are kids, and even the speaker's kids. They're in their 20s. But they were wonderful. And I think it's because they realized they can't trust the corporate media. I think they're educated in terms of the nature of settler colonial projects and racism. Because remember, imperialism is just the external face of white supremacy. That's what it is. And they get it. So, you know, that is the only thing we can do. I think these groups that have been following, there was one in Boston, you know, when Biden's sitting down at these, I don't know how much they pay to have lunch with Biden, $50,000, you know, all the rich donors, and they're out right outside the window. And I can tell you that it rattles the hell out of them. It's great. So that's what we've got to keep doing. I mean, there's a wonderful, wonderful Kissinger, unfortunately escaped justice, but in his memoirs, which please don't go out and buy, he talks about a moment, I think it was 71 or something, there are tens of thousands of people anti-war demonstrators surrounding the White House. And as a protection, they had put empty city buses in a ring around the White House. And Nixon's freaking out. And he's looking out the window. He's going, Henry, they're going to break through the barricades and get us. And that's our job. That's just where we want people in power to be. But it isn't going to be there. They aren't going to feel that heat if we're not in the street.

Eleanor Stein: I think many of us have watched these young protesters. in the last few months and think, see, this is their Vietnam

Chris Hedges: Well, it's a little different. Vietnam, they were coming home in body bags here. So it's not quite their Vietnam. But I think it shows their high, sophisticated understanding of global politics. And I mean, I'm very heartened. I loved Occupy. I couldn't go to Zuccotti Park enough. I got energy from it. I used to sit around the People's Library with all the retired New York City librarians. So yeah, I just went to the demonstration at Princeton University outside NASA Hall where the students were calling for a boycott, divestment, and sanction. By the way, I'm a very strong supporter of BDS and have been since its inception. So and what was remarkable is I watched one faculty, only one faculty member showed up, Max Weiss, who teaches history, and stood up and spoke. It was quite moving, because they're going to go for him. Just, you know, Columbia has banned Jewish Voices for Peace and students dressed as Palestine. But if you go back and look at what they did to the students who were protesting apartheid, what the student in South Africa, what the students were doing when they were protesting the Vietnam War is the same. I mean, it exposes... how the heads of these universities do not work for the universities. They certainly don't work for the students. They work for a bunch of troglodytes on the trustee board, half of whom should be in prison, because they have a lot of money. That's it. That's who they work for. And there's no difference between the way they have reacted and the way university presidents in the Vietnam War reacted. Exposes who they are. I don't think Hezbollah is going to enter the war. I think Iran, they don't. So you have a significant presence, naval presence, in the Persian Gulf off of the coast of Iran. Now Netanyahu would love to draw us into a conflict, especially with Iran. He's been trying to do that for a long time. He's the one who, the Israel lobby and all his courtiers, Elliot Abrams and Paul Wolfowitz, they were the ones who pushed us into Iraq. So, yeah, I don't think, I think Hezbollah, from all I can see, they have done, I would call it, symbolic things. attacks. They have quite an arsenal of sophisticated missiles, about 7,000 or something, that could do serious damage to Israel. And they haven't used those. I think they don't. I mean, traditionally, the Palestinians have been friendless because they're powerless. and not just in the wider world, but within the Arab world as well. I mean, if you look at, I would want a good summary of the conflict, read Rashid Khalidi's 100-Year War in Palestine. But there are several patterns, Israeli deception being one of the big ones. But one of the other ones is just the perfidy of the Arab regimes who have paid lip service to Palestinian rights but not done very... In many cases, as in the case right now of Egypt, conspired with Israel to sell the Palestinians out.

Eleanor Stein: Here's a couple of questions. Who should we trust to give us reliable information? And then a follow-up question. Center for Constitutional Rights, the Palestine Project, do you consider this a reliable source?

Chris Hedges: Yes, they're great. So there's a few of us who spent a lot of time covering the Middle East. You can sign up for my Substack, chrisedges.substack.com. That's all I've done since October 7th is write about the conflict. Jonathan Cook, who also covered the conflict, he's also on Substack. Electronic Intifada, I look at Al Jazeera every day, usually several times a day. I know a lot of the reporters there. They're doing the best coverage by far of anyone out of Gaza. But you have Mundo Weiss, Electronic Intifada, Middle East Eye. There's a few that are good. But the journalists, such as myself, that are writing, I think, with any honesty about this, we're not in the mainstream anymore. I couldn't write what I write and still be at The New York Times. I mean, I actually was banned from the Middle East because I got sick of the propaganda, and I went with Joe Sacco, the great cartoonist, and you should all get Footnotes in Gaza. It's one of the great books on the Middle East. He and I went for Harper's Magazine and spent 10 days in Honey Unis called Gaza Diary, just day by day writing about what life was like. So I took my vacation time to do it and printed it, and the times went berserk and said, you will never write on the Middle East for us again.

Eleanor Stein: I'm not sure you'd want to be writing for them on the Middle East right now, given what they're putting out. But here's an interesting question. What do you think a legitimate response by Israel to the Hamas attack would be or would have been?

Chris Hedges: So... Just as Trump is a symptom of our decayed and anemic democracy, the attack on October 7th is a reaction. You can't isolate it. Far more Palestinian children have been killed by Israel. In fact, I don't believe there were any children killed by, remember we had the 50 babies and that vanished and all that kind of stuff. If you look at any uprising against a colonial project, anyone, any of them, they lash out with a kind of inchoate fury. I mean, what did Nat Turner do? Nat Turner killed every white person he saw. Now, I'm not defending it. And to understand it is not to condone it, but you can't isolate it. And so if you look at Reed C.L.R. James's great history of black Jacobins of the Haitian slave revolt, the only successful slave revolt in human history, and Haiti's been paying for it ever since. And James is very sympathetic, but he doesn't whitewash the torture and atrocities that were committed against the French planter class. He has a wonderful line, you know, these are the, I'm going to butcher it, but it's something like these are the momentary eruptions of an oppressed people rather than the institutionalized torture and atrocity of the state. um even in the french revolution you had clergy and aristocrats had their heads severed and were carried around on pikes through the streets of paris this is what happens when you brutalize a people over a long period of time which i'm not defending it um you know there's two things that one you know those who carry out atrocities should be held accountable whoever they are and not murdering 6,000 children who had nothing to do with it. Most of the people killed in Gaza. Very few, as far as we can tell, very few Hamas fighters have been killed. Why is Israel flattening Gaza? Because they don't want to go into the tunnels. So they'll just kill all the Palestinians. They won't go into those tunnels. And of course, it's a conscious effort to destroy an infrastructure which makes life sustainable. That's why they destroyed the hospitals. So an appropriate response should have been done decades ago. and this sadly is where we've ended up. But you can't, as Pope Francis said, you can't commit terror in response to terror, but that's been this kind of cycle of violence that has been perpetuated since before Israel's founding. Thank you. I mean, I just want to say that when the problem without context is that you see a reaction that's brutal, but you don't see the long, slow drip of oppression that created it. And so to those who don't understand that oppression and haven't covered it, which is most of the media, what they see is incomprehensible, and therefore they certify those people who carried out that action as incomprehensible. And that comes essentially with the conscious decision on the part of the major media not to tell the truth. They don't use the word apartheid. They don't use the word genocide. I mean, they sanitize the vocabulary in such a way as to obscure the reality. And so when something like this happens, it's a shock because nobody's been paying attention to Gaza. And this is the frustration that I and other reporters had reporting week after week, month after month after. We saw it. We knew what was going to happen. It wasn't a surprise. But the world wasn't listening. Certainly those in power were not listening.

Eleanor Stein: So here's a shout-out to Ireland as the only Western nation that has openly spoken out in support of Palestine. Do you think there's anything else that Ireland can do at this point?

Chris Hedges: Well, of course, you know, I mean, what's interesting is that the tactics that were used by the British... and the Jewish militias that they armed in pre-state Israel were all perfected on the Irish. So, I mean, all of it, including taking suspected Irish rebels, because the British were sick of having the trains blown up, and tying them with a rope to the front of the locomotive. So... I think most people, or there's certainly poll numbers suggest that a large number of people are just disgusted by this. And this is just another example of how disconnected the corporate indentured political class is from the rest of us. But yeah, the Irish have been great. And given their history, it would be kind of sad if they weren't.

Eleanor Stein: So here's two questions about going to the International Criminal Court. One is, you believe that Israel has been targeting journalists intentionally and maliciously. Is there sufficient evidence to prosecute the Israelis for this in the International Criminal Court? And the other is, Why countries who want to hold Israel accountable are approaching the International Criminal Court rather than making the Genocide Convention, making a Genocide Convention Treaty?

Chris Hedges: Well, Israel doesn't recognize, like we don't, they don't recognize the jurisdiction of the court. Because, you know, if we recognized the jurisdiction of the court, we'd fill a lot of those cells. Or a lot of those cells would be full. So, and that, you know, one of the things, I lived overseas for 20 years. I lived in the United States for two decades. And the, you know, countries like the United States and Israel and the Global South and much of Asia, certainly the Muslim world, are pariah states. We're pariahs. you know, we have very little credibility, especially after the two decades of military fiascos that we orchestrated in the Middle East, all of which were indefensible. So I think when you are outside the United States, you realize how isolated countries like the United States and Israel are and deserve to be. I travel on my Swiss passport. I do in Gaza, that's for sure.

Eleanor Stein: So a couple of specific questions. You mentioned... Rashida Tlaib. Anything else to comment on the center of her or what can be done to support her?

Chris Hedges: Well, she's the one person who spoke in truth. I mean, she has not held back and with great courage. So, you know, they target all of these voices. People forget Nader, Ralph Nader. Ralph Nader is of Lebanese descent. Ralph speaks fluent Arabic, where I was Ralph's speech writer. And one of the things that frustrated me was that, you know, even with George W. Bush, people weren't supporting the most important Arab leader in our country. who was always great on Palestine, always. And I think, you know, when I heard Obama give that speech to AIPAC, I said, forget it. I don't care if I'm the only one. I'm not betraying the Palestinian people. And I think we have to begin to say that. I've always been third party, so I'm gonna vote for Biden anyway. But Biden has to pay a price for this. It's not excusable.

Eleanor Stein: So I have several questions that basically boil down to what have you seen to be effective at intervening at this or other onslaughts? How can an enduring peace based on mutual respect and security happen? If we have a republic, how do we get our politicians to be responsible to us rather than to those who, you know, they've been sold to the highest bidder?

Chris Hedges: Well, the short answer is that we have to organize, that the only power we have is in numbers, and the only effective weapon we have against power is the strike. And that's what we have to spend. This is what my friend Shama Salwan is working on now. That is the only weapon we have. And that's what we must build, and that's what they're working very hard to prevent us from building. in terms of Palestine, from the river to the sea, a secular state where everybody has equal rights, period.

Eleanor Stein: That language would get you banned from the local library.

Chris Hedges: Well, it won't be the first time I'm banned. I mean, it's sad for me coming out of legacy media like The Times that this is where I've ended up. And I've only ended up here because I'm honest. I'm not a flaming radical. Look at me. My kids make fun of me because I still listen to Earth, Wind, and Fire. But if you look at Matt Taibbi, who's a friend of mine, Glenn Greenwald, all of us were mainstream once. And as the walls have closed in, but we wouldn't sell out. And this is where we've ended up. It's where I.F. Stone ended up in McCarthyite era in the 50s. But with someone like myself, I've been around so long that I have a kind of recognizable name and my books do well. But I see these younger journalists who won't sell out. And I'm terrified for them. It's really hard for them. And it doesn't make me angry because I've not particularly suffered from it, but it makes me sad that that's what's happened to our media landscape. And of course, the same people who run the universities, who sit on the corporate boards, run the media. They run the country. And that's why the media has a credibility rating about equal to Congress. I don't know, maybe less than Congress. And they deserve it. I mean, it's awful. It's awful. I don't actually think of myself as being... I gave a lecture at the University of Alberta and was going on and on, and when I finished, it turns out the entire economics department was seated in the back row, and one of the professors stood up and said, before he answers any questions, I just want all the students in here to be clear that he's just a radical Keynesian. And it turns out they were all Marxists, only in Canada. But really, the emotion I have is sadness. And we've sold out this next generation, these younger generations. We've sold them out. And I think that's why I've taken part in demonstrations, been arrested. And going to jail is more time than I care to donate to the US government. But I do it because I got kids. I want them to say, well, at least he tried. And I think all of us, especially those in the room who are my age, we got to try. We owe it. Not to try is to be complicit. It's not pleasant. I don't like it. But it's got to be done.

Eleanor Stein: Two more quick questions, and then we're approaching our end. This is a rather optimistic question, in my opinion. Some anticipate that the culmination of this conflict will be a Palestinian state, at least according to 1967, because of international pressure. What are your thoughts on the possibility of this?

Chris Hedges: I don't see it. I don't see it. I wish that was true, but I don't see it. I'm really, really scared. I'm really scared, partly because I know, like I know some of the, I know Netanyahu. He was the deputy foreign minister when I first went to Jerusalem. And these people are fascists, and they are ruthless, and this has long been their dream, and they saw October 7th as the moment that would allow them to realize their dream i mean plans to totally depopulate gaza have been part of the israeli military for 50 years so that and they and i i don't think much i think the only way to stop them is if Washington, if the vitamin vitamin straight, I'm going to stop them. I mean, you know, look at the people around Biden, Blinken. I mean, who are these people? You know, the Blinken who sold us the Iraq war, Biden who sold us the Iraq war that I don't see. I wish that was true, but I don't see it.

Eleanor Stein: OK, finally, what would you say? What would you like to say to Palestinian organizers who may still be trying to go back, but who are here at this point? Any comments?

Chris Hedges: Well, I think it's really given the tenor of the racist rhetoric towards Palestinians, it's really important that we stand with them. And that's why I'm such a fan of Jewish Voices for Peace. APPLAUSE And I graduated from Harvard Divinity School, so Netanyahu does not in any way represent, for me, Judaism. He's not Martin Buber or Abraham Heschel or these great Jewish prophets. And I look at groups like Jewish Voices for Peace as authentic upholders because Judaism, like Christianity, were religions that were written by oppressed peoples. And their primary concern was with the oppressed. Read Isaiah, read Jeremiah. And so what you're doing, any members here, is so important not only for the Palestinians, but for holding up the flame of authentic Judaism. You know, when Abraham Heschel, who was not beloved at the Jewish Theological Seminary, still to this day, there's no picture of him there. And the other rabbis, he was marching with King, I think in Selma, and it was on Shabbat. And they said, how can you march on Shabbat? And Heschel said, I pray with my feet.