Zionist crimes

This article first appeared in Morning Star (UK in a shorter form

Honor, justice, compassion, and freedom are ideas that have no converts,Joseph Conrad writes. "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."

- Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

According to Judeo-Christian mythology, the human race began as exiles and migrants and, soon enough, it moved on to murder, with Cain, the first human born, killing Abel, the second born, purportedly over jealousy of God's favour. Seth, the third son, represented the first Never Again moment, and a reboot of humanity.

Millennia later, we're still at it, trying to get it right; still finding it difficult to follow a simple biblical commandment: don't kill -- not physically, not emotionally, not economically -- and we might have ourselves a little Eden here; an acre or so of heaven on earth. But we don't seem up to the task. The carnage in Gaza proves that.

Chris Hedges writes with passion, grief, precision and elegance in his latest book, A Genocide Foretold, as he describes the ethnic cleansing taking place in Gaza under the gaze of world activists, NGOs, and a seemingly reluctant mainstream media.

Hedges won a 2002 Pulitzer Prize as part of the New York Times staff for its reporting on America's new war on terror. He has written many books on social, political and cultural issues, including War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002), American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (2007), and Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt (2012), which chronicles life in poverty in different parts of the United States.

Hedges began writing A Genocide Foretold in September 2024 from the West Bank, noting that he hadn't been back in two decades. He writes with a sense of spatial history: "We are driving the winding road that hugs the barren sand and scrub hillsides snaking up from Jericho, rising from the salt-rich Dead Sea -- the lowest spot on Earth -- to Ramallah." He notes the colonist settlements: "They have grown in number and expanded in size. But they remain protected by blast barriers, concertina wire, and watchtowers surrounded by the obscenity of lawns and gardens." This is an image reminiscent of Martin Amis's The Zone of Interest. Hedges observes: "the feel of an open-air prison."

In his opening chapter, The Old Evil, Hedges gets the reader's senses busy and the mind prepared for human misery. It comes back in a rush, he writes, "the stench of raw sewage, the groan of the diesel, sloth-like Israeli armoured personnel carriers, the vans filled with broods of children driven by chalky-faced colonists, certainly not from here, probably from Brooklyn or somewhere in Russia, or maybe Britain. Little has changed."

The colonists come from all over the globe.

Same-old same-old in Palestine. New generations of Palestinians are begat; when they reach their teenage years many of them are mown down by the Israeli forces; survivors limp into adulthood and old age with their traumas; new generations are begat. The genocide Hedges depicts has been in slo-mo for generations, and now, since October 7 seems in full erasure mode. With American co-destruction.

Hedges, who has covered wars in several theatres for the New York Times, including Iraq and the Balkans, muses on the crucial importance of press reporting from war zones. "Writing and photographing in wartime are acts of resistance, acts of faith," he writes. The word faith is a key word for Hedges, who along with courageous journalism, is a Presbyterian minister. "Images and words chronicle not only the facts, although facts are important, but the texture, sacredness, and grief of lives and communities lost," he writes. Hedges says that's why journalists are targeted and murdered by Israeli forces.

Perhaps Hedges's most important chapter is Exterminate All the Brutes, where he catalogs and analyzes the innumerable times Israel has twisted and mangled facts , or else outright lied, in the service of its long-ago decided plan for exterminating Palestinians to acquire their property. Hedges writes,

All governments lie, as I.F. Stone pointed out, including Israel and Hamas. But Israel engages in the kinds of jaw-dropping lies that characterize despotic and totalitarian regimes. It does not deform the truth; it inverts it. It routinely paints a picture for the outside world that is diametrically opposed to reality.

Despotic and totalitarian. It seems no coincidence that Tsrael is the largest supplier of spyware, like Pegasus, to totalitarian governments intent on quashing dissent. Saudi Arabia used Pegasus in the lead-up to the dismemberment of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Gaza is the dismemberment of a whole people.

A chapter later, in The Psychosis of Permanent War, Hedges argues for what seems obvious to many intelligent people still around from the Sixties. I recall laughing when I read Daniel Ellsberg describe the bald rush of the Cold War and arms build-up for militaristic types, as depicted in the film Dr. Strangelove, as "essentially a documentary." The f*ckers who control and urgently plan for war are psychotic. More than half of the American budget is devoted to the Pentagon; meaning we use nearly $900 billion taxpayer dollars annually to support insanity -- literally.

Hedges sees this institutionalization of warmongering as a decisive narrative that encourages excess. He writes,

Israel has been poisoned by the psychosis of permanent war. It sanctifies its victimhood. Human rights campaigners, intellectuals, and journalists. Israeli and Palestinian are subject to constant state surveillance, arbitrary arrests, and government-run smear campaigns. Its educational system, starting in primary school, is an indoctrination machine for the military.

Even average readers of the NYT or Guardian, who have criticized Israeli policy, especially toward Gazans, know how quickly a moderator can take your comment out with a Cancel warhead.

A Genocide Foretold has 11 chapters of top quality oral history, journalism and humanity, and tells the story of the colonial obliteration of a people in real time. Hedges writes: "The death mask of colonialism too often of European extraction does not change. Nor does the god-like authority of colonists who look at the colonised as vermin, who take a perverse delight in their humiliation and suffering, and who kill them with impunity."

Nobody is playing fast and loose with language when it comes to describing what has happened in Gaza as "genocide." The UN and ICJ have so designated it that way. Only Israel disdains it.

The irony of the atrocity vs. counter-atrocity in Palestine is that only Jews could understand the pain and suffering invo;lved with extermination. Creating a permanent safe haven for Jews on the planet is, in my estimation, one of the winningest things to take place in a human history replete with all the horrors of a self-loathing species.

It is a highly recommended read.