Chris Hedges - Biden, Gaza Genocide, and Israel
Chris Hedges on the Israel-Palestine conflict.
This episode was broadcast by Alternative Radio on 2024-02-29.
https://www.alternativeradio.org/products/hedc022/
The Biden presidency, which ironically may have signed its own political death certificate, is tethered to Israel's genocide.
It insists it is trying to halt what's by its own admission is Israel's indiscriminate bombing of Palestinians, while bypassing Congress to speed up the supply of weapons to Israel.
It insists it wants the fighting in Gaza to end, while it veto ceasefire resolutions at the UN.
It insists it upholds the rule of law, while it subverts the legal mechanism at the international court of justice that can halt the genocide.
That's Chris Hedges, and this is Alternative Radio.
This edition of AR features Chris Hedges on Biden, the Gaza Genocide, and Israel. In a landmark decision, the International Court of Justice, the UN's highest judicial body based in the Hague, by an overwhelming vote, ruled that the accusation that Israel in its assault on Gaza is committing genocide is plausible.
The Israeli Prime Minister in response said, Israel's commitment to international law is unwavering.
The charge of genocide leveled against Israel is not only false, it's outrageous.
Almost certainly, the issue will move from the International Court of Justice to the UN Security Council, where it is likely to be vetoed by Washington.
Meanwhile, in Gaza, where no place is safe, the bloodbath continues.
The number of Palestinians killed, wounded, and missing is soaring.
Internationally, Washington is more and more isolated.
Biden's ironclad backing of Israel is coming under increasing scrutiny and opposition.
The U.S. critics say is enabling genocide.
Our guest today is Chris Hedges. He's an award-winning independent journalist who has covered the Middle East for many years. Noam Chomsky says, Chris Hedges has compiled a remarkable record of reporting and analysis. He has been an incomparable source of insight and understanding, both in his outstanding career as a courageous journalist and in his penetrating commentary on world events.
Chris Hedges is the host of the Chris Hedges report and the author of many books. His latest is The Greatest Evil is War. He spoke at the Islamic Society for Central New Jersey in Monmouth Junction on January 18th. And now, Chris Hedges.
Israel's master plan for Gaza is clear.
Destroy infrastructure, medical facilities, and sanitation, including access to clean
water, block shipments of food and fuel, impose telecommunications blackouts, unleash indiscriminate industrial violence to kill and wound hundreds a day, let starvation and epidemics of infectious diseases along with the daily massacres and the displacement of Palestinians from their homes turned Gaza into a mortuary.
Israel has killed or seriously wounded close to 100,000 Palestinians in Gaza, almost one
in every 20 inhabitants. It is destroyed or damaged 60% of the housing. The safe areas to which some 2 million Gazans were instructed to flee in the south have been relentlessly bombed with thousands of casualties. Palestinians in Gaza now make up 80% of all the people facing famine or catastrophic hunger worldwide according to the UN. Every person in Gaza is hungry. A quarter of the population are starving and struggling to find food and drinkable water. Famine is imminent.
The 335,000 children under the age of five are at high risk of malnutrition. The some 50,000 pregnant women lack health care and adequate nutrition. Infants are dying in droves. Early political and military officials of the South African juris documented at the International Court of Justice make no secret of their genocidal intent, nor of their vision of what comes next.
In September before, the incursion into Israel by Hamas and other resistance fighters, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu displayed a map of what he called the new Middle East at a UN General Assembly meeting: Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem had all been incorporated into a greater Israel. Palestine had ceased to exist.
The Palestinians are being forced to choose between death from bombs, disease, exposure, or starvation, or being driven from their homeland. There will soon reach a point where death will be so ubiquitous that deportation for those who want to live will be the only option. Israel is lobbying countries in Latin America and Africa to accept Palestinian refugees. Israeli leaders are calling this deportation, quote, voluntary migration. This is the plan. No one, especially the Biden administration, intends to stop it.
The most disturbing lesson I learned while covering armed conflicts for two decades is that we all have the capacity with little prodding to become willing executioners. The line between the victim and the victimizer is razor thin. The dark lusts of racial and ethnic supremacy, of vengeance and hate, of the eradication of those we condemn as embodying evil are poisons that are not circumscribed by race, nationality, ethnicity, or religion. We can all become Nazis. It takes very little.
And if we do not stand in eternal vigilance over evil, our evil, we become monsters. Perhaps the saddest irony is that a people once in need of protection from genocide now committed. The cries of those expiring under the rubble in Gaza are the cries of the boys and men executed by the Bosnian Serbs at Srebrenica.
The over 1.5 million Cambodians killed by the Khmer Rouge, the thousands of Tutsi families burned alive in churches and the tens of thousands of Jews executed by the Ainsad's group at Babayar in Ukraine.
The genocide carried out during the Holocaust is not an historical relic. It lives lurking in the shadows, waiting to ignite its vicious contagion. But this truth is bitter and hard to confront. We prefer the myth. We prefer to see in our own kind our own race, our own ethnicity, our own nation, our own religion, superior virtues. We prefer to sanctify our hatred.
The German playwright and revolutionary Ernst Tolar, unable to rouse an indifferent world to assist victims and refugees from the Spanish Civil War, hanged himself in 1939 in a room at the Mayflower Hotel in New York City. On his hotel desk were photos of dead Spanish children. Most people have no imagination, he wrote. If they could imagine the sufferings of others, they would not make them suffer so. This separated a German mother from a French mother, slogans, which deafened us so that we could not hear the truth.
Primo Levy who survived the death camps railed against the faults, morally uplifting narrative of the Holocaust that culminates in the creation of the state of Israel, a narrative embraced by the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. The contemporary history of the Third Reich, he writes, could be reread as a war against memory, an Orwellian falsification of memory, falsification of reality, negation of reality. He wonders if we who have returned have been able to understand and make others understand our experience.
We all inhabit a morally gray zone. We all can be induced to become part of the apparatus of death, often for trivial reasons and paltry rewards. This is the terrifying truth of the Holocaust and the Israelis are no exception.
One month into the genocide, according to a poll in Time Magazine, 57% of Israelis believed Israel was not using enough force in Gaza. These Israelis saw the same images you and I see. The children with amputated limbs, the chalky, lifeless bodies lifted out from under the rubble, the long trenches filled with corpses wrapped in white shrouds, the screams of the wounded in the hospital corridors.
Only 2% of Israelis said Israel was using too much force. The South African lawyers at the Hague who compared Israel's crimes with those carried out by the apartheid regime in South Africa showed the court a video of Israeli soldiers celebrating and calling for the death of Palestinians. They sang as they danced. There are no uninvolved civilians.
As evidence that genocidal intent descends from the top to the bottom of the Israeli
war machine and political system, racism and attribute of all colonial settler societies, whether the British colonists in India and Kenya or the French in Algeria, pervades Israeli society. Palestinians are seen as vermin to be controlled or exterminated. It is very hard not to be cynical about the plethora of university courses about the Holocaust given the censorship and banning of groups such as students for justice in Palestine and Jewish voices for peace.
What is the point of studying the Holocaust if you do not understand its fundamental lesson? When you have the capacity to stop genocide and you do not, you are culpable. It is hard not to be cynical about the humanitarian interventionists Barack Obama, Tony Blair, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Samantha Power who talk in sanctimonious rhymes about the responsibility to protect but are silent about war crimes when speaking out would threaten their status and careers. None of the humanitarian interventions they championed Bosnia, Darfur, Libya came close to replicating the suffering and slaughter in Gaza. But there is a cost to defending Palestinians, a cost they do not intend to pay. The moral universe has now been turned upside down. Those of us who oppose genocide are accused of advocating it. Those who carry out genocide are said to have the right to defend themselves.
Vetoing ceasefires and providing 2,000 pound bombs to Israel that throw out metal fragments for thousands of feet in densely packed refugee camps is the road to peace. In hospitals, schools, mosques, churches, ambulances and refugee camps obliterating families are routine acts of war.
Carrying out genocide in Gaza is a way to de-radicalize Palestinians. Attacking Houthi bases in Yemen will de-escalate a regional conflict and remember none of this makes sense. Those protesters around the world realize if the genocide in Gaza is not halted, it will press a new world order. A world where the old rules more honored in the breach than the observance no longer matter. It will be a world where nations with vast bureaucratic structures and technologically advanced military systems carry out in public view massive killing projects.
The industrialized nations, weakened, fearful of global chaos are sending an ominous message to the global south and anyone who might think of revolt. We will kill you without restraint and no one will stop us. One day you will all be Palestinians.
I fear that we live in a world in which war and racism are ubiquitous in which the powers of government mobilization and legitimization are powerful and increasing in which a sense of personal responsibility is increasingly attenuated by specialization in bureaucratization in which the peer group exerts tremendous pressure on behavior and sets moral norms.
Christopher Browning writes in Ordinary Men about a German, reserved police battalion in World War II that was ultimately responsible for the murder of 83,000 Jews. In such a world I fear modern governments that wish to commit mass murder will seldom fail in their efforts for being unable to induce ordinary men to become their willing executioners.
Evil is protean. It mutates. It finds new forms and expressions. It changes its face but not its essence.
Germany orchestrated the murder of 6 million Jews as well as over 6 million gypsies, polls, homosexuals, communists, Jehovah Witnesses, Freemason, artists, journalists, Soviet prisoners of war, people with physical and intellectual disabilities and political opponents. It immediately set out after the war to expiate itself for its crimes. It definitely transferred its racism and demonization to Muslims with racial supremacy remitting firmly rooted in the German psyche.
At the same time, Germany and the US rehabilitated thousands of former Nazis, especially from the intelligence services and the scientific community and did little to prosecute those who directed Nazi war crimes. Germany today is Israel's second largest armed supplier following the US. The supposed campaign in the US and Germany against anti-Semitism interpreted as any statement that is critical of the state of Israel or denounces the genocide is the latest subterfuge to champion white power.
It is white Germany and the US which have effectively criminalized support for Palestinians and the most retrograde white supremacists including Fylo Semites such as John Hagey or Marjorie Taylor Greene fervently back Israel.
The Israeli historian Ilan Pappé writes that Germany's unequivocal support for Israel is a form of blackmail. The argument for a Jewish state as compensation for the Holocaust was a powerful argument, so powerful that nobody listened to the outright rejection of the UN solution by the overwhelming majority of the people of Palestine, Pappé writes. What comes out clearly is a European wish to atone.
The basic and natural rights of the Palestinians should be sidelined, dwarfed and forgotten, altogether for the sake of the forgiveness that Europe was seeking from the newly formed Jewish state. It was much easier to rectify the Nazi evil vis-a-vis Zionist movement than facing the Jews of the world in general. It was less complex and more importantly it did not involve facing the victims of the Holocaust themselves but rather a state that claimed to represent them. The price for this more convenient atonement was robbing the Palestinians of every basic and natural right they had and allowing the Zionist movement to ethnically cleanse them without fear of any rebuke or condemnation.
I do Dr. Abdul Aziz Aurantisi, the co-founder of Hamas, along with Sheikh Yassin. Aurantisi's family were expelled to the Gaza Strip by Zionist militias from historic Palestine during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. He did not fit the demonized image of a Hamas leader. He was a soft-spoken, articulate and highly educated pediatrician who had graduated first in his class at Egypt's Alexandria University. As a nine-year-old boy, he had witnessed in Hanayunis the executions of 275 Palestinian men and boys including his uncle. When Israel briefly occupied the Gaza Strip in 1956, scores of Palestinians were also executed by Israeli soldiers in the neighboring town of Rafa, where today hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have been forced to flee now that Hanayunis is under attack.
I still remember the wailing and the tears of my father over his brother, Rantisi told me. I couldn't sleep for many months after that. It left a wound in my heart that could never heal. I'm telling you a story and I'm almost crying. This sort of action can never be forgotten. They planted hatred in our hearts.
He knew he could never trust the Israelis. He knew that the goal of the Zionist state was the occupation of all of historic Palestine and Israel would go on to seize Gaza and the West Bank in 1967 along with Syria's Golan Heights and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula. And he knew the eternal subjugation or extermination of the Palestinian people was the goal of the Zionist movement. Our Rantisi and your scene were assassinated in 2004 by Israel. Our Rantisi's widow, Jamila Abdullah Taha El Shanti, had a doctorate in English and taught at the Islamic University in Gaza. The couple had six children, one of whom was killed along with his father. The family's home where I visited them was bombed and destroyed. During the 2014 Israeli assault on Gaza known as Operation Protective Edge, Jamila was killed by Israel on October 19th of this year. Israel's genocide is rearing a new generation of enraged, traumatized and dispossessed Palestinians who have lost family members, friends, homes, communities and any hope of living ordinary lives.
And they too will seek retribution. Their small acts of terrorism will counter Israel's state terror. They will hate as they have been hated. And this lust for vengeance is universal. After World War II, a clandestine unit of Jews who served in the Jewish Brigade of the British Army hunted down former Nazis and assassinated them.
To understand is not to condone, but we must understand if this cycle of violence is to be stopped. The Palestinian attacks of October 7th, which left some 1,200 Israelis dead, feeds this lust within Israel, just as Israel's 17-year siege and obliteration of Gaza feeds this lust among Palestinians.
There is little discussion in the Israeli media of the slaughtering Gaza or the suffering of Palestinians, some 2 million of whom have been driven from their homes, but a constant repetition of the stories of Israeli suffering, death and heroism. The shooting dead of the three Israeli hostages who apparently escaped their captors and approached Israeli forces with their shirts off, waving a white flag and calling out for help in Hebrew is not only tragic, but a glimpse of Israel's rules of engagement in Gaza. These rules are, kill anything that moves.
Israel may appear triumphant after it finishes its genocidal campaign in Gaza and increasingly the West Bank. It may achieve its demented goal. Its murderous rampages in genocidal violence may exterminate or ethnically cleanse Palestinians. Its dream of a state exclusively for Jews with any Palestinians who remain stripped of their basic rights may be realized. At that point, it will revel in its blood-soaked victory. It will celebrate its war criminals.
Its genocide will be erased from public consciousness and tossed into Israel's huge black hole of historical amnesia. And those with a conscience in Israel will be silenced and persecuted. But by the time Israel achieves its decimation of Gaza, it will have signed its own death sentence. Its facade of civility, its supposed vaunted respect for the rule of law and democracy, its mythical story of the courageous Israeli military and miraculous birth of the Jewish nation will lie in ashheaps. Israel's social capital will be spent.
All Zionism, always an oxymoron since Israelis never intended to give equal rights to Palestinians, has already been replaced by religious Zionism. Religious Zionism gives divine sanction to an ugly, repressive, hate-filled apartheid regime, deeply alienating younger generations of Americans, including Jews. Its patron in the United States, as new generations come to power, will distance itself from Israel and religious Zionism the way it is distancing itself from Ukraine.
Israel's support will come from America's Christianized fascists, who see Israel's domination of ancient biblical land as a harbinger of the Second Coming and in its subjugation of Arabs, a kindred racism. Despotisms can exist long after their past due date, but they are terminal. You don't have to be a biblical scholar to see that Israel's lust for rivers of blood is antithetical to the core values of Judaism.
The cynical weaponization of the Holocaust, including branding Palestinians as Nazis, has little efficacy when you carry out a live-streamed genocide against 2.3 million people trapped in a concentration camp. Nations need more than force to survive. They need a mystique. This mystique provides purpose, civility, and even nobility to inspire citizens to sacrifice for the nation.
This mystique offers much of it once embodied in liberal Zionism hope for the future. It provides meaning. It provides a national identity. When mystiques implode when they are exposed as lies, a central foundation of state power collapses.
I reported on the death of the communist mystiques in 1989 during the revolutions in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. The police in the military decided there was nothing left to defend. Israel's decay will engender the same lassitude and apathy. It will become harder and harder to recruit indigenous collaborators, such as Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority, reviled by most Palestinians to do the bidding of the colonizers.
All Israel has left is escalating violence, including the widespread use of torture, which accelerates the decline. The wholesale violence works in the short term, as it did in the war waged by the French in Algeria, the dirty war waged by Argentina's military dictatorship, and during Britain's conflict in Kenya and Northern Ireland. But in the long term, it is suicidal.
Israel may wipe out the current Hamas leadership, but the past and current assassinations of scores of Palestinian leaders has done little to blunt resistance. The siege and genocide in Gaza has produced a new generation prepared to take the place of martyred leaders. Israel has sent the stock of its adversary into the stratosphere.
Israel was already at war with itself before October 7th. Israelis were protesting to prevent Netanyahu's abolition of judicial independence. The religious bigots and Zionist fanatics currently in power had mounted a determined attack on secularism. Israel's unity since the attack is precarious. It is a negative unity. It is held together by hatred. Hatred is a dangerous political commodity. Once finished with one enemy, those who stoke hatred go in search of another.
The Palestinian human animals", when eradicated or subdued, will be replaced by disloyal Palestinians with Israeli citizenship already targeted by a series of discriminatory laws along with Jewish apostates and traitors. The demonized group can never be redeemed or cured.
A politics of hatred creates a permanent instability that is exploited by those seeking the destruction of civil society. The Israeli scholar Yishiyahu Libowitz, who Isaiah Berlin called the conscience of Israel, warned that quote, if Israel did not separate church and state, it would give rise to a corrupt rabbinate that would warp Judaism into a fascistic cult. Religious nationalism is to religion what national socialism was to socialism, warned Libowitz who died in 1994. He understood that the blind veneration of the military, especially after the 1967 war, was dangerous and will lead to the ultimate destruction of democracy.
Our situation will deteriorate to that of a second Vietnam to a war and constant escalation without prospect of ultimate resolution, he wrote. He foresaw that the Arabs would be the working people and the Jews, the administrators, collectors, officials and police, mainly secret police. A state ruling a hostile population of 1.5 million to 2 million foreigners would necessarily become a secret police state, with all that implies for education, free speech and democratic institutions.
The corruption characteristic of every colonial regime would also prevail in the state of Israel. The administration would have to suppress Arab insurgency on the one hand and acquire Arab quislings on the other. There is also good reason to fear that the Israel Defense Force, which has been until now a people's army, would as a result of being transformed into an army of occupation and its commanders will become military governors, will resemble their colleagues and other nations. He saw the rise of virulent racism that would consume Israeli society. He knew that prolonged occupation of the Palestinians would spawn in his words concentration camps for the occupied and as he wrote, Israel would not deserve to exist and it would not be worthwhile to preserve it.
Jews, he understood, can also become Pharaoh. The decision to obliterate Gaza has long been the dream of Israeli fanatics, heirs of the fascistic movement led by the extremist Kach party, who I knew and covered, who was barred from running for office and whose cock party was outlawed in 1994 and declared a terrorist organization by Israel and the United States. They championed 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 the Palestinians who are compared to the biblical Amalgeites massacred by the Israelis. Enemies usually Muslims slated for extinction are subhuman. Violence and the threat of violence are the only forms of communication, those outside the magic circle of Jewish nationalism understand.
Millions of Muslims and Christians, including those with Israeli citizenship, are to be purged. The Biden presidency, which ironically may have signed its own political death certificate, is tethered to Israel's genocide. It tries to distance itself rhetorically, but at the same time it funnels billions of dollars of weapons demanded by Israel, including 14.3 billion in supplemental military aid to augment the 3.8 billion in annual aid to, quote unquote, finish the job. It is a full partner in Israel's genocidal project.
There is no way to deny the courage of the armed Palestinian resistance, whether you accept their ideology or not, as they face down one of the most advanced military machines on the planet with little more than small arms. But there are also other forms of resistance that to me are as important. Writers, poets, journalists, and photographers, many of whom have been targeted and killed by Israel, affirm the belief that one day, a day the writers, journalists, and photographers may never see, the words and images will provoke empathy, understanding, outrage, and provide wisdom. They chronicle not only the facts, although the facts are important, but the texture, sacredness, and grief of lives and communities lost. They tell the world what this genocide is like, how those caught in its maw of death endure, how there are those who sacrifice for others and those who do not, what fear and hunger are like, what death is like.
They transmit the cries of the children, the wales of grief of the mothers, the daily struggle in the face of savage industrial violence, the triumph of their humanity through filth, sickness, humiliation, and fear. This is why writers, photographers, and journalists are targeted by aggressors in war, including the Israelis.
They stand as witnesses to evil, and evil the aggressors want buried and forgotten. They expose the lies. They condemn, even from the grave, their killers. Israel has killed at least 13 Palestinian poets and writers, along with over 83 journalists and media workers in Gaza and three in Lebanon since October 7th.
And this brings me to the Palestinian novelist and playwright, Atef Abu Saif. He and his 15-year-old son, Yasser, who live in the occupied West Bank, were visiting family in Gaza where he was born, when Israel began its scorched earth campaign. Atif is no stranger to the violence of the Israeli occupiers. He was two months old during the 1973 war and writes, I've been living through wars ever since.
Just as life is a pause between two deaths, Palestine is a place and as an idea is a timeout in the middle of many wars. Between Operation Cast led the 2008-2009 Israeli assault on Gaza. If Atif sheltered in the corridor of his Gaza family home for 22 nights with his wife, Hana, and two children, why Israel bombed and shelled. His book, The Drone Eats With Me: Diaries From A City Under Fire, is an account of Operation Protective Edge, the 2014 Israeli assault on Gaza that killed 1,523 Palestinian civilians, including 519 children.
Memories of war can be strangely positive because to have them at all means you must have survived, he notes sardonically. He did what writers do, including the professor and poet Rifat Al-Ariar who was killed, along with Rifat's brother, sister, and her four children in an airstrike on his sister's apartment in Gaza on December 7. Atef once again, finding himself living amid the explosions and carnage from Israeli shells and bombs doggedly publishes his observations and reflections. His accounts are often difficult to transmit because of Israel's blockage of internet
and phone service. On the first day of the Israeli bombardment, a friend, a young poet, a musician, Omar Abu Shahwish is killed.
Apparently, in Israeli naval bombardment, the later reports would say he was killed in an airstrike as he was walking to work. Atef wonders about the Israeli soldiers watching him and his family with their infrared lenses and satellite photography. Can they count the loaves of bread in my basket or the number of falafel balls on my plate, he wonders? He watches the crowds of days to confused families, their homes in rubble, carrying mattresses, bags of clothes, food, and drink. He stands mutely before the supermarket, the bureau de shange, the falafel shop, the fruit stalls, the perfume parlor, the sweet shop, the toy shop, all burned. Blood was everywhere, along with bits of kids' toys, cans from the supermarket, smashed fruit, broken bicycles, and shattered perfume bottles, he writes.
The place looked like a charcoal drawing of a town, scorched by a dragon. I noticed that Ramadan decorations were still hanging in the street. The city has become a wasteland of rubble and debris. Atef, who has been the Palestinian Authority's Minister of Culture since 2019, writes in the early days of the Israeli shelling. Beautiful buildings fall like columns of smoke. I often think about the time I was shot as a kid during the first Intifada and how my mother told me I actually died for a few minutes before being brought back to life. Maybe I can do the same this time, I think. He leaves his teenage son with family members.
The Palestinian logic is that in wartime we should all sleep in different places. So that if part of the family is killed another part lives, he writes.
The UN schools are getting more crowded with displaced families. The hope is that the UN flag will save them, though in previous wars this hasn't been the case.
On Tuesday, October 17, he writes, I see death approaching, here at steps growing louder, just to be done with it, I think. It's the 11th day of the conflict, but all the days have merged into one, the same bombardment, the same fear, the same smell. On the news I read the names of the dead on the ticker at the bottom of the screen. I wait for my name to appear. In the morning, my phone rang, it was Rula, a relative in the West Bank, telling me she had heard there had been an airstrike at Talat Hawa, a neighborhood on the south side of Gaza City where my cousin Hatem lives. Hatem is married to Huda, my wife's only sister. He lives in a four-story building that houses his mother and brothers and their families. I called around, but no one's phone was working. I walked to Auschwitz to read the names. Lists of the dead are pinned up daily outside a makeshift morgue. I could barely approach the building. Thousands of gosens had made the hospital their home, its gardens, its hallways, every empty space or spare corner had a family in it. I gave up and headed toward Hatem's. Thirty minutes later I was on his street. Rula had been right. Huda and Hatem's building had been hit only an hour earlier. The bodies of their daughter and grandchild had already been retrieved. The only known survivor was Wissom, one of their other daughters who had been taken to the ICU. Wissom had gone straight into surgery where both of her legs and her right hand had been amputated. Her graduation ceremony from Art College had taken place only the day before. She has to spend the rest of her life without legs, with one hand. What about the others, I asked someone. We can't find them, came the reply. Amid the rubble we shouted, hello! Can anyone hear us? We called out the names of those still missing, hoping some might still be alive. By the end of the day we managed to find five bodies, including that of a three month old. We went to the cemetery to bury them.
In the evening I went to see Wissom in the hospital. She was barely awake. After half an hour she asked me, Uncle, I'm dreaming, right? I said, we are all in a dream. My dream is terrifying. Why? All our dreams are terrifying. After ten minutes of silence she said, don't lie to me, Uncle. In my dream I don't have legs. It's true, isn't it? I have no legs. But you said it's a dream. I don't like this dream, Uncle. I had to leave, for a long ten minutes I cried and cried.
Overwhelmed by the horrors of the past few days, I walked out of the hospital and found myself wandering the streets. I thought idly. We could turn this city into a film set for war movies, second world war films and end of the world movies. We could hire it out to the best Hollywood directors, doomsday on demand. Who could have the courage to tell Hannah so far away in Ramallah that her only sister had been killed, that her family had been killed. I phoned my colleague, Manar, and asked her to go to our house with a couple of friends and try to delay the news from getting to her. Lie to her, I told Manar. Say the building was attacked by F-16s, but the neighbors think Huda and Hhatam were out of the time, any lie that could help. Leaflets and Arabic dropped by Israeli helicopters float down from the sky. They announced that anyone who remains north of the Wadi waterway will be considered a partner to terrorism, meaning Atef writes, the Israelis can shoot on site. The electricity is cut, food, fuel, and water run out.
The wounded are operated on without anesthesia. There are no painkillers or sedatives.
He visits his niece, Risam, racked with pain in our Shifa hospital, who asks him for a lethal injection. She says, Allah will forgive her. But he will not forgive me, Risam. I'm going to ask him to, on your behalf, she says. After airstrikes, he joins the rescue teams under the cricket-like hum of drones we couldn't see in the sky. A line from T.S. Eliot, a heap of broken images, runs through his head. The injured and the dead are transported on three-wheeled bicycles, or dragged along in carts by animals. We picked up pieces of mutilated bodies and gathered them on a blanket. You find a leg here, a hand there, while the rest looks like minced meat, he writes. In the past week many gosins have started writing their names on their hands and legs in pen, or permanent marker, so they can be identified when death comes. This might seem macabre, but it makes perfect sense.
We want to be remembered. We want our stories to be told. We seek dignity. At the very least, our names will be on our graves.
The smell of unreachieved bodies under the ruins of a house hit last week remains in the air the more time passes, the stronger the smell. The scenes around him become surreal. On November 19, day 44 of the assault he writes, a man rides a horse toward me with a body of a dead teenager slung over the saddle in front. It seems it's his son, perhaps. It looks like a scene from a historical movie, only the horse is weak and barely able to move. He is back from no battle, he is no knight, his eyes are full of tears as he holds the little riding crop in one hand and the bridle in the other. I have an impulse to photograph him, but then feel suddenly sick at the idea. He salutes no one, he barely looks up, he is too consumed with his own loss. Most people are using the camp's old cemetery, it's the safest, and although it is technically long since full, they have started digging shallower graves and burying the dead on top of the old, keeping families together, of course.
On November 21, after constant tank shelling, he decides to flee the Jabalia neighborhood in the north of Gaza for the south with his son and mother-in-law who was in a wheelchair. They must pass through Israeli checkpoints where soldiers randomly select men and boys from the line for detention. Others of bodies are strewn along both sides of the road, he writes, rotting, it seems, into the ground, the smell is horrendous. A hand reaches out toward us from the window of a burned-out car as if asking for something for me specifically. I see what looks like two headless bodies in a car, limbs and precarious body parts just thrown away and left to fester.
He tells his son, Yasser, don't look, just keep walking, son. In early December, his family home is destroyed in an airstrike. The house a writer grows up in is a well from which to draw material. In each of my novels, whenever I wanted to depict a typical house in the camp, I conjured hours. I'd moved the furniture around a bit, changed the name of the alley, but who was I kidding? It was always our house. All the houses in Jabalia are small. They're built randomly, haphazardly, and they're not made to last. These houses replaced the tents that Palestinians, like my grandmother, Aisha, lived in after the displacements of 1948. Those who built them always thought they'd soon be returning to the beautiful, spacious homes they left behind in the towns and villages of historic Palestine. That return never happened, despite our many rituals of hope, like safeguarding the key to the old family home. The future keeps betraying us, but the past is ours. Though I've lived in many cities around the world and visited many more, that tiny ramshackle abode was the only place I ever felt at home he goes on. Friends and colleagues always ask, why don't you live in Europe or America? You have the opportunity. My students chimed in. Why did you return to Gaza? My answer was always the same. Because in Gaza, in an alleyway, in the El-Saftawi neighborhood of Jabalia, there stands a little house that cannot be found anywhere else in the world. If on doomsday, God were to ask me where I would like to be sent, I wouldn't hesitate in saying home. Now there is no home.
Atef, as I write, is trapped in southern Gaza with his son. His niece was transferred to a hospital in Egypt, and Atef continues to write. We are called, as believers, Muslims, Christians, and Jews, to stand with the oppressed. We are called to defy malignant power. Atef, refought, and those like them who speak to us at the risk of death remind us of this injunction. They speak so we will not be silent. They speak so we will take these words and images and hold them up to the principalities of the world, the media, politicians, diplomats, universities, the wealthy and privileged, the weapons manufacturers, the Pentagon, and the Israel lobby, and demand that this genocide cease.
The Biden administration is playing a very cynical game. It insists it is trying to halt what's by its own admission is Israel's indiscriminate bombing of Palestinians, while bypassing Congress to speed up the supply of weapons to Israel, including dumb bombs.
It insists it wants the fighting in Gaza to end, while it vetoes ceasefire resolutions at the UN. It insists it upholds the rule of law, while it subverts the legal mechanism at the international court of justice that can halt the genocide. The ICJ is a UN body, and whatever ruling it makes, even on a temporary injunction saying, you know, there's enough evidence it has to be approved by the Security Council, and the U.S. will veto it. So it's moot.
And let's just, by the way, honor South Africa. They have stood with the Palestinians for decades. But if the court, and you can be sure there will be heavy pressure from the U.S., one, not to issue, in essence, a temporary injunction, saying there's enough evidence. They won't rule at first on whether there's genocide.
They'll just say there's enough evidence to bring the case, therefore it should stop. We know there will be heavy, heavy pressure, because, under international law, if there is a ruling that Israel is committing genocide, the United States is guilty, which it is guilty, of accomplice to genocide.
One pervades every word, Biden, Blinken, Jake Sullivan, and Brett McGurk, the four horsemen of the apocalypse, who support this genocide utter. This cynicism extends to us. Our revulsion for Donald Trump, the Biden White House believes, will impel us to keep Biden in office.
On any other issue, this might be the case, but it cannot be the case with genocide. Genocide is not a political problem. It is a moral one.
We cannot, no matter what the cost, support those who commit or are accomplices to genocide, even if it means we are forced to endure the dreaded return of Trump. Genocide is the crime of all crimes. It is the purest expression of evil. We must stand unequivocally with the Palestinians. We must demand justice. We must hold Biden accountable. If we do not, we join the long list of those who, for expediency or because of indifference, have sold out the Palestinians and sold out all of the oppressed.
I read from the Hadith collection of Imam al Bukhari. He writes, The Prophet, Peace be upon him once said to us, Help your brother, the oppressor, and the oppressed. He asked: Oh, messenger of God, we understand how we can help when oppressed. But how should we help one who is oppressing by stopping him from oppressing others?'
He replied, Evil has not changed down the millenniums, but neither has goodness. Thank you.
You were just listening to Chris Hedges on Biden, the Gaza Genocide, and Israel.
He spoke at the Islamic Society for Central New Jersey in Monmouth Junction on January
18th.
Chris Hedges is an award-winning independent reporter and the author of many books.
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