I’ve just finished Chris Hedges’ A Genocide Foretold. I confess, the only reason I bothered reading this book is because Hedges used to be the Chief Editor of the Middle East Bureau for the New York Times, and I was curious what sort of standards he held himself to (not many, it turns out). He is also a Presbyterian minister, and this colors much of his writing.
- First sentence: “It comes back in a rush, the raw stench of sewage, the groan of the diesel, sloth-like Israeli armored personnel carriers, the vans full of children driven by chalky-faced colonists, certainly not from here, probably from Brooklyn or somewhere in Russia, or maybe Britain.” This is a great way to open your book if you want to tell your readers that you don’t know a single thing about Jewish history or Israeli demography. In paragraph one, we’ve entered the book with the assumption that Israelis are guilty. The title of the first chapter is “THE OLD EVIL.” This book was published in 2025 and from the first sentence, it’s explaining a lot about the New York Times’ embrace of conspiracy theories.
- Hedges’ choppy writing style is like if Ernest Hemingway met Joseph Goebbels. The average sentence is ten words long — I’m rounding up here; a lot of them are three words — and it is painful.
- The entire first chapter is devoted to October of 2023. Hedges has determined that he’s chronicling a genocide by October 8th.
- “It was like this for Black people in the segregated South and Indigenous Americas. It was like this for Algerians under the French. It was like this in India, Ireland, and Kenya under the British. The death mask of colonialism — too often of European extraction — does not change. Nor does the godlike authority of the colonists—” okay. There’s a lot going on here. First of all, as someone who grew up in American South, I am sick and tired of white, Christian journalists from the New York Times trying to universalize the specific history of the civil rights movement for their own theoretical global salvation; they have no idea what they’re talking about and cheapen the very real and painful history of the actual American South. Second, as someone who spent years studying Irish history from the Nine Years’ War through the Troubles, it is laughable to compare any of it to American segregation, let alone the specific colonial histories of Kenya and India. Are we going to pretend that the Irish people didn’t play a role in that oppression whenever they had the opportunity? Ireland doesn’t get a pass on its participation in the British Empire in the same way that Scotland doesn’t get a pass on its participation in the British Empire: they were both happy to help in British conquest until it came to their own homelands. Ireland doesn’t belong in the same sentence as Kenya or India when it comes to colonization, and none of them belong in the same sentence as Palestine.
- Hedges is asked if he holds a Palestinian passport when entering the West Bank. He interprets this as asking if he is “contaminated.”
- “[Since October 7] Israel has detained over 9,860 Palestinians — or should I say taken hostages?” This is needlessly cruel and deeply dishonest; detainment could last a few hours at a checkpoint, or it could lead to an arrest with charges, or it could lead to a prison sentence determined by a court of law. There is no differentiation between the three, and to compare any of them to the situation of the hostages held in Gaza is mean spirited and misleading. There are grave issues with Israel’s criminal justice system, and it takes way too long to bring forward charges and go to trial, but being detained in this system even with these shortcomings is a very long way from what Hamas did to the hostages.
- “Hamas, like all resistance groups, from the African National Congress to the Irish Republican Army, is as demonized as it is misunderstood…. Hamas is not, despite what Israel and Washington say, a terrorist organization.” At least Hedges lets us know who he stands with. This is Hamas apologia all the way down. “Like most armed resistance groups, it uses terrorism as a tactic.” I didn’t realize it was possible to use terrorism as a tactic without being a terrorist organization.
- HE CALLS THE PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY A COLONIAL FORCE???
- According to Hedges, the protests for a ceasefire in support of the hostages fed a “lust for genocide.” Evidently wanting to prevent further bloodshed and bring your people home is genocidal. I will never stop being angry at the people who could have joined those protests and put international pressure on the Israeli government to prioritize the hostages over all else, and commit to a ceasefire. They could have saved thousands of lives, and instead they decided to waste their energy boycotting Israeli academics and peace activists. Beyond the senseless xenophobia, it’s a terrible strategy to actually improve the lives of the people living in this nightmare.
- Hedges denies the mass rapes committed on 10/7. He claims that Israel is “granted impunity from violations of international law, occupation, and genocide, because it has built a lobby with staggering financial resources and a well-oiled machine that props up politicians that support the apartheid state while aggressively funding campaigns to unseat politicians that defend Palestine.” This is just leftist QAnon.
- He maintains that Israelis struck Al Shifa hospital in 2023, against all proof to the contrary and the humiliation the NYT suffered when it became clear it had lied. How does he know it happened? Fauda. “Israel has a whole unit of Israeli Jewish undercover agents trained to pose as Palestinians and secretly operate among Palestinians… [they] produced a highly popular TV series about such people in Gaza called Fauda. You’d have to be beyond credulous to think that Israel couldn’t and wouldn’t rig up a call like this just to fool us.” I confess that I’ve never seen Fauda, but if we’re using TV shows to explain reality I think we may as well pack up and go home.
- As with most antizionist writers, Hedges uses selective citations. Individuals recounting events are cited normally; conspiracy theories about Jews controlling the world are not cited at all, because they can’t be. He uses a breadcrumb-style citation method favoring Al Jazeera and Electronic Intifada, making smaller claims that have sources to lead to a grand conclusion akin to Jewish Space Lasers or Mossad Spy Pigeons. His claim that AIPAC is controlling US policy is backed by the facts that an Arkansas Republican senator who opposed Israel was not reelected, and that Cori Bush lost her primary in Missouri — I organized for that election, and Missourians had much more relevant problems than Israel (I believe decreasing gun violence, improving the abysmal department of transportation, expanding trans healthcare, and access to abortion were the main talking points). Anyway, these two politicians losing their elections are cited as proof that Israel is controlling America.
- “Imagine if China was doing this, if Iran was doing this?” He quotes Al Jazeera on AIPAC. HELLO? HELLO? ARE WE SERIOUSLY LISTENING TO QATARI STATE MEDIA ABOUT QUESTIONABLE FOREIGN LOBBYING?? China and Qatar far surpass Israel in lobbying the American government; this is absurd. We don’t have to “imagine” anything; they’re doing it.
- “The genocide in Gaza is the culmination of the process. It is not an act. The genocide is the predictable denouement of Israel’s Settler-Colonial project. It is coded within the DNA of the Israeli apartheid state; it is where Israel had to end up.” I’ve never understood this argument — ‘our theoretical framework claims that under certain theoretical circumstances, theoretical governments will inevitably make specific theoretical policy decisions.’ It’s a lovely framework, but history doesn’t work that way. Nothing is inevitable and politics are never predictable; there is no a+b=c when it comes to history. If someone is telling you they’ve cracked the code to the way history unfolds, they’re either woefully misled or lying to you on purpose. This is the way conspiracy theories spread. I hate to say it, but a lot of the frameworks used in modern sociology are only a step away from conspiracy theory themselves. There is no “one size fits all” answer to human questions.
- Here we go with our Western universalism: “The genocide says something about not only Israel, but about us, about Western civilization, about who we are as a people, where we came from and what defines us. It says that all our vaunted morality and respect for human rights is a lie.”
- Hodges makes a list of all the modern perils — climate change, racism, genocide, dehumanization, the wretched of the earth in the global south, and concludes that “one day we will all be Palestinians.” No. No. We will not all universalize into a narrow nationalism in the hope that a total victory over the Jews will be the salvation of humanity. That’s already been tried, several times, and it didn’t end well for anyone.
- Golda Meir explaining that in the 1920s, Jews and Arabs alike were considered Palestinians without there being a distinct national divide, or a Palestinian national identity, is seen as “an erasure which requires an egregious act of historical amnesia” and also a “politicide of the Palestinian people.” It’s actually Hedges who embarrassingly fails to understand the history here. His refusal to see Israelis as human beings renders this book unreadable. I see this Golda Meir quote misinterpreted a lot, and it’s only possible to do that if you don’t bother reading the rest of what she said. It is true that the concept of a definitive Palestinian land was a Christian idea, more than a Muslim one; under the Ottomans, they considered Palestine to be the corridor of land from Jerusalem to Jaffa. It’s also true that until the Nebi Musa riots of 1920, started by Hajj Amin to distract from his corruption, it was assumed by most Muslim Arabs that they would become a part of greater Syria when the British Mandate ended, and thus saw themselves as Syrian nationalists rather than Palestinian nationalists. It was violence against Jews, first in 1920 and then in 1929, that began to form a separate Palestinian national identity. I also find it interesting that Christian Arabs played a huge role in the larger pan-Arab nationalism, as a way to separate themselves from the Dhimmi; as pan-Arabism has fallen and political Islam has risen, Arab Christians have seen themselves driven out of their lands in the same way Mizrachi Jews were in the 20th century. EDIT: None of this means that modern Palestinian national identity is invalid or illegitimate; it’s a modern nationalism like any other modern nationalism, regardless of when it arose. Israeli national identity is a new expression of the peoplehood of Am Israel, and Palestinian national identity is a new expression of the peoplehood of the Levantine Arabs who live between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. That one arose as a reaction to the other doesn’t make it illegitimate, or the material needs and desires of its people any less real.
- We quote Rashid Khalidi: “the surest way to eradicate a people’s right to their land is to deny their historical connection to it.” Oh, I’m sure, Rashid Khalidi. That would explain his endorsement of Nur Masalha, who goes so far as to say that the ancient Kingdom of Israel has no historical relation to the land, calls Maimonides an Arab, and promotes Khazar theory. One of my greatest frustrations with this history is that Israeli historians will go out of their way to criticize the actions taken by their leaders, and Palestinian historians will rewrite history to make it look like they’ve never made any mistakes. If you can’t look your mistakes in the face, you’ll never learn.
- According to Hedges, Israel is the “modern face of Nero, who illuminated his opulent garden parties by burning to death captives tied to stakes” and the Western world is “Nero’s guests.” And the West better be careful, because “those who were once Nero’s guests, soon became his victims.” We’re back to leftist QAnon.
- Aaron Bushnell “died for our sins.” I wish I were making this up.
- Hedges ends the book at a Columbia encampment. He calls the university’s (frankly understated) response to the intentional destruction of its library and the kidnapping of its janitors “a system of totalitarianism.” Online backlash to the encampments is presented with the same gravity as the war in Gaza. If Hedges genuinely thinks there’s a comparison to be made here, he is only worthy of derision.
This is a hodgepodge of conspiracy theories wrapped up in NYT prestige. If this is who led their Middle East department for years, it explains much more about the Times than it does about Palestine. Hedges stations himself in Jenin and Ramallah, the two most radical cities in the West Bank, and positions himself as an authority in Gaza without actually visiting it. His conclusions are drawn before the book begins. Like most voyeurs of this conflict, he’s more interested in his own journalistic reputation than any sort of peaceful solution for the people of this land.
