Review of A Genocide Foretold: Reporting on Survival and Resistance in Occupied Palestine by Chris Hedges (Seven Stories Press, 2025)

Sometimes, living in this rapidly decaying late capitalist United States, I feel a little like Winston Smith from George Orwell’s 1984. The ruling class of this country maintains its power by enforcing systems of rampant injustice and brutality worldwide. This reality is seldom if ever mentioned in mainstream American media and political discourse; the US is, in fact, generally portrayed as a stellar democracy at home and a beacon of light for the world’s oppressed in its foreign policy. The systematic obscuring of the reality of the crimes of the US ruling class is exemplified in the bipartisan US backing of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza. 

There are obvious limits in American media and politics as to how much criticism of Israel is allowed–the criticism of it that does exist in American culture is immensely disappointing in its relatively limited extent (given the true depth of Israel’s crimes as an apartheid state). For example, at the national level there have been a small group of Democratic lawmakers who have made critical noises against Israel’s crimes in Gaza: examples include Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, Rashida Tlaib, Jeff Merkley and Chris Van Hollen. While Tlaib’s stance has been heroic and vigorous, the general thrust of the criticisms of Israel by these politicians has been strikingly limited, none more so than in the case of Senator Sanders. A stereotypical liberal Zionist, Sanders has supported the multiple Israeli military aggressions against Gaza within the last two decades. While denouncing Israel under Netanyahu as “extremist and racist,” Sanders has expressed the illusion that Israel was, in the distant past, a progressive place which respected human rights. In reality the Jewish supremacist apartheid and war crimes of Netanyahu’s government are continuous in many ways with the so-called progressive Labor Party governments which ruled Israel during its first three decades (1948-77) and oversaw the so-called Israeli-Palestinian peace process of the 1990s. 

As Israel responded to the atrocities of October 7th with its genocidal assault on Gaza, Sanders defended it by proclaiming Israel’s right to self-defense but soon began to add a few strong caveats: he objected to the horrific toll on civilians–labelling Israel’s actions as ethnic cleansing and war crimes–and unsuccessfully sought to marshall support for congressional legislation to suspend some–but not all–US weapons exports to Israel. While continuing to use extremely harsh language to describe Israel’s conduct of its military campaign in Gaza, he has continued to insist that Israel had a right to start that campaign in the first place. He recently publicly reiterated his belief that Israel has a fundamental “right to defend itself”–which means, in effect, that–so long as it is done with better pretence of protecting civilians than Netanyahu has done in Gaza since October 7th–he approves of Israel’s efforts to militarily crush resistance to its illegal policies of blockade and starvation that it imposed on the Gaza Strip long before October 7th. .

Another example of the gross inadequacy of mainstream progressive criticism of Israel is represented by New York Times columnist and CNN contributor Nicholas Kristof. Similar to Sanders, Kristof argues that Israel’s attack on Gaza after October 7th started off as a “just war” but has degenerated into “war waged unjustly” as Israel’s firepower has inflicted unimaginably horrific suffering on Palestinian civilians. He also has criticized the US government for its unconditional massive supply of military aid that has enabled Israeli atrocities. Unlike most US politicians and media commentators, Kristof doesn’t reflexively cheerlead Israel’s every action. He has positioned himself as a moderate standing between Hamas “murdering, torturing and raping Israeli civilians” on the one hand and the excesses of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza on the other hand. Kristof criticizes as equally culpable Zionist fanatics who reflexively attack every criticism of Israel as anti-semtic and pro-Palestinian protestors whom he accuses of tolerating “strains of anti-semitism” within their movement and who claim, falsely he says, that “Zionism is racism.” 

Unlike the generality of the US political and media class, who have displayed for decades a cult like unwillingness to portray Israel as anything other than a paragon of democratic virtue and human rights amidst the general barbarism of the Middle East— Kristof is willing to concede that the word “apartheid” is a “rough approximation of Israeli rule in the West Bank where Arabs have long been oppressed under a system that is separate and unequal.” He also allows that Palestinian citizens of Israel “are treated like second class citizens” within Israeli society. 

Lest anyone think that he is overzealous in his criticism of Israel, Kristof stated in a Times column earlier this month that “I don’t see Hamas and Israel as moral equivalents.” For him, Hamas is the lead villain and Israel is comparatively virtuous, exercising its perfectly just right to retaliate against the October 7th atrocities, even if it has engaged in excesses against Gazan civilians while doing so; he has lectured Israel not to “engage in war crimes to repay war crimes” committed by Hamas.. 

On April 13th, Kristof made the following post on X, a mixture of welcome moral clarity (about the US role in Israeli atrocities) and astonishing obtuseness: 

“Just heard from an American volunteer surgeon who was inside the Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza when it was bombed by Israel today. He’s ok, but others are not: a child died while being evacuated. We can’t be sure what munitions were used but it’s a good bet the US…supplied the bombs used to target this hospital. Is it a war crime? I don’t know: I’m not an international lawyer. But really? In Gaza, we Americans choose to support the blockade of food from civilians and the bombing of a hospital? For the sake of both Gaza’s children and Israeli hostages, it’s long past time to end this.” 

It is a testament to the level of Stalinist style conformity on Israel within American political and intellectual life that a person of such obvious decency and intelligence as Kristof refuses to express a judgement as to whether Israel’s bombing of a hospital is a war crime. As multiple replies to Kristof’s comments on X pointed out, when Russia has bombed hospitals in Ukraine, Kristof and other mainstream liberals have had no trouble (correctly) calling it a war crime. 

In general, the likes of Kristof and Sanders represent the critical extreme with regard to Israel within mainstream American politics and media. In most cases, the rhetoric on Israel is much worse: Israel has been portrayed as a completely flawless beacon of civilization fighting Islamic Arabic barbarism. As left media critic Adam Johnson recently noted, the issue of Israel’s genocide entered the margins of mainstream media and political consciousness during the college campus anti-genocide protests of 2024–the reaction to which by media and political elites was largely hostile. However, as Trump’s thugs have unleashed Mccarthyite terror against campus protesters–effectively eliminating the protests for the most part–the US media and political class have seemingly lost even a hostile interest in the claims made by the protestors, even as Israel’s policy of imposing literal mass starvation on the Gaza Strip has intensified.

Chris Hedges on Gaza

It provides a modicum of relief to one’s mental health to turn from Kristof’s lame bothsidesism and Bernie Sanders’s blather about Israel’s “right to defend itself” to reading Chris Hedges’s new book A Genocide Foretold: Reporting on Survival and Resistance in Occupided Palestine. 

Hedges, who came out as a radical leftist in the 2000s after retiring as a New York Times foreign correspondent, does not walk on eggshells when offering criticism of Israel. He offers the plain, unvarnished truth: residents of Gaza have every justification under international law to launch armed resistance against the occupation of their land by Israel. In his book–made up of his reprinted Scheer Post and Substack columns as well as material from his podcast–Hedges describes such topics as AIPAC’s sinister influence on American politics; demolishes the  coverup of the hundreds of civilians massacred by Israel’s first assault on Gaza’s Al Ahli Baptist Hospital in October 2023; and the courage of anti-genocide student protestors at Princeton University.

I think Hedges’s book’s best chapter is its fourth, entitled “Exterminate all the Brutes.” It is a cogent, penetrating analysis of the development of the racist propaganda within Israel–and the west generally–that has led to acquiescence to the Gaza genocide. This pro-genocide mass psychology is rooted in Palestinian resistance to the decades long Israeli project to crush Palestinian nationhood and establish Jewish supremacy over all of Palestine. Hedges describes Israel’s decades long policy in the West Bank and Gaza of “killing of civilians, dispossession of land; arbitrary detention, torture, disappearances, closures imposed on Palestinian towns and villages, house demolitions, revoking residence permits, deportation, destruction of the infrastructure that maintains civil society, military occupation, dehumanizing language, and theft of natural resources, especially aquifers.” 

Another cogent part of the book is Chapter 6, which features an interview with Norman G. Finkelstein. Here, Hedges writes of Israeli policies that were the context for Hamas’s attack on October 7th: 

“How can you trap 2.3 million people in Gaza, half of whom are unemployed, in one of the most densely populated places on the planet; reduce the lives of its residents, half of whom are children, to a subsistence level; deprive them of basic medical supplies, food, water and electricity; use attack aircraft, artillery, mechanized units, missiles, naval guns, and infantry units to routinely slaughter unarmed civilians and not expect a violent response?” 

In his interview with Hedges, Finkelstein compares the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7th to the 1831 slave rebellion of Nat Turner. Finkelstein notes that, although Turner’s rebels committed mass atrocities against white civilians, William Lloyd Garrison did not condemn them–nor praise them. Garrison saw Turner’s atrocities against whites as highly predictable consequences of imposing the extreme degradation and brutality on other human beings that was the American system of chattel slavery. Finkelstein–and Hedges–view Garrison’s stance as the proper one to take with regard to Hamas atrocities on October 7th–and Hedges admits that they were definitely atrocities, even if widely publicized claims about Hamas engaging in mass rape and beheading babies turned out to be largely if not entirely apocryphal. 

A Genocide Foretold contains its share of stories relating to Israel’s deliberate campaign of mass murder, starvation and torture of Gaza’s people since October 7th. Perhaps the most searing section of the book is Hedges’s quotation of Gaza City lawyer Fadi Baker’s account  (given to the Israeli human rights group B’tselem) about the horrendous torture he endured after Israeli troops shot him in the leg and arrested him while he was out seaching for flour to feed his family in January 2024. He was stripped naked and left for four days in a “very cold” room into which very loud music was blasted day and night.  He further reported: 

“After four days, they took me for interrogation….they put cigarettes out in my mouth and on my body. They put clamps on my testicles that were attached to something heavy…My testicles swelled up and my left ear bled….From there they took me to a different pen, where they left me naked for about four or five days. I got very little food and drink there too, and they made me wear a diaper. During the interrogation, I was given electric shocks and beaten so badly that I passed out…..I developed wounds, bleeding and pain in my body, especially the left leg, which had bruises and wounds full of pus that hurt badly. My leg turned blue and nearly reached a state of necrosis. I was kept in the pen for five days, and then I had surgery, without anesthesia, on my swollen left leg ….Then they moved me back to the pen, where I was forced to kneel every day for two weeks, handcuffed and blindfolded…. We showered once a week and got clean underwear only once during that time.” 

After about seven weeks of this treatment, Hedges narrates that Baker and other detainees were put on a bus by the Israeli military, driven back into Gaza and released; they were told they were “forbidden to speak to the media about what they had endured.” 

The account of the horrendous torture meted out to Baker is an example of Hedges’s unique ability to evoke with his narration the truth depths of the horrors perpetrated by our ruling class. It is a gift that has been very much in evidence in his past work, for example his 2012 book Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, which is one of the best books I’ve ever read. In Days of Destruction, Hedges vividly evokes the horror of post-Great Recession American life through stories about the hellscape of post-industrial Appalachia, crime and Democrat Party corruption in Camden, New Jersey and the struggles of undocumented immigrant agricultural workers to free themselves from literal slave labor conditions in Immokalee, Florida. 

LIke A Genocide Foretold, Days of Destruction contains a catalog of the horrors of exploitaiton and injustice that are part and parcel of our modern economic, political and social system. But at the end of their narratives, both books give reasons for hope, providing short profiles of inspiring activists who are fighting against the evils perpetrated by our ruling class. 

A Genocide Foretold is a relatively short, quick read; it includes as an appendix a report dated October 1, 2024 submitted to the UN General Assembly by Francesca Albanese, the courageous UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in the West Bank and Gaza. I don’t agree with every point made in the book–for example some of the arguments made by Hedges about the manner in which AIPAC influences US policy on Israel–just as I don’t agree with arguments Hedges has made in different places about the necessity of radical leftists making common cause with the far right on certain issues. But those disagreements are relatively trivial; Hedges is an extremely gifted writer whose voice is badly needed in these times where barbarism is flourishing so strongly. 

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