Chris Hedges' Speech on Gaza: The End of the Western Mythology
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnl49IWqIcY&t=1460s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkujET0ajAQ
Thank you. It is a tremendous honor for me to be here with Gabor, one of the intellectual and moral giants of our time. This time next week, I will be in Cairo with the great cartoonist Joe Sako, who wrote "Palestine" and "Footnotes in Gaza." We will begin working on our book about the genocide by interviewing Palestinians in Cairo—a book my publisher, Simon & Schuster, who has made handsome profits off me in the past, has already told me they do not want.
My old office in Gaza is now a pile of rubble. The streets around it, where I once went for coffee, ordered maftoul or manakeesh, had a haircut, are now flattened. Friends and colleagues are dead or have vanished; last heard from weeks or months ago. No doubt, they are buried somewhere beneath the broken slabs of concrete. The uncounted dead number in the tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands. Israel has made Gaza a wasteland—fifty million tons of rubble and debris, with rats and dogs scavenging amid the ruins and pools of raw sewage. The fetid stench and contamination of decaying corpses rise from beneath mountains of shattered concrete.
Palestinians—90% of whom are displaced—risk death from unexploded ordnance left behind after 18 months of airstrikes, artillery barrages, missile strikes, and blasts from tank shells, along with exposure to toxic substances like raw sewage and asbestos. Israel, supplied with billions of dollars worth of weapons from the United States, Germany, Italy, and the UK, created this hell and intends to maintain it. The blockade of all food and humanitarian aid since March 2nd—more than 60 days—has resulted in outbreaks of hepatitis A caused by drinking contaminated water, scabies, malnutrition. Sixty thousand children show signs of malnutrition; 57 Palestinians have starved so far since March 2nd, most of them elderly and children. Widespread starvation, nausea, and vomiting are common.
Palestinians in Gaza live in makeshift tents amid slabs of concrete, many forced to move over a dozen times as homes, apartment blocks, schools, hospitals, bakeries, mosques, and universities have been destroyed or damaged. Israel bombed the Islamic University in Gaza City and the Turkish Palestinian hospital on March 21st. Control demolitions have obliterated cemeteries, shops, offices. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East estimates that clearing Gaza of rubble will take 15 years and cost between 40 and 50 billion dollars. Yet, any rebuilding effort—supported by Israel and the Trump administration—will not be done for Palestinians. Israeli organizations, including far-right groups like Nala, have held conferences to prepare for the colonization of Gaza once Palestinians are removed.
This is the final chapter of the genocide, accentuated by Israel's security cabinet decision to occupy all of Gaza and remain there indefinitely, while emptying the northern part of the Gaza Strip of Palestinians. It is a final, blood-soaked push to drive Palestinians from Gaza—no food, no medicine, no shelter, no clean water, no electricity. Israel has turned Gaza into a Dantean cauldron of human misery, where Palestinians are being killed in the hundreds, and soon again in the thousands or tens of thousands, or they will be forced out never to return. This final chapter marks the end of Israeli lies—the lie of a two-state solution, the lie that Israel respects the laws of war protecting civilians, the lie that it bombs hospitals and schools only because they are used as staging areas by Hamas, the lie that Hamas uses civilians as human shields while Israel routinely forces Palestinians into tunnels and buildings ahead of its troops, the lie that Palestinian rockets are responsible for the destruction of hospitals, UN buildings, and Palestinian casualties. It is a lie that humanitarian aid is blocked because Hamas is hijacking trucks or smuggling weapons, and a lie that Israeli babies are being beheaded or that Palestinians are carrying out mass rape of Israeli women.
The lie that 75% of those killed in Gaza were Hamas "terrorists," and that Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad are responsible for the breakdown of the ceasefire on March 18th, which has resulted in more than 2,300 Palestinians killed, 6,000 injured, and a total death toll exceeding 52,000, with thousands more under rubble. Israel's naked genocidal project is exposed. The few remaining food kitchens will close within days as the UN's World Food Program and UN Relief and Works Agency stocks run out. Mass starvation will follow, along with deaths caused by contaminated water and food. Scores of people are killed and wounded each day under relentless bombardment—bombs, missiles, shells, bullets. If Israel has its way, nothing vital—bakeries, water treatment plants, sewage facilities, hospitals, distribution centers, clinics—will function. Less than half of the 53 emergency vehicles operated by the Palestinian Red Crescent are functional due to fuel shortages, and soon, there will be none.
Israel's message is unequivocal: Gaza will be uninhabitable. Leave or die. The images from Gaza over the past 18 months have been horrific, but what is coming now will be worse. It will rival the most atrocious war crimes of the 20th century, including the mass starvation, wholesale slaughter, and leveling of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943 by the Nazis. October 7th marked a turning point—a line dividing an Israeli policy that once advocated brutalization and subjugation of Palestinians from one that now calls for their extermination and removal from historic Palestine.
What we are witnessing is akin to the aftermath of the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876, when the U.S. military, led by George Armstrong Custer, suffered a humiliating defeat. Following that, Native Americans were targeted for extermination, their remnants forced into reservations where thousands died of disease, lived under the merciless gaze of their oppressors, and fell into lives of misery and despair. I fear the same fate awaits Palestinians in Gaza—dumped into one of the world's hellholes and forgotten. The expansion of Greater Israel—seizing Syrian territory in the Golan Heights, southern Lebanon, Gaza, and the occupied West Bank—continues to be cemented into place. Over 40,000 Palestinians have been driven from their homes in the West Bank, with expectations that it will soon be annexed by Israel.
But the genocide in Gaza is only the beginning. The world is unraveling under the weight of the climate crisis, which triggers mass migrations, failed states, catastrophic wildfires, hurricanes, storms, flooding, and droughts. As global stability collapses, the violence inflicted upon Palestinians will become ubiquitous. Israel’s destruction of Gaza signals the death of a global order once guided by international laws and rules—laws that have long been violated by the U.S. in its imperial wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Yet, there was at least a utopian vision behind these laws.
Now, the United States and its Western allies not only supply the weapons to sustain this genocide but actively obstruct most nations’ demands for adherence to humanitarian law. They have carried out attacks against Yemen, the only nation that has tried to halt this genocide, with militarized drones, helicopter gunships, walls, barriers, checkpoints, watchtowers, detention centers, deportations, brutality, torture, and the denial of entry visas. These acts amount to apartheid, stripping Palestinians and Yemenis of their rights, turning their existence into an ordeal of electronic surveillance, loss of individual rights, and state-sponsored violence—familiar scenes to desperate migrants along the Mexican border or those attempting to enter Europe.
The message from the global North to the rest of the world is clear: we have everything, and if you try to take it away from us, we will kill you. Thank you.