Chris Hedges
This is the end. The final
blood-soaked chapter of the genocide. It will be over soon. Weeks. At most. Two
million people are camped out amongst the rubble or in the open air. Dozens are
killed and wounded daily from Israeli shells, missiles, drones, bombs and
bullets. They lack clean water, medicine and food. They have reached a point of
collapse. Sick. Injured. Terrified. Humiliated. Abandoned. Destitute. Starving.
Hopeless.
In the last pages of this horror
story, Israel is sadistically baiting starving Palestinians with promises of
food, luring them to the narrow and congested nine-mile ribbon of land that
borders Egypt. Israel and its cynically named Gaza Humanitarian Foundation
(GHF), allegedly funded by Israel’s Ministry of Defense and the Mossad, is
weaponizing starvation. It is enticingPalestinians to southern Gaza the way the
Nazis enticed starving Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto to board trains to the death
camps. The goal is not to feed the Palestinians. No one seriously argues there
is enough food or aid hubs. The goal is to cram Palestinians into heavily
guarded compounds and deport them.
What comes next? I long ago
stopped trying to predict the future. Fate has a way of surprising us. But
there will be a final humanitarian explosion in Gaza’s human slaughterhouse. We
see it with the surging crowds of Palestinians fighting to get a food parcel,
which has resulted in Israeli and U.S. private contractors shooting dead at
least 130 and wounding over seven hundred others in the first eight days of aid
distribution. We see it with Benjamin Netanyahu’s arming ISIS-linked gangs in
Gaza that loot food supplies. Israel, which has eliminated hundreds of
employees with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine
Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), doctors, journalists, civil servants and
police in targeted assassinations, has orchestrated the implosion of civil
society.
I suspect Israel will facilitate
a breach in the fence along the Egyptian border. Desperate Palestinians will
stampede into the Egyptian Sinai. Maybe it will end some other way. But it will
end soon. There is not much more Palestinians can take.
We — full participants in this
genocide — will have achieved our demented goal of emptying Gaza and expanding
Greater Israel. We will bring down the curtain on the live-streamed genocide.
We will have mocked the ubiquitous university programs of Holocaust studies,
designed, it turns out, not to equip us to end genocides, but deify Israel as
an eternal victim licensed to carry out mass slaughter. The mantra of never
again is a joke. The understanding that when we have the capacity to halt
genocide and we do not, we are culpable, does not apply to us. Genocide is
public policy. Endorsed and sustained by our two ruling parties.
There is nothing left to say.
Maybe that is the point. To render us speechless. Who does not feel paralyzed?
And maybe, that too, is the point. To paralyze us. Who is not traumatized? And
maybe that too was planned. Nothing we do, it seems, can halt the killing. We
feel defenseless. We feel helpless. Genocide as spectacle.
I have stopped looking at the
images. The rows of little shrouded bodies. The decapitated men and women.
Families burned alive in their tents. The children who have lost limbs or are
paralyzed. The chalky death masks of those pulled from under the rubble. The
wails of grief. The emaciated faces. I can’t.
This genocide will haunt us. It
will echo down history with the force of a tsunami. It will divide us forever.
There is no going back.
And how will we remember? By not
remembering.
Once it is over, all those who
supported it, all those who ignored it, all those who did nothing, will rewrite
history, including their personal history. It was hard to find anyone who
admitted to being a Nazi in post-war Germany, or a member of the Klu Klux Klan
once segregation in the southern United States ended. A nation of innocents.
Victims even. It will be the same. We like to think we would have saved Anne
Frank. The truth is different. The truth is, crippled by fear, nearly all of us
will only save ourselves, even at the expense of others. But that is a truth
that is hard to face. That is the real lesson of the Holocaust. Better it be
erased.
In his book “One Day, Everyone
Will Have Always Been Against This,” Omar El Akkad writes:
Should
a drone vaporize some nameless soul on the other side of the planet, who among
us wants to make a fuss? What if it turns out they were a terrorist? What if
the default accusation proves true, and we by implication be labeled terrorist
sympathizers, ostracized, yelled at? It is generally the case that people are
most zealously motivated by the worst plausible thing that could happen to
them. For some, the worst plausible thing might be the ending of their
bloodline in a missile strike. Their entire lives turned to rubble and all of
it preemptively justified in the name of fighting terrorists who are terrorists
by default on account of having been killed. For others, the worst plausible
thing is being yelled at.
You can see my interview with El
Akkad here.
You cannot decimate a people,
carry out saturation bombing over 20 months to obliterate their homes, villages
and cities, massacre tens of thousands of innocent people, set up a siege to
ensure mass starvation, drive them from land where they have lived for
centuries and not expect blowback. The genocide will end. The response to the
reign of state terror will begin. If you think it won’t you know nothing about
human nature or history. The killing of two Israeli diplomats in Washington and
the attack against supporters of Israel at a protest in Boulder, Colorado, are
only the start.
Chaim Engel, who took part in the
uprising at the Nazis’ Sobibor death campin Poland, described how, armed with a
knife, he attacked a guard in the camp.
“It’s not a decision,” Engel
explained years later. “You just react, instinctively you react to that, and I
figured, ‘Let us to do, and go and do it.’ And I went. I went with the man in
the office and we killed this German. With every jab, I said, ‘That is for my
father, for my mother, for all these people, all the Jews you killed.’”
Does anyone expect Palestinians
to act differently? How are they to react when Europe and the United States,
who hold themselves up as the vanguards of civilization, backed a genocide that
butchered their parents, their children, their communities, occupied their land
and blasted their cities and homes into rubble? How can they not hate those who
did this to them?
What message has this genocide
imparted not only to Palestinians, but to all in the Global South?
It is unequivocal. You do not
matter. Humanitarian law does not apply to you. We do not care about your
suffering, the murder of your children. You are vermin. You are worthless. You
deserve to be killed, starved and dispossessed. You should be erased from the
face of the earth.
“To preserve the values of the
civilized world, it is necessary to set fire to a library,” El Akkad writes:
To
blow up a mosque. To incinerate olive trees. To dress up in the lingerie of
women who fled and then take pictures. To level universities. To loot jewelry,
art, food. Banks. To arrest children for picking vegetables. To shoot children
for throwing stones. To parade the captured in their underwear. To break a
man’s teeth and shove a toilet brush in his mouth. To let combat dogs loose on
a man with Down syndrome and then leave him to die. Otherwise, the uncivilized
world might win.
There are people I have known for
years who I will never speak to again. They know what is happening. Who does
not know? They will not risk alienating their colleagues, being smeared as an
antisemite, jeopardizing their status, being reprimanded or losing their jobs.
They do not risk death, the way Palestinians do. They risk tarnishing the
pathetic monuments of status and wealth they spent their lives constructing.
Idols. They bow down before these idols. They worship these idols. They are
enslaved by them.
At the feet of these idols lie
tens of thousands of murdered Palestinians.
June 9, 2025
Julia Conley
"The almost
daily massacres of starving Palestinian families desperately seeking food
denied to them by the Israeli-imposed campaign of intentional starvation are
crimes against humanity," said one advocate.
As activists who had been headed for Gaza with humanitarian aid
remained in Israeli custody Monday, Palestinian rights advocates condemned
reports that the death toll at aid distribution points set up by a private
Israel-backed company continued to grow.
The Associated Pressreported that "Israeli forces and allied
local gunmen" were behind gunfire that killed at least 14 Palestinians who
were taken to local hospitals on Monday, and roughly 100 people were injured.
The people killed were the latest among a total of at least 127
Palestinians who have been killed as they've approached distribution points set
up by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a private group staffed by U.S. defense
contractors and supported by the Israeli and U.S. governments—but rejected by
the United Nations and groups that have long provided aid in Gaza, who say the
GHF is not a neutral party and is endangering Palestinians by forcing them to
walk several miles through their war-torn enclave to retrieve food boxes
weighing 44 pounds each.
At Al Jazeera, Hind Khoudary reported that as Palestinians have
approached the aid points in recent days, "the Israeli army starts opening
fire, Israeli quadcopters hover above their heads, and Israeli tanks proceed to
bear down on the aid seekers."
Among the people killed at a distribution point in Rafah near
al-Mawasi was "a woman named Hanan who was solely responsible for feeding
her kids and family," reported Khoudary.
"These distribution sites are in the middle of nowhere, where
Israeli bulldozers destroyed residential homes," Khoudary added.
"It's totally chaotic. Israeli forces have been firing live ammunition as
well as tear gas canisters to disperse starving Palestinians."
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have previously admitted to opening
fire on Palestinians at GHF sites, but have claimed "shots were directed
near individual suspects who advanced toward the troops."
The APreported that men from a local militia called the Popular
Forces, led by Yasser Abu Shabab, opened fire at a distribution site in Khan
Younis after the men tried to organize the crowd and people "pushed
forward."
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said last week that his
government has armed Abu Shabab's militia as part of an effort to undermine
Hamas. Abu Shabab denied the claim. Aid workers have said the Popular Forces
have long looted trucks carrying humanitarian relief—something Israel has
repeatedly accused Hamas of doing as it has entirely cut off aid to Gaza since
March.
An eyewitness named Hussein Shamimi told the AP that his
14-year-old cousin was killed in the attack on Monday.
"There was an ambush," said Shamimi, "the Israelis
from one side and Abu Shabab from another."
At least four people were shot in the neck, another witness told
the outlet.
Nihad Awad, national executive director of the Council on American
Islamic Relations in the U.S., called for an "immediate end" to the
U.S. government's "complicity" in Israel's assault on Gaza, which has
killed more than 54,000 Palestinians since October 2023, and in the attacks on
people at GHF aid points.
"The almost daily massacres of starving Palestinian families
desperately seeking food denied to them by the Israeli-imposed campaign of
intentional starvation are crimes against humanity carried out with the
complicity of our own government," said Awad. "Food and other
humanitarian supplies must enter Gaza unimpeded, without Israel being allowed
to use starvation as a weapon of war and a tool for ethnic cleansing."
Also in Khan Younis on Monday, a Palestinian child became the
latest to die of malnutrition at the Children's and Maternity Hospital.
At least 58 children in Gaza have died of malnutrition since Israel
began its total blockade of aid in early March.
Meanwhile, organizers with the Freedom Flotilla Coalition reported
Monday they had been unable to contact 12 international activists and
volunteers who were aboard the Madleen, bound for Gaza, for 19 hours.
The activists, including Swedish climate leader Greta Thunberg, had
been sailing to Gaza to deliver humanitarian aid.
"These citizens were sailing peacefully under international
law, in international waters, and Israel went and forcibly abducted them,"
Huwaida Arraf toldAl Jazeera. "This was done, as Israel puts it, to
'maintain a maritime closure of Gaza'—which it has no authority to do."
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