The genocide is almost complete. When it is concluded it will have exposed the moral bankruptcy of Western civilization.
The Last Piece – by Mr. Fish.
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 enticing Palestinians 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.
Palestinians under the rubble in 2023 after Israeli airstrike of homes in the Gaza Strip. (Ashraf Amra /United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East/ Wikimedia Commons /CC BY-SA 4.0)
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 camp in 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.’”
The Sobibor extermination camp gate in the spring of 1943. The pine branches, braided into the fence to make it difficult to see in from the outside. (Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)
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.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR. He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report.
This article is from Scheerpost.
NOTE TO READERS: There is now no way left for me to continue to write a weekly column for ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show without your help. The walls are closing in, with startling rapidity, on independent journalism, with the elites, including the Democratic Party elites, clamoring for more and more censorship. Please, if you can, sign up at chrishedges.substack.com so I can continue to post my Monday column on ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show, “The Chris Hedges Report.”
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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It has never been in question throughout history despite our nose blindness R2P is Right 2 Profit on the suffering ot others for institutional strategic religious, economic, and cultural .gains versus pains.
Genocide for zionist bribes is indeed US policy. The helpless fear the tyrants of their village, church, or workplace.
But the US has no moral foundation or social contract: genocide makes most feel lucky and powerful, and they can evade fake “antisemitism” accusations from other fake liberals by saying nothing or approving of it as good nazis.
I ask those in discussion groups not to use “antisemitism,” equivocating anti-zionism with anti-Jewish views, because this permits the false accusation that opposition to an extremist minority is opposition to the ethnic or religious group.
All ascriptive groups have tyrants pretending to be their defenders, accusing opponents of being enemies of the tribe.
If I oppose the mafia, KKK, Al Qaeda, or Naziism, am I plotting against Italians, white people, Muslims, or Germans?
Of course not. It is those who make such accusations, the tyrants demanding privileges to steal, who discriminate.
The Nazi claims against the Jews led to the Zionist claims against the Palestinians; so one genocide leads to another.
Some Arab nations should hang their heads in shame. Complicit in this genocide by courting the USA and its allies; normalizing relations with the apartheid state of israel.
Acts of altruism are few and far between. Humanity casts its eyes aside and continues to pursue its daily self-indulgences or its daily survival; depending on where you live.
I don’t know if it’s the fatality, the catastrophic feel, or the vivid imagery, but this article had me crying for 30 minutes straight. I blame the elites, the governments, those in power; that is without a doubt. But I also blame the people, I blame us for buying so easily into this narrative that we are not enough, and that we, as individuals, couldn’t do enough. Regardless of the protests or the beautiful exceptions, humanity has become lazy and too easy to manipulate. If we had only shown one ounce of the courage of the Palestinians.
Currently, I would say that people in general are still able to make a distinction between Jewish people in general and Zionists in regards to the genocide in Gaza. However, when this horror is complete and everyone is trying to forget it, the distinction between ordinary humane Jewish people and genocide supporting Zionists will dissolve. I expect that the ethnic cleansing of Gaza will be a pyrrhic victory that will forever turn Israel into an outlaw state and more generally make Jewish people objects of suspicion in societies around the world. Not to mention their own inner state of mind. A complete tragedy for everyone. This is the outcome when Zionists, neocons or fascists take control of a society. The US is also currently following this path.
Chris Hedges is a brilliant writer and author. The truth is hard to bear of the evil our so-called civilized society has inflicted on innocent Palestinians. The irony is the haunting resemblance of the current attack on Palestinians to the holocaust experienced by the Jews. I feel terrible and helpless in the face of the genocide.
This is one of the best articles I have read. finally, Chris says what most won’t say. the genocide is complete and we are all responsible. My tears have been in vain.
I, who have done nothing, am complicit in the genocide.
“God will chastise the world with Russia. Nations
will be annihilated. The survivors will envy the dead”. Stand by for nuclear winter.
Keep poking the grizzly!
All those who don’t react with visceral contempt for what Israel is doing to Palestinians have lost their moral compass.
My grandfather, a New York Jew who financially supported the founding of Israel at its beginnings would be appalled at its current genocide.
I have read Omar El Akkad – brilliant writer whom everyone should read. Kudos to the Globe and Mail for assisting his development.
Chris Hedges is right.
At the root of it the problem we find Donald Trump, who seems to have been bought and paid for by Israeli interests. He can turn on a dime when he sees the need. Overwhelming pressure should be directed at him. People who remain silent share responsibility in this hideous, loathsome crime.
The root of the problem is not Donald Trump.
yes, Tom..the root of the current horrific attempt at genocide one can come to by studying colonial history, the rape, murder, and plunder of our planet resources by European colonisers, mainly the Dutch, the Portuguese, the Spanish, the British, the French, the Italians, the Germans, and last not least the USofA, a former European colony itself, please study the last 500 years of European colonialism, the European menace as I call it, responsible for all major atrocities committed against humanity on this tortured planet, continuing in a last attempt to subjugate and plunder Eurasia, we are witnessing the final showdown between the vicious and depraved psychopathic European mainly AngloSaxon coloniser and the rest of this planet…worry that the psychopath Coloniser US et al. is attempting to push humanity into armageddon in its deranged and unhinged madness..stay tuned and keep on studying history while you still can…so sad and horrible!
Nonsense. He embodies the worst.
This is indeed the white global north letting the brown global south know that resistance to our tyranny is futile. We have not changed from the genocides and slaveries of old. Any pretense of democracy was just a ruse to keep the masses pacified while the wars of conquest rage on.
I would like to hold out a sliver of hope that the caravan that has just reached Libya will break into Gaza and help the starving Palestinians. I understand Egypt has granted visas to the caravan members.
you got it, Lois..I second your analysis of West European colonial “tyranny” for the last 500 years..who will be the winner in the probably last and final war of conquest of Eurasia remains to be witnessed…
The pro Israel power bloc has been victorious. It’s only a matter of time before they embroil us in a serious war against the innocent Persian state. These same neocons drenched in Russophobia and hubris have us on the brink of World War 3 with Russia. They don’t value life like the rest of us; exhibit A is their treatment of the helpless Palestinians in Gaza.
Please help us all.
We will indeed be haunted and divided by poor structure of government and mass media, their corruption by unregulated economic power, and the resulting moral failure of our culture of pure selfishness.
The US proved its extreme selfishness by refusing to lift the poorest half of humanity from poverty, ignorance, malnutrition, and disease, as we could easily have done in our post-WWII wealth and power. Had we done so we would have no enemies, no excuses for war subsidies, and no record of twenty million killed in our own genocides.
That historic failure is now complete, and our national failure of morality, is indeed a truth hard to face.
Excellent comment Mr. Brant.
Keep up the fine work.