Israelis have blinded themselves morally and intellectually. They view the genocide through the lens of a bankrupt media and political class that shows them only what they want to see.
Never Again (Certain Restrictions Apply) – by Mr. Fish.
Israelis do not see the images of skeletal corpses of Palestinian children who they have starved to death as a curse.
They do not see the slain families they gun down at food hubs — designed not to deliver aid but lure starving Palestinians into a massive concentration camp in the south of Gaza in preparation for deportation — as a war crime.
Israelis do not look at the savage bombing and shelling that kill or wound dozens of Palestinian civilians, where an average of 28 children die daily, as anything extraordinary.
They do not see the wasteland of Gaza, pulverized by bombs and methodically being torn down by bulldozers and excavators, leaving virtually the entire population of Gaza homeless, as barbaric.
They do not see the destruction of water purification plants, decimation of hospitals and clinics, where doctors and medical staff are often unable to work because they are weak from malnutrition, as savage.
They do not blink at the assassinations of doctors as well as journalists, 232 of whom have been murdered for trying to document the horror.
Israelis have blinded themselves morally and intellectually. They view the genocide through the lens of a bankrupt media and political class that tells them only what they want to hear and shows them only what they want to see.
They are intoxicated by the power of their industrial weapons and license to kill with impunity. They are drunk on self-adulation and the fantasy that they are the vanguard of civilization.
They believe that the extermination of a people, including children, condemned as human contaminants, makes the world, especially their world, a happier and safer place.
A Palestinian man mourns his family members who were killed in the Israeli bombing of the Nuseirat refugee camp, Gaza Strip, Aug. 10, 2024. (UNRWA /Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0)
They are the heirs of Pol Pot, the killers that carried out the genocides in East Timor, Rwanda and Bosnia and, yes, the Nazis.
Israel, like all genocidal states — no population since World War II has been dispossessed and starved with such speed and ruthlessness – has a final solution that would have earned the stamp of approval from Adolf Eichmann.
The Preordained Final Chapter
Starvation was always the plan, the preordained final chapter of the genocide.
Israel methodically set out from the beginning of the genocide to destroy sources of food, bombing bakeries and blocking food shipments into Gaza, something it has accelerated since March, when it severed nearly all food supplies.
It targeted the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) — on which most Palestinians depended on for food — for destruction, accusing its employees, without providing evidence, of being involved in the attacks of Oct. 7.
This accusation was used to give funders such as the United States, which provided $422 million to the agency in 2023, the excuse to halt financial support. Israel then banned UNRWA.
Over 1,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli soldiers and U.S. mercenaries in the chaotic scramble to get one of the few food packages distributed during the brief blocks of time, usually an hour, at the four aid sites set up by the Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, according to the U.N. Human Rights Office.
Once Gaza was turned into a moonscape after 21 months of saturation bombing, once Palestinians were forced to live in tents, under crude tarps or in the open air, once clean water, food and medical aid became nearly impossible to find, once civil society was obliterated, Israel began its grim campaign to starve the Palestinians out of Gaza.
One-in-three people in Gaza are going multiple days without eating, according to the U.N.
Mother cries for her 4-year-old daughter, who lost her life due to malnutrition and lack of treatment, Aug. 14, 2024. (UNRWA /Wikimedia Commons/ CC BY 4.0)
Starvation is not a pretty sight. I covered the famine in Sudan in 1988 that took an estimated 250,000 lives. There are streaks in my lungs — scars from standing amid hundreds of Sudanese who were dying of tuberculosis. I was strong and healthy and fought off the contagion. They were weak and emaciated and did not.
I watched hundreds of skeletal figures, ghosts of human beings, trudge at a glacial pace across the barren Sudanese landscape. Hyenas, accustomed to eating human flesh, routinely picked off small children.
I stood over clusters of bleached human bones on the outskirts of villages where dozens of people, too weak to walk, had laid down in a group and never got up. Many were the remains of entire families.
The starved lack enough calories to sustain themselves. They eat anything to survive — animal feed, grass, leaves, insects, rodents, even dirt. They suffer from constant diarrhea.
They have trouble breathing because of respiratory infections. They rip up tiny bits of food, often spoiled, and ration it in a vain attempt to hold off the gnawing hunger pains.
Starvation reduces the iron needed to produce hemoglobin, a protein in red blood cells that carries oxygen from the lungs to the body, and myoglobin, a protein that provides oxygen to muscles, coupled with a lack of vitamin B1, which affects heart and brain function.
Anemia sets in. The body, in essence, feeds on itself. Tissue and muscle waste away. It is impossible to regulate body temperature. Kidneys shut down. Immune systems crash. Vital organs atrophy. Blood circulation slows.
The volume of blood decreases. Infectious diseases such as typhoid, tuberculosis and cholera become an epidemic, killing people by the thousands.
It is impossible to concentrate. Emaciated victims succumb to mental and emotional withdrawal and apathy. They do not want to be touched or moved.
The heart muscle is weakened. Victims, even at rest, are in a state of virtual heart failure. Wounds do not heal. Vision is impaired with cataracts, even among the young. Finally, wracked by convulsions and hallucinations, the heart stops.
This process can last up to 40 days for an adult. Children, the elderly and the sick expire at faster rates. This is the future Israel has preordained for the 2 million people in Gaza.
They See Paradise
But it is not the future Israelis see. They see paradise. They see an ethno-nationalist Jewish state where Palestinians, whose land they stole and occupied and whose people they have subjugated and forced into an apartheid existence, do not exist.
They see cafes and hotels rising up where thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of bodies lie buried under the rubble. They see tourists frolicking on the Gaza beachfront, a vision enhanced by an Artificial Intelligence-generated video uploaded to social media by Israeli Minister of Innovation, Science and Technology Gila Gamliel. It is what a Gaza devoid of Palestinians would look like, echoing the absurdist AI video posted by Donald Trump.
Gamliel, on right, with U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, June 2019. (David Azagury / U.S. Embassy Jerusalem/Wikimedia Commons/ CC BY 2.0)
In the video, carefree Israelis eat at seaside restaurants. Anchored in the sparkling Mediterranean are luxury yachts. Gleaming hotels and office high rises, including a Trump Tower, dot the beachfront.
Attractive residential neighborhoods stand where now there are broken, jagged mounds of concrete. The video shows Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife, Sara, as well as Trump and Melania, strolling along the seaside.
Still from AI-generated video promoting Trump’s takeover plans for Gaza, which the U.S. president posted on his social media account on Feb. 26, 2025. (Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)
Gamliel, like other Israeli leaders and Trump, cynically uses the term “voluntary emigration” to describe the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. This omits the stark choice Israel actually offers the Palestinians — leave or die.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has called for a “security annexation” of the northern Gaza Strip and vowed that Gaza will become an “inseparable part of the State of Israel.” He made the remarks at a Knesset conference called “The Gaza Riviera — from vision to reality,” which presented proposals for the building of Jewish colonies in Gaza.
Smotrich said Israel would “relocate Gazans to other countries,” and that Trump endorsed the plan.
Israeli Minister of Heritage Amichai Eliyahu, who once proposed dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza, declared that “All Gaza will be Jewish.”
The Israeli government “is racing ahead for Gaza to be wiped out,” Eliyahu said. He described Palestinians as Nazis. “Thank God, we are wiping out this evil. We are pushing this population that has been educated on ‘Mein Kampf.’”
Eliyahu in 2022. (Yossi Logsi Fleshman/Wikimedia Commons/ CC BY-SA 3.0)
Genocidal killers embrace fantasies of eradicating a native population and expanding their ethnonationalist state. The Nazis carried out their genocidal assault, which included mass starvation, on Slavs, Eastern European Jews and other indigenous people, dismissed as Untermenschen, or subhumans. Colonists were then to be shipped to Central and Eastern Europe to Germanize the occupied territory.
These killers do not reckon with the darkness they unleash. The upscale beachfront properties dreamt of by Israel will never appear, just as the modern, exclusively Serb capital, with its golden domed cathedral, imposing presidency building, 15-story clock tower, state-of-the-art medical center and national theater with a 72-foot revolving stage was never built on the ruins of Bosnia.
Rather, there will be ugly apartment blocks, populated by the usual miscreants, proto-fascists, racists and mediocrities who live in the Jewish colonies in the West Bank.
These ultranationalists, who have formed rogue militias to seize Palestinian land and joined the Israeli army in murdering over 1,000 Palestinians in the West Bank since Oct. 7, will define Israel.
They are the Israeli version of the 3-million-strong Pancasila Youth — Indonesia’s equivalent of the Brown Shirts or the Hitler Youth — that in 1965 helped carry out the genocidal mayhem that left half a million to one million dead.
These rogue militias, equipped with automatic weapons provided by the Israeli government, lynched Saifullah Musallet, a 20-year-old Palestinian-American, who was attempting to protect his family’s land two weeks ago. He is the fifth U.S. citizen killed in the West Bank since Oct. 7.
Once these Israeli goons and thugs are done with the Palestinians, they will turn on each other.
The genocide in Gaza signals the abolition, for Israelis as well as Palestinians, of the rule of law. It marks the obliteration of even the pretense of an ethical code.
Israelis are the barbarians they condemn. If there is any warped justice in this genocide it is that Israelis, once they finish with the Palestinians, will be forced to live together in moral squalor.
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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I agree 100%!
We are next and this is not going to be pretty. The zionist, right wing israeli government knows no limits to their anti-social, slaughter, and general horrific treatment of any person who does not bow to their demands with no explanation or consideration. Do it now or die.
The IDF seems to relish observing suffering and death scenes, stooping to make sure they kill orphaned children so they do not have to ‘waste their resources’ on caring for them.! It continues as they find a death threat around every corner, after they have bombed it.
Now this reinforcement of their behavior by both Biden – democrats and Donal of Orange – republicans and a totally schizophrenic U.S. congress. No viable opposition from our government to the ongoing genocide. This unacceptable, allowing the unthinkable, when it can be stopped. Instead our government chooses to aid in the slaughter.
Folks in D.C. best get things sorted out and soon.
Mr. Fish, Giacometti’s Pointing Man has a message for ~They See Paradise~ in a cellblock with Hannibal Lecter= Smotrich and Buffalo Bill= BenGvir. Chris, wtf, why do you keep reporting “It” targeted UNRWA? “It” had a lot of help from US Orthodox NJAC law fare. Why not name and indict the jerk who lives in Atlanta for shutting down UNRWA; put his worthless ass in a cellblock for starving to death way more children than Wayne Williams (*30+) ever dreamed of dumping in the Chattahoochee River. Your last interview with Maura Finkelstein untangled the oppressive Hillel/AIPAC nexus and their campus surveillance of professors and students. Hillel is “It’s” other gig.
2010 Hillel flashback:
hxxps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jDIfFEUrcQ. Posted on EI. AIPAC / Hillel connection with sicko Alan Dershowitz as bonzo.
I am seeing things which are not explained or talked about.
I have been under the impression, perhaps mistakenly, that the Gazans were at the end of their tether, dressed in almost rags, weakened by little food etc. but videos till now show fairly well dressed people at protests, (remember the crowds at the taking away of some of the freed hostages in SUVs), men strong enough to carry heavy flour(?) sacks distances, black market food being sold, $9 for a loaf – they use US $s? and where is that food coming from?. Who has money after all these months? What food are the incoming doctors eating and where from when all Gazans are supposed o be starving. They must of course have reasonable food to carry out that work – with the constant bombing they seem to survive OK, just luck? compared with the journalists killed deliberately.
How are the people cooking flour, there is fuel of some kind, wood from wrecked buildings etc? What water is used, dirty and polluted presumably – I haven’t heard of how people deal with what food they can get.
We know the Israelis don’t mind killing their own people but no one seems to ask them aren’t they killing the ‘so important hostages’ with their bombing? With their starvation policy won’t their beloved hostages starve to death? Who is feeding them and with what, if that is the case. I’ve never heard any mention of this ever in any medium since Oct 7.
Confused – any help with this?
The Genocide Riviera — from vision to reality.
Cited from article 7/28/25 in: counterpunch.org
“There is no nation that feeds its enemies. The British didn’t feed the Nazis nor did the Americans feed the Japanese, nor do the Russians feed the Ukrainians now.”
– Amichay Eliyahu, Israel’s Heritage Ministry, July 24, 2025: –
If Russia is not justified in its preemptive attack on Ukraine, after the Wests many years of provocative behaviors against its borders, how is it justified for Israel to commit the genocide it is now in the process of carrying out against those inadequately armed Semites, who dared to stand up and challenge the Israeli states longtime war crimes; from Gaza, “the world’s largest open-air prison camp” refers to the quote made by Baruch Kimmerling, (in 2003), the late Israeli scholar and professor of sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. This statement was made before the 2006 blockade imposed on Gaza after Hamas was elected to power.
The only WAR Israel ever fought against enemies with somewhat matching fully equipped armies, was the preemptive surprise attack it initiated against the ‘sovereign’ Arab states immediately surrounding it; namely Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Iraq. Lebanon played a very, very minor role!
The indigenous Arab Palestinians, on the “other” hand, were, and are now the scapegoated people, who first began to be ethnically cleansed from Palestine, in 1948, on an unending pretext of the project of zealous Zionists for a “Muslimrein” Israeli state.
The Ghosts, now eternal of the former ‘German National Socialist’ state continue to haunt the now mass paranoid Israeli mindset; while they blindly accept, and replicate, the same savageries of the past of what was done to their ancestor co-religionists, and what they are now perpetrating in all of occupied Palestine, in front of the eyes of a sickened global population.
The only other legitimate, so-called defensive war, against another ‘nation state’ was the1973 Yom Kippur War, where Egypt and Syria launched a retributive surprise attack on Israel.
Another brilliant post from Mr Hedges. The stark reality that he writes of, in clear, concise terms, is soul crushing. Although it is a difficult piece to read, the mental images of those living this stark reality makes words such as “difficult” absurd and irrelevant. Even describing the pain and suffering of those in Gaza is beyond my capacity for meaningful language. I have no experiences to draw from in order to create a context for his descriptions of life (or death) in Gaza. I have no personal knowledge of anyone who has suffered as those in Gaza are suffering. Even the word “suffering” is inadequate, trite in this instance. I appreciate the anger and frustration that comes through Mr Hedges’ words.
A society that openly accepts and legitimizes these atrocities is a deeply perverted one. Collectively the Israelis have lost the ability to feel compassion or empathy for anyone beyond themselves. To truly be empathetic or compassionate, in my opinion, requires that one automatically feel those emotions when confronted with the suffering of another without any qualifiers. I believe the most basic objects of sympathy, compassion, or empathy, are babies or young animals, kittens or puppies, who are suffering in some way. An entire society that can see or be told of an infant starving to death and feel no empathy or compassion for the infant and its family is sick. If the suffering and death of an infant does not immediately give rise to compassion and empathy, the observer has lost their ability to feel both, has lost any claim to humanity.
The final observation that Israelis’ punishment will be, in part, their being sentenced to a life among those just like themselves is a perfect ending. Israelis have sought from the inception of the state to drive all others out and live behind walls and barriers with only other Israelis of their ilk. It brings to mind the saying: Beware of what you seek for you may surely find it.
“Collectively the Israelis have lost the ability to feel compassion or empathy for anyone beyond themselves.”
One can also attribute that statement to the majority of western governments who have stood by these past months and complicitly enabled these horrors.
quote:
“…Emaciated victims succumb to mental and emotional withdrawal and apathy. They do not want to be touched or moved.”
———————
My memory —
Have you ever helped somone dying on the floor and witnessed how much it hurt both of you , the moan of helping them in a chair ?
My impression — Like a painful state of inflamatiom , stiffness ? where it hurts to move for fear more pain which mentally supports apathy to a foregone conclusion .
If this was able to be read , I ask for forgiveness !
They would do the exact same thing to you.
The starvation policy along with the shooting of hundreds of innocent civilians standing in line for food aid is solely a Jewish supremacist policy that’s deliberate, repulsive and sadistic. It’s an infliction of misery on the Palestinian people in Gaza.
Moreover, don’t ever think for one second that these Jewish supremacists wouldn’t do the same exact thing to your comfortable gentile family in Peoria if you stood in the way of Greater Israel. In a heartbeat the Jewish supremacists would quickly and guiltlessly annihilate you and your whole family because that’s what they are, that’s what they do, it’s a sadistic paranoid cult that’s built on arrogance and exclusivity, they view us gentiles as dumb goyim akin to animals.
If you happen to stand in the way of Smotrich and Ben-Givr’s distorted fantasies you and your loved ones would be starved, jailed and shot.
Only propinquity is stopping them from targeting your children.
“The starvation policy along with the shooting of hundreds of innocent civilians standing in line for food aid is solely a Jewish supremacist policy”.
I don’t know about that. For example, the Rapid Support Forces in Sudan are currently doing almost exactly the same, according to multiple sources.
In Southwest Asia there is no group or para military force doing anything remotely comparable in repulsiveness to what the Jewish supremacists are doing. (And if there is a group of a similar bent, it’s mercenary lunatics on the indirect payroll of these evil Zionists.)