Kim Hedges
Chris Hedges speaks about the Middle East with a certitude conferred by firsthand reporting that’s hard to dismiss, given his credentials as a former New York Times Middle East bureau chief and combat correspondent who has been bearing witness in the region and beyond for decades. The impassioned discourse of Hedges, an ordained Presbyterian minister, is imbued with a sense of moral clarity similar to that of abolitionists such as John Brown, whose anti-slavery jeremiads drew from Christian liberation theology.
Hundreds came to hear Hedges speak on May 31 at a sold-out fundraiser for KPFK, Los Angeles’s Pacifica radio station, at the Iman Cultural Center, a gathering place created by the city’s Iranian and Muslim community. Hedges had recently returned from Egypt, where he was interviewing Palestinians from Gaza who fled the Israeli invasion for an upcoming book. He took the stage in Los Angeles and delivered an hour-long spellbinding sermon about Israel’s continued bombardment of Gaza, which he harrowingly relates in the recently published A Genocide Foretold: Reporting on Survival and Resistance in Occupied Palestine (Seven Stories Press).
Despite it being the last night of the week-long book tour, Hedges seemed to genuinely relish his interactions with attendees following a question-and-answer session. Perhaps it was balm for the soul of the Pulitzer Prize-winner, who was rather infamously heckled and interrupted for criticizing the Iraq War during his commencement speech at Illinois’s Rockford College in 2003. The New York Times went on to formally reprimand its onetime Middle East Bureau Chief for his public remarks.
The Progressive spoke to Hedges at the Iman Cultural Center about his new book, the weaponization of antisemitism, and his call for radical civil disobedience. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: Tell us about your new book.
Chris Hedges: I’ve done quite a bit of writing on the genocide since October 7. And Seven Stories Press wanted me to put together a book.
Of course, I spent seven years in the Middle East; I was the Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times. I’m an Arabic speaker. Because of that I spent significant time in Gaza. I lived in Gaza for months at a time. I know a lot of Palestinians from Gaza, a lot of friends, some of whom have died. Most of whom have disappeared. We would hear from them sporadically, then we’d just stop hearing from them. So, it’s a very personal issue for me. I understand the region, I understand the long conflict between Israel and Palestine. It’s antecedents, it’s history. I tried to put all of that together to give the genocide context.
Q: You speak very authoritatively [on the topic] because of that background. It’s hard to refute what you’re saying.
Hedges: Well, it’s factually based. I mean, I was there. I covered it; I know it. I understand the history that led to October 7. I’m well aware of the long provocations carried out by Israel against the Palestinians, including the sealing off of Gaza since 2006. Turning it into a vast concentration camp that led to the eruption, or what Norman Finkelstein correctly calls “a slave revolt,” by the Palestinians who were trapped inside. Many of the people who burst through the security barriers [on October 7] had never been out of Gaza their entire life.
Q: Do you see any way out of this morass? Is there any solution?
Hedges: The solution is that we have to stop arming Israel. If we don’t stop arming Israel, they’ll be able to complete their genocidal project.
Q: What is “their genocidal project”?
Hedges: Well, they’re trying to completely depopulate all of the Palestinians from Gaza. And if they are able to succeed in driving the Palestinians out of Gaza, they will turn on the West Bank. They would like to take all of the land—they would like to “Judaize” all of the land of historic Palestine.
Q: How do you explain the treatment of Palestinians by the government of Israel when the Jewish people themselves had suffered so many years of persecution?
Hedges: I think the roots of it lie in the classic settler colonial project. If you look, for instance, at how the British behaved in Kenya, when they fought the Mau Mau; or the British in India; or the British in Ireland, you will find many, many historical parallels in how colonial settler projects work. Both in terms of dehumanizing the colonized, as well as all of the military tactics that are used to try and repress existence.
Q: Those who speak out against apartheid, genocide, and the mass murder of children in Gaza are often cynically accused of antisemitism. I’m sure that this type of argument has been leveled against you. What do you think of that framing, and how can people who want peace and an end to the killing reframe the narrative?
Hedges: Well, of course, that’s what they attempt to do. I don’t spend a lot of time responding to them. It’s a ridiculous argument. Of course, there’s a significant percentage of Jews who oppose the genocide. And you have these campaigns against people who stand up for Palestinian rights. Let’s take the case of Germany: You have the ancestors of Nazis persecuting Jewish Germans who denounce the genocide. That shows you how twisted and perverted all of this has become.
Certainly, the Trump Administration has very close connections to the far right, many of whom are rabidly antisemitic. The right is not held to account for its antisemitism because this is really broader than an assault against those who stand up for Palestinian rights. It’s an assault on the American left. Antisemitism is just weaponized to achieve that.
Q: Your father was a Presbyterian minister; you’re also an ordained Presbyterian minister. What does that role look like for you? Do you have a physical place where you conduct services?
Hedges: No, I was ordained to work in prisons. So, I teach in a college degree program offered by Rutgers University, and have since 2010. I’ve taught more than 600 students in prison.
Q: The part of your speech tonight that was most compelling to me was when you said, “I know the killers.” You spoke about “the snipers.” Tell us about that.
Hedges: Well, I covered war for twenty years. I was in a lot of combat. I know the culture of war, which I spent a lot of time writing about in my [2002] book War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. So, I’m familiar with both the warrior mentality and the aftereffects of war, including the trauma of it. Inevitably [the psychological consequences of being a hitman] hits you—sometimes years later, but it does hit you.
Q: This is a very human question: How do you sleep?
Hedges: I don’t. I mean, since the genocide I don’t sleep. How can I sleep? My friends are dead; my friends are murdered. I was in Sarajevo during the [Serbo-Croation] war [in 1991-1995]—I know what it feels like to be shelled continuously. I haven’t slept, really.
Q: What do you think of the Trump regime?
Hedges: Well, the Trump regime rhetorically is cruder than the Biden regime, but there’s no difference in terms of sustaining and funding the genocide.
Q: What’s next for you?
Hedges: I’ve just come back from Egypt where I’ve been interviewing Palestinians from Gaza with the [Maltese-American] cartoonist Joe Sacco [creator of the graphic journalism books Palestine and War on Gaza]. We’re trying to get our book finished by October. That’s a huge undertaking. I have to now really shut myself off and devote all of my time to writing and putting together that book with Joe. The goal is to publish it by the beginning of next year [by Fantagraphics].
Q: What would you like to end on?
Hedges: The genocide would stop if we, as Americans, shut down the arms shipments to Israel. It’s clear that the ruling parties won’t do it. So, it’s incumbent upon us to do it. That means picketing, obstructing weapons sites where weapons are manufactured that go to Israel. It means going to ports and refusing to load weapon shipments on ships that take them to Israel. If we don’t actively organize to disrupt the flow of weapons to Israel, then I think all of us who covered the Middle East are terrified that Israel’s genocidal project will be allowed to reach its inevitable conclusion, which is the depopulation of Gaza.