Joshua Scheer

Genocide seeks to destroy more than lives. It seeks to erase a people’s history, culture and memory—and bury the evidence beneath the rubble. At the launch of Requiem for Gaza, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Chris Hedges explains how he and cartoonist Joe Sacco set out to preserve what Israel’s destruction threatens to obliterate: the voices and experiences of Palestinians themselves.

Drawing on interviews with 29 Palestinian families who fled to Egypt, Hedges describes parents struggling to protect their children, survivors haunted by the relatives they left behind, and the devastation of a society’s doctors, writers and journalists. These intimate accounts expose the human reality that casualty figures and diplomatic language cannot convey.

The discussion is also a searing indictment of the Western governments that Hedges argues have armed and sustained the genocide while dismantling the international rules they claim to defend. His call is urgent: preserving testimony must be accompanied by resistance—from dockworkers refusing to ship weapons to collective action that disrupts the machinery of war.

Recorded on October 3, 2026, at The Whistleblower in Dublin, this conversation features Chris Hedges joining Art O’Connor for the launch of Requiem for Gaza and was shared by The Whistleblower and The Chris Hedges YouTube Channel.

Transcript Below

NOTE TO SCHEERPOST READERS FROM CHRIS HEDGES: 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. Bob Scheer, who runs ScheerPost on a shoestring budget, and I will not waver in our commitment to independent and honest journalism, and we will never put ScheerPost behind a paywall, charge a subscription for it, sell your data or accept advertising. Please, if you can, sign up at chrishedges.substack.com so I can continue to post my now weekly Monday column on ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show, The Chris Hedges Report.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, best-selling author & activist

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Chris Hedges: Requiem for Gaza — Book Launch

Chris Hedges in conversation with Art O’Connor
The Whistleblower, 30 South Anne Street, Dublin — October 3, 2026
Video shared by The Whistleblower and The Chris Hedges YouTube Channel, October 6, 2026.

Transcription note: This transcript was edited from the supplied YouTube transcript for clarity and readability. Timestamps, verbal fillers and accidental repetitions have been removed, and obvious transcription errors corrected. The speakers’ substantive remarks have been preserved. Bracketed notes identify wording or names that remain uncertain in the supplied text. This version has not been checked against the recording; speaker assignments are inferred from context.

Art O’Connor: Hello and welcome. It’s kind of packed. Hopefully we can all stay comfortable. The fan is on.

[Applause and cheering.]

Obviously, it’s our sincere pleasure and privilege to welcome Chris Hedges. You all seem to know him. He’s a Pulitzer Prize–winning writer and author whose career has taken him into contact with some of the most significant conflicts and political upheavals of our time. He’s written extensively about war and resistance and inequality, and his latest book, which we will be discussing this evening, Requiem for Gaza, continues that tradition and continues his longstanding advocacy for Palestine.

Please join me in welcoming, again, Chris Hedges. Thank you.

[Applause.]

The book has an interesting form, and there’s an oscillation between the abstract institutional language of international law and diplomacy and then the very intimate recollections of the people you’ve interviewed. Maybe you can talk about how that came about and how you arrived at that form.

Chris Hedges: I can stand. I just want to make sure everyone can hear me. Can you all hear okay at the back?

Well, I’ll back up a little bit. I did a book a few years ago with Joe Sacco called Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt. This was written out of the poorest pockets of the United States. All books have, at least for me, a rough kind of model. That model was Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, by James Agee, with the photographs by Walker Evans. It was about the sharecroppers in the South.

One of the things about the poor in the United States is that they’ve been rendered invisible by the commercial media, because reports on poor people don’t sell Lexuses and everything else. [Unclear phrase referring to The New York Times.]

So I wanted that visual aspect. But what I didn’t recognize until Joe started working on it is that a cartoonist is very different from a photographer, in the sense that a photographer can capture an image in a moment. A cartoonist can actually recreate the past through a panel.

For instance, in Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, we’re in southern West Virginia, and we’re interviewing a miner named Rudy, who entered the mines when he was 17 in the 1930s, after his father was killed in a mine accident. The only time he leaves West Virginia is when he’s drafted in World War II and fights in the Battle of the Bulge, where he’s badly wounded. That’s it.

But Joe went back and looked up all of the equipment that would have been in the mine in 1937, when Rudy first went into the mine. It’s incredibly labor-intensive, and he draws the trajectory of Rudy’s life with that fealty to detail.

That was the first thing I didn’t understand. The second thing I didn’t understand is that when you work with a cartoonist like Joe, you give them the best narrative. That’s counterintuitive to a writer. We have certain narratives that are gold, but you hand off the best because he makes it visual.

Joe and I had done a magazine piece for Harper’s magazine called “A Gaza Diary,” where we went and lived in Khan Younis, a refugee camp in Gaza, for 10 days. In that magazine piece, we encountered elderly survivors of the massacres that Israel carried out during the 100-day occupation of Gaza in 1956, in Khan Younis and Rafah.

We put that into the story. It was broken down day by day. The editor of Harper’s magazine, Lewis Lapham, took it out because he said, “It’s history.”

Joe was incensed and went back, and over the next four years found most of the survivors, the eyewitnesses, and wrote Footnotes in Gaza, which is one of the great masterpieces of journalism in Gaza. If you don’t have it, get it.

But when he finished that four-year project, he said, “I’m done, and I can never do anything like this again,” because dealing with that material is emotionally taxing. But I think, in some ways, drawing it is worse. He said, in a sense, “These people are inhabiting my room for a year and a half.”

A few weeks into the genocide, Joe called me and he said, “We have to do a book on Gaza.” It’s not a book either of us wanted to do. We didn’t want to go back into that material, but because we both spent so much time in Gaza—Joe for his book Palestine, later for Footnotes in Gaza, and then, of course, I covered the Middle East for seven years, and I’m an Arabic speaker, and no other New York Times reporter ever wanted to go to Gaza. So I lived in Gaza for months on end. We know it. We have colleagues and friends there.

I should just say that as the genocide progressed, most of those friends disappeared, in the sense that we would hear from them sporadically, and then we just stopped hearing from them at all. No doubt they are under the rubble with probably tens of thousands of other Palestinians who have never been counted.

That’s not conjecture, because I have friends whose entire families have been killed in strikes on apartment complexes by Israel, and their names are never registered because their bodies never appear in the morgue or in the hospital. So that Hamas count is a vast, vast undercount.

We at first thought we would get into Gaza. That was rather naive. But it soon became clear the Israelis were not going to allow journalists into Gaza. So we went to Egypt and we interviewed 29 families who had fled Gaza, and then we tell the story of the genocide through the experiences of those families.

It’s really in the details that you understand the immense human tragedy—all the stuff that often, in journalism, never makes it into the copy or never makes it onto the screen.

Joe said, “This is it. I’m never doing another book like this again.” I am doing one more book, and then I’m not. I have just come from Paris, and then was in Guatemala and Mexico, because I am going to do a book on the genocides in Central America, in particular in Guatemala, because I was there for it in the ’80s and nobody’s done it.

I’m bilingual in Spanish, and although I did not travel with the Guatemalan rebels, I traveled quite a bit with the FMLN in El Salvador, so I know rebel units and how they work. All these old comandantes—we’re all keeling over. So we’ve got to do it before we all go. Most of them haven’t spoken.

I was in Paris interviewing a major Guatemalan comandante. There are very, very few left. I was in Mexico interviewing a former Jesuit priest who became a comandante. They’re unbelievably fascinating stories. And then I really will not do anything like this again.

There were two logistical problems with the book. One, we’re dealing with a large number of people, because you’re dealing with 29 families. Multiply each family by five or something—you’re dealing with huge numbers of people.

But the other big problem was that the Palestinians, since the genocide began, have been displaced so much. They would spend a few weeks here and then a few weeks there. As we were putting it all together, we came back and did transcripts. We taped everything. We brought a wonderful Palestinian translator with us named Ruba.

But the problem was that after we got back, they would be describing a certain incident, and where was that? Was that when they were in Al-Mawasi or when they were in Khan Younis? And then, of course, you’re dealing with a large number of people. So I wrote my prose section of the book. What’s that?

Art O’Connor: You wrote Ulysses.

[Laughter.]

Chris Hedges: I wish I wrote Ulysses. I’m a total Joyce fanatic, I have to admit. Don’t anybody do this, because I want to be alone, but I intend to be the first person at the Martello Tower tomorrow morning. Don’t go with me. I want to be in there. I just want to feel Joyce and Buck Mulligan. I’m going to be standing at the door when it opens.

I wrote it in the Princeton University Library. I got a study room there, and Ruba was just on WhatsApp the whole time, verifying, checking, so that my writing was as grounded in the reality and veracity as Joe’s drawing.

Ruba was also, at the same time, communicating with Joe, because one of the disconcerting things we found as we did the book is that Palestinians have pictures of everything, including their dead children, which they would then pull up on their phone and show us—these chalky faces of children that had been pulled from the rubble.

The photographic evidence of every incident that was described to us was available. This was, for Joe, of course, golden. Joe is incredibly meticulous and incredibly careful that whatever drawing he does captures the physical reality of that moment.

So that’s the book. Just a little footnote on publishing the book: I normally publish my books with Simon & Schuster. My editor at Simon & Schuster said, “Don’t even send us the proposal. We’ll never publish it.”

Art O’Connor: Wow.

Chris Hedges: I talked to Joe, and I said, “We could pitch it to Metropolitan Books. They would do a book like this, maybe.” I think Joe said, quite astutely, “Let’s just go with Fantagraphics.” They normally do just comics, although they don’t have any money, which is a problem because I had to front all the money into Egypt. Joe doesn’t have any money.

So everybody has to buy a book. I’m really in the hole. [Laughter.] I don’t even want to tell you. I’ve been lying to my wife here.

But Joe said, “If we go with a big publisher, you know what they’re going to do? They’re going to assign some editor to it who’s just going to harass us through the whole—let’s just keep it with Fantagraphics.”

Physically, the book is beautiful. That also counts a lot for Joe. He writes into his contract the size of the book and the weight of the paper. If you notice, the paper weight is heavier than a normal book. That was important, and I think he’s probably right. The material is so incendiary. The New York Times already sent back a notice saying, “We’re not reviewing it. Don’t worry. We’re not touching it.”

Fantagraphics is a small publisher. It’s been snapped up in Europe. The French edition, which came out earlier than the English edition, sold out in a week—an 11,000 print run. It was sold out in a week. They had to immediately go back and print another 4,000. Italy, Spain, Greece—not Germany. They’re not touching it.

But it was our effort, because genocide is about erasure. Of course, it’s about the physical erasure of Palestine, and the erasure of human beings, and the erasure of the intellectual class. The Israelis certainly know what they’re doing. They hunt down intellectuals and writers like Refaat Alareer, doctors. That entire intellectual elite is just decimated.

That is classic. If you look at who the Soviets executed in Katyn Forest, it was the officer corps and the intellectuals. That’s what always happens in any genocide.

Art O’Connor: There’s a striking moment in the book when Hayat [name spelling unconfirmed] has a lump in her breast. She goes to two hospitals. She ends up in the European Hospital and is told that of the four people there who have the ability to carry out and interpret a mammogram, three have been murdered and one is missing, possibly. So those people were targeted.

Chris Hedges: Yeah. We should be clear that, having interviewed such a large number of people, there’s no question that these people are targeted. We interviewed a fair number of doctors, and the Israelis were just so callous. Also, this is true with journalists. They were killed almost immediately when their shifts were over, by drones, or they were killed on the way to work.

Or what the Israelis would do is take vans with medical staff that were on their way to their shifts and take out everybody in the whole van. These drones are very precise, so they don’t necessarily take down an apartment building. They just take out the one apartment where the doctor and his family live.

There’s no question—and, of course, we know they’re using AI—that these people are just hunted. They’re hunted not because they’re Hamas, obviously, or because they’re militants. They’re hunted because they’re that intellectual class, that professional class that makes a civil society possible. You cannot get to the end of this book and not realize that this was the Israeli policy from the beginning.

Art O’Connor: It’s the erasure of a class, and it’s also the erasure of memory. You bring out in the book that there’s this intention to sever Palestinians from their sense of historical identity.

I wonder, in that context, do you think preserving memories, like you and Joe have—and anyone who reads the book will be involved in this—involves some kind of responsibility? Is the preservation of memory important in shaping what will come after this conflict?

Chris Hedges: Well, the preservation of memory is key, but this is a small contribution, because we’re only talking about 29 families. Joe focuses on one particular family when he draws it out, and the story—I’m not going to ruin it—is just devastating.

So yes, of course, the erasure of memory is—I write a little bit because, at some point, I go to the Armenian center in New York, which I’d been to before, and it’s very moving. It’s at the Armenian cathedral, but they have historical archives where all these Armenians who survived the genocide contributed poems and drawings and even little maps of all of their villages that no longer exist.

I’m in there, and I pull out one of the boxes for one of the villages. The curator of the archive—they open it up, and it’s this handbound volume that some survivor has written. It said, “Because I have written this down, this memory will be eternal.” I open the book, and I hear him say next to me, “I think you’re the first person that ever opened that book.”

So, yeah, memory is key. The erasure of memory—look, the Zionist project is founded on historical amnesia. The entire project. Palestinian society has been in Palestine for generations, hundreds of years. The whole myth of the Zionist project is predicated on a historical lie.

To perpetuate that lie, it becomes not simply enough to deny the historical, cultural, literary reality of Palestine, but to destroy it, to obliterate it, to erase it. That’s very, very much a part of what is happening in Gaza.

For me, the great tragedy of what’s happened in Gaza is that this is one of the most ancient spots on the globe. Alexander the Great, or Ramses II—even Napoleon marched through there up to Acre, where he got his ass kicked and had to leave the Middle East.

These old mosques—and I write about it at the beginning—where I would go and worship with my Palestinian friends, they’re built on the ruins not just of Byzantine but Roman and Philistine temples. It just seems like everybody in Palestine, in their backyard, has a little box full of archaeological artifacts that they’ve dug up in their garden or their field.

That’s a loss for all of us. That’s not just a loss for the Palestinians. It’s a loss for all of us.

Art O’Connor: I will say, I was going to make an impassioned endorsement of the book later, but since we’re on the subject of the terrain, I think one of the signs of the power of the book—and it’s a magnificent achievement—is that this map we are all familiar with at this point, we see in the news all the time, but it’s typically as a sort of blank canvas for a semiotics of destruction. You know that there are aid stations here that were used to lure people out to be shot.

After reading this book, you will see this map completely differently. Like Al-Karama, up here on the northern outskirts of Gaza City, you’ll go, “That’s where Osama Abdu lived with his wife Diana, his four children, their cat Sam.” [Personal-name spellings unconfirmed.]

This beach is where he’s dragging his mom, because he’s 30 pounds lighter a few months later, in his underwear, at gunpoint, because he’s too tired to carry her anymore and she’s arthritic, to Rafah, which is 35 kilometers away or so.

The book will affect you in a really profound way, and you’ll start to understand this map in terms of the place and the people that live there. It will be populated at precisely the time, historically, when it’s being systematically depopulated. I would recommend the book to anyone, and I congratulate Chris and Joe on that. I think it’s an extraordinary achievement.

It also repeatedly interrogates the idea of survival. You have these people who survive Gaza, but they end up in Cairo in many cases, in Egypt, with no legal status, no ability to work, no ability to study in some cases, no access to health care in some cases. Some of the women have to become prostitutes to make money. They’re in dire straits.

Do you think the language of survival actually obscures the political precarity of these people?

Chris Hedges: Well, we should be clear. You have about 150,000 Palestinians in Egypt, but they have no legal status. They cannot send their children to school. They cannot work. As you said, they cannot access health care. There are some Palestinians who, for medical reasons, were evacuated, and they can achieve some care if they’ve been officially evacuated for medical reasons, but the vast majority are completely locked out of the system.

They’re nonpeople. They pay—it’s a very mercenary process. It’s called Hala. They pay $5,000 to the Egyptian government. It used to be $350, cash, U.S. dollars, to get out of Gaza. As soon as the genocide started, the Egyptians saw a bonanza and were charging some people up to $10,000. It has to be paid in advance, and it has to be paid in U.S. dollars, in cash.

These are tremendous sums of money. Palestinian families are big. Their relatives abroad are scrambling to try and raise the funds. Sometimes that means part of their family can get out, part of their family can’t. I talk about [name unclear] and that whole process, this young boy.

Then, when they get there, they’re just bereft. That was a problem, because I lived in Egypt, and the Sisi regime is a very brutal dictatorship. Most of the Palestinians live in poor neighborhoods. I knew very well that we couldn’t sneak into Egypt. We would spend maybe 30 minutes in Imbaba or one of these other big slums, and next thing you know, the Mukhabarat would grab us.

I’d already been—I’ll back up a little bit—grabbed by the Mukhabarat earlier, because early in the genocide, the Egyptian press syndicate, which is headed by a wonderfully courageous Egyptian journalist, called on international reporters to join their Egyptian colleagues to go to Rafah to protest the exclusion of the foreign press from Gaza and to demand a ceasefire.

So I flew to Egypt. I stayed up all night, actually, on the plane, and I wrote “A Letter to the Children of Gaza.” Anyone seen it?

Audience: Yes.

Chris Hedges: Yeah. I stayed up all night on the plane and wrote that. We got there in the morning, and we were with them. [Name unclear] was there. Suddenly, these vans surrounded us, and we’re all hauled off to the police station.

A couple of things were interesting. One, there was some physical violence directed at Egyptian journalists, but also the question was, “Is your mother Palestinian? Is your father Palestinian?” Of course, we never got to Rafah.

Having once already donated a few hours to the Egyptian police, I didn’t really feel like donating any more. I spent probably three months petitioning the Egyptian government for permission, because there was no way we were going to carry out this work unless—which meant that we had to tell them where we were going to be, and I didn’t lie.

The other problem, of course, is Cairo is massive. It’s 20 million people. You can’t do an interview on one side of Cairo and think you’re going to drive to the other side of Cairo for your interview at one o’clock.

Every interview was set up—the Palestinians, since they are stripped of all their rights, they’re very wary of saying anything. Every interview was set up through family connections. There wasn’t one interview that was set up without a reference.

But then we had to group our interviews geographically, so that if we’re doing an interview with this family, the next family can’t be that far away. It was quite logistically difficult in terms of setting it up.

We spent many, many days in our—I used an old friend of mine, Tarek [name spelling unconfirmed], but unfortunately Tarek’s crazy. Egyptian drivers are crazy, but Tarek wins the prize. Brakes are irrelevant. If he goes up on a ramp and he gets stuck, he just slams it into reverse and makes the cars—and he doesn’t go into reverse slowly.

Tarek’s theory is that as long as the car is pointed in the right direction, it really doesn’t matter whether he’s going forward or backward.

[Laughter.]

He drove us—we were trying to get to Alexandria, and the traffic was bad. Ruba’s going, “I can’t believe this guy’s a friend of yours.”

[Laughter.]

Tarek decides that he’s going to take a shortcut, but, of course, he doesn’t know Alexandria. I’m not joking. We ended up in the middle of a garbage dump.

[Laughter.]

Then he slams the car into reverse, and all the other drivers are screaming at him. Anyway, we spent a lot of time in that car.

Art O’Connor: Nice. But these displaced people are in Egypt without rights, and it’s a difficult situation. It’s complicated as well, but this kind of moral—this survivor’s guilt and this idea of—you go into this idea of—

Chris Hedges: Well, they have guilt, of course. They left. They struggle with guilt. All of them struggle with guilt, because not just the fact that they left, but they’re constantly on their phones with family members who are still there, and they wake up every day and wonder if they’re dead or alive, and then they can’t get them.

If they have family or friends who are journalists: “Should I call them?” Because if there’s a lot of traffic to that cellphone, that person is targeted and killed.

We open the book with a wonderful poem by [poet’s name unclear in the supplied transcript], who lives in Paris. Just last night, we were together, and he was saying, “When the genocide started, I didn’t speak out. I didn’t speak out. I didn’t speak out, because I knew that those poets and writers who had a heavy presence on social media were all being killed.”

He was a close friend of Refaat. He worked closely with Refaat. He said, “I felt that if I didn’t speak out, maybe I wouldn’t be targeted.” But then he said, “All of my colleagues were being killed, and I was being silent, and I finally couldn’t.”

Gaza has an amazing—it’s like Ireland. They produce great writers. I don’t know why such a small place has so many great writers. Ireland, too. Most of Gaza is a big slum, but they’re highly educated, and that’s courtesy of UNRWA. They have like a 99 percent literacy rate.

If you go, as I did, and work throughout the Middle East, all the doctors, all the professors, all the computer—not all, but a lot of them are Palestinian. It is this amazing brain trust. But their writers are really, really good, really, really first-rate.

You had, of course, that great Palestinian cartoonist, Ali [name incomplete in the supplied transcript], who’s very famous. He was in Lebanon. Anyway, when Joe came to Gaza and started working, he said, “Usually I go somewhere and people don’t understand what I’m doing, and I have to explain it. But not in Palestine. They all understand the importance and the role of cartoonists, of great cartoonists.”

Art O’Connor: There are six sections. The final section is called “Resistance,” and there’s an interesting tension in it between powerlessness and resistance. You talk about how the people on the flotilla knew it was very likely they would be intercepted, and they went anyway. The dockworkers you mention know that they’re not going to rewrite government policy on their own. But these acts are represented as being politically significant precisely because they’re unwilling to accept this situation as inevitable.

Chris Hedges: You try to resist. It’s clear that the international order has collapsed. It’s clear that Western governments are no longer making even a pretense of supporting the rule of law, including international humanitarian law, or the Genocide Convention, or the U.N. Charter, or anything else.

It’s clear that the Western governments, by sustaining, funding and arming the Israelis, are completely complicit in the genocide. This is very ominous because, as the climate breaks down, as you have climate refugees, Gaza is a message to the Global South. What is that message? It is that we have everything, and if you try and take it away from us, we will kill you. That’s the message.

Read Pankaj Mishra’s great book, The World After Gaza. We are entering a very frightening kind of Hobbesian universe. Even the Irish government, which is long on rhetoric, its AI centers are complicit in choosing targets in Palestine. Ireland, after the United States, is the second-largest trading partner with Israel.

Even Ireland—not the Irish people. I think the Irish people have been pretty good, but not your government. It’s incumbent upon us. That’s it. If we are going to create a world that we want to live in, a world where there are rules and laws, not just for the strong, but for the weak and the vulnerable and the oppressed, then it’s up to us.

In the last chapter, I go to Italy with Francesca Albanese, and we go to Genoa. It’s myself, Francesca, Greta Thunberg, Yanis Varoufakis, Thiago Ávila, who runs the flotillas and was viciously—I mean, beaten unconscious twice. They singled him out, obviously, the Israelis, on this flotilla. We joined the dockworkers in Genoa who carried out a strike and refused to load weapons onto ships bound for Israel.

That’s it. That’s all we have left. It’s incumbent upon us to put pressure on our governments, because they’re not going to do it on their own. That means disrupting the business of commerce and government and war.

That’s why I went, and I actually brought a film crew. If you go on YouTube—I know you have nothing else to do tonight—[laughter] type in my name with “Resistance 101.” I wanted people to see what resistance looks like and must look like.

That gets back to all the old, great, radical, militant labor movements. [Unclear phrase] are communists. They were all holding hammer-and-sickle flags. We have to get back to that kind of militancy. Otherwise, we are just going to live in a terrifying world.

They have now systems of control, systems of surveillance. I covered the Stasi state in East Germany. The Stasi couldn’t even dream of this stuff, and they’re already using it.

I don’t know if anyone has read Auguste Blanqui, the great French revolutionary. He’s great. Blanqui is great. During the Paris Commune, the Prussians were terrified Blanqui was going to get into the Commune, so they arrested him and didn’t let him in.

I like him as a theorist because he kept saying, “Stop being naive. Stop believing in the inevitability of human progress. History can be rolled backwards with a flick of a switch.” Blanqui is right. We are rolling backwards, and we don’t want to get to a point where we all wake up and it’s too late. Because when it’s too late, we’re shackled.

The walls are closing in quickly, especially in my country. I may see you again. I may be back here forever. I don’t know.

[Laughter.]

I’d come to Ireland. Things are really, really, really grim.

Art O’Connor: You call it an age of technological barbarism.

Chris Hedges: Yeah, it’s technological barbarism. That’s what it is. But it’s barbarism. It’s barbarism.

The genocide in Gaza is, I think, a pivotal and seismic moment, a turning point even, because however hypocritical Western powers were, and in particular the United States, about human rights, about the rule of law, at least they paid lip service to it. They didn’t willfully shred it the way they’ve done with Gaza.

Look, the mechanisms that have tried to hold Israel to account—the International Criminal Court—these judges are sanctioned, just like Francesca. Francesca, because the U.S. controls the world financial system, she can’t book a hotel room. She can’t use her Visa card. She can’t get reimbursed for her medical expenses.

It’s a kind of civic death, which is what they did to Julian Assange, by the way. Julian was in Sweden, and suddenly he’s completely cut off. WikiLeaks’ accounts are frozen. His credit cards don’t work. It was a civic death, which is also, by the way, what they did to Paul Robeson.

It’s not just that they are refusing to adhere to the rule of law or show any kind of respect to international bodies that attempt to enforce the rule of law. It is that they are imposing civic death on those individuals, those few individuals, who are attempting to sustain a world where rules matter.

There’s a great Turkish-German journalist in Germany, and I’m just drawing a blank on his name. They’ve done exactly the same thing to him. When they were trying to pay the rent out of his wife’s account, they just turned around and froze her account, too. He was highlighting the genocide, and they had over seven million followers and this kind of stuff.

We’re in a really dangerous moment. We don’t want to sleepwalk into this moment. This genocide is not over. Israel controls 70 percent of Gaza. Just the other day, I think it was one of the ministers—it wasn’t Smotrich, it was someone else—started talking, maybe it was the minister of defense, that they’re all going to be moved.

That is our problem. The Israelis have not particularly hidden in any way what they intend to do or what they think of the Palestinians: “human animals.”

Art O’Connor: “Mowing the lawn.”

Chris Hedges: “Mowing the lawn,” yeah.

Art O’Connor: That was always what they were doing before—the cynical term for bombing Gaza.

Chris Hedges: Yeah. Driving Palestinians back to a subsistence level. But here they’re really talking about the complete eradication of Gaza and depopulation of Gaza in very open terms. In very open terms. And they mean it.

They just don’t know where Palestinians are going to go. My Egyptian colleagues told me that the Egyptian military called Sisi in and said, “If any kind of an arrangement is made where the Palestinians are pushed into northern Sinai, you’re finished.” Not because the Egyptian military cares about the Palestinians, but because it would be a security headache for Egypt, just as the Palestinian camps in Jordan, Black September, were for King Hussein, who I knew very well.

They’re not done. They’re not done. Trump just gave them—I can’t remember the figure—what, another $20 billion or something worth of weaponry, including 1,000-pound bombs.

I’ll just end by saying there were little things that surprised us when we did the interviews. One was the sophistication of the drones, where the drones would be sent and have loudspeakers, and they would be calling people out. Palestinians would have to line up and show their IDs to the drones that would take photographs. They would be ordered to separate into different groups, but by the drones.

Then, of course, those Palestinian boys and men who were in a particular group would all disappear and end up in one of the torture camps that Israel runs in the Negev. We weren’t always aware of the sophistication of the technology.

Then I think the other thing that perhaps surprised us, which is captured in the book, is the way Israeli soldiers taunted the Palestinians.

Art O’Connor: Yeah. That comes through when they’re crossing to Rafah, especially. What comes out in the book is the kind of quotidian fabric, the normal stuff in life. Having a beautiful daughter suddenly becomes a terrible thing, because there are rumors of kidnap and rape. You’re trying to think, “How are we going to hide this child?” It’s really, really devastating. I would recommend the book to everyone.

Chris Hedges: And also the struggle that parents have. The entire world just becomes one of unmitigated evil. How do you protect your child? How do you talk to your child?

Art O’Connor: Yeah. They’re pretending that the explosions are a celebration for the younger children, and they’re smiling, and they’re trying to convince them.

Chris Hedges: Yeah. It’s heartbreaking. Eating animal fodder.

Art O’Connor: Yeah. Burying a relative who has been dug up by wild dogs and is being eaten. So burying him for the second time there.

It’s in the details, as you said, and there are a lot of details in this book. It’s gruesome and it’s brutal, but it’s necessary reading, and I think it’s a marvelous achievement. We can end there. Thank you so much, Chris. [Closing words unclear.]

[Applause.]

Chris Hedges: Thank you. So I’ll see you all at 10 o’clock tomorrow morning.