Joshua Scheer
In Requiem for Gaza, the veteran reporter and comics journalist preserve the stories of Palestinian survivors—and confront the Western institutions that have enabled their destruction.
The destruction of Gaza does not end with the killing. It reaches into memory, culture and history, threatening to erase the lives behind the casualty counts. In Requiem for Gaza, Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco confront that erasure through the testimony of Palestinians who survived.
Drawing on interviews with 29 families in Cairo, the longtime collaborators document displacement, bereavement and the impossible choices imposed on people fleeing bombardment. Sacco follows one family’s ordeal, finding in its intimate details the human devastation that official statements and sanitized headlines conceal.
In this conversation, Hedges and Sacco discuss the emotional burden of recording these experiences, the targeting of Palestinian journalists and medical workers, and the Western press’s betrayal of its colleagues in Gaza. Their indictment extends to governments, universities and financial institutions that, they argue, have enabled the destruction while punishing those who resist it. What emerges is both an act of remembrance and a warning about a world in which human rights and international law are discarded when they obstruct power.
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Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, best-selling author & activist
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Edited transcript
Edited for clarity and readability, preserving the speakers’ meaning. Speaker labels are based on context; uncertain names appear in brackets. Not checked against the recording.
The origins of Requiem for Gaza
Chris Hedges: Well, thank you. I think we were going to begin by talking about the origins of this book.
Joe and I each spent significant amounts of time in Gaza—Joe for his book Palestine and his book Footnotes in Gaza, which I consider one of the masterpieces of reporting on the Palestine-Israel conflict.
I spent seven years in the Middle East. I was the Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times. Because I’m an Arabic speaker, although I was based in Cairo, I was frequently sent to Gaza, often for weeks at a time. So Gaza is something we know extremely well.
Joe called me literally just a couple of weeks after the genocide began, because I think our familiarity with the Zionist project was such that we recognized very swiftly that the incursions of October 7 had really given the most virulent and militant messianic strain within Zionism—which has always been there, of course—the green light to do what it has long wanted to do, which is obliterate Gaza and drive the Palestinians from Gaza.
I’ll let Joe deal with this. We’re old, you know. It wasn’t a book we wanted to do. It’s emotionally extremely taxing. I remember Joe saying—he focused on the experience of one particular family in the book—“It’s as if they were living in my room for a year.”
But I think there was a feeling, because of our familiarity with Gaza, because we have colleagues—we dedicate the book to the Palestinian journalists—that it was a kind of imperative.
Joe Sacco: Yeah, I think we had no choice. As Chris said, when it came down to it, neither of us wanted to approach this subject again. But we had to.
I did call Chris up, and initially I was thinking, “Let’s do a magazine piece”—address it, but keep it relatively short. I think it grew in your mind as a book, and then at some point I realized, “Well, it should be a book.”
Obviously, we couldn’t get into Gaza. Unless you go with the Israeli army on sort of a package tour, you can’t get in as a foreign journalist.
Gathering survivors’ testimony in Cairo
Joe Sacco: We decided to go to Cairo and interview people. Basically, we spoke to Palestinians who had got out of Gaza.
There were two groups we spoke to. There were people who had paid to get out of Gaza. There’s a system called Hala where people pay for—I don’t know if it’s exactly a visa. It’s like a permit to get into Egypt. They have to be screened by the Egyptians and the Israelis.
The going rate was 5,000 for an adult and 2,500 for a child. Usually, it was people with some means to be able to raise money, or having family abroad. So we spoke to people who got out through that method, which I don’t think is really available at this point.
The other group we spoke to were people who had either been wounded or were accompanying wounded family members. They’d been evacuated.
We went to Cairo. We spent about three weeks there, and we traveled with a great Palestinian American person named Ruba, who was our translator. She was kind of your tutor for a while, if I’m not mistaken.
Chris Hedges: Yeah, because I had studied Arabic, but I hadn’t used it much. After I left the Middle East, I went on to cover the war in the former Yugoslavia, and I wanted to bring it back.
I had a wonderful Syrian teacher who I had classes with three times a week through Zoom, but it’s very hard to do writing and reading with Zoom. So I would meet for one three-hour session each week with Ruba, primarily for reading and writing.
Then I went to Jordan the summer before we went to Cairo to do intensive Arabic. So it’s still kind of intermediate Arabic. It’s not fluent, but I could engage and follow the conversations, which I wanted.
There’s kind of a funny story, because Joe, when he did Footnotes in Gaza—I should let you explain Footnotes in Gaza—had worked with Aboud [name uncertain].
Within Arab society, you just don’t say no. You just dance around the question enough until the person figures it out. But we didn’t figure it out. We kept bombarding Aboud, who lives in Cairo and has an Egyptian passport, because we wanted him to work with us, and he just kept not answering.
Joe Sacco: Right. Actually, he was from Gaza, and he was in Khan Younis. After two months, after his home was destroyed, he managed to get out through this Hala system.
Because he’d worked with me on the book Footnotes in Gaza, I just assumed he would want to work with me again. We’re good friends, but he has family in Gaza still, as most people we met do. People are rightfully worried about what they say and how they get involved, because it might have consequences for their relatives in Gaza.
So I was a little hesitant about Ruba because, according to Chris, she was a bit of a hard-ass. And she was, kind of, but she was full of humor and a perfect person to basically manage us.
It was a three-person team, and she should be here with us today. She was really instrumental: a fluent Arabic speaker, organizing our time.
Cairo is a big place. To figure out how to get from where to where, and how to coordinate interviews so they’d be relatively close by, near each other in various sections of Cairo—she was pretty good at that.
Chris Hedges: Palestinians have no legal rights in Egypt. They can’t work. They can’t send their children to school.
We interviewed 29 families, and every single contact was done either through close friends or relatives. Because Cairo is so massive, once families had agreed—all this was done before we got to Cairo—we had to structure our interviews geographically, in the same section of the city, because we couldn’t go from one side to the other.
History and the struggle against erasure
Chris Hedges: I just want to mention—and Joe can add something to this—Footnotes in Gaza.
Joe and I had done a magazine piece for Harper’s called “A Gaza Diary,” where we wrote, just day by day, what it was like in Khan Younis, in a refugee camp.
In the course of those interviews, we interviewed elderly survivors of the massacres that Israel had carried out in Rafah and Khan Younis during the 100 days they occupied Gaza in 1956.
The editor of Harper’s took it out, arguing that it was history. Of course, the Zionist project is about fostering historical amnesia. It’s about the erasure of history. It’s about de-Arabizing this part of the Middle East, which has been Arab for centuries.
We were both incensed. But Joe just went back and did this amazing book, which, if you don’t have it, you should get.
And this is why it’s called Footnotes, because it’s not even very well known among Palestinians, right?
Joe Sacco: We did this piece for Harper’s in the early 2000s, and one of the people we went to see was Abdul Aziz al-Rantisi, who was one of the founders of Hamas. We sat with him in his house in Gaza City.
Just to give you an idea about how this transpired: the security was such that you go into the street and you ask a bunch of kids, “Where does Rantisi live?” and they just point up to his place.
So we went up and talked to him, and he told us what had happened to his uncle in 1956.
According to the U.N., about 270 Palestinian civilians were killed in Khan Younis by Israeli forces—basically taken out of their homes, lined up against a wall and shot, or shot in the street, or shot in their homes if they didn’t respond to loudspeakers.
Al-Rantisi’s uncle was one of the people killed.
He told us how he remembers—he was 9 years old at the time—people wailing through the village, through the refugee camp of Khan Younis. He said, “Even telling you this now, I want to cry.”
He said, “They planted hatred in our hearts.” That was the moment for him that everything shifted.
That’s why it’s important to talk about what’s going on now, and 1956, too. We don’t want these memories to be erased, because what happened in the past is often the foundation blocks of what’s going on today.
Chris Hedges: Yeah. That, of course, was what drove us.
Genocide is not just about the physical erasure of a place. It’s about a cultural erasure. And it’s about the erasure of, as I said, historical memory.
I think we both looked at this book as our tiny effort to record these experiences so they wouldn’t be lost.
The material is tough. It’s a tough book to read. But I think it’s often in the detail, the small details, that the human loss, tragedy—it is just driven home.
There were moments for both of us where, even though we did the interviews, I know we just had to walk away for a while.
Following one family through catastrophe
Joe Sacco: I wasn’t sure how to approach this book, because we did all the interviews.
We did a book together called Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, where we did the interviews, but I took certain parts from a lot of people’s stories and illustrated them, and you wrote prose.
But, to be honest, I was so overwhelmed by the material we had, I thought, “I just have to concentrate on one story or I’m going to lose it.”
It was really just a matter of trying to ground myself in one story. Working with Chris is a really good thing, because Chris is very generous. If I say I wanted to do this story, you just said, “Go ahead.”
Chris Hedges: It’s because I’m scared of you.
[Laughter.]
Joe Sacco: The story I chose to tell—we interviewed a guy named Osama and his wife, Diana [names as transcribed]. He’s a clinical psychologist, and he was very self-reflective.
He could also talk about how Palestinian society had been damaged by so many months, and actually years, of a genocide—what it had done to Palestinian society in general.
Through his story, I was able to show the family dynamics, how people related to each other, how they grieved together when family members were killed. And, like you say, the small details: their cat, which they brought with them.
Like many people, they evacuated in the early days because of very heavy bombing. They moved from place to place and ended up in the office where he worked. That’s where they were trying to live, with the bombardments going on and then tanks coming into the immediate vicinity.
His brother and his brother’s family were hit by a bomb. They were staying right next to them. They went through all these experiences.
What was fascinating about the story, and why I really kind of picked on it, was it had a sort of epic quality to it, because Israeli soldiers came into where they were staying and forced them out, made the men strip to their underwear, and then told them to go to the beach and walk to Rafah, which was about 35 kilometers away.
They were with their elderly parents. Osama was with his elderly parents, and after about 100 meters—because they’re walking in soft sand—his mother can’t go on anymore.
So they send the rest of the family ahead, and he and his brother, with the elderly father there too, are trying to help the mother along.
At some point she can’t go on at all. They’re trying to carry her on their back, and she’s a bit overweight. They end up just trying to drag her in the sand.
You can sort of imagine this. Then it becomes a very existential moment: Do they abandon their parents?
I’ll let you read the book and see where it goes. But what I appreciated about him was that he was willing to talk about the breakdown in people’s thoughts and in relationships, and the guilt that comes along with that.
In some ways, that story sounds extraordinary. But I think Chris and I both felt that the stories we were hearing were all extraordinary, so you couldn’t even say one was extraordinary. The base level was so high—of trauma and levels of trauma.
Everyone we spoke to had lost numerous family members, often dozens. All of them had lost their homes. All of them had been moving from one place to another.
The ones in Egypt are living with great anxiety about the relatives they have left behind, and a lot of guilt: Should they have left? Women were separated from their husbands and from their children.
The stories are hard. It’s a hard book to read.
As I get older, I need to refresh my memory a little more. So I had to reread the book to do promotion in France, on the way there, and I had to reread it before doing a couple of promotional events with Chris.
I sort of didn’t want to do this book, and I didn’t want to read it either.
The targeting of doctors and journalists
Chris Hedges: With 29 families, you’re dealing with a large number of people. You’re not just dealing with 29 people.
I think very early on we saw patterns that defined the genocide. We interviewed journalists. We interviewed doctors.
It was very clear from these interviews that Israel was targeting the entire professional class. There were just too many incidents that we recorded.
Doctors who either were about to start their shift or had just ended their shift were killed by drones. These drones were very precise. They would wipe out the doctor, and often his entire family, in an apartment building, but it would be just their apartment. It wasn’t the whole building.
Or the vans that would bring medical workers to the hospital: Israel knew when they left, and they were struck, and everyone inside was killed.
That was from the beginning. It was interesting that it took the Palestinians a few weeks to see that pattern. But that was very, very clear.
We were told that, at some point, people were afraid that doctors were living next door to them—
Joe Sacco: Or journalists.
Chris Hedges: Or journalists.
Joe Sacco: One of the journalists we spoke to—his colleague had handed him the microphone. They were changing shifts. His colleague was taking over, and the journalist who had finished reporting went back to his home, which was a short walk away.
A bomb hit the home, and on camera this journalist found out that his friend had just been killed. It’s actually a well-known story, in a way. We spoke to this journalist in Cairo.
He had a flak jacket on with the word “Press” and a helmet with the word “Press.” He took them off—on live TV, just tore them off—and said, basically, “This is a target. We’re a target because of these. It says ‘Press.’”
Chris Hedges: We dedicate the book to our Palestinian colleagues, our Palestinian journalists, over 250 of whom have been assassinated, sometimes with their families.
I think Joe and I feel a great deal of frustration with the Western press, who have really betrayed Palestinian journalists.
How has that happened? One, by amplifying Israeli lies. I was in the Middle East for seven years. We all knew Israel was lying. Israel lies like it breathes.
But to not print or broadcast what Israel says, its distortion of events and reality, is to be cut off. Large media organizations like The New York Times prize access, often above the truth.
I think one of the things that disturbed both of us so much was the way these journalists were defamed as being members of Hamas or terrorists.
There was one point where it was actually a Reuters crew that was targeted and killed, and the headlines were, “Israel targets Hamas camera.” It was a Reuters camera. Reuters had given the coordinates to Israel before the strike.
It was also a double-tap strike, which is really cruel, because with these double-tap strikes, you hit people, and then when people come to try and care for the wounded or remove people, they hit them again.
Another thing that surprised me was the sophistication of the drones. We did an interview where they’re using loudspeakers on drones to corral Palestinians in open areas. Then they have to line up and show their ID cards and do a retina scan into the drone, and then the drone is separating men and boys.
I don’t know much about drones. I just had no idea that these drones were developed to an extent where they had essentially replaced IDF soldiers.
Joe Sacco: Yeah. You can see the unfortunate technological advances in the war in Ukraine, and certainly in Gaza.
I know we want some questions.
Gaza and the collapse of the international order
Chris Hedges: We can go for another few minutes.
I think our final goal in the book is not, of course, simply to tell the story, but to make the point that this genocide is a seminal moment in modern history.
It is really about the complete evisceration of any pretense of the rule of law.
It is a message that Western countries like the United States and Israel are sending to the Global South. As we see climate refugees, with the breakdown of the climate, and their numbers grow, that message is: We will stop at nothing, including genocide.
I think this has resonated throughout the Global South. They get it.
Pankaj Mishra—Joe and I had dinner with him in London—I think wrote a really smart book called The World After Gaza.
More than just the culmination of the Zionist project, this is a very frightening change within the global order.
The U.N. Charter, the Genocide Convention—and, of course, the Trump administration has just sanctioned not just ICC judges but the entire court, with the goal of destroying it, making it financially impossible for the court to function.
This genocide is a pivotal moment when any pretense of human rights or the rule of law has been jettisoned. I don’t know that there’s any going back from this.
Of course, the United States often violated its own ideals, or supposed ideals. But at least it was acknowledged as a utopian vision, or something that we should aspire to.
That’s gone. That’s finished.
Joe Sacco: Yeah. You could say it was aspirational, because obviously international law often didn’t apply to Western states.
But the other thing I think the genocide has done is really derail what you could say is liberal society in the West.
You see how institutions like the academy have betrayed students. You saw the protests at Columbia University, other universities. You can talk to this. I think you spent time with encampments—was it at Princeton?
Chris Hedges: And Columbia.
Joe Sacco: So you can talk to that.
Basically, the institutions, the academy, called in the dogs and bent over backwards to cooperate first with the Biden administration. Let’s not forget that this was happening under Biden, too.
But it’s the courts, it’s financial institutions and the press. You can go country to country and say what’s been going on.
In Germany, you can’t say certain things. People are getting arrested left and right.
In Britain, there’s a group called Palestine Action, which you might have heard of, which has broken into places, industries that are providing weapons for Israel.
Maybe you could get them on trespassing charges or something like that, but they’re getting them on terrorism charges.
But not just that: If you hold up a sign in support of Palestine Action, you’re arrested. It’s illegal to hold up a sign saying, “I support Palestine Action.”
The hammer coming down in that kind of way really speaks to how our liberal ideals are beginning to evaporate.
You can see the same thing in the United States, of course. Maybe you can talk about some of Princeton—
Chris Hedges: Well, the Trump administration, or the State Department, has also declared Palestine Action a terrorist organization in the U.S.
That means it comes with sanctions. I was in Italy last year with Francesca Albanese, who is sanctioned, special rapporteur in Palestine. She can’t use credit cards. She can’t book a hotel room. She’s not reimbursed for medical expenses. She had a small apartment, I think it was in Washington, that was seized and is frozen.
That’s what they’ve done to the ICC judges.
Because the United States controls the world financial system, once the Trump administration—Palestine Action has a fundraising page, like a GoFundMe page or something, to challenge in court their designation as a terrorist group. Because of the Trump declaration and sanctions, that was instantly shut down.
So it’s civic death.
This is what they did to Julian Assange. Julian was in Sweden, and suddenly he doesn’t have access to his bank accounts, credit cards or anything else.
That is the weapon that they’ve used: 17 ICC judges, now the ICC court itself, Francesca.
I had gone to Italy. Francesca had asked me to come and join her, Greta Thunberg, Yanis Varoufakis and Thiago Ávila, who organizes the flotillas, to support the dockworkers in Genoa who had gone on strike and refused to load weapons onto ships bound for Israel.
That is really all we have left, because our governments have no intention of halting the genocide or standing up for the rule of law. It’s totally left to us.
As Joe said, the response of these governments has been to shut down anyone with a conscience.
Free speech does not exist on college campuses in the United States. The students who set up these encampments, who were the nation’s conscience, have been expelled, suspended.
You saw this horrific alleged gang rape at Cornell. I think nothing exposes the moral bankruptcy of college administrators better than the fact that they expelled students who protested the genocide and refused to criminally charge students accused of rape.
Public opinion shifts while governments refuse to change
Joe Sacco: One thing that has really surprised me, and I never thought I’d see it happen, is the shift in the viewpoint of Americans about what’s going on.
Israel now is considered unfavorably by a majority of Americans. I never thought I would see that.
Getting back to the media, that comes really in spite of the media, in spite of the reporting that’s been done—not really reporting, but the journalism that’s been done in the United States.
I think it’s because people had access to their phones, and they could see what was happening.
I don’t even think they needed to understand the politics of what was going on. That could be found out later. But just viscerally, to see the carnage in Gaza—and I think a lot of what really seemed to turn people was the starvation.
Americans have changed their mind. If you look at Europe, the polls show the same thing among the populace, but the governments haven’t been moved. That’s what’s interesting.
If politicians really licked their finger and stuck it in the wind, they would say, “We need to shift our policies.” But they seem to be hanging on to a really bankrupt policy.
It’s been going on for a long time, obviously, but in this period, both administrations are guilty.
I think we’re complicit in the United States in the genocide. We’ve been sending bombs, as you know, and providing diplomatic cover, as a lot of European countries have been doing, too.
I don’t think, if the Democratic Party comes into power, we’re going to see a major shift. I think they’re going to keep these policies going.
But it is good that American people have changed, because some of the grassroots Democrats, let’s say, have begun to question the Democratic establishment.
But the establishment tries to destroy those people. The Democratic establishment tries to destroy the people within its own party that are trying to shift things.
[End of supplied excerpt.]