On The Jimmy Dore Show, Dore asks journalist Chris Hedges why he sees Gaza as a turning point for the rest of the world. Drawing on interviews he and cartoonist Joe Sacco conducted in Egypt with 29 Palestinian families for Requiem for Gaza, Hedges recounts how Israeli drones ordered Palestinians out of buildings and separated men and boys from their families, some of whom never returned. He argues that these accounts show how Israel carried out what he calls a planned genocide and warns that the U.S. and its allies, by letting it proceed, have made it easier for powerful countries to flout international humanitarian law elsewhere.
Dore also asks why Simon & Schuster didn’t publish the book. Hedges says the publisher told him to skip sending a proposal, and he recalls Sacco’s concern that another publisher might tone down the book’s account of what happened in Gaza. The book ultimately came out through Fantagraphics, Sacco’s longtime publisher.
“They’re starting with the Palestinians, but they’re not ending with the Palestinians,” Hedges tells Dore.
Watch the full interview with Chris Hedges and find more conversations about war, politics and the media on The Jimmy Dore Show.
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Editor’s note: ScheerPost prepared this transcript from the supplied captions of the Nov. 11, 2026, interview on The Jimmy Dore Show. The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity. Brackets flag unclear wording and describe material shown or read on the program. The interview includes graphic descriptions of violence.
The opening exchange
Chris Hedges: There were so many things that surprised us in the interviews. You know, it’s all in the details, but one of them was this. I didn’t know this. The quadcopters are equipped with lenses and loudspeakers. So, they will call Palestinians out of buildings and then the Palestinians have to line up and not only show their IDs to the quadcopters, but have their retina scanned. And then the quadcopter separates the groups, sending usually the men and boys to one side. Some of whom, by the way, never come back. They just disappear. But it’s all done with a quadcopter. I didn’t know that. I mean, maybe other people know about it, but I didn’t know it.
Jimmy Dore: So, it’s a drone basically and they do retina scans on them and they and there’s a loudspeaker. I mean, it’s really out of a science fiction movie, but it’s not.
How the book came together
Jimmy Dore: New book about Gaza. It’s called Requiem for Gaza. It’s by Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco. And it’s got a lot of great cartoons. Now, you know, it really does tell the story in a powerful way. You know, first of all, I noticed this wasn’t published by Simon & Schuster. Why didn’t you pitch it to them?
Chris Hedges: I did. But they told me, “Don’t even send us a proposal.” [Laughter]
Jimmy Dore: So who’s the publisher?
Chris Hedges: So it’s Fantagraphics, which is Joe’s publisher. They usually do comic books.
Although I will say physically the book is gorgeous. And I think we also they’re kind of a leftwing publisher. We denounce the genocide. I think one of Joe’s fears is that okay, we couldn’t get Simon & Schuster, but maybe we could go with someone else. But then the material as you know is so incendiary that they would have nickeled and dimeed us with an editor who you know would muted or destroy it. I mean I once did a book for [publisher’s name unclear] that they wouldn’t even publish. Well they said they would publish it after they assigned an editor to take out all what they call the negativity [laughter]
Which that didn’t work out too well. I mean had to buy my book back which hurt but I did. So, the book has done really well in Europe. It 11,000 print run in France, sold out the first week. We just had actually a very nice review in the Financial Times, surprisingly. You know, a lot of play Spain, Italy, but here it’s a big black hole. The New York Times said it’s interesting. The Guardian said they wouldn’t review it even though Joe is a contributor. And what we did is we went to Egypt. We when we realized we were not going to get into Gaza and both Joe and I spent extensive time in Gaza. I was the Middle East bureau chief for the New York Times and spent a lot of time in Gaza. Joe did two books out of Gaza, Palestine and Footnotes in Gaza. We went to Egypt and interviewed 29 families who had fled Gaza. And then we write the story of the genocide through the experiences of those families. But it’s so grounded in details and times and dates and experiences that there’s just no way to pick it apart. It’s not a polemic. And so they the response is to ignore it. And it’s very similar, Jimmy, to when I write about a year or two into the Iraq war, I wrote a book called Collateral Damage with the journalist Laila Al-Arian. He interviewed 50 combat veterans from Iraq by name. None of it was anonymous. And they spoke about atrocities against Iraqi civilians that they had either witnessed or taken part in. So the that book was huge. Also in Europe, I think the Independent excerpted four or five thousand words, Le Monde etc. I mean Le Monde ran huge sections of the introduction of this book, but again in the United States it went into a big black hole. That’s what’s happening with this book.
Jimmy Dore: And you think that’s because of the reach of Israel and the lobby?
Targeting and escape from Gaza
Chris Hedges: Yeah. But it’s also fear. I mean, you know, so the New York Times still doesn’t use the word genocide. The New York Times flatly told the publisher, “We’re not reviewing it.” jeez. So you know we’re not even arguing whether there’s a genocide or not. We’re beginning with that as the starting point and the stories are just yeah I mean you it’s not just one family. Everybody has been devastated and the patterns of abuse. We interview doctors and journalists and you see from the inception of the genocide that there was a targeted a campaign of targeted assassinations. I’m talking about journalists who immediately leave their shift and are killed or doctors who either leave their shift or on their way to the hospital who are killed and
When these quadcopters come in they will actually take out you may have 10 apartments let’s say in a building they take out the one apartment with a doctor and his family that vans full of medical workers trying to get to hospitals were blown up. It was it’s it was so organized and so intentional and when you interview the number because it’s not just 29 families a lot of people we interviewed when you interview that number of people then the patterns become completely evident.
Jimmy Dore: So these people made it out of Gaza into Cairo. Tell people how they got out.
Chris Hedges: Two ways. Either they were wounded themselves or they accompanied family members who were seriously injured or they paid money through an Egyptian organization called Hala. It used to be that if you wanted to go to Cairo or Egypt, you paid $350. You would get an exit visa. As soon as the genocide started, the Egyptians out of the kindness of their hearts raised that to $5,000 US dollars. Families were scrambling with relatives overseas and 2,500 for children, 5,000 for adults. So, it was either one of those two ways.
Schools, universities and cultural erasure
Jimmy Dore: I wanted to show this at the beginning of the book. This is some stuff that I didn’t know. I think people would be surprised to find out, cuz I was, that the occupied Palestine has a literacy rate of 98%. Whoa. One of the highest on the planet.
“Education is revered. Gaza’s 12 universities, all destroyed by Israel, were the centerpieces of life. The strip turned out doctors, engineers, professors, lawyers, computer programmers, and teachers. It produced accomplished poets and novelists and musicians. These were the Gaza’s main contri contributions to the Arab world. This highly educated and artistic class along with all educational and cultural institutions in an act of scholasticide was targeted for elimination by Israel from the inception of the genocide.” Now, we just covered RFK Jr. Saying that, you know, the Arabs are mud people and they don’t they don’t produce any they don’t win any prizes or awards. Of course, that was all wrong. He was completely wrong. He was just doing, you know, racism against the Arabs. But I found that to be surprising and I didn’t know about this and so I’m going to guess most people don’t know that in the United States. And do you I think that if people knew that it would it would help, don’t you think?
Chris Hedges: Yeah. And it’s really because of the UN. So the UN set up through UNRWA these UNRWA schools which are really good and as you just read it created highly literate highly educated population which is a threat it’s a threat to the Zionists and so they weren’t just assassinating doctors and journalists they were assassinating writers and poets [name unclear] anybody within that cultural and professional elite was meant to be wiped out because that’s what genocide is about. It’s not just about the annihilation of a people. It’s about cultural and historical erasure which is of course one of the reasons that Joe and I wrote the book in that we didn’t want these stories as the Zionists want to disappear. We wanted these stories to be recorded and honored. And you know, it’s our small contribution to that massive attempt to create historical and cultural amnesia.
The history of dispossession
Jimmy Dore: Well, you say that Zionism, the Zionist project is founded on amnesia. Yes. So, can you talk about that?
Chris Hedges: Sure. Because they have to fabricate history. So Palestinians have been in the area of Palestine for centuries. And of course the Jewish argument is that this is a Jewish homeland. Well, at the turn of the century before the European colonists, remember Netanyahu’s family comes from Poland. There Jews were only six% of Palestine.
Jimmy Dore: How much? Say it again. You dropped for a second. What percent?
Chris Hedges: Six percent. So around 1920, the Jewish population in Palestine was 6 percent. And Netanyahu from Poland, his real name is Milkowski. Okay. Okay. So you had these European colonists. It’s a classic settler colonial project. So they had to create or fabricate a history. They had to de-Arabize an Arab country. From the moment they got there with the help of the British by the British were completely complicit because they control Palestine till 48. Arabs suddenly became second-class citizens in their own land. And so the it was about land. It was about the dispossession of Palestinians, the seizure of their land. That’s how colonial project works. But of course they create the myth of you know a land without people for a people without a land kind of stuff. This is Peters and others. It’s all garbage of course. So in order for colonial settler projects to perpetuate themselves they create a fictitious history and they erase the actual history and that’s what Zionism has done from its inception.
Gaza and the Holocaust comparison
Jimmy Dore: Just you also at the beginning of the book you talk about the you give some numbers to the wipeout that has happened during this genocide since October 7th. You say 92% of Gaza’s residential buildings have been damaged or destroyed and around 81% of all structures are damaged according to the UN. 82% of Israeli Jews support the ethnic cleansing of the entire population of Gaza. And 56% support doing the same to Palestinian citizens of Israel. Let’s remember there are Palestinian citizens.
They just voted in the last election. 47% support killing all civilians in cities captured by the Israeli military. That is 79% of Israeli Jews say they are not so troubled or not troubled at all by reports of famine and suffering among the population in Gaza according to a survey conducted in July 2025. Israel is a genocidal is a genocidal state and a genocidal society. I mean I don’t know how people can look at those numbers and come to any other conclusion but that what would be the difference between this and the Jewish holocaust?
Chris Hedges: There are differences in the way they were carried out and instrumentalized but no difference in terms of the dehumanization drive to annihilate the Jews. I mean, if you look at the conditions of any of the Jewish ghettos, the Warsaw ghetto for instance, remember the Nazis after the uprising led by Marek Edelman and he was the only one who survived, but led by these Jewish resistance fighters, they leveled it. It didn’t exist. Now, of course, Jews were transported to death camps like Treblinka. That is a big difference. But in terms of everything else, there really is no difference between what happened in Warsaw and what happened in Gaza. So Gaza doesn’t exist anymore.
Israel already controls 70% of it and whatever building h buildings, you know, wrecked buildings are still partially standing. They by the day are bringing in excavators and much of it made by Volvo by the way to work to create a kind of moonscape to level it all. And you have we don’t know how many were killed. Certainly far more than the 74,000. I mean I know that because I have friends in Gaza whose extended families were completely wiped out and they’re never counted because their bodies never made it to a morgue or hospital. So it’s, you know, I don’t know. I’ve heard numbers up to 600,000.
We don’t know, but it’s far more than the 74,000. Anyway, you have about 2 million Palestinians living in these under these tarps and tents in 30% of Gaza without access to healthcare or clean water. That’s very key. It’s winter. It’s Israel, by the way, has just begun to they never abided by the ceasefire agreement in terms of 600 trucks a day. That never happened. And they are tightening again. I mean, everybody’s worrying about another famine. So, and that also was a Nazi tactic to cut off the food to the ghetto. So, no, this looks like lots looks like Warsaw looks like any of the ghettos that the Nazi the Nazi regime perpetrated or orchestrated for the Jews along with the rhetoric. I mean, you know, the rhetoric is the same.
Why bear witness?
Jimmy Dore: You talk about why you wrote this book. You start it off with this poem by [poet’s name unclear].
[Dore begins reading the poem that opens the book.] “The story I carry, the one I’ve written over and over again in the dark in my mind, has no witnesses left. No places, no names, no future, no language strong enough to hold it.
Genocide crushes expression. It shatters the very words we use to survive. I try to write, but fear silences my hand. I try to remember, but everything has been erased. I try to speak, but there is no language left that can hold the weight of this devastation. And yet I must speak. I must continue because silence is another form of disappearance and I refuse to vanish. So that’s the same reason you wrote the book, right?
Chris Hedges: Exactly. I was just in Paris. He’s in exile in Paris now. We had dinner. Amazing poet. I mean there’s I mean that’s the tragedy. I mean it’s it’s it’s it’s a it’s really an assault. You know remember Gaza is one of the oldest places on the planet. And I write about the mosques that I visited and below them are like Phoenician, Byzantine, Roman ruins, it’s all gone. It’s all vanished. It’s you know it’s yeah I mean aside from the horrific tragedy that it is to the Palestinian people and I also want to say Jimmy that it’s creating a kind of new world order where rules don’t matter where the message that industrialized nations are sending to especially the global south is that there’s no instrument including genocide we won’t employ to maintain our dominance and our wealth. I mean, we have everything is this message we’re sending. And if you try and take it away from us, we’ll kill you. And we don’t want to live in a world like that. I covered the war in Bosnia, you know, where it’s run by warlords and gangsters and thugs. You don’t want to enter a world like that. But everything’s evaporated. The UN, even the UN endorsed in a very shameful moment Trump’s so-called peace plan. The UN itself is bankrupt. And we are either going to reconstitute the rule of law ourselves or we’re going to enter a kind of Hobbesian world where you know there’s no restraint on industrial barbarity which is of course precisely what Israel has done.
What it took to record the testimony
Jimmy Dore: So I just want to give a little slice of that industrial barbarity. Before I get into it, I’m going to show a cartoon that’s at the end of chapter 1. You know, Chris, for me just to read the book like I it again I it kept me I couldn’t sleep last night and it’s it’s un it’s I can’t imagine that what’s happening there is I mean the detail that you do go into you know people where the guy’s jaw gets he goes up to go the bathroom. His jaw gets knocked out and his tongue is gone and he’s still alive and he tries to write and then he dies an hour later and then they have to put a tarp over him and the kids want to see his Yeah. And they try to bury a body and they do and then the dogs dig it up and eat it and then they have to rebury that same I mean just the barbarity of what these people are put through.
It’s like that’s what I that’s why I said to me there’s no difference than the Holocaust than what the Israel is doing to the people of Palestine. It’s I couldn’t like I couldn’t imagine this kind of depravity really. I mean it I saw Schindler’s List. This is if exactly as horrible as that. Every bit as horrible as that if not more. And
How I mean just to just to read it, it shook me emotionally. How do you deal with it? How and how has it changed you? I mean, how do you manage to get through life?
Chris Hedges: Well, it’s hard. And you know, Joe said, “I can never do this again.” I mean, he said the So, he chronicled and if you don’t know his work, he’s amazing. He invented the whole genre of comics journalism, and he focused on this one family, Osama, child psychologist, who’s pictured there. He said, “It’s as if they were living in my room for a year, and I can’t do it again. I can’t.” It was awful. I think both of us grit our teeth. Look, every interview we did in Cairo, people just finally broke down sobbing. And the other thing so disconcerting is everything is on their phone, including the pictures of their dead children, you know, chalky face dug up from the rubble. But I think we felt because both of us had spent so much time in Gaza, we had a kind of obligation to tell the story. We know Gaza. We know and also we have long connections with Palestinian. Palestinians in Egypt have no rights. They can’t send their children to school. They can’t work. They live very precarious existences.
And so you really need connections in order for them to speak to you. They don’t you can’t just walk in cold and interview Palestinians. So, I think we felt that because of all that, and as you know, I’m an Arabic speaker. Because of all that, we had an obligation to do it. But it was awful and tough. And I mean, I’m not going to lie to you. It was, you know, I just had, you know, nightmare after nightmare after nightmare, especially since I was in Gaza during the war. So, I know what it feels like to be hit with hundreds of shells a day. My office in the center of Gaza City was destroyed. You know, I would see the pictures from Gaza and I go, “Oh, yeah. I used to go down that street. I used to go there. I the place where I used to live is destroyed in Gaza.” So, it was rough. But I felt I think both Joe and I felt that we didn’t have a choice.
One family’s story
Jimmy Dore: [Dore shows illustrations and reads from the book.] So, I just want to show a bit of the book, the comic section, which I felt was very powerful. So, this is the family he focused on. And so he talks about I’m going to join it when they’re held up in an apartment and the IDF shows up and with their guns and their quadcopters and they get them all out of the building and he says the stairs were full of soldiers. There are soldiers here. There are soldiers up there all pointing their guns. It’s scary. They don’t show their faces. They don’t show their faces. So there it is. There’s there’s kids and there’s so Diana, who is the last down the stairs, manages to talk the soldiers into letting her take Nagam’s insulin pens. Without them, my daughter would not survive because we were hearing that there were no medications in the South.
Outside, the soldiers order the males, all but Osama’s father and the youngest of boys, to strip off their clothes down to their underwear. Sounds very Nazi-like. Sounds very Nazi-like. They are told to go to the beach and walk on the sand to Rafah. There you go. You go straight. If you turn around, turn your head, we will shoot you. So there they are.
And after about one kilometer they find a group of elderly people who have spent all night in the rain and cold according to Osama. But to walk on the sand is very Oh wait, one of them is dead in a wheelchair. His wife and the others are unable to go on. They need help getting onto the sand. But to walk on the sand is very difficult. Osama tells us, “We tried to help but we couldn’t.” And that’s got to be an unbelievably impotent feeling. The soldiers 100 the soldiers a 100 meters away were shouting at us to move or they’re going to shoot us.
The dentist and his family are coming down the same road and they have and they too have someone in a wheelchair, an ill elderly man. They are struggling because there was no normal street. It was destroyed. A lot of sand, a lot of mud, a lot of stones. Osama learns later that the sick man died. The beach. So now they’re at the beach. The beach road was full of tanks. There they are. There’s the beach.
Osama says, “All looking at gunning and pointing guns at everyone walking. Even if you’re naked, they got the guns on you.” There were martyrs everywhere. It seems they were evacuating, but they had their bags on. One here, one there. It was very clear that they died from gunshot wounds. You can’t spend a lot of time checking because you will also be killed. So, there’s dead people all around them as they’re being forced to march in their underwear. Osama’s parents are having a hard time keeping up. I didn’t want to risk all the family. He says he and his brother [name unclear] tell the others to go on ahead. His father who’s 74 is able to walk but after about a 100 meters his mother says I’m not I’m not able to move. She is overweight and has arthritic knees and they’re walking in the sand. So now we are struggling starting to struggle. How can we move her all this way? I mean I’m not sure how many kilometers to Rafah but it’s not less than 35. Osama and his brother help her for another 500 meters. So there they are.
After that she was not able to walk even with our support. So we had to carry her on our back. But since fleeing his home, Osama had lost 30 kg. So he’s emaciated. He and his brother are both so weak and exhausted. We were screaming at our mother, “Please move. They will kill us. We are not able to carry you anymore.” So, we got her laying down in the sand. We are dragging her from her legs. So, now they’re dragging her on the beach.
And we were just pulling her. It’s very hard on the sand, like every 5 m, 7 m, and we fall in the sand. We cannot continue. And then we stay like 20 seconds, 15 seconds, and then we continue. We turn her. We pull her from her hands and then we fall in the sand. We continue like this maybe for five kilometers. When I remember this, I want to throw up. He says, “I can’t imagine this.”
So Diana and the others, meanwhile, are moving faster. The children drift toward the waterline where the sand is wet and firm. I guess this didn’t please the soldiers, she says. One of the group of female soldiers points her gun in their direction and fires. You couldn’t tell if she was just scaring us or meant to shoot at one of us. My daughter Zana was scared. She covered her head with her hands and shook her head. One of the soldier imitates how Zana flinched in the gunfire. She was mocking my daughter and they were all laughing.
I mean far behind. After struggling for about 10 kilometers, Osama, his brother, and his parents reach a shelter of a small cliff. Every time we stopped, we were terrified that they would shoot us. We were not allowed to stop. But now we were unable to walk. And he tells his father we could no longer pull his mother. If we stay here, they will kill us. And if we don’t and if they don’t kill us, we will be eaten by dogs. I’m sorry. We need to leave you here. So he has to tell his parents. I My mother was crying. Please, son, don’t leave me here. I have to because we’re going to die, all of us.
So I’ll just end it there. And so that’s the kind of I don’t know.
You say Gaza is a pivotal moment. Why is it a pivotal moment, Chris?
Why Hedges calls Gaza a turning point
Chris Hedges: Because as the world breaks down, especially with the climate crisis and the rise of authoritarian states, and because the Western nations, in particular, the United States and Israel, but the Europeans as well, decided to ignore very clear humanitarian law to prevent genocide.
There are no rules anymore. I mean, the rules were always utopian. The United States violated them all the time. But at least they were recognized as something we should aspire to. That’s gone now. And the global south has got it. I mean, I’ve just spent a lot of time in Mexico and Guatemala for my new book. They get it. They get the message. And they know who that message is being directed towards.
And you know, I fear that’s the kind of world we’re headed towards. One where it’s just about the you know the unrestrained use of industrial violence to essentially pound you know those Frantz Fanon calls the wretched of the earth but and they’re so they’re starting with the Palestinians but they’re not ending with the Palestinians.
Jimmy Dore: It’s also you know you talk about the it’s a technological we’re we’re rolling backwards into a technological barbarism. You know you talk about those quadcopters. Yeah.
Chris Hedges: And how they were there were so many things that surprised us in the interviews. You know it’s all in the details but one of them is I mean I didn’t know this quadcopters are equipped with lenses and loudspeakers. So they will call Palestinians out of buildings and then the Palestinians have to line up and not only show their IDs to the quadcopters but have their retina scanned and then the quadcopter separates the groups sending usually the men and boys to one side some of whom by the way are never come back just disappear but it’s all done with a quadcopter. I didn’t know that. I mean maybe other people know about it but I didn’t know it.
Jimmy Dore: So, it’s a drone, basically, and they do retina scans on them, and there’s a loudspeaker. I mean, it’s really out of a science fiction movie, but it’s not.
Palestinian journalists and Hamas
Jimmy Dore: And just before we wrap this up, you talk about how the, you know, the Zionists and the media al everybody in Palestine is Hamas, but you talk about how the people in Palestine a lot of them hate Sinwar, the leader of Hamas and or the former and how so talk about their animosity toward Hamas for causing all this, right?
Chris Hedges: Yeah, there was an animosity. I mean, I know a lot or knew, some of them are no longer with us, Palestinian journalists, and they had a very contentious relationship often with Hamas. Hamas, they had to work under the auspices of Hamas. But, I mean, we interview one journalist and we ask her about Yahya Sinwar, and her answer is, “[unclear].” I don’t know if I can swear on your show, Jimmy. [clears throat]
Jimmy Dore: Why not? Can I? Okay, sure.
Chris Hedges: So, yeah, of course. I mean, this idea that everyone’s Hamas is ridiculous as and I’ve spent a lot of time in Gaza, of course, but you know, that justifies Israel’s genocide. You know, they’re they’re all Hamas and, you know, if they’re babies, they’re they’re want to be Hamas. It’s but that’s what you do when you create a kind of cartoonish vision of the world and you seek to justify a genocide if you everybody becomes guilty you know whether they’re guilty or not.
Jimmy Dore: Okay. Well everybody should check out the book. It’s here it is. Let me show you the cover. Requiem for Gaza by Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco. Doing very well outside the United States, interestingly enough. [laughter]
Anyway, well, Chris, it’s always uplifting whenever you come on. It’s always a another Fourth of July feel-good moment for us. And [laughter] anyway, thanks for the great work you’re doing. I appreciate your time. Thanks for coming on.
Everybody check out the book and check out Chris’s Substack. And hopefully we’ll see you soon.
Chris Hedges: Thank you. Okay, take care.
Find more interviews on The Jimmy Dore Show and read more from Chris Hedges at The Chris Hedges Report.