How Palestinian History Is Systemically Forgotten (w/ Micaela Sahhar) | The Chris Hedges Report

Micaela Sahhar reframes monumental events in Palestinian history through an intimate lens of her own family’s displacement during the 20th century.

This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

“How do we understand now if we don’t understand 1948 or 1917 or all the things that happened during the British Mandate?”

This is a central question Micaela Sahhar, author and educator, asks while dissecting her book, Find Me at the Jaffa Gate. Sahhar reframes these monumental events in Palestinian history through an intimate, granular lens of her own family’s displacement during the 20th century.

Sahhar joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report, sharing more personal narratives, revealing how her family lived through the pivotal moments that shaped modern Palestine.

“To grow up as a diaspora Palestinian,” Sahhar explains, “ is to be equipped with a particular kind of superpower, which is to understand the enormous rift between a dominant culture and what you know to be true from the people you love and trust.”

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Host

Chris Hedges

Producer:

Max Jones

Intro:

Diego Ramos

Crew:

Diego Ramos, Sofia Menemenlis and Thomas Hedges

Transcript:

Diego Ramos

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Transcript

Chris Hedges

Palestinians in Gaza, like millions of Palestinians in the diaspora, will soon battle to preserve memory, to defy an indifferent world that stood by as they were slaughtered. They will doggedly seek to preserve scraps of their existence. They will write memoirs, histories and poems, draw maps of villages, refugee camps and cities that have been obliterated, set down painful stories of butchery, carnage and loss. They will name and condemn their killers, lament the extermination of families, including thousands of children, and struggle to preserve a vanished world. But time is a cruel master.

Intellectual and emotional life for those who are cast out of their homeland is defined by the crucible of exile, what the Palestinian scholar Edward Said told me is “the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place.” Said’s book, Out of Place, is a record of this lost world.

Micaela Sahhar, whose Palestinian family was driven from Jerusalem during the 1948 Nakba, or catastrophe, asks in her book Find Me at the Jaffa Gate, what the daughter of a Nakba survivor inherits. It is not property or tangible heirlooms, nor the streets and neighborhoods of a father’s childhood and the deep roots of family who have lived in one place, Jerusalem, for generation upon generation.

Micaela Sahhar, as the older generations in her family who were raised in Palestine die off, seeks, with a sense of urgency, to capture the world that formed them. She struggles with the gaps and blank spaces that cannot be recovered, piecing together the fragments and shards of memory to prevent a lost world from being erased. Joining me to discuss her book Find Me at the Jaffa Gate is Micaela Sahhar.

Your book is non-linear. I’m just curious as to why you decided to write in that format. It bounces back and forth in place and time.

Micaela Sahhar

Thank you, Chris. Thank you for that introduction. I suppose the non-linearity of the book really reflects the process of writing the book. And I was keen to foreground that process for people.

When I started the project, it was my sense, actually, that the diaspora is really cut off from a broader Palestinian polity. And of course I live in Australia, so it’s really quite far indeed. And so there was this idea that in writing this narrative, which is not an epic narrative, it’s an intergenerational narrative, it’s a polyphonic narrative of different people’s experiences that I could capture the experience and the way that we are connected to the past and the way that a presence connected to the future.

And I do a lot of work actually with First Nations and Māori writers here in Australia. And I learned a proverb, a Maori proverb recently, which is “I walk backwards into the future with my eyes fixed on the past.”

And I think in some ways that captures quite well how a non-chronological narrative is able to capture these sort of experiences of displacement of, I guess, settler coloniality rather than post-coloniality. And how also we can understand the experience of now.

I mean, I didn’t start writing this book during the genocide, but I was editing it during the genocide. How do we understand now if we don’t understand 1948 or 1917 or all the things that happened during the British mandate? And I think the answer is we can’t. So this importance of connecting the past to the present as something that isn’t in the past, as something that actually informs in a very urgent way the present.

Chris Hedges

And yet these stories, you have an experience at school, you can explain, but in many ways these stories, these narratives, these realities, these histories are not acknowledged by the dominant narrative and the dominant society.

Micaela Sahhar

No, that’s absolutely correct. And I suppose the non-linearity in some ways also allows for a particular way of positioning authority, archival authority, state authority next to family members, the memories of family members, the ephemeral documentation that my family has that other families have, and thinking actually about who is the authority in these sort of situations where you don’t have obviously a national repository of narrative in the situation of diasporic experience.

But here’s a huge, and I come from a very interdisciplinary background, I’m trained actually as a lawyer and an historian as well as a creative writer. But there’s been a real explosion in a scholarly sense of the archives of resistance in the Palestinian context. And this does deal with ephemera, photographs, tickets, guidebooks, exactly. It is, that’s right. Yeah.

Chris Hedges

Guidebooks. I mean that’s part of your book. You can talk about it. I mean and the guidebook actually, doesn’t it, the guidebook leads to the cafe, right? You can explain that.

Micaela Sahhar

Yeah, that’s right. I was doing some work actually on guidebooks for a completely separate project I’d found online. And I think this is this desire of the displaced Palestinian person who grows up on the one hand, a very Palestinian family, but within a mainstream culture where your own reality is there’s no space for it.

And so in a sense, you grow up with a strange sort of superpower that you understand there are other realities and other ways to be apart from a mainstream culture. But I was doing work on these guidebooks and as I was doing so I came across a number of articles in the Palestine Post — which is today the Jerusalem Post and it was in its inception a Zionist magazine — referring to a particular restaurant project actually which I mentioned to my then living great aunt and she said that was my father’s restaurant.

And so being able to locate my family in a very precise way suddenly, not just for my grandfather’s generation, but for my great grandfather’s generation in the operations of the mandate through, to be honest, this ephemeral, but Zionist repository of materials was one way in into the story.

And so right at the start of the story, and you’re right, I talk about the Palestine restaurants, and I do it quite quickly. It’s a way of locating myself and my family in this disappeared landscape that on the one hand is physically still there.

I mean, my family are from the Greek colony, which at the time was called the New Jerusalem and today is called West Jerusalem in this sort of colonial partitioning of space. And many of those buildings are still there, including our family’s home. But there’s a rift in the possibilities of what that space is for Palestinian people today.

Chris Hedges

And so many Palestinians in refugee camps in Lebanon, your own family, they still carry the keys and the deeds.

Micaela Sahhar

That’s right. I mean, there’s a sense that what you have, that your key and your titles will one day assist you in prosecuting the case for a turn.

And so these are really vital and nourishing and sustaining aspects, I think, of Palestinian identity. And then of course, there’s all the UN registries. I mean, there’s a wonderful book that Salim Tamari edited called Jerusalem 1948, and it’s got a partial registry in it.

I think it was in an article by Dr. Salman Abu Sitta, who has thought about what the right of return would look like and how you would in a practical and tangible sense repatriate people to their ancestral homes and my grandfather’s property is in that.

We have documentation, we have maps, we have the proof, if you like, of our history in a place that we’re told we never existed and I think this is so often on display, and you would know this Chris, but the assault on Palestinian memory and Palestinian documentation has a long history.

We saw it in Sabra and Shatila where the office, the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization] were ransacked by the IDF and seized its archival documents. It’s the maps, it’s the deeds, it’s the memories. And ever since then, and a lot of my work has been on contemporary military assaults of Israeli forces on Palestinian territories.

But the assault is also and always on education, on history, on archives and so you have the seizure and ransacking of you know the Ministry of Culture in 2002. You have the obliteration of universities in Gaza. Every time it’s bombarded and with shocking finality in the recent genocide.

Chris Hedges

Just explain what happened — your own family, its own history, what happened in ‘48, and to what extent as a child you obviously were cognizant of that pain, that loss, but how cognizant were you of what actually happened? But let’s begin with just your own family and their history up to ‘48 and then after ‘48.

Micaela Sahhar

Sure, so my family were a middle-class Greek Orthodox Jerusalemite family. My grandfather was involved in the tourism trade and also they had a furniture shop and he had brothers and they worked across these enterprises together. And at a certain point he bought a property from the Greek Patriarchate who was selling off land in New Jerusalem and built a house out of Jerusalem stone, you know, in the 1920s and early 30s as was common or typical to the era.

It’s interesting, Chris, thinking actually about what happens to my family in 1948 and actually in part as a result of this book, it is of course not 1948 per se, it’s a series of events that lead up to an exile or a departure and create an impossibility. And I think it’s often forgotten, actually, that the British, while suppressing Palestinian political organization, turned a blind eye really and actively enabled in some cases the development of sort of Zionist paramilitary groups in Palestine and certainly in urban areas in Jerusalem.

And throughout the 1940s, those terrorist activities increased. And a really impactful moment in that is the bombing of the King David Hotel in 1946. To this day, I believe it’s the most significant terrorist event that the British experienced in terms of the casualty numbers.

Chris Hedges

Right, and that was what, how many people? 61, I can’t remember the number who were killed.

Micaela Sahhar

Over 90, 96, although reports vary, but 50% of those approximately are Palestinian people. And so I write about it in the book, but my aunt and uncle are walking home from school on the day of the bombing of the King David Hotel and they walk past the destruction of it.

And actually there’s a little boy playing marbles, he doesn’t go to school and my uncle remembers seeing him before school and then afterwards he’s one of the casualties. He’s not documented anywhere. But there are a number of people from Jerusalem who know this story.

And you know, and he’s been blown apart and the marbles are rolling around in his exposed skull. And for my aunt, and to think then about the sort of traumatic events, when my uncle said this and he died some years ago, she said, yeah, I must have seen that, but now I don’t remember.

And about 10 years later, when I was writing the book and I was asking her, she said, no, no, I wasn’t there. I was at home sitting on my balcony and I could see the smoke in the sky and I was eating grapes.

And she was most insistent about the grapes and eventually I wrote it into my book and my cousin who’s a psychiatrist said, well, obviously the grapes are the marbles. And so I suppose there’s this buildup of fear, of anxiety, of terror. And apparently after the bombing of the King David Hotel, there are just funerals for days because there’s over 40 Palestinian casualties.

And although that’s a horrific foreshadowing of what Palestinian people have experienced since then, none more so than the people of Gaza. It’s quite an unprecedented experience in the 1940s to have just funerals for weeks and weeks and weeks. And also the society in Jerusalem is fairly small and quite coherent. And so everyone’s affected.

Everyone knows someone who’s been lost, someone’s cousin, someone’s sister, someone’s friend, someone’s colleague. Everyone knows someone who’s killed in that bombing. So the effect of that is, I think, underestimated in terms of the experience for the Palestinian Jerusalemites in the 1940s.

But then in a very specific sense, the reason why my family ultimately exiled is as a result of another bombing that happens not very long after the announcement of the 1947 partition plan in November 1947, after which, of course, as Joseph Massad says, Palestinians don’t accept it and they think it’s terribly unfair and riots break out on amongst both the Zionist militias and sort of Palestinian liberation groups.

But in early January there’s a bombing of another hotel of a Christian-Arabian hotel, the Semiramis Hotel in Katamon late at night and it gives everyone a shock and my family lives in a neighborhood that’s quite nearby and when I first asked my aunt about it, which was actually while I was writing the book, I suddenly connected the date because it happened on the 4th of January and my father was born 10 days later.

And I said to her, you know, do you remember this bombing? And she said, yes, I do. She said, we thought the roof was going to fall in. We got out of bed, we crawled around on the floor. We didn’t know what to do. And then my father said, realised that all the hospitals were full because of the casualties.

And this is a bombing that kills two dozen people and leads to real chaos. This is early 1948 at this point. And so in order to access medical care, my family go to Amman, to the Italian hospital in Amman, where my grandmother gives birth to my father 10 days later. And during which time they’re debarred from ever returning to their home.

So their intention when they leave is not to leave, their intention when they leave is to seek medical care, medical treatment. And certainly I know Palestinian friends in Gaza have been put in similar situations as well where urgent medical care, if they’re lucky enough to be able to access evacuation on medical grounds.

Chris Hedges

You have thousands of them in Egypt and then talk about what happened after so they can’t go back and then what happens.

Micaela Sahhar

So they can’t go back. So they spend several years in Amman in a makeshift sort of accommodation, which is typical of the era. And Amman is, of course, flooded with Palestinian people. And this is the beginning of the refugee crisis. And this, of course, is why the United Nations establishes UNRWA, the Relief and Works Agency, which is specifically designated for Palestinian people.

And at some point, my grandfather makes the decision to apply for citizenship wherever he can find it. And he has a brother who’s in Australia. So this, of course, obviates or fast tracks his capacity to come here. And so that’s what they do.

They do try and go back to Jerusalem. They get stuck, as one of my aunts recalls, on the sort of east side of the cyclone fence that gets put up down the centre of Jerusalem in the 1950s. They can’t access their home, their property, their business, etc. My grandfather’s quite a versatile worker I suppose and turns his hand to a number of different jobs but ultimately they come out to Australia in 1952 and of course it’s this very final separation in many ways.

My grandmother doesn’t see her eight other siblings more than once again in her life so it’s this very, very substantial fracturing of the fabric of Palestinian relationality, life, family, culture. And in some ways, this book is about a reassembly of those things to allow some sort of, if only literary resolution and reunification or something like this.

Chris Hedges

Well, you deal with fragments, but you also acknowledge the holes. I mean, you have to speculate in a way. You have to guess. You have to...

Micaela Sahhar

That’s right. Yeah, I think this was an important part of thinking about people who are in some ways so vital, but the people left to talk about them were children, you know, and the memories of children are some things loom very large but there’s not a lot of connective fabric if you like between those sort of reflections and the people.

The people who are otherwise lost to us, I suppose there’s the impression of a favorite art, there’s the impression of a missing art, there’s memories that are provoked perhaps by photos, and there’s also the fallibility of memory and the lack of documentation. And some people are harder to follow in a research sense than others because there’s less materials, perhaps they didn’t have children, perhaps they, this sort of thing.

And I’m quite young in my family as well, so I missed out on the storytellers, on some of the storytellers that might have been able to fill in these blanks. But I actually felt this was an important thing to foreground.

I think in an anglosphere context, there’s a real reification of nuclear families, you know. And actually originally when I was trying to publish the book, a publisher said to me, well, it’s very well written, but there’s just too much family in here.

And actually the point was to think about the closeness of some of these family members, their centrality, you know, the way that they created a community and how central this is, I suppose, to the social fabric.

Chris Hedges

Can you talk about in your own childhood, the shadow of exile, how it expressed itself? There was that moment at school, I think, where you tell a teacher that you’re from Palestine and the teacher answers, well, that can’t be because Palestine doesn’t exist. But just talk about to what extent it was more what you intuited emotionally as a kid growing up in a family of exile.

Micaela Sahhar

Yeah. I mean, perhaps this is true of oldest daughters and their fathers, but I was very close to my dad and very close to dad’s family. I think dad’s family had a kind of cultural resilience about them.

So visiting my grandparents was like visiting a sort of a portable Palestine to be transported into their home was to be transported into another reality, you know, in which there was Arabic language, there were various items, although in some ways scant items, but many things recalling who they were certainly in terms of the practices of food. This was quite important.

So there was always a sense, I don’t think there was ever not a sense for me of Palestinian-ness. I think it was the confrontation with the school system that found that to be very confronting. Of course, I went to school in the year of the First Intifada. And so there’s a particular transformation in the imagination perhaps of that preparatory school music teacher of what a Palestinian kid is.

But you know, I encountered this later on as well. And so, later on in the book, I talk about studying Brian Friel’s Freedom of the City, which is a play set in Derry. And this teacher wanting to discuss conflict situations and asking me or asking the class to discuss places that have been, I suppose, contested and this is the 90s and people don’t have a vocabulary for things like settler colonialism or certainly not in schools.

And so there’s this complete lack of understanding of the Palestinian experience in this country. And this comes back to a whole history of Australian support actually for the project of Israel and comes back also to the suppression as I know you would know, Chris, the suppression of Nakba. The fact that the journalists of 1948 who want to cover the Nakba can’t publish the work that they’re producing.

You know, there’s an Australian journalist historian Peter Manning who writes about the fact that the Sydney Morning Herald in this country completely missed the Nakba, reported on what was going on but as a collective picture it never understood that what was going on was as significant as what was going on and so it was missed entirely.

Chris Hedges

That was true in the entire world press. I mean, you had reporters go to Jaffa, which was primarily an Arab city, a Palestinian city, and almost completely ethnically cleansed. It was targeted by the Zionists because they wanted it. And they can describe the empty houses, but they don’t... The Nakba was just almost universally not covered.

Micaela Sahhar

Yeah. That’s right.

Chris Hedges

It was, I mean, you had the physical evidence of it and sometimes the physical evidence was described, but what actually happened is not transmitted.

Micaela Sahhar

That’s right. And in some ways, I think moving about a world in which what’s happened to you hasn’t been conceptualized is a very difficult thing to live with for Palestinian people and for Palestinian people in exile.

I don’t know that I knew the Nakba as a young person. I think I learnt it around the time that I was 10 or 11. My grandfather was a great storyteller and this for me was another way in which Palestine became a reality. But he died when I was quite young and so in writing this book I’ve developed a sort of adult relationship to him in a way that I couldn’t really imagine having done without having written this.

There are a few tapes, there’s a few things he wrote and there are a lot of absolutely glorious photos of him as a young man and as a tour guide in Palestine and in Jerusalem. And I suppose he’s also a somewhat ephemeral presence on the edge of my life that has left a very big impression on it.

Chris Hedges

What did you learn from this, from writing the book that you didn’t know before?

Micaela Sahhar

There’s a line in a memoir by the daughter of Khalil Sakakini, Hala Sakakini, Jerusalem and I, and she talks about the bombing of the Semiramis Hotel and about trying to stop Palestinian people from leaving the neighborhoods that they lived in at that time. And she says that she would say to people, you should feel ashamed to leave.

And I think what I learned, a number of things I learned actually, you know, they’re small and large. I think they’re the small family histories that also describe in some ways a national history. I think my father had carried the guilt with him all his life of his family leaving Jerusalem. And it was only through me writing the story and grappling with both the events leading up to his birth, which I don’t think anyone had ever discussed with him.

And finally had a conversation with his sister about it. And it’s extraordinary to me that a baby for 77 years had carried the weight of his family’s exile in his body and on his shoulders. So I think, maybe it’s a little bit beyond me, but I think for my father, that was a really important discovery. And for me also, I understand that what happened to my family was circumstantial and that this sort of, this idea of shame in the Palestinians who departed is really something that has to be put to one side.

I hope I made a space to be honest for Palestinian people who are in the diaspora and who quite often disappeared at both ends of their diaspora. They’re disappeared by the state of Israel and quite often disappeared in the societies they go into, certainly in a place like Australia where the demographic dream is to flatten everyone out into the same sort of product.

And I hope this creates a space for people who read it to be Palestinian people, not people of Palestinian descent, because that’s what colonialism sort of wants to do, right? To eradicate the indigeneity or the Palestinian-ness of people.

And I think it helped me to understand considerably more, and actually I’m in the middle of writing a paper about it at the moment, but to understand the degree to which terrorism was used as a tactic in the urban spaces of Jerusalem during the 1940s in particular.

And since the book’s been published, a lot of people have contacted me from the Palestinian diaspora to tell me it’s the first time they’ve read themselves in writing. Because although there’s a lot of work on Palestine, Palestinian epics by various authors and there’s beautiful poetry, but I do think that the Palestinian diaspora has seen itself as somewhat lesser, up until really the Unity Intifada in 2021, which was an important moment that shifted some of that relationality between the outside and the inside.

For me, I think there was a real need for this book and the feedback I’ve had from various people have managed to track me down that for the first time they’ve seen themselves written somewhere. Both the wispiness of the stories but the reality and the vitalness of that in their life has been an important lesson.

Chris Hedges

You go back to Palestine and you visit these places your family is from. Can you talk about that?

Micaela Sahhar

Yeah, I mean, I’m a person who’s quite geographically challenged in ordinary circumstances, but going back to Jerusalem, I have spent years studying pre-1948 maps and looking at images and piecing things together. And at one level, I felt a little bit like a pigeon, who understood where they were going, who understood the terrain and the geography, or a migratory bird who knows where they’re going without necessarily having been taught.

And my approach to Jerusalem, initially, was through the West Bank and a friend’s brother had driven me down to the border and he just said to me, then you’ll see the wall and you’ll understand how pathetic they are. And so there was this sense as I drove through the West Bank and sort of, I don’t think anything quite prepares you for the reality of the way in which our country has been divided by Israeli settlement and terrorism really.

But when I arrived to Jerusalem, I felt very, and when I first, you know, I saw my grandparents’ house, I suppose, but also walked the streets, which in a sense are ordinary streets. I think people really reify Jerusalem and it’s part of the problem for the Palestinian people is the reification of this city and this place.

But to try and experience it as neighborhoods in the way that I experienced the neighborhoods of my father’s childhood was incredibly powerful. And I tried to walk out. I suppose the walks that my grandparents and my aunts and my uncles had done with mixed success because of the way in which things are divided, the way in which things have been redeveloped.

And I also understood in the materiality of the place and the physicality of the place, things that I could not have understood had I not been able to go, both the kind of the awe and the beauty and the in some ways devastation of my grandparents life. My grandfather, like nearly any Palestinian you speak to, wanted to be buried at home.

And of course it wasn’t to be and it wasn’t possible. But the other really special thing that happened for me going to Jerusalem and to Palestine was reconnecting with family who remained and learning all kinds of fascinating and interesting things about that, hearing memories sort of refracted through other branches of the family that have now come to me, having stories offered.

Actually, after I published the book, a tour guide contacted me and told me a story about the relationship between my brother and one of, sorry, my grandfather and one of his brothers. And that in their house, they used to wheel a phone between their two apartments. I mean, it’s a tiny little detail, but to someone whose trade is really in stories, and I think the inheritance for Palestinian people is often in story and in memory to have this little image is just beautiful.

I had a chat on the phone to a very elderly lady who was employed by my grandfather, which again, had I not gone, wouldn’t have been possible. And she could describe the furniture showroom that he had and another gentleman who described to me how beautiful the display in that shop had been.

And that area, which is the Mamilla Mall area, the name exists today but it was all moved through some sort of Israeli architectural project and so that’s certainly not the topography of the time that I’m writing about or trying to access.

Chris Hedges

And how do you watch Gaza? I mean, it is unlike anything we’ve seen in the history of Palestine, even the Nakba. And of course, so much of what’s happening in Gaza, as you mentioned, is about erasure, complete, not just physical erasure, cultural erasure.

They’ve targeted their poets, their professors, their doctors, the entire educated elite, and targeted is the right word because the drones hit specifically their apartment or the journalists who as soon as they finish their stand up or they’re in their media tent are murdered. What is Gaza evoked for you?

Micaela Sahhar

As a writer, I mean, there are no words, there are no words strong enough to evoke what Gaza has been, I think, to describe it as the nadir of human experience is apt, but also hardly touches the sides of what we’ve been, we’ve been watching. I do think there is no way to understand Gaza without understanding an entire history of erasure, deflection, destruction from first the Zionists and then from the Israeli state.

So in a sense to understand 1948 is also to understand 2025. And to think about, you know, we’ve been talking, Chris, about the fact that the Nakba was missed entirely. People went and reported it and they missed it. In a sense, the genocide has been missed too. I mean, you had an experience during your Australian trip, was to be interviewed by someone who refused to connect any of the dots. People have the facts in front of them and they refuse to understand the bigger meaning.

And I think that’s, in some ways, Palestinian people are perhaps well equipped. I spoke about this at the start, this idea to grow up as a diaspora Palestinian is to be equipped with a particular kind of superpower, which is to understand the enormous rift between a dominant culture and what you know to be true from the people you love and trust. Has it availed us of much in this period?

I mean, I think over a number of years, over a number of decades, advocacy for Palestine has become stronger. We’ve developed better allies. I mean, I’m wearing a much loved t-shirt of mine, which is a Blackfulla Palestine Solidarity t-shirt. And just after the genocide began coincided with a moment here in Australia where there had been a referendum to change the constitution to offer a voice to parliament for First Nations people.

And it was not, it was not carried. And so at a rally a couple of weeks into the genocide First Nations allies and friends included us into their day of mourning and called it from our invasion to your Nakba and then created these t-shirts of solidarity.

And I think those solidarities have been so vital in this time. You know, we saw it with the Red Nation in the States who immediately called the genocide a genocide. They didn’t wait around for two years, unlike, some states that have managed to call it a genocide.

And here in Australia too, there’s been the absolutely appalling, time-wasting, draining distraction of the fights around what is and isn’t anti-Semitism. And a lot of those arguments are conducted in very bad faith. We see it with the IHRA [International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance] definition of anti-Semitism, which has been shot down in certain spaces but reared its head again here and has really, along with a number of other movements, cost so much time and energy.

The idea that from the River to the sea is an anti-semitic or even genocidal slogan, I think it’s been quite extraordinary. I think this was a moment where we probably thought that at last the narrative could not be denied. And amazingly, there have been other distractions, other deflections. Maybe not so, maybe not surprisingly, but certainly amazingly.

And I think if you don’t understand what happened to Palestinian people across the 20th century, you can’t make sense of the way that a Western international hegemonic consensus has tried to disappear a genocide now.

Chris Hedges

Great, thanks Micaela. And I want to thank Diego [Ramos], Thomas [Hedges], Max [Jones], and Sofia [Menemenlis], who produced the show. You can find me at ChrisHedges.Substack.com.

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Photos

Gazans-Pray-Amid-Destruction

Children stand at the destroyed Albani Mosque in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip on October 17, 2025. Hamas announced that it was committed to a US-brokered ceasefire agreement with Israel and the return of all bodies of hostages still missing under the rubble of Gaza. (Photo by Doaa Albaz / Middle East Images via AFP) (Photo by DOAA ALBAZ/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images)

Funeral-in-Khan-Yunis

Palestinian mourners gather as a child squats beside a body wrapped in a white shroud, killed by Israeli shelling, in the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Yunis, Gaza Strip, on November 26, 2025. (Photo by Doaa Albaz / Middle East Images / AFP via Getty Images)

ISRAEL-PALESTINIAN-CONFLICT-ECONOMY

A shopkeeper plays an instrument as he waits for customers next to Israeli security forces in the Old City market of Jerusalem on November 17, 2025. (Photo by Jewel SAMAD / AFP) (Photo by JEWEL SAMAD/AFP via Getty Images)

PALESTINIAN-ISRAEL-CONFLICT

Israeli, Palestinian and foreign activists hold placards against Israeli occupation and house demolitions in east Jerusalem predominantly Arab neighbourhood of Silwan, on November 8, 2025 during a protest over Israel’s planned evictions of Palestinian families from homes in the eastern sector’s Silwan district. (Photo by AHMAD GHARABLI / AFP) (Photo by AHMAD GHARABLI/AFP via Getty Images)

Palestinian refugees leaving Gaza Gettyimages Hrant Nakashian, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Detail of Falls Map 4 Ottoman defences at Beersheba Cyril Falls, A. F. Beck, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Hollinger’s Jerusalem Post For Sale

JERUSALEM, ISRAEL - MARCH 10: The day’s edition of The Jerusalem Post lies above an original edition from exactly sixty years earlier, March 10, 1944, in the newspaper’s offices March 10, 2004 in Jerusalem, Israel. (Photo by David Silverman/Getty Images)

Palestinian Refugees Flee from Southern Lebanon

Palestinian refugees arrive at camp Sidon, fleeing from the bombardments and the Israelian army, which continues its advance in southern Lebanon. (Photo by Claude Salhani/Sygma via Getty Images)

Massacres des camps de Sabra et Chatila

Femmes et enfants palestiniens aux abords du stade après les massacres des camps de Sabra et Chatila par les phalangistes le 18 septembre 1982 à Beyrouth, Liban. (Photo by Alain MINGAM/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)

Islamic University turned into a shelter for Palestinians in Gaza

GAZA CITY, GAZA - MARCH 22: An interior view of demolished Islamic University as Palestinians take shelter with makeshift tents at the campus in Gaza City, Gaza on March 22, 2025. Palestinians continue to struggle with problems in accessing water, food and basic services due to ongoing Israeli attacks. (Photo by Hamza Z. H. Qraiqea/Anadolu via Getty Images)

British Military Camp at klm. 41, Lubban-Nablus, Middle East Rd. British troops on observation post with rifles, machine-guns & flare-lights, view looking toward Sinjel from height above Lubban, West Bank

British Military Camp at klm. 41, Lubban-Nablus, Middle East Rd. British troops on observation post with rifles, machine-guns & flare-lights, view looking toward Sinjel from height above Lubban, West Bank. (Photo by: Sepia Times/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

Members of the Special Night Squads in British Army uniform, Palestine, c1938-1939.

Members of the Special Night Squads in British Army uniform, Palestine, c1938-1939. Brigadier General Orde Wingate (1903-1944) organised the Special Night Squads - armed groups formed of British volunteers and men from the Haganah (Jewish militia). (Photo by Jewish Chronicle/Heritage Images/Getty Images)

British Troops Digging Through Rubble of King David Hotel

The southern wing of the King David Hotel, which was the headquarters of the British Army in Palestine, was blown up by the Zionist terrorist organization Irgun. British personnel disregarded a telephoned warning; as a consequence, 92 people died. (Photo by © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)

The Semiramis Hotel bombing

The Semiramis Hotel bombing. carried out by the Haganah on the Christian owned Semiramis Hotel in the Katamon neighbourhood of Jerusalem in Mandatory Palestine. January 1948. (Photo by: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

Palestinian refugees queue for food distributed by

GAZA, ISRAEL - NOVEMBER 9: Palestinian refugees queue for food distributed by the UNRWA (UN Relief and Work Agency for Palestinian refugees) at a camp in Gaza 09 November 1956. Des rTfugiTs palestiniens attendant la distribution de nourriture effectuTe par l’UNWRA (Agence des Nations unies de secours aux rTfugiTs palestiniens) dans un camp de Gaza le 09 novembre 1956. (Photo credit should read RENE JARLAND/AFP via Getty Images)

Freedom of the City Royal Court 1973 Northern Ireland Political Ephemera Collection

Disorders in Lod, May 2021 Israel Police, CC BY-SA 3.0

<https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Israeli West Bank Barrier Justin McIntosh, CC BY 2.0

<https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

TOPSHOT-PALESTINIAN-ISRAEL-CONFLICT-WEATHER

TOPSHOT - Displaced palestinians stand on a road after heavy rain in Jabalia city, northern Gaza Strip, on November 25, 2025. The Gaza Strip has been largely reduced to rubble after two years of fighting, sparked by Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, which resulted in the deaths of 1,221 people. (Photo by Omar AL-QATTAA / AFP via Getty Images)

Italian Daily Politics 2023

ROME, ITALY - DECEMBER 10: Pro-Palestine activists with kites and Palestinian flags hold banners with the names of the victims of Gaza and the text “They have names, they had dreams” as they remember Refaat al-Areer (poet, writer and literature teacher, murdered in Gaza with his family), at the entrance to the publishing fair “Più Libri Più Liberi” on December 10, 2023 in Rome, Italy.(Photo by Simona Granati - Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images)