Israel’s settler colonial project perpetuates the cycle of violence against the indigenous inhabitants of historic Palestine. Palestinians have been forced to speak back in the language Israel speaks.
n.b. Marek Edelmann, the only leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising to survive WWII, was a life-long anti-Zionist who condemned Israel for doing to Palestinians what was done to Jews.
It’s time for Americans to drill down and do an accounting of the role of the Israel lobby in foreign affairs. Especially in amoral unprincipled invasions like Iraq, Libya, and dubious ones like Afghanistan. It seems on the surface at least, that pro-Israel media and columnists are predictably for the demonization and invasion and devastation of Israel’s neighbours.
They just need to read a few books. Chomsky has done the work - all it takes is a trip to the library (and turning off the corporate-owned “news.”)
However, do we really think this is going to happen? Instead, the vast majority seem to be closed-minded to history and nuance and change. People in America (or replace with any Western ally) seem to have such cognitive dissonance: their God and their country and their politician can never be wrong.
So onward it goes - let’s go disarm the weapons of mass destruction in Gaza....or the next place. Merry f#*king Christmas. ....If you work for Raytheon or some such outfit I presume it’s some pretty big gifts under the tree.
It is clear that the current slaughter of innocent civilians in Gaza will only lead to additional slaughter in the future. I am amazed that the "leaders" of the US government can't seem to understand this basic fact. A just resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is desperately needed, but such a possibility seems more remote than ever. Perhaps I expect too much from a nation that invaded Iraq on the basis of lies. It's worth remembering that Biden voted for that invasion.
It isn't. The United States is in no wise neither a democracy nor a democratic republic, but an oligarchy featuring unlimited political bribery for those who can afford pricey lawyers.
How can they take money and be fair? Corruption to the core. Our system is out of control and run by the God Almighty Dollar with soul-less people turning their backs on Americans and the world. Humanity deserves better!!!!
The world was warned by a former president and war hero that the military industrial complex would destroy democracy in America, but ours would not be the first ignorant civilization to forget its own history. I wrote about President Eisenhower’s historic watching for Project Censored a few years ago. https://www.projectcensored.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/C17_09_Buttar_IkesDystopianDream-copy.pdf
Washington’s commitment to militarism is thoroughly bipartisan, which itself reflects an institutional corruption of which Americans generally remain oblivious. That is a frequent theme of my writing on Substack, most recently, including this post from a few weeks before the Israeli genocide escalated. https://shahidbuttar.substack.com/p/anybody-seen-a-fighter-plane
You are welcome. A list that ought to be visible to every American. Were our news platforms truly dedicated to the ethic of serving an informed citizenry.
I think the list to which you refer has to do with comparisons of energy consumption in the world…in which case I believe I lifted it from Counterpunch’s (counterpunch.com) Nathaniel St. Clair’s "Roaming Charges”. He consistently has on-going informative data about scientific assessments of climate events and its associations…his Roaming Charges appears most Fridays in Counterpunch. If you don’t get anywhere with that, please let me know and I’ll try other means to find the source
The number of israeli victims is not 1200. My information is that the Zionists first inflated the number to 1400, including 346 military dead. 38 days later they first reduced to 1200 officially, then , much later, they said 900! Like the gruesome details about "40 babies beheaded" and "mass rapes" invented by the Zionists immediately, most of their statements are lies and wild exaggerations.
Recognizing the genocide in Gaza as a continuation of the colonial project to eradicate indigeneity is critical, because ultimately it exposes the complicity of actors well beyond the Middle East.
Washington’s role has proven critical in enabling Israel’s belligerence and disrespect for international human rights, and is also independently problematic by reflecting an ongoing pattern that has lasted decades. Too many Americans forget how recent was the genocide in North America, and how even supposedly “progressive” communities remain complicit. I wrote about that theme a few weeks ago at an earlier stage of the still unfolding massacre. https://shahidbuttar.substack.com/p/indigenous-lives-matter-from-north
Thank you Chris for having the guts to understand the history that drove the Palestinians on Oct 7 to want to lash out, kill and grab any Israeli they could see. They surely knew they were committing suicide - for their people and probably themselves - by their actions - that this would be their last chance to "even" the score, but they lashed out anyway. If I had suffered 50 or 75 years of oppression I would probably have been with them, crazy with hatred. I get so tired of people trying to show how even handed they are to Israel that they begin every statement with a denunciation of the "war crimes" of Hamas before moving on to the real war crimes of Israel. What Israel is doing is so savage, so horribly indecent, that any criticism of Hamas's killings needs to be subordinated to an afterthought, long after the crimes of Israel have been dissected and denounced.
I can't help but weep at the opportunity the Israelis had, but spat on, after Oct. 7. They could (conceivably) have taken responsibility for the hatred they had created and sworn to do better. They could have thrown open the walls and gates and check points of Gaza and embraced Palestinians as brothers in a strange land. The Jews I knew growing up in NYC might have thought that way. Palestinians can work on a kibbutz the same as anyone else. Eschewing hatred could have been a gift to the world. Why is hatred and militarism always the first choice of human beings?
War is not that special event WAR!!! There is no erasure of accountability for killing that happens in War. Every willing soldier, every general, every politician who causes the death of another is a murderer and should be judged by the standard, civilian rules of behavior. I don't accept war as a special status. It doesn't exist for me. I read today about AR-15's and the effects of the utmost weapons used in war. Why are weapons allowed to be created that are so lethal? I think we need to pass laws that restrict all weapons to be no more lethal than a slingshot. I know how crazy such a thought is. I know how it runs smack up against the drive for revenge and profit. But it's possible, if humankind would abandon the drive to kill. We are a universal tribe, that are losing our planet to hot weather because of our stupidity. This is the one drive we need to obey - to protect this one planet from its cleansing of all species. We are all in the same boat. If only we could think rationally.
In general I agree with you, but on one point absolutely not. Palestinians are NOT allowed to work on kibbutzim like "anyone else" - meaning Jews. This is a fundamental point in Chomsky's Peace In The Middle East, where he early on describes his disillusionment with Zionism after witnessing the mistreatment of Palestinian workers by kibbutzniks.
I still hear people argue that Palestine wasn’t a proper country; as though that somehow proves that they didn’t exist? or had no history? or deserve no consideration? I still haven’t figured out the point of that argument. I doubt that there is one. It’s probably intended to just gaslight you and make you shut up and go away.
Forget Hitler. It's more like the treatment of the indigenous inhabits in the U.S.
They didn’t have proper deeds to the land in proper English, or enjoy a form of ownership that the invaders wanted to recognize. And anyway, they were subhuman, heathens, and in the way of progress.
I read this essay and listened to the reading. It is good to revisit its substance.
I think Chris Hedges' approach will lead to nothing but more death. He offers no path to a solution, indeed he has written as much with Calvinist Determinism: "The peace process is irrecoverable." & "The only language left is the language of death. It's how Israel speaks to the Palestinians. It is how the Palestinians are forced to speak back."
Hedges is now employing the rhetoric of oppressor and oppressed along with colonizers. In this context it is intended as pointing the way to justice. Such a position is meaningless because is not a departure from 75 years of failure.
Hedges ignores entirely the root causes of this continuous and festering dilemma. Both the Palestinian leadership and the Israeli leadership understand each other all too well. Both are playing a zero-sum-game with the final objective being not a peaceful coexistence but rather the total annihilation of the other.
Deploring on the one hand the events of 10/7/2023 and then portraying them as an expected and therefore understandable evil only leads to more death. Such rhetoric maintains the zero-sum-game.
Israel's current leadership sees this conflict as existential and through that lens all of its actions are justified. A people who came out of near eradication in Europe are far closer to genocide that Hedges ever approached. He generally ignores this completely or when acknowledging it blithely opines that such a history does not justify genocide. In truth, Hedges has little concept of genocide other than employing it with rhetorical flourish.
The HAMAS leadership is much to blame for this tragedy. It is that leadership that decides upon the strategies employed for liberation.
As well intended as they may be, the global voices supporting HAMAS are complicit in the death and destruction.
Pedants like Hedges support, with their truth, further death.
Gandhi transformed the Indian subcontinent and he did it in less than 40 years. We are 75 years since the Nakba and nothing has changed.
A lot of words to knock Chris Hedges, and that's all. 'closer to genocide...' Anybody can have a sound idea of 'genocide'. - You seem to like hearing yourself talk.
Next up on the US neocon war mongers hit list is China. Having lost the last twenty or so wars initiated by this sad crew of faux Christian soldiers this next war with China will be a spectacular defeat which in all likelihood will spell the end of the American Empire as the aspiring world dominator, less than a century old, not unlike the Nazis or Communists who also couldn’t make it to a century of rule. It’s clear these failed enterprises of global domination no longer work like the Romans, Ottomans or Persians once did. God speed. Americans don’t deserve or have the merit, skill or aptitude to dominate this planet.
We’ve known about “the evil-done-to becomes an-evil-doer” by the 2,500 year Iliad documentation by Homer regarding the berserker Achilles, an explicit symbol of the perversity and criminality of war.
However, before my awareness of Homer and Achilles, I, 18 years old, first learned about this human perversity by experiencing enforced participation in it, witnessing the War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity thereof, perpetrated by the Government of the United States in the horrors and nightmare in Vietnam, made possible by the U.S. Assembly Line industry that successfully manufactured a 3,000,000 Corpse Count Commodity product while developing the world’s greatest Blitzkrieg Gold Medal bombing record in North Vietnam .... and still wars nonstop are streaming to this very day, a death cult gold mine pouring filthy lucre into World-wide One Percent’s Power Black Box organized, coordinated, managed, and enforced by non-stop threat, blackmail, intimidation, and violence of holocaust dimensions.
To this very day, following the current flood of America’s death cult gold mine wars, U.S. Subaltern Government of Israel now perpetrates the same with the full assurance of the U.S. Government, while a super majority of 70 % of American Citizens and every nation but two, with clarity of thought and mind, vehemently oppose.
22,000 dead non-combatant civilian Palestinian citizens and children in Palestine today is not a matter of Israeli Self-Defense, but rather the crime of perpetrating genocide as coached a nation that from its birth to now developed its incredibly profitable Genocide Industry, effectively guided by its true religion: Satanic Cannibal Capitalism’s mandate to garner absolute control of the world’s filthy lucre. The expression of “self-defense,” in this case is an example of Orwellian Newspeak, the political abuse and murder of language that amounts to the pornographic propaganda of criminal violence
The whole world, led by the U.S. President ordered and enforced by his American Death Cult Corporate Gangster Bosses, now seems deadlocked in a global downward death cult spiral
When the Global Nuclear Holocaust is initiated by the nihilistic ruling cabal, pray and plead to be directly under the various nuclear detonations detonating, easily a kissing blessing o love to be thankful for when one understands that one’s micro-second human materiality’s vaporization will not be felt nor known into that good night, that the slow agony of radiation disease snd the even slower agonizing death-genocide of the starvation of Nuclear Winter, with its accompanying gestation of disease, plague, cannibalism, and the slow, creeping tidal wave of dropping darkness, all the aforementioned will be evaded by the flash finishing gentle vapor vanisher.
I am not sure where to post this comment among Chris's writings. But his notion that the savagery of Israel towards Gazans is antithetical to the best traditions of Judaism is dead-wrong. The savagery of Israel towards Gazans is completely congruent with the precepts of classical Judaism that uphold the exclusive righteousness of Jews while denigrating all "others." Chris has only to read the magnificent and short work by Israel Shahak, Jewish History, Jewish Religion. Most people conflate Reform Judaism with what is actually encoded in the Talmud, hence Chris's confusion.
Powerful analysis of the revenge syndrome. It must be resisted. At the risk of sounding idealistic, we must turn to the likes of the standard set by Jesus of Nazareth - forgiving, and even loving the perpetrator-enemy. "no viosence ! did you hear me ? NO VIOLENCE !!" If the pattern of revenge is to be accepted as your article implies, we are ALL doomed.....
n.b. Marek Edelmann, the only leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising to survive WWII, was a life-long anti-Zionist who condemned Israel for doing to Palestinians what was done to Jews.
It’s time for Americans to drill down and do an accounting of the role of the Israel lobby in foreign affairs. Especially in amoral unprincipled invasions like Iraq, Libya, and dubious ones like Afghanistan. It seems on the surface at least, that pro-Israel media and columnists are predictably for the demonization and invasion and devastation of Israel’s neighbours.
They just need to read a few books. Chomsky has done the work - all it takes is a trip to the library (and turning off the corporate-owned “news.”)
However, do we really think this is going to happen? Instead, the vast majority seem to be closed-minded to history and nuance and change. People in America (or replace with any Western ally) seem to have such cognitive dissonance: their God and their country and their politician can never be wrong.
So onward it goes - let’s go disarm the weapons of mass destruction in Gaza....or the next place. Merry f#*king Christmas. ....If you work for Raytheon or some such outfit I presume it’s some pretty big gifts under the tree.
It is clear that the current slaughter of innocent civilians in Gaza will only lead to additional slaughter in the future. I am amazed that the "leaders" of the US government can't seem to understand this basic fact. A just resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is desperately needed, but such a possibility seems more remote than ever. Perhaps I expect too much from a nation that invaded Iraq on the basis of lies. It's worth remembering that Biden voted for that invasion.
The American leadership understand just fine.
They don't care..
n.b. Biden did more than merely vote for The War On Iraq..he was a principal congressional architect of that particular crime.
Please see my comment re Blood Money re 10 top USA politicians anointed with most AIPAC cash.
"BLOOD MONEY: THE TOP TEN POLITICIANS TAKING THE MOST ISRAEL LOBBY CASH
By Alan MacLeod, MintPress News.
December 19, 2023 Educate!
Biden $4,346,264
Menendez $2,483,205
McConnell $1,953,160
Schumer $1,725,324
Hoyer $1,620,294
Wyden (OR) $1,279,376
Cruz $1,299,194
Durbin , $1,126,020
Brown , $1,028,686
Gottheimer $1,109,370"
Unbelievable! A I P A C is a dangerous, corrupting outfit. How can anyone claim that there is Democracy in the US?!
It isn't. The United States is in no wise neither a democracy nor a democratic republic, but an oligarchy featuring unlimited political bribery for those who can afford pricey lawyers.
How can they take money and be fair? Corruption to the core. Our system is out of control and run by the God Almighty Dollar with soul-less people turning their backs on Americans and the world. Humanity deserves better!!!!
The world was warned by a former president and war hero that the military industrial complex would destroy democracy in America, but ours would not be the first ignorant civilization to forget its own history. I wrote about President Eisenhower’s historic watching for Project Censored a few years ago. https://www.projectcensored.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/C17_09_Buttar_IkesDystopianDream-copy.pdf
Washington’s commitment to militarism is thoroughly bipartisan, which itself reflects an institutional corruption of which Americans generally remain oblivious. That is a frequent theme of my writing on Substack, most recently, including this post from a few weeks before the Israeli genocide escalated. https://shahidbuttar.substack.com/p/anybody-seen-a-fighter-plane
This is a useful list, for which, thanks. It is utterly disgusting.
You are welcome. A list that ought to be visible to every American. Were our news platforms truly dedicated to the ethic of serving an informed citizenry.
could you tell me where this list came from.....that would be very helpful
I think the list to which you refer has to do with comparisons of energy consumption in the world…in which case I believe I lifted it from Counterpunch’s (counterpunch.com) Nathaniel St. Clair’s "Roaming Charges”. He consistently has on-going informative data about scientific assessments of climate events and its associations…his Roaming Charges appears most Fridays in Counterpunch. If you don’t get anywhere with that, please let me know and I’ll try other means to find the source
The number of israeli victims is not 1200. My information is that the Zionists first inflated the number to 1400, including 346 military dead. 38 days later they first reduced to 1200 officially, then , much later, they said 900! Like the gruesome details about "40 babies beheaded" and "mass rapes" invented by the Zionists immediately, most of their statements are lies and wild exaggerations.
Recognizing the genocide in Gaza as a continuation of the colonial project to eradicate indigeneity is critical, because ultimately it exposes the complicity of actors well beyond the Middle East.
Washington’s role has proven critical in enabling Israel’s belligerence and disrespect for international human rights, and is also independently problematic by reflecting an ongoing pattern that has lasted decades. Too many Americans forget how recent was the genocide in North America, and how even supposedly “progressive” communities remain complicit. I wrote about that theme a few weeks ago at an earlier stage of the still unfolding massacre. https://shahidbuttar.substack.com/p/indigenous-lives-matter-from-north
Thank you Chris for having the guts to understand the history that drove the Palestinians on Oct 7 to want to lash out, kill and grab any Israeli they could see. They surely knew they were committing suicide - for their people and probably themselves - by their actions - that this would be their last chance to "even" the score, but they lashed out anyway. If I had suffered 50 or 75 years of oppression I would probably have been with them, crazy with hatred. I get so tired of people trying to show how even handed they are to Israel that they begin every statement with a denunciation of the "war crimes" of Hamas before moving on to the real war crimes of Israel. What Israel is doing is so savage, so horribly indecent, that any criticism of Hamas's killings needs to be subordinated to an afterthought, long after the crimes of Israel have been dissected and denounced.
I can't help but weep at the opportunity the Israelis had, but spat on, after Oct. 7. They could (conceivably) have taken responsibility for the hatred they had created and sworn to do better. They could have thrown open the walls and gates and check points of Gaza and embraced Palestinians as brothers in a strange land. The Jews I knew growing up in NYC might have thought that way. Palestinians can work on a kibbutz the same as anyone else. Eschewing hatred could have been a gift to the world. Why is hatred and militarism always the first choice of human beings?
War is not that special event WAR!!! There is no erasure of accountability for killing that happens in War. Every willing soldier, every general, every politician who causes the death of another is a murderer and should be judged by the standard, civilian rules of behavior. I don't accept war as a special status. It doesn't exist for me. I read today about AR-15's and the effects of the utmost weapons used in war. Why are weapons allowed to be created that are so lethal? I think we need to pass laws that restrict all weapons to be no more lethal than a slingshot. I know how crazy such a thought is. I know how it runs smack up against the drive for revenge and profit. But it's possible, if humankind would abandon the drive to kill. We are a universal tribe, that are losing our planet to hot weather because of our stupidity. This is the one drive we need to obey - to protect this one planet from its cleansing of all species. We are all in the same boat. If only we could think rationally.
In general I agree with you, but on one point absolutely not. Palestinians are NOT allowed to work on kibbutzim like "anyone else" - meaning Jews. This is a fundamental point in Chomsky's Peace In The Middle East, where he early on describes his disillusionment with Zionism after witnessing the mistreatment of Palestinian workers by kibbutzniks.
I still hear people argue that Palestine wasn’t a proper country; as though that somehow proves that they didn’t exist? or had no history? or deserve no consideration? I still haven’t figured out the point of that argument. I doubt that there is one. It’s probably intended to just gaslight you and make you shut up and go away.
Forget Hitler. It's more like the treatment of the indigenous inhabits in the U.S.
They didn’t have proper deeds to the land in proper English, or enjoy a form of ownership that the invaders wanted to recognize. And anyway, they were subhuman, heathens, and in the way of progress.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/19/us/politics/biden-israel-gaza-poll.html
The polling about the Israeli genocide campaign in the U.S. depicted in the above link is jaw-dropping.
Helps me understand why masking is so unpopular.
I read this essay and listened to the reading. It is good to revisit its substance.
I think Chris Hedges' approach will lead to nothing but more death. He offers no path to a solution, indeed he has written as much with Calvinist Determinism: "The peace process is irrecoverable." & "The only language left is the language of death. It's how Israel speaks to the Palestinians. It is how the Palestinians are forced to speak back."
Hedges is now employing the rhetoric of oppressor and oppressed along with colonizers. In this context it is intended as pointing the way to justice. Such a position is meaningless because is not a departure from 75 years of failure.
Hedges ignores entirely the root causes of this continuous and festering dilemma. Both the Palestinian leadership and the Israeli leadership understand each other all too well. Both are playing a zero-sum-game with the final objective being not a peaceful coexistence but rather the total annihilation of the other.
Deploring on the one hand the events of 10/7/2023 and then portraying them as an expected and therefore understandable evil only leads to more death. Such rhetoric maintains the zero-sum-game.
Israel's current leadership sees this conflict as existential and through that lens all of its actions are justified. A people who came out of near eradication in Europe are far closer to genocide that Hedges ever approached. He generally ignores this completely or when acknowledging it blithely opines that such a history does not justify genocide. In truth, Hedges has little concept of genocide other than employing it with rhetorical flourish.
The HAMAS leadership is much to blame for this tragedy. It is that leadership that decides upon the strategies employed for liberation.
As well intended as they may be, the global voices supporting HAMAS are complicit in the death and destruction.
Pedants like Hedges support, with their truth, further death.
Gandhi transformed the Indian subcontinent and he did it in less than 40 years. We are 75 years since the Nakba and nothing has changed.
A lot of words to knock Chris Hedges, and that's all. 'closer to genocide...' Anybody can have a sound idea of 'genocide'. - You seem to like hearing yourself talk.
Next up on the US neocon war mongers hit list is China. Having lost the last twenty or so wars initiated by this sad crew of faux Christian soldiers this next war with China will be a spectacular defeat which in all likelihood will spell the end of the American Empire as the aspiring world dominator, less than a century old, not unlike the Nazis or Communists who also couldn’t make it to a century of rule. It’s clear these failed enterprises of global domination no longer work like the Romans, Ottomans or Persians once did. God speed. Americans don’t deserve or have the merit, skill or aptitude to dominate this planet.
Thank you. Shared with my electeds.
We’ve known about “the evil-done-to becomes an-evil-doer” by the 2,500 year Iliad documentation by Homer regarding the berserker Achilles, an explicit symbol of the perversity and criminality of war.
However, before my awareness of Homer and Achilles, I, 18 years old, first learned about this human perversity by experiencing enforced participation in it, witnessing the War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity thereof, perpetrated by the Government of the United States in the horrors and nightmare in Vietnam, made possible by the U.S. Assembly Line industry that successfully manufactured a 3,000,000 Corpse Count Commodity product while developing the world’s greatest Blitzkrieg Gold Medal bombing record in North Vietnam .... and still wars nonstop are streaming to this very day, a death cult gold mine pouring filthy lucre into World-wide One Percent’s Power Black Box organized, coordinated, managed, and enforced by non-stop threat, blackmail, intimidation, and violence of holocaust dimensions.
To this very day, following the current flood of America’s death cult gold mine wars, U.S. Subaltern Government of Israel now perpetrates the same with the full assurance of the U.S. Government, while a super majority of 70 % of American Citizens and every nation but two, with clarity of thought and mind, vehemently oppose.
22,000 dead non-combatant civilian Palestinian citizens and children in Palestine today is not a matter of Israeli Self-Defense, but rather the crime of perpetrating genocide as coached a nation that from its birth to now developed its incredibly profitable Genocide Industry, effectively guided by its true religion: Satanic Cannibal Capitalism’s mandate to garner absolute control of the world’s filthy lucre. The expression of “self-defense,” in this case is an example of Orwellian Newspeak, the political abuse and murder of language that amounts to the pornographic propaganda of criminal violence
The whole world, led by the U.S. President ordered and enforced by his American Death Cult Corporate Gangster Bosses, now seems deadlocked in a global downward death cult spiral
When the Global Nuclear Holocaust is initiated by the nihilistic ruling cabal, pray and plead to be directly under the various nuclear detonations detonating, easily a kissing blessing o love to be thankful for when one understands that one’s micro-second human materiality’s vaporization will not be felt nor known into that good night, that the slow agony of radiation disease snd the even slower agonizing death-genocide of the starvation of Nuclear Winter, with its accompanying gestation of disease, plague, cannibalism, and the slow, creeping tidal wave of dropping darkness, all the aforementioned will be evaded by the flash finishing gentle vapor vanisher.
I am not sure where to post this comment among Chris's writings. But his notion that the savagery of Israel towards Gazans is antithetical to the best traditions of Judaism is dead-wrong. The savagery of Israel towards Gazans is completely congruent with the precepts of classical Judaism that uphold the exclusive righteousness of Jews while denigrating all "others." Chris has only to read the magnificent and short work by Israel Shahak, Jewish History, Jewish Religion. Most people conflate Reform Judaism with what is actually encoded in the Talmud, hence Chris's confusion.
Powerful analysis of the revenge syndrome. It must be resisted. At the risk of sounding idealistic, we must turn to the likes of the standard set by Jesus of Nazareth - forgiving, and even loving the perpetrator-enemy. "no viosence ! did you hear me ? NO VIOLENCE !!" If the pattern of revenge is to be accepted as your article implies, we are ALL doomed.....