A Genocide Foretold: Reporting on Survival and Resistance in Occupied Palestine
Chris Hedges. Seven Stories, $18.95 trade paper (224p) ISBN 978-1-64421-485-5
Journalist Hedges (The Greatest Evil Is War) weaves together Palestinian accounts of the war in Gaza, the work of historians, and his own reporting from the West Bank to offer a searing indictment of Israel. In Hedges’s view, “the genocide is the predictable denouement of Israel’s settler-colonial project.” He makes direct comparisons between the Israeli government’s talking points and Hitler’s “Big Lie,” and presents Hamas as a resistance movement rather than the antisemitic extremist group it’s often presented as in Western media. Indeed, the West’s perception of and relationship to Israel is Hedges’s focus—he delves into American politicians’ alignment with the pro-Israeli lobbying group AIPAC and the suppression of the antiwar encampment movement on U.S. college campuses. He notes that college protesters see the conflict as having global significance rather than being the unique and complicated affair presented by Western media—one student drew parallels to Bangladesh’s 1971 war of independence, another to the Wounded Knee massacre. Hedges presents their view as the clear-eyed one, pointing to ways in which Israel exports a brand of surveillance and policing that functions, in his telling, as an extension of the West’s long history of colonial exploitation. (For instance, drones created by Israeli weapons manufacturers to monitor Palestinians are now deployed in Europe to monitor migrants.) The result is an authoritative argument against the singularity of the conflict and an indictment of Western media narratives that present it as exceptional and beyond critique. (Mar.)
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Reviewed on: 01/07/2025
Genre: Nonfiction