Starvation as a Weapon: Chris Hedges on Gaza

More than Palestinians seeking food have been killed by Israeli forces in just the last sparse months according to the United Nations Israel s blockade on aid ongoing bombardment and the dismantling of independent relief efforts have pushed Gaza to the brink of mass famine At least people are suffering from severe malnutrition and aid groups warn of a manufactured humanitarian catastrophe It s not about the distribution of food it s not about humanitarian aid It s about creating luring Palestinians who are desperate into the south putting them into a closed military zone says Chris Hedges the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and former Middle East bureau chief for the New York Times This week on The Intercept Briefing host Jordan Uhl speaks with Hedges about how we got here and what s at stake Hedges spent seven years covering the conflict between Israel and the Palestine much of that time in Gaza He s the author of books the majority of new being The Greatest Evil Is War and A Genocide Foretold Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts Spotify or wherever you listen TRANSCRIPT Jordan Uhl Welcome to The Intercept Briefing I m Jordan Uhl More than Palestinians seeking food have been killed by Israeli forces in just the last scant months according to the U N CBS And as Israel s military operations ramp up hunger is at an all time high WTHR At least people have died from starvation in the Gaza Strip in the last hours Al Jazeera This is what death by forced starvation looks like JU Famine has persisted throughout the war But in March the dilemma deepened as Israel imposed a blockade to aid broke its ceasefire with Hamas and resumed airstrikes on Gaza By May a newly formed U S contractor the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation had taken over majority aid distribution after Israel effectively banned independent and established relief groups including the U N agency for Palestine Refugees UNRWA Gaza s aid sites were reduced to just four Modern Intercept reporting from inside Gaza observed a famine that is manufactured and an aid distribution system seemingly designed to cause more suffering and death Ant nio Guterres We need look no further than the horror show in Gaza With a level of death and destruction without parallel in latest times JU UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres speaking at the Protection Council AG Malnourishment is soaring starvation is knocking on every door and now we are seeing the last gasp of a humanitarian system built on humanitarian principles Sky News Gunfire This is what the head of the U N is talking about Gunfire The abject chaos and danger Gazans face trying to get food JU In one of the strongest rebukes of Israel s actions to date more than aid and human rights groups issued a joint declaration calling on world governments to intervene DN The NGOs including Amnesty Oxfam Doctors Without Borders warned Illnesses like acute watery diarrhea are spreading Markets are empty Waste is piling up Adults are collapsing on the streets from hunger and dehydration unquote JU Gaza is on the brink of mass famine At least people are suffering from severe malnutrition according to staff at Al-Aqsa Hospital in central Gaza This is not a tragedy of circumstance It s a deliberate campaign of mass starvation enforced through Israel s unrelenting bombing and continuous blockade on the flow of aid into Gaza which is prohibited under international law The death toll in Gaza has reached nearly officially but experts and relief workers on the ground expect the actual number of casualties to be significantly higher To be clear This is a genocide And Israel s campaign of ethnic cleansing wages on as lawmakers voted overwhelmingly in the Knesset on Wednesday on a non-binding resolution demanding annexation of the West Bank To understand how we got here and what this moment most of demands we turn to someone who has spent years reporting on the conflicts Chris Hedges the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and former Middle East bureau chief for the New York Times He spent seven years covering the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians much of that time in Gaza The author of books his greater part latest are The Greatest Evil Is War and A Genocide Foretold He has taught at Columbia NYU Princeton and the University of Toronto Welcome to The Intercept Briefing Chris Chris Hedges Thanks Jordan JU We re speaking on Tuesday July nd I m eager to talk about this book I finished it in recent times But I also want to just first say thank you You are somebody who has had an outsized influence on my understanding and views on foreign protocol And I heard you speak at my undergraduate alma mater in Youngstown Ohio in the early s and you were talking about the death of a liberal class and what you revealed there stuck with me to this day And I remember looking around the room and seeing other people being encouraged and stimulated by what you were saying And I ve inevitably seen you as somebody who has been able to speak truth to power and distill societal and complex problems in a way that we can all comprehend And just craved to say thank you I m really excited about this CH Well thanks that day Staughton Lynd came to that event with his wife Alice He s a great hero of mine JU Yes Staughton Lynd He s the labor attorney who fought to stop steel-mill closures in Youngstown Ohio and ultimately the locality s post-industrial decline CH I remember that event because I speak at places like Skidmore where the children of the one percent are forced to go They definitely have to carry slips that you sign and the majority of them seemingly spent the whole talk on their phones But that wasn t true at Youngstown because I remember they were seated down the aisles because the pupil body was older their parents had been laid off They had felt the effects of de-industrialization in Youngstown where the closure of the steel mills and of curriculum they had the limit because of that experience to ask the kinds of questions the children of the privileged don t have to ask or don t want to ask So I remember that event very well JU Let s get into this book I wanna start though with your book War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning In it you talk about the use of myth to justify or perpetuate war In one context you talk about the creation myth of Israel and how Israelis are unwilling to question what they re conditioned to believe about the state of Israel Then you also write about the myth of war and how through the filter of the press the reality of war is misconstrued or even hidden People are propagandized into believing the official narrative In this development in Gaza right now it is a war for Israel s survival It is one of self-defense and solely against Hamas How else do you see the role of myth in Israel s genocide in Gaza CH Well every country including our own has a foundational myth which is a narrative to essentially hold up national virtue national courage And we do it to this day We ve never really examined the two foundational institutions that created the United States slavery and genocide against the Native Americans Israel is the same It has its own creation myth that somehow the Palestinians who let s be clear had lived in historic Palestine for centuries did not have an identity as a people that the land was largely uninhabited I mean these were just comprehensively false narratives still propagated by Zionists And then the myth of war which you mentioned is another myth And that is the myth of glory and honor and courage and bravery and all the things that after about seconds of combat you will realize are ridiculous And it s very hard to fight that But you know speaking about myself I spent years overseas covering various conflicts but also veterans who come back and attempt to be honest You see it with groups like Veterans for Peace or Iraq Veterans Against the War These people through overcoming a great deal of trauma and essentially being cast aside by the society and certainly their own comrades within the military have attempted to speak truth But that truth is essentially deluged with the propaganda peddled by the news media the entertainment industry politicians The tawdry reality of violence the sickening reality of violence the savagery of it the indiscriminate killing that is emblematic with all kinds of industrial weapons is sanitized and rewritten and it s extremely hard to counter that myth Just as it is extremely hard to counter the national creation myth and we re watching the Trump administration roll back those efforts So whether that s through teaching about slavery in school they of unit wanna restore the names of Confederate generals to US Army bases The attack on DEI that perpetuates white supremacy and patriarchy is one that is challenged I mean throughout our history is challenged with great expense And you see that in Israel with these very courageous figures like Gideon Levy who writes for Haaretz and Amira Haas You had the genocide scholar Omer Bartov who was a veteran from the war he was a unit commander he teaches at Brown coming out and calling what s happening in Gaza genocide I would argue it s a little late but at least he s doing it The great Israeli historian Ilan Papp or Avi Shlaim And these people have become pariahs in their own country because what they re attempting to do is puncture that myth And people cling to that myth because at its core it s really about self adulation JU I m curious if you could elaborate on that What makes this so enticing to people Why is this type of myth-making so effective In your books you ve talked about war specifically and the myth of war as an elixir And you also point out how it s a deep level of introspection for anybody really to question their national myth because it s not just what you ve learned it s also how you identify and how you see yourself So what makes it so complicated to challenge it and why is this messaging so effective CH Because to look honestly at who we are where we come from and what we ve done is an existential dilemma and it s extremely disconcerting and uncomfortable as it should be And so people prefer to have their egos and their national pride and their sense of self worth massaged and catered to even if that comes through lies And that s why it creates both a societal and a personal predicament because one has to reckon with the darkness that is endemic within white supremacy and patriarchy and empire And to confront that darkness is painful It s hard And so most of people will not only flee from that confrontation but gravitate towards figures let s say like Trump who essentially perpetuate or trumpet that myth because it s about feeling good about ourselves I mean James Baldwin writes about this quite eloquently and he talks about the confusion of ignorance with innocence That somehow Americans are innocent Well they re innocent in their own eyes because they re willfully ignorant They willfully blind themselves to who they are what they ve done Whether it s in Vietnam or Iraq or Afghanistan or Gaza where this genocide would not be perpetuated but for the stockpiles of munitions that are sent to Israel Israel blew through its stockpiles numerous months ago I think up to percent of all munitions that Israel uses come from the United States And it s just easier not to look It s the old story about the good German the people who claim that they didn t know there were concentration camps and they didn t know that their Jewish neighbors were being disappeared and shoved into crematoriums But that s true in every conflict I covered including in Bosnia The Serbs in Belgrade really did not want to know and did not know the genocidal campaigns that the Bosnian Serbs were carrying out in Bosnia against the Muslims JU Now this new book A Genocide Foretold is heavy It s a depressing read and at times it made me question humanity How could so multiple people stand idly by But in your conversations your encounters and your experiences with Palestinians and Gaza you exposed glimmers of hope You witnessed real courage and an unwillingness to accept a terminal fate Could you talk about particular of the people you talked to for this book and maybe something one of them declared or did that you still think about CH Yeah I opened the book in Ramallah I was visiting my friend Atef Abu Saif the great Palestinian novelist He s from Gaza He and his teenage son were in Gaza on October They were stuck in Gaza for days He wrote a memoir a kind of diary of that experience called Don t Look Left which I highly recommend I think that this is true in all war war brings out both the best and the worst in people I mean let s look at the gangs that steal food and sell it on the black realm If you sought to leave Gaza no one can leave Gaza now by the way But before you had to pay Hala the Egyptian organization in U S cash per head to get out So you have families who don t have a great number of tools scrambling contacting relatives and friends abroad to try and raise those funds to escape the hell that Gaza is So you have those predators that arise in every war I remember during the war in Bosnia one of the largest part lucrative options to earn money was both on the Serb side and on the Bosnian side when Serb soldiers would be killed you would have a gang or a mafia that would hold the body and then the Serb Mafia would do the same with Muslim bodies And at night for huge sums of money those bodies would be sold to their families across the river So that s consistently true in war It brings out these predators who see the vulnerability of others as a way for personal enrichment and empowerment But war also brings out among those who have a conscience and empathy tremendous acts of self-sacrifice and courage And when you confront the radical evil that is war that self-sacrifice that courage that empathy can get you killed It s subversive And so you see these figures of the doctors and health staff in Gaza hundreds who ve been killed I think the number is medicinal staff over journalists have been murdered And let s be clear I just came back from Egypt where I ve been interviewing Palestinians these are targeted killings They re not random killings For instance they usually will kill the doctors as they re either going to their shift at the hospital or returning And they ll bring in a quadruped one of these drones and you ll have a multi-story apartment building and the apartment building of that clinician or that journalist often is just attacked and blown up So it s clearly targeted or they re targeted as they re moving either to and from their work For instance I was in Qatar I ve been to Qatar twice to do broadcasting for Al Jazeera Arabic and Al Jazeera English And when you go into the foyer it s quite chilling that just including of discipline Shireen Abu Akleh who was murdered in the West Bank by an Israeli sniper Just the number of photographs of the dead And these people are not naive They know what it means to be a medical expert in Gaza They know what it means to be a journalist in Gaza And yet they do it anyway So that s classic in terms of my experience in war And on the one hand of class it shows the worst aspects of humanity what human beings are the atrocities human beings are capable of committing But then it shows these remarkable figures who at the liability of their own lives and multiple of them don t survive stand up to do what s right And let s be clear they re not usually intellectuals usually The intellectual class collapses pretty rapidly Intellectualism is morally neutral and several times the intellectuals are the worst And I think we see that here I don t know of any head of any Holocaust studies department there may be one but I haven t seen one who s denounced the genocide You have a handful of genocide scholars like Omer Bartov for instance who have And I would suspect just about every university in this country has if not a department certainly a Holocaust studies campaign they ve revealed nothing And that s to ignore the fundamental lesson of the Holocaust which is that when you have the quota to stop genocide and you do not you re culpable And we re all culpable for what s happening now in Gaza Break JU I want to pivot to Israel s pattern of lying stalling scrutinizing and then later but only sometimes quietly admitting wrongdoing You write about the attempts to obfuscate the al-Ahli hospital explosion where a blast took the lives of a insufficient hundred people And that exact number varies from both al-Shifa Hospital and the Gaza Wellness Ministry but it injured over more people Could you remind listeners of that tragedy the spin in the aftermath and how the response by Israel and its allies is part of a larger deliberate effort to blur reality CH Well you know I spent seven years covering this conflict and a lot of that time in Gaza I lived in Gaza at a place called the Marna House which of module doesn t exist anymore And this is a pattern So when Israel carries out an atrocity when I was there they were bombing refugee camps and they claim that these were in their words surgical strikes against a bomb making factory Well in fact when you got to the dense overcrowded alleys they were just rows of bodies including children Whole blocks had been destroyed But Israel dominates the news cycle by perpetuating their version of events which is almost uniformly untrue The Israeli regime lies like it breathes For instance with the assassination of Shireen Abu Akleh they claim that Hamas militants shot her It turned out that there was footage and B Tselem this great Israeli human rights organization they proved this to be false But by the time the information comes out and weeks later as is the pattern Israel will concede that yes maybe she was killed accidentally by but it doesn t matter the story is moved on So in the affair that you mentioned they claim that these were errant rockets Certainly the New York Times noticed that the timestamp on the video that Israel disclosed didn t correspond to in any way to when the explosions took place So we knew it was false but that s classic Israel is very media savvy When I covered Gaza for instance and this didn t happen in any other conflict I covered I would be interviewing eyewitnesses and casualties and then the Jerusalem Bureau would just be inserting almost every other paragraph statements from the IDF from the Israeli Defense Forces countering what these casualties and eyewitnesses commented What it does is essentially neutralize the story and by the end of it you can believe whatever you want to believe But that s been exposed There s only so various lies Israel can tell that hospitals are command and control centers for Hamas human shields The irony is that Israel is the one that uses human shields on a regular basis and because Hamas the resistance fighters will booby trap buildings They will take Palestinian prisoners put them in Israeli army uniforms not give them a weapon and sometimes with their hands tied or their handcuffed and then force them into tunnels or buildings that are potentially booby trapped ahead of Israeli troops That s extremely common But I sense that I I think with almost two years of this live streamed genocide I don t sense that Israel s ceiling to fool the masses is as deft or as effective as it was when a lot of people weren t paying close attention For instance a meager years ago there was this horrible scene at Netzarim where a father was sheltering his young son The young son is killed It s just the video footage I can hardly look at the footage anymore from Gaza it s just I ve lost colleagues and friends Literally the it s not so a large number of I mean specific of them we know have died but it s more that we hear from them sporadically and then we just stop hearing from them altogether And I assume they re buried under the rubble The numbers of dead are far far far above the -some-thousand what is it official death count I would not be surprised if it s Atif s my friend s sister-in-law or family were all killed Largest part of them were killed His niece survived but lost both her legs and an arm But they re not counted in the records because the numbers of death or the official statistics on death are accumulated either in morgues or in hospitals which are no longer functioning That is the way Israel operates Here they imposed a blockade on food and humanitarian aid on March nd increasing not only widespread malnutrition but cases of starvation Then they have destroyed UNRWA the UN agency that once had distribution points for food And turned it over to this allegedly Mossad-created but certainly Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation which only opens aid distribution points for an hour and nobody argues they have anywhere near enough aid to feed a desperate population But they ve set these up in southern Gaza as kind of traps or bait to lure Palestinians in And then when people can t get food and there s rioting and people will crawl push their way into these centers desperate to get a food package Majority of people are carrying knives either to protect themselves or to steal food packages from others And then Israeli troops and US mercenaries hired by this agency have killed over Palestinians and wounded thousands But of syllabus it s not about the distribution of food it s not about humanitarian aid It s about creating luring Palestinians who are desperate into the south putting them into a closed military zone They re talking about to begin with which is just a gigantic concentration camp And that is the next step of subject is expulsion Israel is in conversation with countries like Somalia Somaliland Sudan and they don t really care where they go I would not put it beyond Israel to breach the fence There s a nine mile margin between Egypt and Gaza Parts of that perimeter are literally just a fence To breach the fence despite Egyptian objections and pushing Palestinians out But that s the next step It is the complete ethnic cleansing the complete depopulation of Gaza And that s why if you look closely at footage you ll see especially in the north these heavy bulldozers and excavators that are ripping down buildings that are in rubble They re clearing it to essentially expand greater Israel just as they have expanded greater Israel into Lebanon and into Damascus JU You also tackle one of the more challenging and nuanced aspects of this conflict armed struggle and resistance In War As A Force you talk about how you re not a pacifist You write There are times when the force wielded by one immoral faction must be countered by a faction that while never moral is perhaps less immoral We in the industrialized world bear responsibility for the world s genocides because we had the power to intervene and did not I raise this because I m curious how you see this ending If there s a pathway to avoid the total erasure and destruction of Gaza and driving out the Palestinians who remain there Is there a diplomatic explanation or is armed resistance or military intervention the only hope they have left CH No I mean Hamas has been pretty decimated And let s be clear the Palestinians under international law have a right to use armed force to resist what s happening to them The only resolution would be for the United States to suspend or cut all military aid to Israel or a coercive measure taken on the part of countries to create a no-fly zone over Gaza and use naval vessels to break the Israeli blockade to deliver humanitarian aid I don t see any of that happening Short of either of those two things happening Israel will ostensibly succeed and its demented vision of depopulating Gaza driving people off land that they have lived in for centuries And of program they re turning with increasing ferocity on the West Bank If they get away with Gaza and I think they will they ll try the same thing in the West Bank So as was true in the war in Bosnia it was clear to though I was in based in Sarajevo during the war it was clear that only a NATO bombing So we were thoroughly surrounded Sarajevo was utterly surrounded by Serb heavy artillery They dug in tanks and these millimeter tank rounds were just used as artillery shells They were firing Katyusha rockets Those are bursts of rockets that can take I ve seen it take down a four story building in a matter of seconds killing everyone inside usually The only way it would stop would be to launch airstrikes And of unit the Bosnian establishment didn t have any heavy weapons much less air power And when that was done the Serbs were broken And I supported that action and I endorsement coercive measures to halt the genocide in Gaza That s what the United States and NATO allies did in northern Iraq And I was there when Saddam Hussein carried out a campaign of ethnic cleansing of the Kurds and they were dying in the mountain passes Well they forced the Iraqis to withdraw below the th parallel of Iraq and created a no-fly zone That s exactly what should be done in Gaza That s the only way to halt it JU For years you ve talked about and written about how war is a stimulant and it s used to divert people s attention away from societal collapse What does that collapse look like now How has the Trump administration s actions impacted your analysis of American decline CH Trump is you know he s the symptom He is not the infection American decline has been long in the making decades long in the making Our democratic institutions were eroded and corrupted and neither of the political parties really function as real political parties Even the Democratic voters didn t have a say in Kamala Harris s nomination Ran this vapid issueless celebrity driven campaign Which of program failed spectacularly You know a figure like Trump arises out of this morass out of this social decay It s what I saw in Yugoslavia So the war in Yugoslavia was not caused by ancient ethnic hatreds It was caused by the economic collapse of Yugoslavia and also hyperinflation And it vomited up these Trump-like figures Radovan Karad i and Slobodan Milo evi and Franjo Tu man And these demagogues pedal a hyper-masculinity They re cultish figures They pedal magical thinking They prey on the despair and desperation of a population that feels utterly betrayed As the working class in the United States has been betrayed in particular by the Democratic Party Since Bill Clinton gave us NAFTA in we ve had million mass layoffs And this has just destroyed My mother s family all comes from Maine The mills are all closed I am intimately familiar with the psychological economic and physical toll that this has taken And of lesson in desperation they have turned to a figure like Trump I think Trump would have been destroyed by a figure a candidate like Bernie Sanders who talked the language of the New Deal I think that s why you re seeing so much patronage in the mayoral race in New York for Zohran Mamdani But the Democrats they betrayed their own base And what Trump is doing it s kind of the rule of idiots of late empire He is accelerating the implosion of empire the destruction of empire through willfully ignorant and self-serving and counterproductive measures I m no fan of the Voice of America USAID I watched it work It was clearly used to manipulate governments That s why Morales threw them out of Bolivia because if there s a executive they don t like they re running all these quote unquote democracy initiatives which are really just funding and organizing the opposition They use aid as a weapon For instance in Port-au-Prince the Haitian establishment craved a new airport USAID was willing to give them money but they reported you constantly have to oppose Cuba s entry into the organization of American states I mean so there s perpetually kind of this quid pro quo but Trump doesn t even understand how the empire works And that s characteristic of late empire He s surrounded himself with sycophants and grifters and con-artists and imbeciles and buffoons These people are however dangerous but they don t have a clue as to what they re doing They have the limit to destroy they re destroying the Department of Schooling for instance or the EPA but they don t have the maximum to build anything And so if you look at late empire I studied classics For instance if you look at the end of the Athenian Empire or you look at the end of the Roman Empire you had a very similar phenomenon where those people who manage the empire at the end accelerate the collapse And that s precisely what Trump is doing JU We re also starting to see more elected agents including a handful on the right criticize the billions in foreign military aid we send to perpetuate and prolong wars and argue we have more pressing domestic requirements that affect people s material conditions Now what do you make of this slowly but seemingly growing group of members of Congress Is there a noticeable shift and what do you think the way forward is CH Well they re responding to a widespread feeling among the population that while they re suffering and while they re distress is not being addressed we re sending billions of dollars to Israel and Ukraine But the only way to halt this is to severely cut back the one trillion dollars roughly we give to the Pentagon every year And they re not going to do that because the military is a state within a state It can t be defied in the same way that the CIA can t be defied And that s why the socialist Karl Liebknecht on the eve of World War I called the German military the enemy from within And even Bernie Sanders if you watch was loathed to take on the military industrial complex That was a battle he didn t wanna fight They re not even audited I don t think the pentagon s been audited for a decade So you have half of all discretionary spending being poured down a rat hole These debacles in the Middle East Iraq Afghanistan Libya Syria Gaza Ukraine and it of curriculum drives up the debt which is dangerous But it also diverts money or there is no money for the majority basic social services whether that s Meals on Wheels or anything else So that is Arnold Toynbee the historian cites an out of control military an unregulated uncontrolled military machine as being the common characteristic of the decline of all empires And I think that is precisely where we are So yes you re right People will raise these issues but unless they re willing to confront the war industry and unless they re willing to seriously curtail the money that we spend more money on the war industry than I think it s the next eight countries combined including like Russia and China and everywhere else So that s how empires die And I don t see several politicians willing to take on that battle because that would implode their political career JU I wanna thank you so much for joining me A Genocide Foretold is available wherever you get your books now Do you have anything else you d like to add and where can people find more of your work I know I follow you on substack I ve been a day one subscriber CH Yeah chrishedges substack com So that has everything And the only thing I would add is just my deep admiration for the students at these universities who ve stood up They re the nation s conscience For these groups like Students for Justice in Palestine Jewish Voices for Peace I have unbounded admiration for them As I do for these very lonely figures like Francesca Albanese the U N repertoire These are real heroes and when the history of this genocide is written it will condemn most of of us but it won t condemn them It s because of their work that people like myself who are outspoken about the genocide are able to continue JU Chris thank you so much for joining us CH Thanks Jordan JU That does it for this episode of The Intercept Briefing We want to hear from you Share your story with us at -POD-CAST That s - - You can also email us at podcasts theintercept com This episode was produced by Laura Flynn Sumi Aggarwal is our executive producer Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief Chelsey B Coombs is our social and video producer Fei Liu is our product and design manager Nara Shin is our copy editor Will Stanton mixed our show Legal review by David Bralow And transcript by Anya Mehta Slip Stream provided our theme music You can aid our work at theintercept com join Your donation no matter the amount makes a real difference If you haven t already please subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts And tell all of your friends about us better yet leave us a rating or a review to help other listeners find us Until next time I m Jordan Uhl Thanks for listening The post Starvation as a Weapon Chris Hedges on Gaza appeared first on The Intercept