Gaza war heralds era of ‘technologically advanced barbarism’

Israel’s assault in Gaza marks the beginning of a new world order based on technologically advanced barbarism, the US journalist Chris Hedges said in a lecture at Leinster House.Hedges condemned what he described as Israel’s use of the Holocaust to justify its wars on Gaza, Lebanon and Iran and said the US and Europe, through their support of Israel, have forfeited all claim to speak for democracy and human rights.A prominent voice in US alternative media, Hedges spoke in a function room in Leinster House at the invitation of Sinn Féin TD Aengus Ó’Snodaigh. His talk was attended by TDs from a cross-section of Irish political parties and by members of the public. Hedges is in Ireland to promote Requiem for Gaza, written with the illustrator Joe Sacco.READ MOREThe destruction of Gaza and the killing of 74,016 inhabitants (according to the Gazan health ministry on September 26th) “have imploded the moral authority of Holocaust studies and Holocaust memorials”, Hedges said. “They have been exposed as vehicles not to prevent genocide but to perpetrate it, not to explore the past but manipulate the present.”The purpose of Holocaust studies ought to be “to examine the dark side of human nature and the frightening propensity we all have to commit evil”, Hedges said. Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. 'Genocide is not an anomaly. It is coded in the DNA of western ‘civilisation’.' Photograph: Oliver Morris/Getty Images Instead, most Holocaust scholars use it “to sanctify Jews as eternal victims and absolve the ethnonationalist state of Israel of its crimes of settler colonialism, apartheid and genocide”.Israel has denied ⁠it has perpetrated a genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, saying it was fighting Hamas militants and accusing the group of hiding behind civilians.Hedges alluded to genocides committed by Belgium, Germany, the US and UK against indigenous populations. “Genocide is not an anomaly,” he said. “It is coded in the DNA of western ‘civilisation’.”Yet other holocausts are minimised or left unacknowledged. The “sacralisation” of the Nazi Holocaust unites western powers and Israel in a tacit quid pro quo, Hedges said. “Arming and funding the state of Israel, blocking UN resolutions and sanctions that would condemn its crimes, and demonising Palestinians and their supporters becomes proof of atonement,” Hedges said. “Israel, in return, absolves the West of its indifference to the plight of Jews during the Holocaust, and Germany for perpetrating it.”Jewish academics in the US who have criticised Israel’s exploitation of the Holocaust, including Norman Finkelstein and Raz Segal, respectively the son and grandson of Holocaust survivors, have seen their careers stunted.Israel, Hedges said, “is admired by the far right because it has turned its back on humanitarian law and uses indiscriminate lethal force to ‘cleanse’ its society of those condemned as human contaminants”.Hedges writes in Requiem for Gaza that the Hamas atrocities of October 7th, 2023, which included the deaths of 1,195 Israelis, “gave Israel the pretext for what it has long craved – cover to implement its own version of the Final Solution”. October 7th, he said, “marks the dividing line between the slow-motion ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and their wholesale extermination and removal from historical Palestine”.Hedges reported for seven years from Israel-Palestine for The New York Times. He maintains there is “a genocidal impulse … at the heart of the Zionist project”, which he defines as “the desire by large segments of Israeli society to eradicate and expel all Palestinians”. Hedges recalled the extremist rabbi Meir Kahane, founder of the Kach Party, who was assassinated in New York in 1990. Baruch Goldstein, a Brooklyn-born doctor and Kach member, murdered 29 Muslim worshippers in a mosque in Hebron in 1994.“Kach’s racial intolerance and calls for mass violence against Palestinians infected larger and larger segments of Israeli society,” Hedges said. “It found near universal acceptance after the attacks of October 7th.”[ Killing and destruction in Gaza: new book examines Israel’s campaign and the enablersOpens in new window ]Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu “has spent his political career nurturing these Jewish extremists, including Itamar Ben-Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich, Avigdor Lieberman, Gideon Sa’ar and Naftali Bennett”, Hedges said. Ben-Gvir, Israel’s minister of national security, hung a portrait of Goldstein in his livingroom. “The decision to obliterate Gaza has long been the dream of far-right Zionists, heirs of Kahane’s movement,” Hedges said.Hedges noted in his address: “Israel has dropped more bombs on Gaza than were dropped on London, Dresden and Hamburg combined during World War II. The atomic bomb that obliterated Hiroshima had a blast of 15 kilotons of TNT. Seventy-five kilotons have been dropped on Gaza.”Hedges won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of al-Qaeda but resigned from The New York Times in 2003 after 15 years with the newspaper when it reprimanded him for opposing the US invasion of Iraq in a graduation commencement speech.[ A Genocide Foretold: Reporting on Survival and Resistance in Occupied Palestine by Chris Hedges - a lucid, at times hectoring, short readOpens in new window ]The Belfast film-maker Seán Murray, who directed the film Journacide: The War on Truth, also addressed the session. Murray’s film details the killing of four Lebanese journalists, brother and sister Fatima and Mohamed Ftouni and Ali Shoeib in March and Amal Khalil in April. [ Israel’s targeting of journalists is an attack on truth and historyOpens in new window ]All were killed in “double tap” air strikes where Israeli forces attack an area then return later to bomb rescue workers and journalists. Murray had invited the families of the slain journalists to attend the event, but they were refused Irish visas.[ Four students from Gaza challenge ‘irrational’ visa refusal to pursue studiesOpens in new window ]Chris Hedges will speak at The Whistleblower bookshop, 30 South Anne St, Dublin, at 6.30pm on Saturday, October 3rd, and in the Thomas Davis Theatre, Trinity College Dublin, at 6.30pm on Monday October 5th