Palestine Talks | Chris Hedges on the moral corruption of Israel and the “savagery” of violence

thank you so much Chris for sitting with me for this much anticipated philosophical discussion I'm hoping we can explore a few things today regarding the situation in Gaza and Palestine more broadly and one would be to try as much as possible to make philosophical sense of what's happening in Gaza and of course Palestine more broadly and what the moral evil committed by Israel specifically reveals about human beings and collectively what we might be able to do about that in a way that's principled and just so I thought I'd first start off by asking you um what is the kind of language do you believe that's philosophically appropriate to even begin to make sense of the evil that we're seeing right now in Gaza everything Israel does is defined by the fact that it is a settler or colonial state and while the specific may be different from other settler colonial states the broad outlines are the same uh so you can look at the British in India the British in Kenya the French in Algeria uh the trajectory is ex is very similar uh you have uh uh and largely in the case of Israel which was also of course true in Algeria or true in Kenya or true in India India you have a uh a foreign uh entity that occupies land uh where indigenous inhabitants have been living for centuries Millennia even and uh in order to justify that from the very Inception you have to lie um you create uh a narrative uh of justification that is completely specious and untrue true and that's of course exactly what happened in Israel they uh claim got attempted to claim this was Joan Peters and others that uh there was no Palestinian identity that the land was largely vacant um this of course was incorrect uh the uh the there is an immediate demonization of the indigenous inhabitants they're kind of subhuman they're Barbarian they're they're certainly less uh in terms of their value they're less than the colonists and we know we talk about settlers these are colonists that's who they are um so initially you try all sorts of subterfuges uh to make your subtler or Colonial Project work violence is always a part of it but at the beginning uh you attempt to buy land land you uh attempt to mify a certain segment of the indigenous population uh to work as collaborators uh that has actually worked less well in uh Palestine historic Palestine than it has in than it did in places like India where you you raise the Indian army a lot of them I think 40% of them were siks which about 2% of the Indian population uh you the British were quite successful ful in raising a colonial police force in Kenya um that never really worked in Palestine uh but that was the idea of Oslo that they would bring yaser Arafat fata the PLO back and they would function as a colonial police force uh it didn't work at all in Gaza um it it has worked but not very well in the West Bank that's essentially what mmud abas does but eventually uh the other uh attempts to or all of the the less uh Co of attempts to control the population fail and it becomes naked Force naked violence uh of an escalating degree and that's precisely what we saw through uh repeated assaults against Gaza I don't like to call it a war the Palestinians do not have mechanized units or tanks or planes or a Navy or even real command and control it's there it's an asymmetrical force uh um but is no match for an industrial the industrial weapons that uh Israel is able to array against them um but you have escal escalating assaults that have now culminated in full-blown genocide and connected to your point on naked force uh you make this very pointed Insight in your piece I just wanted to cite that I believe he published last December en titled the evil that Israel does is the evil Israel gets and in it you say the only language left and this is bbaa left is the language of death it is how Israel speaks to the Palestinians it is how the Palestinians are forced to speak back so I'm wondering if you can expound on that and also perhaps comment on this seeming reluctance on the part of the western media to even address that well the so Israel's intent and we know from private correspondents by benorian and others uh the intent was always to cleanse historic Palestine um uh that intent uh had to be denied uh because uh it of course would make it hard hard to mify the Palestinians uh and it would be hard for Israel to uh project the image of the only democracy in the Middle East and uh you know making flowers bloom from the desert and all this kind of stuff that goes into Israeli mythology but the intent was always there so you reached a point I think Oslo was really the the U moment the Palestinians realized that there would never be a peaceful solution uh that Israel was not uh Oslo for viewers who don't know in essence was going to allow fata or the Poo to run arat came back from Tunis from Exile would allow them to run or administer Gaza and the West Bank but not the borders Israel controlled all of the borders um and uh finally Arafat wasn't willing to be a quizzing and I think there's pretty good I think most of us who cover the Middle East believe he was murdered by the Israelis probably poisoned um the Israelis have a long history by the way of uh assassinating not just leaders in Gaza I knew one of the founders of Hamas Abdul Aziz rantisi I knew Naran both of them assassinated by the Israelis Abu Jihad and Tunis Etc so um that that would not be out of character in any way um but after that I think it was clear to the Palestinians that uh Israel had no intention especially with the expansion of the uh settlements by the colonists in the West Bank um no intention of uh honestly attempting to create a two-state solution well why doesn't the Western media respond one part of it is they don't know the history um you know they haven't I spent seven years in the Middle East uh but the other thing is the power of the Israel Lobby is so intense um that uh to state Naked Truth uh even to use let's talk about my old employer of the New York Times even to use the word apartheid to use the word genocide as forbidden um and Israel um has quite a large propaganda machine they uh many of the people within that machine are uh quite well vered in American Media and how it works they speak fluent English um the Palestinians don't have it's always been a problem with the Palestinians I mean going back uh decades is that they uh lacked an understanding of uh Western systems of power and how they worked and this was always a huge advant anage on the part of the zionists the old zionists people like benguan golden my ear ABI eban who I knew they came out of the ABA Ian went to Oxford he spoke better English than I did so they were very astute at how to manipulate uh Western governments um but you know you will still hear to this day that the Palestinians forfeited a deal on Oslo it it was never an acceptable deal most of the residents in Gaza are the descendants of refugees so the right of return is key uh the idea that the any so-called Palestinian state would not control its own borders uh means that in essence it's under siege whether it's a very Draconian Siege which happened of course in Gaza after the election of amas or whether it's uh slightly less Draconian Siege in the West Bank but they're still under siege and to your point earlier certainly what we're seeing Play itself out so violently is colonialism and we hear similar langu political language to describe what's happening in Gaza right now but I'm wondering as a philosopher morally what you believe is the principal reason that states such as in Israel become so morally corrupt and not only that just so seemingly unrepentant for this needless suffering that they're in flicting well because in order to maintain a settler Colonial project you uh it requires that you uh dehumanize those who are being colonized uh it requires that you build uh vicious militarized forces of occupation uh it requires that you uh Crush all descent and of course eventually you crush internal descent among your own uh which has been happening in Israel uh it requires uh uh that on a daily basis you instill fear and Terror in the hearts of the subject population uh you know this is uh what Israel calls deterrence which is just massive use of Firepower to kill indiscriminately um and that has uh an incredibly corrupt ing influence on the society itself it empowers the worst elements of the society the military the security forces uh the secret police um and uh they kind of matize within the society until they run it so I mean what we have seen now in Israel is a shift from Liberal Zionism although I don't think liberal Zionism was any less violent to the Palestinians than religious sanism but it's been replaced now by this religious Messianic Zionism which is in some ways for in some ways it's it's better because they're more open about the genocide that they want to commit I mean the uh plethora of Israeli statements that come from Israeli leaders on uh you know slaughtering everyone in Gaza they've been quite that would have not happened under liberal Zionism they would have been more careful about what they said so um it it it is a very corrosive process and uh again you can go back and look at the effects of it upon the French in Algeria or the British in Kenya it's the same um you especially when the indigenous inhabitants seek to use violence against you then uh it it's the savagery is almost you know beyond belief um I was in Saro during the war and we were surrounded by the serbs we were being shelled with maybe 3 to 400 shells a day that resulted in about four to five dead a day and about two dozen wounded a day well you have to juxtapose that with Gaza where you have hundreds of wounded and dead a day just to again highlight the scale of the kind of carpet bombing and shelling that's taking place Gaza is a tiny place it's only 20 mil long and five miles wide um everything has been decimated the there there no universities are gone the almost the entire Health Care system has been destroyed there's no clean water etc etc so uh and that's what happens in the end with selller colonial projects including our own in the United States what did we do after the battle of the Little Big Horn uh when cting Bull and Crazy Horse and the others wiped out the seventh Cavalry it was just completely scorched Earth until I think it was 1890 were at Wounded KN and they're setting up Gatling guns they're setting up machine guns to mow down indigenous people who were not who were they may have had arms but but they weren't there was no conflict they just mowed them down this was so that's what happens I mean the difference is settler colonial projects can work when you eradicate the indigenous population we eradicated about 90% of indigenous Americans that can't happen in Israel because uh you have such a large uh number of Palestinians in the diaspora um I I I may have the numbers a little mixed up but it's I think it's about 5.6 million roughly in the West Bank and Gaza and I if I remember correctly it's like 9 million in the diaspora but anyway you it it it isn't going to work but that is the intent the intent is to create a humanitarian crisis of such catastrophic proportions in Gaza that the only only choice is death or deportation that's what Israel is doing will that happen I don't know that's clearly the intent uh and that's what sett colonial projects do and you mentioned before liberal Zionism and whether you're sure that actually exists is that philosophically a contradiction of terms to you well it is but it it certainly did exist because there was a battle between the jabotinsky and the uh herut and these you know babinsky was praised by musolini as a fascist I think he called him a good fascist the harut party which bib netanyahu's father was a member I think a founding member of uh and they came out of a a lot of the Jewish terrorist groups that attacked both the British and the Palestinians but they called for the complete ethnic cleansing of Palestine I was in Jerusalem when Rabbi Mahana this very right-wing racist Rabbi founded the part well the liberal zionists ban the party from running in elections um and what we're seeing now in Israel these are The Heirs of Kahana Heirs of the party so uh liberal Zionism was always oxymoronic in a sense that um you can't maintain a settler Colonial project and claim to espouse liberal values but is quite effective in seducing the West uh and that's really was its main uh benefit uh for Israel they could speak in the language of democracy and human rights Etc even even at the very moment they were running an apartheid state thankfully if I can use that word um because this should have happened earlier the uprisings that we're seeing in support of Palestine globally so there is that support there is that growing solidarity but there's this issue of governments especially in the west not intervening enough and I'm wondering if this failure continues what is at stake or what are the consequences for our shared Humanity Beyond but uh notwithstanding the situation in Gaza well first I would draw parallels between the way Israel operates and the way the United States operates so Israel will bomb a consulate in Damascus and kill Iranian leaders Israel carry out strikes in Lebanon against Hezbollah leaders um it the United States does the same thing it it carries out what are in essence acts of war against countries which in which technically we're not at War Israel does that all the time the United States does that all the time and uh and that is trying to solidify a global order uh which uh where international law and international rules are irrelevant I think that's why you've seen such a strong reaction especially in the global South um I the only country that is actively attempting to Halt the genocide is Yemen I don't think that's accidental uh you had 30,000 yemenis starve to death you had Cera epidemics I mean they were under that us Saudi Siege so uh it's very close to home historically in terms of memory but it's also within the memory of many countries in the global South that have endured uh the savagery of colonial settler projects I don't think it's accidental that South Africa uh brought the case to the international court of justice uh because again historically uh they were an apartheid state they they lived in conditions very very similar to the conditions that Palestinians live under uh so yes we have seen a reaction on the One Hand by uh particularly the global South countries that uh see in the suffering of Palestinians their own historical suffering but we've also seen an utter refusal on the part of the United States and Israel to do anything meaningful uh in terms of halting the genocide I don't think at this point there is much credible argument against this live streamed G gen side so um and that and and I think that part of the fear in the global South is that as we uh suffer from the climate crisis and crop yields Decline and floodings and mass migrations Etc um these Rogue unaccountable uh forces of the global North will react with the kind of savagery that we're seeing in Gaza I think it presses a kind of savagery and I and that is fearful it's fearful to me and it's fear ful to much of the world so to your point on the savagery that we're witnessing you did see this firsthand in Gaza as a journalist and I'm wondering how that has informed or um transformed your thinking about what you believe are the things that are required to effectively oppose the kind of brutality that Israel inflicts on such a colossal scale well I I spent a lot of time covering conflicts uh in Latin America covered the war in El Salvador for 5 years and uh covered the war in Bosnia out of Saro Etc so there are moments when uh you oppress a population to such an extent that the only option they have left is violence uh especially when uh the forces arrayed against you are seeking your own Annihilation this was true in Saro I mean we were surrounded by the serbs pounded shell sniper fire constantly and um nobody had long discussions about pacifism uh because we were actually surrounded in trenches I mean there were trench systems around the city and if the serbs broke through those trenches and burst in the city they would slaughter a third of the inhabitants and drive the rest into Refugee or displacement camps and that wasn't conjecture that's what they did in the dream of Valley that's what they did in vukovar so we knew what they were going to do at that point you pick up a gun it doesn't save you from the poison of violence violence is always tragic um but that's really where the Palestinians have been left uh they they've not been given any other option that was Israel's choice that was not their choice in fact if you look closely at the historical record uh when the Palestinians like the great March of return or anytime they attempt to build nonviolent resistance movements they actually uh Israel is even more violent in terms of uh killings and shootings than they are uh because I think they fear because that nonviolent movement will resonate widely throughout the world um so yeah this was Israel's decision I don't like it I don't I've been around enough violence toest it but I also understand that there are times and this is one of them when the oppressive power shuts down all the other options and that's what Israel's done and since October 7th alone I mean before that as well but um we're seeing since October 7th alone just a great deal of critique of Western media including those Outlets or Publications that at least within much of the public imagination is or are regarded as the progressive outlets and I don't think it's any secret to say that the New York Times is is one of those and I'm wondering in your view whether the failure to provide robust accounts of what's happening in Gaza is not only um not providing a full picture to the public of the scale of evil that Israel's committing but is some how facilitating that violence or even genocide well the first of all the New York Times has never been good on Israel that's not it's not like they ever was a moment in the past when they were good on Israel uh they uh you know I just as an example and I spent seven seven years covering because I speak Arabic I was primarily in Gaza and the West Bank I did very I did some coverage inside Israel but actually not very much um and the way they would neutralize a story out of Gaza so I'm on the ground in Gaza uh Israel carries out an air strike I go to let's say jabali I count the bodies but every other paragraph is the Israeli defense for a spokesperson uh countering what I've reported on the ground so by the time you get to the article you can believe whatever you want to believe it neutralizes the reporting that was not something I experienced for instance in Bosnia I didn't experience that but Israel is different uh well the they replay October 7th endlessly I'm not in any way taking away the tragedy and and even atrocities that were committed without question uh but it becomes a way to justify the genocide uh and of course they invent these salacious stories beheaded babies and uh women who were raped except they weren't raped and mean it's just on and on and on as a way to uh you know turn the or at least publicly attempt to turn the Palestinians into sub humans and animals into barbarians um uh and they do that you know again in to justify the attacks on hospitals and schools and mosques by claiming that Hamas uses uh Palestinians as human Shields therefore they have a right to carry out a Siege against hasifa I mean so um it's uh unfortunately you know that is all that those narratives are picked up by the press and uh let's never forget that the Israelis have forbidden blocked foreign journalists from going into Gaza and they have mounted a very aggressive campaign to Target and assassinate Palestinian journalists including Turkish somebody was working for Turkish television lost their legs so but that that's those uh that's all part of an attempt to essentially shut down the counternarrative and so that they can dominate it um it and it's um and the you know the Foreign Press is culpable I mean they're complicit the New York Times especially is complicit I mean they ran this big story on systematic sexual assault and rape that when it was picked apart just turned out to be complete complete fabrication they also by the way ran a podcast a few years ago called the caliphate yeah which was based on a testimony of a con artist who wasn't even there I mean but it plays to that narrative ever since 911 Muslims in the United States have been really demonized and you can you know the things that within public discourse you is somehow acceptable to say about Muslims can't be said about anyone else um but yeah Israel has done a a pretty good job of controlling the Press coverage it's changing perh grabs a little bit because of the courage of the Palestinian reporters uh because of social media these images are you know shocking and hard to deny um but yeah the the New York Times have just done an appallingly awful job of covering this and of course writing editorials denouncing calls for ceasefire on the one hand you have what seems like part of the establishment that has invested itself in ing social justice movements in many cases but on this one issue it's the total opposite so I'm wondering what that says about the Western establishment of Western media well so I wouldn't describe the New York Times as Progressive I would describe it as liberal okay but uh first of all it's a cold war liberalism so it Embraces American militarism the New York Times gave its full throated support for the invasion of Iraq which I publicly opposed and and was pushed out of the paper for opposing in public Arenas uh it's cheerly cheer the war in Ukraine uh Libya Afghanistan everywhere else so uh it's very much works as a propaganda arm of American militarism uh it is willing to cover social movements like black lives matter as long as it does not investigate uh the corporate State the corporate coup d'a that has taken place I mean if you read the New York Times you would think everybody supports Donald Trump because they're bigots racists or what Hillary Clinton calls deplorables not because since 1996 this is when records started being kept 30 million American workers have lost their jobs in Mass layoffs that's the engine bu Trump I know because I've written books and reported on it uh but they won't go there because they they're advertisers they depend on those advertisers they are uh essentially organs that refuse to look at the uh gross distortions within the American economy and the political system that have been caused by corporations and this billionaire class uh private Equity firms Etc so um they are quite happy or willing to write about race uh but not from an economic perspective solely from a social perspective um and in terms of foreign policy um they buy into that narrative that we're going to liberate the women of Afghanistan with 101st Airborne which is absurd for anybody who's been around the 1001st Airborne as I have so um it's again I would go back to Liberal Zionism I would say that there's a kind of uh you know cognitive dissonance between uh the supposed liberal values that liberal zionists espouse are that uh liberal values that corporatists espouse because as soon as you start talking about economic Justice Like Bernie Sanders did then um they destroy you and the New York Times was remember very very hostile to Bernie Sanders um so uh again I you know they I think it's a liberal patina but I don't think it's real I don't think it I don't think it uh because the fundamental concerns um that have impoverished let's say people within our internal colonies as Malcolm X called them those are not addressed or the issue of mass incarceration we have the largest prison system in the world 25% of the world's prisoners were less than 5% of the world's population why because in these impoverished urban blighted Urban areas there's no work and so if you know the work doesn't knit you don't have a job or place in the society that knits you to that society that gives you a stake in that Society uh which is a form of social control as Emil durheim points out um and so therefore you uh find other forms of social control which are militarized police and a carcel state it's in moments like this that it becomes apparent that those who identify as liberal still seem to have no problem invading other countries with War uh colonialism all these things that perhaps on the surface you would not expect when you hear a liberal speak about democracy Universal values it just I think the word you used uh of cognitive dissonance is very appropriate here um because when you really see it for what it is it's it's very disenchanting so my last question to you Chris is whether you think States like Israel uh have passed the point of uh no return or they're beyond moral Redemption what what has to be done to hold them accountable at this point again in a way that is principled and in accordance with the rule of law well Israel since its Inception has always violated international law uh and is violating it now um I I don't think there's any going back I think Israel has been exposed for what it is um I don't think the mythology of Israel the Mystique of Israel I don't think anyone's going to buy it anymore um it it is a naked brutal repressive racist apartheid state uh and most of the world has figured that out now that doesn't mean especially with the backing of the United States it can't hang around for a long time um but I would say that that younger generation uh and especially among younger Jews in the United States they don't have those that emotional bond that their parents or grandparents have to Israel or to Zionism that's gone uh and that's why Israel is working so fervently to build ties with the Christian right I wrote a book called American fascist the Christian right and the war in America I think they are fascists and I'm a Divinity School graduate don't use the word fascist lightly but I have seen how they have distorted the Bible uh the same way the German Christian Church under the nais distorted the Bible to sacralize state power and most importantly white supremacy so uh the the Christian right is predominantly white it again drawing from that dispossessed uh working class um they have this kind of uh dream of a return to a golden era which was probably never golden but uh that's what happens in uh when people are pushed out of the society and they see remember the the the people who run Israel are uh of European descent uh BB Netanyahu in particular was raised in Philadelphia went to MIT I mean so um it that that uh white supremacy uh which they Embrace uh within their own movement uh they uh see reflected uh in the Zionist project because this is really a battle between European colonists and people of color uh and uh so where is it going I think in the long term I mean the the the moment the United States refuses to back Israel uh it's going to have a very hard time surviving um the and this is one of the tragedies of the genocide I think it's up to 68% now of Munitions to sustain this genocide come from the United States and are pouring in Biden is not going to change that because the Israel Lobby is very powerful in the United States he doesn't want to alienate it uh but yeah once the United States begins to back away which may take a generation um it's going to be harder and harder for Israel to sustain itself thank you so much Chris for this Illuminating discussion and for putting everything into such important philosophical in historical context I'm wondering if there's any final observations or insights You' like to share no I mean I'm very involved in the boycott divestment sanction movement I think we have to employ the same techniques that we use to isolate the parthe regime in South Africa to isolate and sanction the apartheid regime in Israel that's I I spent a lot of time attempting to do that thank you again Chris I'm very grateful for this discussion great thanks

Channel: TRT World

Views: 231,311

Keywords: american militarism, chris hedges, chris hedges gaza, dehumanisation of palestinians, israel military, israel politics, israel violence, israel vs palestine, israel-palestine, middle east, mass media, palestine talks, war crimes, conflict, debate, interview, israel palestine debate, militarism, occupation, trt palestine talks, trt world, us mass media, oct 7, moral corruption, war on palestine, israel news

Id: qyErcPn2VIU

Length: 35min 56sec (2156 seconds)

Published: Sat May 04 2024