Chris Hedges, the Pulitzer Prize-winning American author and journalist, recently made the best-ever 7-minute speech regarding Israel. The text is given below:
“There is a historical analogy here, but it is not one that Bennett, Netanyahu, or any other Israeli leader wants to acknowledge. When those who are occupied refuse to submit, when they continue to resist, we drop all pretence of our civilizing mission and unleash, as in Gaza, an orgy of slaughter and destruction.
We become drunk on violence. We kill with reckless ferocity. We become the beasts. We accuse the oppressed of being. We expose the lie of our vaunted moral superiority. We expose the fundamental truth about Western civilization. We are the most ruthless and efficient killers on the planet. This alone is why we dominate the wretched of the Earth.
It has nothing to do with democracy, or freedom, or liberty. These are rights we never intend to grant to the oppressed. Honour, justice, compassion, and freedom are ideas that have no converts, Joseph Conrad reminds us. There are only people without knowing, understanding, or feelings who intoxicate themselves with words, repeat words, Shout them out, imagining they believe them, without believing in anything else but profit, personal advantage, and their own satisfaction.
Genocide lies at the core of Western imperialism. It is not unique to Israel. It is not unique to the Nazis. It is the building block of Western domination. The humanitarian interventionists who insist we should bomb and occupy other nations because we embody goodness, although they promote military intervention only when it is perceived to be in our national interest, are the useful idiots of the war machine and global imperialists.
They live in an Alice in Wonderland fairy tale where the rivers of blood we spawn make the world a happier and better place. They are the smiley faces of genocide. You can watch them on your screens, you can listen to them spout their pseudo morality in the White House and Congress. They are always wrong, and they never go away.
Israel, like all settler colonial projects, including our own, was founded on lies. The lie that Palestinian land was unoccupied. The lie that 750,000 Palestinians fled their homes and villages during the ethnic cleansing or left their towns and villages of their own accord, out of fear of war, or because they were told to do so by their leaders. The lie is that it was Arab armies that started the 1948 war.
That saw Israel seize 78 percent of historic Palestine. The lie that Israel faced annihilation in 1967. Forcing it to invade and occupy the remaining 22 percent of Palestine as well as land belonging to Egypt and Syria. Israel is sustained by lies. The lie that Israel wants a just and equitable peace and will support an independent Palestinian state.
The lie that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. The lie that Israel is an outpost of Western civilization in a sea of barbarism. The lie that Israel respects the rule of law and human rights. The brazenness of Israeli lies stunned those of us who reported from Gaza. It did not matter if we had seen the Israeli attack, including the shooting of unarmed Palestinians.
Leave a Reply