A Genocide Foretold
Reporting on Survival and Resistance in Occupied Palestine
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- USD 12.99
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- USD 12.99
Publisher Description
With intimate and harrowing portraits of the human consequences of oppression, occupation, and violence experienced in Palestine today, Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges issues a call to action urging us to bear witness and engage with the ongoing humanitarian crisis.
Hedges wrote the first section of the book when he was in Ramallah in July 2024, and he draws from his experience doing extensive reporting from the Middle East, including Gaza, for the New York Times.
A Genocide Foretold confronts the stark realities of life under siege in Gaza and the heroic effort ordinary Palestinians are waging to resist and survive. Weaving together personal stories, historical context, and unflinching journalism, Chris Hedges provides an intimate portrait of systemic oppression, occupation, and violence. The book includes chapters on:
What life is like in Gaza City and Ramallah in the midst of approaching bombs and gunfire.The history of the dispossession of Palestinians of their land in relation to the ideology of Zionism.A portrait of Amr, a 17-year-old highschool student who is forced to evacuate his village with his family.Psychoanalysis of the state of permanent war that has led to the destruction of hospitals, telecommunications centers, governmental buildings, roads, homes universities, schools, and libraries and archaeological and heritage sites in Gaza.The ways in which the collective retribution against innocents is a familiar tactic employed by colonial rulers.A heartbreaking final chapter called “Letter to the Children of Gaza.”
Hedges, the Pulitzer Prize–winning former Middle East Bureau Chief for The New York Times, is an Arabic speaker who spent seven years covering the conflict. He wrote the first section of the book when he was in Ramallah in July 2024. A Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist, he is also the author of two bestselling books, War is a Force that Gives us Meaning and The Greatest Evil is War. In A Genocide Foretold he writes with an emotional depth that can only be achieved from spending many years on the ground in Gaza and the West Bank. A Genocide Foretold is a call to action, urging us to bear witness and engage with the ongoing humanitarian crisis.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
