A genocide foretold Reporting on survival and resistance in occupied Palestine

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. (Mar.)

A furious attack on the Israeli state. "Israel was founded largely on lies," proclaims Hedges, including, by his lights, "the lie that it was Arab armies that started the 1948 war that saw Israel seize seventy-eight percent of historic Palestine." The author and formerNew York Times journalist adds, "The Israeli public is infected with racism," so much so that it tolerates "Israeli'slebensraum master plan for Gaza," a term fraught with echoes of Nazi "living space" expansionism, very much intended. And the vicious Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israeli civilians, among them attendees at a rock concert? Well, it "included atrocities," Hedges allows, and Hamas, with a master plan of its own, may have enshrined the destruction of Israel in its foundational document, but even so, "Hamas is not, despite what Israel and Washington say, a terrorist organization." However, Israel is, in Hedges' view, alternately a member of a "cabal" of arms dealers "dedicated to permanent war" and a puppet master controlling the U.S. Congress, media, and academia through a combination of bribes and bullying. There is no doubt that Israel's invasion of Gaza has been brutal, leading to a catastrophic loss of life. Many of Hedges' hyperbolic accusations, though, long predate the war in Gaza, old tropes freshened by new broadside-of-the-barn charges: Columbia is "a Potemkin university," both Americans and Israelis are "infected with the same white supremacy," the Palestinian Authority is "a hated colonial police force," and so forth. If you're looking for nuance, you won't find it here. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.