Chris Hedges speaks to IA about Gaza genocide, Bondi and ‘blowback’

MICHELLE PINI: Hello and welcome to Indi Eye. I’m Michelle Pini and I’m joined today by Chris Hedges.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Presbyterian minister and author. He is the former head of the New York Times Middle East bureau and publisher of the Chris Hedges Report.

Chris Hedges, welcome to Indi Eye.

CHRIS HEDGES: Thanks, Michelle.

MP: I thought we might go firstly to the horrific Bondi massacre, where 16 people are now dead and 40 injured. And I believe that you know, in terms of the war in Gaza at the moment, of course, this is a very significant issue. A lot of people are, I guess, chiming in and speaking up about this and its significance on anti-semitism and all of those things. What are your thoughts on that?

CH: Well, it’s blowback. I mean, so you’ve had over two years of genocide. Before this ceasefire, it’s not really much of a ceasefire. Over 300 Palestinians have been killed. Hundreds more injured. Anywhere between six to 20 a day are killed. During the quote-unquote “ceasefire”, the second day of the ceasefire, 150 Palestinians were killed.

And there is, I’ve spent a lot of time in the Muslim world, in the Arab world in particular, since October 7th, long trips to Egypt, Qatar, two trips to Qatar. I was in Jordan, the West Bank. And there is a very understandable rage on the part of the Arab world that, not only are Western nations, including Australia, of course, which provides parts for F-35s, not halting this genocide, but they are sustaining it. In particular, the United States, with over $22 billion worth of weapons since October 7th.

But not just the United States, the UK, Germany, as a major arm supplier. Even though there’s been a rhetorical shift with countries like Australia and the UK recognising a Palestinian state, the UK only cut its arms shipments by 10%. So there is a feeling, and I think a legitimate feeling, that — and of course we all condemn and are outraged about what happened in Australia.

But I think there’s a legitimate feeling that when it’s brown bodies, they don’t count. It doesn’t matter. Where was the outrage before this faux ceasefire? It’s not really a ceasefire. It’s just a slow-motion genocide now. When Israel was killing 250 people a day, including thousands of children, there various figures, but at least 10,000 children.

MP: I believe it’s as high as 20,000.

CH: It may be 20, exactly, so nobody actually knows the numbers because thousands upon thousands of people are unaccounted for, as somebody I worked for seven years in Gaza, many friends in Gaza and  like I many, many people who know people in Gaza we would hear from people sporadically and then just stop hearing from them. They’re no doubt buried under the rubble.

A good friend of mine, a great Palestinian novelist, Adu Abus safe. His sister’s family was completely killed. Well, his niece survived. She lost both her legs, but everyone else was killed. And they’re not counted among the dead because they’re just the whole apartment building came down. Nobody in that apartment building is counted because they didn’t recover the bodies. And so we don’t actually know the numbers. People have estimated as high as 100 160,000.

We don’t know, but certainly much, much higher. And it’s been very frustrating for all of us who have decried this mass slaughter from the beginning. So, you know, what do we expect?

There’s a terrible frustration in the Muslim world that doesn’t in any way condone, and I don’t want to condone any of this violence. But, you know, to understand is not to condone.

We have to understand that this is what the CIA, after Afghanistantermed blowback. It’s blowback. And I think all of us who have spent significant time in the Middle East warned that this is inevitable, especially since we haven’t even begun to see Palestinian reprisal attacks.

Palestinians, I was in Cairo last Spring, and with the cartoonist Joe Sacco we extensively interviewed 29 families from Gaza — writing a book about the genocide through the experiences of those 29 families. Every single one of them has been devastated. I mean, with counting extended families, cousins that we’re talking about dozens of dead. Nobody’s escaped. And so there is a very legitimate rage in the Arab world and particularly among Palestinians, and they don’t have the mechanisms that Israel has.

They don’t have an army, a navy, an air force, mechanised units, missiles. They don’t have that support. Yeah, so they will respond in the crude forms of violence, which is called terrorism. And that is what, you know, history has borne that out. It’s what Zionist groups did before 1948, including blowing up the King David Hotel. I think there were 91 casualties or something.

So, you know, that’s what we’ve spawned. This isn’t going to be the end of it. It’s horrible. It’s frightening, but it’s totally it would have been totally preventable if Israel was held account to the rule of law and to the ICJ, to the Geneva Convention and everything else, but they have not. It’s been a it’s been unmitigated state terror for over two years.

MP: But what do you think, though — I mean, I think I heard you on another YouTube video, actually describing it as “a gift to Netanyahu”, this shooting in Australia. How do you think that’s going to play out?

I mean, in one way, it probably does, you know, it’s already been weaponised here by sections of the media, of course, and also by the Conservative Opposition party, in terms of you know, Albanese not being strict enough on anti-semitism, Prime Minister Albanese that is and so forth.

So, how do you think that will play out from here and what should the PM and Australia’s position be on this?

CH: Well, Australia should have been much more rigorous in terms of opposing the genocide. they should, you know, this idiotic response that they’re provide non-lethal parts to the F-35s. Well, the F-35 is quite a sophisticated killing machine. It doesn’t have any non-lethal parts. Um, but that Australia’s just done what the rest of industrialised nations in the north have done, which is sustain the genocide.

Israel long, months and months ago, went through all of its stockpiles. It’s dependent on all sorts of engines for its I mean its entire airfleet is from the United States, but it depends on that constant resupply in order this genocide would not have been able to be sustained if these countries had not decided to continue arm shipments. And in the case of the United States, billions of dollars of arms shipments to perpetuate it. So they should have stopped the genocide. I mean, that’s not a political position. That is asking them to abide by international law. And that’s what’s so frightening.

The message this delivers to the global south is that you know it doesn’t matter. Law doesn’t matter. Or maybe it matters for you, but it doesn’t matter for us. And that’s just not a world we want to live in. I covered the war in Bosnia. I can tell you that when the world breaks down into those Hobsian nightmares and the people with the guns rule, it’s a very frightening place.

MP: Yeah. But why do you think that the media has, for so long, basically effectively covered this up and misrepresented what’s going on in Gaza? Why do you think that’s the case? Well, two re I mean two reasons. So, I mean, first, as someone who covered the Middle East, and I worked for the New York Times, these large media organisations, above everything else, prize access. So, if you’re going to hold Israel to account – like Al Jazeera, which has been expelled from Israel – you’re not going to get a place at the table. You’re not going to be invited to the background briefings. You’re not going to get your spot on the little dog and pony show where the IDF takes you out for a couple of hours in Gaza with, you know, Israeli units. And large organisations like the New York Times — they don’t want to get cut off. That’s first.

The second thing is that there’s a price to pay. If you challenge that dominant narrative, they’re going to come for you. And it’s not good for your career. It’s not good for your news organisation. And most journalists – especially at the level of journalism that I was at, at the Times – they are consummate careerists.

They know very well what’s good for their career and they’re not going to do anything to jeopardise it. I mean, I was pushed out of the New York Times because I denounced Bush’s call to invade Iraq. I spent months of my life in Iraq — I knew. And seven years in the Middle East, and I’m an Arabic speaker. I knew this was the debacle that it became. But to say that at the time was to be a pariah. And there was no difference, in my opinion, my assessment, from any of the other reporters in the Middle East. They just were smart enough to keep their mouth shut. So that’s it. That’s it.

And if you pedal the false narrative that Israel perpetually doles out to the press, you’re not going to pay a price. If you challenge that narrative, they’re going to come for you.

MP: Yeah. Absolutely. And so, I mean, we’re no strangers, of course, to that narrative in Australia and Independent Australia is an outlier, if you like, from the mainstream — what I like to call the mainstream media club, here. And, of course, your experience with that club was, let’s say, less than positive. In terms of having been invited out here to speak.

For those who don’t know, Chris was invited out to Australia to be a keynote speaker at the National Press Club and then that invitation was rescinded. And of course, my favourite line, Chris, is where you did say,  ‘Please have the decency to remove the word “press” from your club’, about the National Press Club of Australia.

Now, how did that actually transpire, and why do you think that firstly they invite you and then they change their mind?

CH: Well, I can only speculate. So I was invited to give the Edward Said annual lecture at the University of Adelaide and then, of course, other events respond from that initial invitation, including an address of the National Press Club.

I think the National Press Club saw Pulitzer Prize, American, New York Times, and thought that I was going to regurgitate the usual garbage, the mainstream press regurgitates. And that they probably did a little research, including reading a column that I had written called ‘The Betrayal of Palestinian Journalists’, and they decided absolutely not. That’s my guess because we were scheduled, we had a confirmation letter and they had posted on their site.

What was surprising to me was that they lied outright. Now that was very surprising. They should have done that with more finesse. They said that the event had never been confirmed. It had been confirmed. I had the confirmation letter, and we shared it with many media organisations in Australia and, it had, somebody had thankfully taken a picture of the website.

So, they said it wasn’t posted on the website, is completely untrue. And then I had heard from someone inside, that they were reaching out to the Israeli ambassador, who has spoken there before to see if he could speak in the name of balance. They’d gotten blowback on a previous event.

So yeah, that’s what happened. And it’s not actually new. I’ve got to know those of us who speak about Palestinian rights and confront Israel in the Zionist lobby, this is kind of, you know, not uncommon.

What was surprising was that these people were a press club was so utterly mendacious about what happened.

MP: Welcome to Australia, Chris!

CH: I don’t know. The United States probably isn’t any better. 

MP: I know. But I’m interested in this idea of the balance that you spoke of just then, which is frequently quoted in the media here and is a real bugbear of Independent Australia and our editorial position because, you know, there are certain issues in which there simply are not two sides.

For example – and I’m not suggesting war, of course – but things such as you know, climate change. People say, well, we need to have two sides of climate change. To me, it’s a bit like saying there are two sides to gravity. You know, there are not two sides. Climate change is a scientific fact. There seems to be this obsession with this faux balance. Well, what are your thoughts on that?

Well, because what it does is protect journalists from powerful entities that would go after them for speaking an unvarnished truth. But it’s very cynical because what you’re doing is, in the name of balance, essentially allowing propagandists, people who peddle lies, to quote/unquote “balance” out the truth.

So, you know, Israel, I covered, you know, I lived in Gaza for months at a time and watched Israeli lies. Israel lies like it breathes. And so, you know, the frustrating part for those of us who are on the ground is that the truth, the reality that we sought to impart as journalists to the rest of the world, was constantly obscured by Israeli lies. And the journalists at my own newspaper who were peddling those lies, they knew they were lies.

I mean, maybe if you’re if David Maher in Australia, you don’t know they’re lies, but the people on the ground in Jerusalem, they all know that Israel is lying.

I said in that column that I wrote – I wrote a column about being cancelled – I can’t remember the title of it, by the press club. And I talked about the Israeli ambassador.

I said, well, yes, he could provide balance if he was honest. He could tell us about Lavender, the AI system that targets Palestinians in Gaza. He could talk about the quotas that up to ten or 20 civilians can be killed if you’re trying to target a Hamas fighter. Up over a hundred can be killed if you’re trying to target a Hamas commander. I mean, that would be balanced because I’m not on the inside of the IDF. I mean, I know, you know, as a reporter, I can glean stuff on theoutside. That would be balance. That would kind of create the circle. It would broaden our understanding of the truth.

But that, of course, is not what he does, or Israeli officials do. And so, yeah, balance has become a way to obscure truth, not enhance it. And that has been, you know, one of the frustrating things about dealing with Israel for all the years that I’ve dealt with them.

MP: And so do you see a positive here in terms of the world view shifting somewhat? Certainly in Italy, where you’ve just returned from, joined by Greta Tunberg, Francesca Albanese and Yanis Varoufakis, with the strikes there against this genocide in Gaza. What are your thoughts on that? Are people waking up? Is there a way forward?

CH: Yeah, people have woken up, and the government’s response has been very heavy-handed censorship and repression. So, they’ve shut down the university encampments. They have expelled – I mean, Columbia University, I live in Princeton, so I was at that encampment a lot, but I was also at Columbia – hundreds of students were expelled. Professors Katherine Frankie, the constitutional law expert, I mean, she’s quite an eminent figure, taught at the law school for 25 years — thrown out. 

Rashid Khalidi, one of the great historians of the Middle East, because of the new rules, will not even teach a survey course because they would be in violation.

It’s that whole conflation of criticism of Israel with anti-semitism. I mean, this is, and also let’s be clear, in these encampments, a rough estimate, 20 or 30% of the students were Jewish. Certainly the the largest ethnic group was probably Jewish. So yeah, I mean, 77% of registered Democrats want to halt arm shipments to Israel, which is part of the reason Kamala Harris lost, because they were just so tone-deaf that they didn’t listen to their base.

I just testified a few weeks ago at the state house in Trenton, New Jersey, about adopting the IHRA, which is this bill that conflates criticism of Israel with anti-semitism.

I was there testifying with a Holocaust scholar, an Israeli Holocaust scholar named Raz Seagull — a very courageous and brilliant Holocaust scholar. And when we were trying to speak, the chairman muted our microphones so no one could hear us.

So there we were, attempting to argue that this bill would shut down free speech while they were shutting down free speech. So yeah, that’s the response. I think most people, I mean in I don’t know Australia, but certainly within the United States and this, you’ve seen it even on the right, which is why figures like Charlie Kirk, a very repugnant racist, homophobic, Islamophobic, who’s now been deified by the Trump Administration. 

But even he had to shift because young people, even young Republicans, are not buying this anymore. I mean, how could you? It’s two years of live-streamed horror.

So, yeah, but the response of the state and the response of media organisations. I mean, we’ve seen in the United States, Larry Ellison, one of the richest people in the United States, has bought up CBS. He’s trying to buy TikTok; he’s probably going to get it, CNN. And their response is just wholesale censorship. They’ve appointed this really repugnant, irresponsible and dishonest figure, Bari Weiss, to run CBS News.

I mean, the only good thing is that she’s so incompetent, it isn’t going to work. But yeah, it’s censorship. It’s really because they don’t have any other answer, at this point.

So yeah, I think there’s been a huge, huge shift. And that frightens Israel, and it frightens the Zionists, or the Israel lobby. And it frightens those in power who, I mean, first of all, the weapons manufacturers, who’ve made a killing off the war in or the genocide in Gaza in the same way they’ve made a killing off of Ukraine. So yeah, there are powerful entities that find this threatening.

MP: And you know, given that our job as you’ve said many times and we say frequently as well, is, as journalists, to report the truth, with these changes with these very wealthy people buying out all our, not only media organisations but social media organisations, how are people going to be able to get the message out and, you know, and actually report the truth?

CH: Right, so it doesn’t work. I mean, what they’re trying to do doesn’t work, and the best example is Turkey. I used to cover, spend a lot of time in Turkey. So, Erdoğan destroyed the Turkish press – by the way was one of the most vigorous and respected press in, let’s call it the Muslim world, Turkey’s not technically, I think in the Middle East.

But Hürriyet, I mean, these were amazing press organisations. I mean, these journalists were really, really good and Erdoğan destroyed it. Well, nobody reads Hürriyet anymore. They all like, gravitate to podcasts by Turkish journalists who are living in exile in Germany.

So, it isn’t going to work. I mean, it is, the idea that they are going to be able to disseminate these kinds of falsehoods is a pipe dream. They, you know, if they shut down TikTok, people will find other ways to get information.

That was true in the old Soviet Union. You know, where they would send out mimeograph newsletters. That’s, I think, how Solzhenitsyn, first disseminated parts of Gulag Archipelago.

These people have no credibility left. So they can buy up all these media organisations, do everything they want, but people are going to walk away.

MP: They’re going to listen to people like us, hopefully.

CH: Yeah. They’re going to listen to people who are attempting to actually grapple with the truth rather than sell propaganda.

MP: And so on that, I mean, I’m not sure if you’re aware, but Australia has passed new legislation actually covering social media for those under 16. It is now illegal for people under 16 to access social media. How how do you think that’s going to play out?

CH: Well, I have kind of conflicted emotions about it because, as someone who teaches, well, yeah, I always find that I think all of us who’ve taught for a long time are finding that that kind of addiction to social media has destroyed attention spans even at elite universities and made it hard for people to concentrate and read.

Because as soon as you get on social media, you know, you stop reading. So, there’s that aspect of it. I mean, I fear a post-literate culture and with AI, a culture that no longer knows how to write, and when you don’t know how to write, you don’t know how to organise your thoughts. You don’t know how to think clearly. So, there’s that aspect. On the other hand, of course, there’s a censorship aspect.

MP: Yeah.

CH: The idea that you can stop people from seeing the horror in Gaza or accessing information that challenges whatever the power elites want you to believe. I mean, that element is there without question and we’re probably about to see TikTok seized by Ellison and Zionists.

But I don’t think it ultimately works. I  don’t think I think people, even if they don’t know exactly what’s happening, they do know they’re being lied to.

MP: Right. Well, that’s a very positive way to look at it and I really appreciate that because yes, like you, I am conflicted. You know, I have their grown children now, but the whole social media landscape has been troubling for a long time. And also the way in which it’s controlled and the way in which the algorithms, I guess, force feed information — funnel information in a certain way to people, and, you know, shadow ban independent news media organisations. All of those things are very troubling.

However, the idea that we can just go, right, that’s it, you’re no longer able to access information — I find that also quite repugnant and difficult to grapple with. So, I think this idea that people know they’re being lied to, even if they don’t actually know the full circumstances behind events and so forth, but we’ll try and seek out the truth — I find that very comforting in a way.

So, yeah, thank you, Chris.

And, so lastly, how do you feel, as journalists, we need to move forward from here? How do we actually navigate the difficulties with AI, ChatGPT kind of dominating people’s Google searches? The difficulty in accessing social media and being made available for people.

What should we be doing to actually get to the truth, which is our job? It’s our one job. We’ve got one job! 

CH: Yeah, the problem is these media platforms are owned by these large corporations, Meta and others, that are completely tied to the national security state. And of course, I’m a victim of that. You know, I had a show on RT America. It wasn’t on Russia. It was on the United States. And as soon as they shut RT down, YouTube disappeared all six years of my show.

So the entities that we use to essentially reach an audience are entities that are controlled by people who are antagonistic to the message that we’re trying to send. And that is a big, big problem. Something actually Julian Assange predicted and wrote about in his book, Cypherpunks.

I’m a friend of Julian. So, and let me just, you know, again hold him up, as I did when I was in Australia, along with John Pilger. I think I said you produced some of the best journalists of our era and some of the worst. I was actually thinking of Murdoch, but we can include David Mahr, too.

MP: Do we really call him a journalist?

CH: No, he’s not a journalist. He’s what we call a throat. Yeah. You know, somebody who sits in front of a microphone and you know, stares at his own reflection, in essence.

I told him that when I walked out. I mean, the first thing I said to him was that “You’re a piece of shit”. And the second thing I said, “In our business, we call you a throat, right? Which I have no respect for them at all. So, yeah.

MP: I was referring to Murdoch, by the way, but yeah, sure.

CH: Yeah. You know we have to fight the battles. But people know when you are attempting to be honest. I mean people sense that. People understand that.

I mean, I was, a few months ago, standing in line for a train at the Washington Union Station in Washington DC and the woman behind me said, “Oh, I know who you are, and I respect what you do, and I voted for Trump.”

And I thought, but at least she knows I’m trying to be honest. I mean, I loathe Trump, of course, but I thought, you know, at least she knows I’m not trying to spin her.

MP: Yes. And that’s a very interesting point. But you know, I guess Trump is the elephant in the room for us in many ways because there’s no escaping him, even though, you know, he’s not the president of Australia but he influences the “free world” as we like to refer to it. And we find it quite astounding that he would be returned. And, I know it’s too late to kind of go over that now, but…

CH: Yeah, that’s a long discussion, but it really comes from the orchestration of social inequality, massive social inequality. And a system that funnels wealth upwards into the hands of a billionaire class, Jeff Bezos and others, Palantir [Peter Thiel] and all these figures.

MP: And Musk and Zuckerberg…

CH: And so people know they’ve been betrayed. And they’ve been betrayed by both the quote-unquote “liberal class”, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. And so, they, you know, Trump is worse, but he’s — people are desperate. He expresses a kind of rage and calls for vengeance. Of course, what he does, like all demagogues, is focus that vengeance on the vulnerable. On Muslims, undocumented people, etcetera, who are not the people who created the mess.

But that’s what classically what demagogues or authoritarian states always do. Trump is not the disease. He’s the symptom. And it’s the Obamas and the Bidens, and the Clintons and the Bushes, that essentially destroyed our democracy piece by piece.

Sheldon Wolin, the great political philosopher, calls it a “corporate coup d’état in slow motion”. No, that’s actually John Ralston Saul — sorry, the Canadian philosopher. But yeah, that’s right. That’s what happened. And so people are grasping, and people are desperate. People say, you know, they’re suffering. I mean, 60% of the people in the United States don’t have $400 for an emergency bill.

Well, that when societies break down like that you

MP: Sixty per cent?!

CH: Yeah, 60% of the United States is living paycheck to paycheck, really struggling. And we don’t have universal health care. Over half of, about 500,000 people a year who have health insurance go bankrupt, I mean, the whole system is so predatory, so mercenary.

You know, student debt, personal debt, suppression of wages, I mean it’s — United States is a very cruel, cruel place. Not to mention the fact that we have mass shootings almost on a daily basis. We just had one at Brown University. So it’s … and that’s what happens.

I mean, I saw it in the former Yugoslavia when the economic collapse of Yugoslavia and hyperinflation led to the rise of these, you know, figures like Radovan Karadžić and Slobodan Milošević and Franjo Tuđman and others. Or you go back to Weimar. I mean, this is what happens.

MP: Go back to Germany.

CH: Yeah. And Trump is just, you know, he embodies, he personally embodies the diseased society itself. He is an expression of a deeply diseased society.

MP: Chris, it’s been such a eyeopening and amazing time having you here today. I’d like to do it again, hopefully, in a little while. But do you have any closing thoughts before we go?

CH: No. Just my warning to Australia is, you know, don’t let the United States turn you into a colony because that’s what they’re trying to do. You don’t want to get sucked into our military adventurism, probably against China. That’s a really, really bad idea for us. And for Australia.

MP: Yeah. And I think you know in many ways, of course, we identify because we started out as a colony, with that kind, of you know, having this big brother looking out for us. And I think that is a huge issue and one of the reasons, one of the things that we rail against here. You know, trying to actually have an independent nation — independent of the monarchy and of the U.S. military machine.

But thank you very much for that. I really appreciate it, and all your insights into the world today. A little bit bleak, but you know, it is our job to talk about it, isn’t it?

CH: Yeah. Thanks, Michelle.

MP: Thank you.