“We progress backwards.”
Graffiti on a UN school wall, quoted by Hedges.
It is tempting to call Chris Hedges’s A Genocide Foretold a work of journalism. Certainly, it has the scaffolding: on-the-ground reporting from Ramallah, firsthand testimony from Gaza, a chronology of violence, the kind of human detail (dust, diesel, broken fruit stalls) that renders atrocity real. But calling this journalism undersells it. Hedges, a former war correspondent for the New York Times, is no longer writing to inform. He is writing to indict. Not just Israel, though he does that unflinchingly, but the moral and legal architecture that once promised to make genocide impossible. The UN. The ICC. The Enlightenment. Liberalism itself. In his telling, Gaza is not an exception. It is the logical destination of empire.
What gives this book its power is not that Hedges is a reliable narrator, though he is. It’s that he has stopped pretending to be neutral. He has not simply chosen a side. He has named the crime: genocide, not war; colonialism, not conflict; resistance, not terrorism. And in doing so, he shows what it means to break the consensus of polite Western discourse. That consensus. That the situation is tragic but complex, that Israel has a right to defend itself, that two sides must come to the table, is exposed here not as confusion but as ideology. An ideology built to excuse the unacceptable, and to deny Palestinians the dignity of resistance.
Hedges’s chapters are not conventional reports. They range across testimonial fragments, historical parallels, elegies for the dead, long-form polemics, and political theology. He is at times a reporter, at others a preacher, a poet, a prophet. He quotes Darwish and Donne, draws on Sartre and T.S. Eliot, and invokes God not to offer comfort but to pronounce judgement. The destruction of Gaza becomes, in this register, not just a war crime but a desecration. When Israeli tanks shell Al-Shifa hospital and the screen goes black—“every infant in an incubator will die. Every dialysis patient will die. Everyone in the intensive care unit will die”—Hedges does not reach for strategic analysis. He writes as if witnessing the crucifixion of the modern world.
He begins in Ramallah, in a battered black Mercedes, with a Palestinian friend who has lost his job, his savings, and nearly his hope. “A few more months like this and we’re finished,” the man tells him. It’s September 2024. The checkpoints are multiplying. The settlements have spread. Children are being shot in the head. The air is thick with sewage and smoke. From this already bleak scene, Hedges moves south, into the rubble of Gaza. He enters through the Rafah crossing from Egypt—“a bottleneck of chaos and grief,” he writes.Waiting for hours in the sun alongside families clutching exit permits. Most foreign journalists were kept out. Hedges, exceptionally, got in.
There, the narrative shifts from observation to lamentation. He profiles the writer Atef Abu Saif, whose son Yasser now barely speaks, and the poet Refaat Alareer, whose final poem, If I Must Die, became a viral elegy for the dispossessed before he himself was killed in an Israeli airstrike. Their deaths are not presented as tragic side-effects but as deliberate acts. “Writers, photographers, and journalists are targeted by aggressors in war—including the Israelis—for obliteration,” Hedges writes. “They stand as witnesses to an evil the aggressors want buried and forgotten.”
The chapter on Amr Abdallah, a seventeen-year-old boy killed in the rubble of Khan Younis, reads like a eulogy written for a world that no longer exists. Hedges recounts the drone-dropped leaflets ordering evacuation: “You must evacuate immediately… The city of Khan Yunis is a dangerous combat zone.” But there is nowhere safe in Gaza. “Doomsday on demand,” Atef writes, imagining Hollywood directors hiring Gaza as a ready-made set for war films. It is not just the targeting that is industrialised, it is the narrative too.
In one of the book’s most chilling observations, Hedges notes that “many targets are selected by artificial intelligence.” Civilians are chosen by algorithm. The human cost is incalculable, but the war remains quantified, sanitised, measured. “We picked up pieces of mutilated bodies and gathered them on a blanket; you find a leg here, a hand there, while the rest looks like minced meat.” This is not the language of diplomacy. It is the language of horror. And yet this horror is defended daily in Western capitals.
His most important chapters (Exterminate All the Brutes and The Psychosis of Permanent War) abandon personal narrative for revolutionary critique. Drawing on histories from Kenya, Algeria, and the Warsaw Ghetto, Hedges rejects the idea that Israel has “lost its way.” On the contrary, its way has always been this. What Israel has perfected, he argues, is the art of annihilation behind the mask of democracy. Gaza becomes a laboratory for that art: “Israel is estimated to have dropped over 83,000 tons of explosives—more than all the bombs dropped on Dresden, Hamburg, and London during World War II combined.”
Western media, in this account, is not simply complicit but structurally embedded in the project. He recounts the early reports of beheaded babies, women raped and burned alive, and mass executions on October 7, none substantiated, all repeated breathlessly by journalists, heads of state, and liberal pundits. “The start of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood was accompanied by a deluge of Israeli propaganda,” he writes. The truth arrives too late, if at all. Meanwhile, the death toll in Gaza climbs into the tens of thousands.
What separates this book from even the best critical reporting on Israel-Palestine is its refusal to reduce history to context. For Hedges, history is not something we look back on to understand the present. It is the present. The Nakba never ended. The logic of 1948 is still in motion. “Every new war drags us back to basics. It destroys our houses, our institutions, our mosques, and our churches… There are no warning sirens. War just arrives.” He quotes a slogan scrawled on the wall of a UN school: “We progress backwards.” The message is not metaphor. It is prophecy.
Some of Hedges’s most scathing words are reserved not for the Israeli military but for the Palestinian Authority. “It is a hated colonial police force,” he writes, “propped up to give the illusion of autonomy.” It does not govern. It pacifies. This pacification, he warns, will not hold.
“If Israel can empty Gaza,” he writes flatly, “the West Bank will be next.” Already, settlements have expanded, land has been seized, and armed settlers now function as a “shadow army.” Hedges quotes Smotrich’s plan to bring a million more colonists into the West Bank and annex Area A outright. The erasure, as he makes clear, is not piecemeal. It is methodical.
His central argument is blunt: the violence is not a distortion of the Israeli project; it is its fulfilment. From Zionism’s founding documents to its current military strategies, the aim has been consistent: maximum land, minimum Arabs. The genocide is not creeping. It has arrived. “The Jewish settler-colonial project is protean,” he writes. “It changes its shape but not its essence.”
There is something almost unbearable about the final chapter, Letter to the Children of Gaza. Addressed to a child the author has never met, it reads like a message to the dead. “You have never been in a plane,” he writes. “You have never left Gaza.” The juxtaposition is simple and devastating. Hedges is flying above the Atlantic. The child is buried beneath the rubble. They will never meet. But the writer insists on the connection: “I go because of you.” That sentence, almost biblical in its cadence, could serve as the epigraph to the entire book.
The Genocide Foretold is not a warning. It is not a plea. It is a final record from the ruins of international law. A war diary for a civilisation that can no longer pretend to be civilised. What makes it unique is not its reporting, or even its rage, but its refusal to be useful. Hedges is not trying to save the system. He is trying to bury it. What remains, in the ashes, is witness.
And resistance.
Because in the end, that is what the book is: an act of resistance. Against the lie. Against the silence. Against the idea that some lives are more grievable than others. You could say it is a message to the living. But it reads more like a promise to the dead.
“I go because of you.”
from Letter to the Children of Gaza, Hedges’s closing words to a child he never met.
