Iran And Gaza Are Only The Beginning Chris Hedges At Princeton

TITLE: ‘Iran and Gaza Are ONLY THE BEGINNING’ (Chris Hedges at Princeton) CHANNEL: The Chris Hedges YouTube Channel DATE: 2026-03-27 ---TRANSCRIPT--- Thank you for inviting me. I um have just finished uh with the cartoonist Joe Sako. I hope you know his work Palestine footnotes in Gaza, a book on the genocide. We interviewed 29 families in Egypt from Gaza uh and have spent the last year writing the story of the genocide through their experiences. We literally turned in the manuscript a week ago, which is why if I look burned out, I am burned out. It’ll be published um in uh October. Um but I didn’t want to speak about the book given what’s happening as I speak in southern Lebanon, in Iran, and in Gaza. Um I wanted to speak a little more globally today.

The genocide in Gaza is the beginning. Welcome to the new world order, the age of technologically advanced barbarism. There are no rules for the strong, only for the weak. Oppose the strong. Refuse to bow to its capricious demands. And you are showered with missiles and bombs.

We watch this madness daily with the war on Iran, the saturation bombing of southern Lebanon, and the suffering in Gaza. International bodies such as the United Nations have been neutered, transformed into useless appendages of another age. The sanctity of individual rights, open borders, and international law have vanished.

The most psychopathic rulers of human history. Those who reduced cities to ashes, herded captive populations to execution sites, and littered lands they occupied with mass graves and corpses, have returned with a vengeance, opening up a vast moral abyss.

The law, despite a few valiant efforts by a handful of judges who will soon be purged domestically and an international bodies such as the International Court of Justice is contemptuously violated.

Savagery abroad, savagery at home.

The BBC’s Lucy Williamson reports that Israel is destroying South Lebanon, and I quote, “Using Gaza as a model, a blueprint for destruction, used again as a path to peace.” End quote.

Over 1 million people have already been displaced in Lebanon. 1ifth of the entire population of a country that already hosts the world’s highest number of refugees per capita in just a few weeks. Add to this 2 million displaced in Gaza and 3 million displaced in Iran. 6 million people rendered homeless for four decades. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been lobbying for the US to go to war with Iran.

Previous administrations, Republican and Democrat, have refused in no small part because of fierce opposition within the Pentagon, which did not view Iran as an existential threat and did not project a positive outcome for the United States or its allies.

But Donald Trump, encouraged by his inept negotiating team of his son-in-law Jared Kushner and fellow real estate developer and golfing partner Steve Witkoff, each fervent Zionists, took the bait. Joseph Kent, who resigned his position as director of the National Counterterrorism Center to protest the war, wrote in his resignation letter that quote, “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”

The public rationale for the war on Iran since it began on February 28th has been protein. Is it to shut down Iran’s nuclear program? Is it to thwart Iran’s ballistic missile program? Is it because the US carried out preemptive attacks on Iran, as Marco Rubio said, to ensure the safety of US assets once Israel decided to strike? Is it because the Iranian government carried out lethal repression, killing hundreds of anti-government protesters during massive street protests? Is it regime change? Is it an attempt to shut down Iran’s so-called state sponsored terrorism? Or are these subuses for something else?

Certainly, Israel and the US seek regime change, but here it appears the US and Israel diverge. Israel also apparently seeks, as in Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Lebanon, the physical disintegration of Iran, the breaking apart of the country into waring ethnic and religious enclaves, the transformation of Iran into a failed state. Persians in Iran, where I worked frequently, constitute roughly 61% of the population with various minority groups who often suffer state repression making up the remaining 39%.

These ethnic groups include Azerbaijanis, Kurds, Lures, Balaks, Arabs, and Turkmans along with religious minorities such as Sunnis, Christians, Bahigh, Zoroastrians, and Jews. The shattering of Iran into antagonistic ethnic and religious enclaves would leave Israel as the dominant power in the region, given it the ability to, if not occupy its neighbors uh then directly control and subjugate them through proxies, part of a longheld desire for greater Israel. It would also make it possible for foreign states to control Iranian gas reserves, the second largest in the world and its oil reserves 12% of the global total.

Israel’s crusade against the Palestinians, the Lebanese, and now the Iranians is justified by the extermination of 6 million Jews during the Holocaust. But it is not lost on the global south, especially Palestinians, that nearly all Holocaust scholars have refused to condemn the genocide in Gaza. Not one of the institutions dedicated to researching and commemorating the Holocaust have drawn the obvious historical parallels or decrieded the mass slaughter.

Holocaust scholars, with a handful of exceptions, have exposed their true purpose, which is not to examine the dark side of human nature and the frightening propensity we all have to commit evil, but to sanctify Jews as eternal victims and absolve the ethnationalist state of Israel of its crimes of settler colonialism, apartheid, and genocide.

The hijacking of the Holocaust, the failure to defend Palestinian victims because they are Palestinian has imploded the moral authority of Holocaust scholars and Holocaust memorials. They have been exposed at ve as vehicles not to prevent genocide but to perpetuate it, not to explore the past but manipulate the present. Any tepeeid recognition that the Holocaust may not be the exclusive property of Israel and its Zionist supporters is swiftly shut down. The Holocaust Museum in Los Angeles deleted an Instagram post that read, “Never again can’t only mean never again for Jews.” After a backlash in the hands of Zionists, never again means precisely that. Never again, only for Jews. Am Cesar in discourse on colonialism which you if you haven’t read it you should read it writes that Hitler seemed exceptionally cruel only because he presided over quote the humiliation of the white man applying to Europe the colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria the quote unquote coolies of India and the blacks of Africa. The near annihilation of Tasmania’s aboriginal population, the German slaughter of the Herrero and Namakqua, the Armenian genocide, the Bengal famine of 1943.

Then British Prime Minister Winston Churchill referred to Hindus as quote a beastly people with a beastly religion along with the dropping of nuclear bombs on civilian targets in Hiroshima Nagasaki illustrates something fundamental about Western civilization. Genocide is not an anomaly. It is coded within our DNA in America. The poet Langston Hughes said, “Negroes do not have to be told what fascism is in action. We know its theories of Nordic supremacy and economic suppression have long been realities to us.” The Nazis, when they formulated the Nuremberg laws, modeled them on laws designed to disenfranchise blacks. America’s refusal to grant citizenship to Native Americans and Filipinos although they lived in the US and US territories was emulated by the German fascists who stripped citizenship from Jews. American anti-misogynation laws which criminalized interracial marriage were the impetus to outlaw marriages between German Jews and Aryans. American juristprudence classified anyone with 1% of black ancestry, the so-called one drop rule, as black. The Nazis, ironically, showing more flexibility, classified anyone with three or more Jewish grandparents as Jewish. The millions of indigenous victims of colonial projects in countries such as Mexico, China, India, Australia, the Congo, and Vietnam for this reason are deaf to the fatuous claims by Zionists that their victimhood is unique. They too suffered holocausts, but these holocausts remain minimized or unacnowledged by their Western perpetrators.

Israel embodies the ethno nationalist state our own Christian fascists and the far-right dream of creating for themselves one that rejects political and cultural pluralism as well as legal diplomatic and ethical norms. Israel is admired by the far right because it has turned its back on humanitarian law and uses indiscriminate lethal force to cleanse its society of those condemned as human contaminants.

It was this distortion of the Holocaust that troubled Primo Levy who was imprisoned in Ashvitz from 1944 to 1945 and who wrote Survival in Ashvitz. Levy was a fierce critic of the apartheid state of Israel and its treatment of Palestinians. He saw the showa as quote an inexhaustible source of evil that is perpetuated as hatred in the survivors and springs up in a thousand ways against the very will of all as a thirst for revenge as moral breakdown as negation as weariness as resignation.

Levy deplored the manachism of those who shun nuance and complexity. He condemned those who reduce the river of human events to conflicts and conflicts to duels, us and them. He warned that the network of human relationships inside the concentration camps was not simple. It could not be reduced to two blocks, victims and perpetrators. The enemy he knew was outside but also inside. Morai himkowski known as King Heim ruled in the load ghetto in Poland on behalf of the Nazi occupiers. The ghetto became a slave labor camp that enriched Rcowski and his Nazi masters. Rcowski deported opponents to death camps. He raped and molested girls and women. He demanded unquestioned obedience. He embodied the evil of his oppressors. For Levy, he was an example of what many of us under similar circumstances are capable of becoming.

We are all mirror mirrored in Rumcowski. His ambiguity is ours. It is our second nature. We hybrids molded from clay and spirit. Levy wrote in The Drowned and The Saved. His fever is ours. The fever of our Western civilization that descends into hell with trumpets and drums, and its miserable adornments are the distorting image of our symbols of social prestige.

Like Rumcowski, we too are so dazzled by power and prestige as to forget our essential fragility. Levy continues, “Willingly or not, we come to terms with power, forgetting that we are all in the ghetto, that the ghetto is walled in, that outside the ghetto reign the lords of death, and that close by the train is waiting.”

Levy understood that the line between the victim and the victimizer is razor thin. We can all become willing executioners. There is nothing intrinsically moral about being Jewish or a survivor of the Holocaust. And Levy for this reason was persona nonrada in Israel.

Zionists find in the Holocaust and the Jewish state a sense of purpose and meaning as well as a cloying moral superiority. After the 1967 war, when Israel seized Gaza, the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, Syria’s Golan Heights, and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, Israel, as American sociologist Nathan Glazer approvingly observed, became quote the religion of the American Jews. The Holocaust became their moral capital.

Jewish suffering is depicted as ineffable, uncommunicable, and yet always to be proclaimed, writes the European historian Charles Mayor. In the unmasterable past, history, Holocaust, and German national identity. It is intensely private, not to be deliluted, but simultaneously public, so that gentile society will confirm the crimes. A very peculiar suffering must be enshrined in public sites, Holocaust museums, memory gardens, deportation sites, dedicated not as Jewish, but civic memorials. But what is the role of a museum in a country such as the United States, far from the site of the Holocaust? Is it to rally the people who suffer or to instruct non-Jews? Is it supposed to serve as a reminder that it can happen here? Or is it a statement that some special consideration is deserved? Under what circumstances can a private sorrow serve simultaneously as a public grief? And if genifi genocide is certified as a public sorrow, then must we not accept the credentials of other particular sorrows too? An American historian of Polish ancestry argues that with a German invasion of 1939, the Poles became the first people in Europe to experience the Holocaust. And that historians have so far chosen to interpret the tragedy in exclusivist terms terms, namely as the most tragic period in the history of the Jewish diaspora. If Polish Americans claim that their own quote unquote forgotten Holocaust, what recognition should they enjoy? Do Armenians and Cambodians also have a right to publicly funded Holocaust museums? And do we need memorials to 7th Day Adventists and homosexuals for their persecution at the hands of the Third Reich? Unique suffering confers unique entitlement. Any crime Israel carries out in the name of its survival, its right to exist, is justified in the name of this uniqueness.

There are no limits. The world is black and white, a neverending battle against Nazism, which is protein, depending on who Israel targets. To challenge this bloodlust is to be an anti-semite, facilitating another genocide of Jews. This simplistic formula not only serves the interests of Israel, but also the interests of colonial powers that carried out their own genocides, ones they also seek to obscure.

The sacralization of the Nazi Holocaust offers a bizarre quid proquo. Arming and funding the state of Israel, blocking UN resolutions and sanctions that would condemn its crimes and demonizing Palestinians and their supporters becomes proof of atonement and support for Jews. Israel in return absolves the West for its indifference to the plight of Jews during the Holocaust and Germany for perpetrating it. Germany uses this unholy alliance to separate Nazism from the rest of German history, including the genocide German colonists carried out against the Nama and Herrerero in German southwest Africa, now Namibia.

Such magic, the Israeli historian and genocide scholar Raz Seagull writes, legitimizes racism against Palestinians at the very moment that Israel perpetrates genocide against them. The idea of Holocaust uniqueness thus reproduces rather than challenges the exclusionary nationalism and settler colonialism that led to the Holocaust.

Professor Seagull, the director of the program in Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Stockton University in New Jersey, wrote an article about the war on Gaza on October 13, 2023 titled A Textbook Case of Genocide. This denunciation from an Israeli Holocaust scholar whose family members perished in the Holocaust was a very lonely stance.

Professor Seagull saw in the Israeli government’s immediate demand that Palestinians evacuate the north of Gaza and the blood curdling demonization of the Palestinians by Israeli officials. The defense minister said Israel was fighting quote unquote human animals, the stench of genocide. The whole idea about prevention and never again is that as we teach our students there are red flags that once we notice them we’re supposed to work in order to stop the process that could escalate to genocide. Professor Seagull told me even if it’s not genocidal yet. Holocaust studies as a field might be dead which is not necessarily a bad thing. He continued, “If indeed Holocaust studies is intertwined from the beginning with the ideology of global Holocaust memory, maybe it’s good that we won’t have Holocaust studies anymore. And maybe it will open the door for even more interesting and important research on the Holocaust as history, as real history.” Professor Seagull paid for his honesty. The offer to lead the University of Minnesota’s Center for Holocaust and Genocidal Genocide Studies, which has issued no condemnation of the genocide, was revoked. When Professor Seagull and I testified at the state capital in Trenton in opposition to the adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, the IH Bill, which equates criticism of the state of Israel with anti-semitism. We were jered by Zionists and our microphones were cut by the committee chairman. There we were arguing that this bill would cretail free speech while we were in real time being denied free speech.

Genocide is the next stage in what the anthropologist Arjun Apador calls quote a vast worldwide Malthusian correction that is geared to preparing the world for the winners of globalization minus the inconvenient noise of the losers. The funding and arming of Israel by the United States and European allies as it carries out genocide has effectively imploded the postworld war II international legal order. It no longer has credibility. The West can no longer lecture anyone about democracy, human rights, or the supposed virtues of Western civilization.

The ruse that somehow we as a nation promote democracy, equality, and human rights is finished. At the same time that Gaza induces vertigo, a feeling of chaos and emptiness, it becomes for countless powerless people, the essential condition of political and ethical consciousness in the 21st century, just as the first world war was for a generation in the west. Pankage Mishra writes,

“None of us who reported from Israel and Palestine, where I worked as a reporter for seven years, predicted this genocide, and yet we were acutely aware of the genocidal impulse that lay at the heart of the Zionist project, the desire by large segments of Israeli society to eradicate and expel all Palestinians. This genocidal impulse was there from the inception of Zionism. Victor Clemper, a professor of linguistics and the son of a Berlin rabbi living under Nazi rule, noted in his diary, quote, “To me the Zionists who want to go back to the Jewish state of 70 AD, the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus, are just as offensive as the Nazis with their nosing after blood, their ancient cultural roots, their partly caning, partly obtuse winding back of the world. They are altogether a match for the national socialists.”

I covered the extremist rabbi Marahana who claimed that violence was a Jewish virtue and revenge a divine commandment. He was when I was based in Jerusalem, barred by the Israeli government from running for office. Kahana was assassinated on November 5th, 1990 in New York City. His party in Israel was outlawed four years later after Baroo Golstein, a Brooklyn-b born doctor and member, entered Hebrron’s Ibrahimi mosque and opened fire on worshippers, killing 29 Palestinians, an event I covered for the New York Times. Goldstein, dressed in his army captain’s uniform, was overpowered by worshippers and beaten to death. Following its statements of support for the massacre was declared a terrorist organization by the United States.

But Kahanaism didn’t die. It was nurtured by Jewish extremists and colonists. Cox’s racial intolerance and calls for mass violence against Palestinians infected larger and larger segments of Israeli society. I saw this intolerance at political rallies rallies held by Netanyahu who received lavish funding from right-wing Americans associated with Apac when he ran against Yeetsak Rabbine who was negotiating a peace settlement with the Palestinians.

Netanyahu’s supporters chanted Kahana inspired slogans such as death to Arabs and death to Rabbine. They burned an effigy of Rabbine dressed in a Nazi uniform. Netanyahu marched in front of a mock funeral for Rabbine and Rabbine was assassinated by a Jewish fanatic on November 4th, 1995.

Netanyahu, who first became prime minister in 1996, has spent his political career nurturing these Jewish extremists, including Itamar Bengavier, who hung a portrait of Goldstein on the wall of his living room. Bezel Smotrich, Avidor Lieberman, Gideon Sar, Naftali Bennett, and others. Netanyahu’s father, Ben Zion, who worked as an assistant to the founder of revisionist Zionism, Vladimir Jabotinski, who was referred to by Bonito Mussolini, and I quote, as a good fascist, was a leader in the Harut Party that called on Israel to seize all of the land of historic Palestine. Many of those who formed the Harut Party carried out terrorist attacks during the 1948 war that established the state of Israel. Albert Einstein, Hannah Erin, Sydney Hook, and other Jewish intellectuals described the Harut Party in a statement published in the New York Times as a party quote closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy, and social appeal to Nazi and fascist parties.

There has always been a virulent strain of Jewish fascism within the Zionist project mirroring mirroring the strain of fascism in American society. Unfortunately for us and the Palestinians, these fascistic strains are ascendant.

The decision to obliterate Gaza has long been the dream of far-right Zionists, heirs of Kahana’s movement. Jewish identity and Jewish nationalism are the Zionist versions of the Nazis blood and soil ideology. Jewish supremacy is sanctified by God as is the slaughter of the Palestinians who Netanyahu compared to the biblical Amalachites who were massacred by the Israelites. Europeans and Euroamericans in the American colonies use the same biblical passage to justify their genocide against Native Americans. Enemies, usually Muslims, who are slated for extinction are subhumans who embody evil. Violence and the threat of violence are the only forms of communication. Those outside the magical circle of Jewish nationalism understand messianic redemption will take place once the Palestinians are expelled. Jewish extremists call for the Alaka mosque, one of three of the most sacred sites for Muslims supposedly built on the ruins of the Jewish second temple which was destroyed by the Roman army in 70 AD to be demolished. These extremists call for it to be replaced by a third Jewish temple, a move that would set the Muslim world al light. The West Bank, which zealots refer to as Judea and Samaria, is being annexed, as I speak, by Israel. Israel, governed by religious laws imposed by ultraorththodox shas and united Torah Judaism parties will soon mirror the despotic theocracy in Iran.

James Baldwin preciently saw this regression to our innate barbarism and just the students here if you have not read James Baldwin you don’t understand America he warned that there was a quote terrible probability that western populations struggling to hold on to what they have stolen from their captives and unable to look into their mirror will precipitate a chaos throughout the world which if it does not bring life on this planet to an end will bring about a racial war as the world has never seen and for which generations yet unborn will curse our names forever.

The savagery in Iran, Lebanon, and Gaza is the same savagery we face at home. Those carrying out the genocide, mass slaughter, and unprovoked war on Iran are the same people dismantling our democratic institutions.

The Iranians, Lebanese, and Palestinians know there is no appeasing these monsters. The global elites believe nothing. They feel nothing. They cannot be trusted. They exhibit the core traits of all psychopaths. Superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance, a need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception, manipulation, and the inability to feel remorse or guilt. They disdain as weakness the virtues of empathy, honesty, compassion, and self sacrifice. They live by the creed of me me.

The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues. The fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths. And the fact that millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane. Eric Fro writes in the sane society.

We have witnessed evil for nearly three years in Gaza. We watch it now in Iran. We watch it in Lebanon. We see this evil excused or masked by political leaders and the media. The New York Times in a page out of Orwell sent an internal memo telling reporters and editors to eskeew the terms refugee camps, occupied territory, ethnic cleansing, and of course genocide when writing about Gaza.

Those who name and denounce this evil, including the heroic students who set up encampments on campuses here at Princeton and even abroad, are smeared, blacklisted, and purged. They are arrested and deported. A deadening silence is descending upon us. The silence of all authoritarian states.

We know where this ends.

Fail to do your duty, fail to cheerlead the war on Iran, speak out against the crime of genocide, and see your broadcasting license revoked as Trump’s chair of the FCC, Brendan Carr, has proposed.

We have enemies. They are not in Palestine. They are not in Lebanon. They are not in Iran. They are here among us. They dictate our lives. They are traitors to our ideals and they are traders to our country. They envision a world of slaves and masters and Gaza is only the start. There are no internal mechanisms for reform. We can obstruct or surrender. These are the only choices left. Thank you.