'Iran and Gaza Are ONLY THE BEGINNING' (Chris Hedges at Princeton)

ELI5/TLDR

Chris Hedges, speaking at Princeton in the middle of an active US war on Iran, argues that Gaza is not an aberration but a preview. The same Western states funding the destruction of Gaza, southern Lebanon, and now Iran are, by his reading, dismantling their own democratic institutions in parallel. He spends most of the talk on a single thesis: that “Holocaust uniqueness” has been weaponised to license a new form of settler-colonial violence, and that the line between victim and perpetrator is thinner than anyone wants to admit.

The Full Story

The framing — Gaza as template

Hedges opens by saying the genocide in Gaza is “the beginning,” not the climax. The new world order he describes is one where international law has been hollowed out, the United Nations sidelined, and the strong simply do as they please. As evidence he cites a BBC report describing Israel’s destruction of South Lebanon as using Gaza as “a blueprint for destruction, used again as a path to peace.”

The numbers he stacks up: roughly one million displaced in Lebanon (a fifth of the country), two million in Gaza, three million in Iran. Six million people uprooted in a few weeks.

The case against the Iran war

The talk is set against a US war on Iran that, in Hedges’ telling, began on February 28th. He argues previous administrations resisted because the Pentagon never saw Iran as an existential threat. The current war, he says, was sold by Netanyahu to a Trump team — Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff — that lacked the experience to push back.

He cites the resignation letter of Joseph Kent, who quit as director of the National Counterterrorism Center, writing that “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.”

Hedges suggests US and Israeli aims diverge. The US wants regime change. Israel, he argues, wants something more drastic — the physical disintegration of Iran along its 39% non-Persian fault lines (Azerbaijanis, Kurds, Arabs, Balochis, and others), the same playbook he sees in Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Lebanon. The prize: Iran’s gas reserves (second-largest in the world) and 12% of global oil reserves.

The Holocaust argument — the heart of the talk

This is where Hedges spends most of his oxygen, and where the talk is most provocative. His claim is that “Holocaust uniqueness” — the doctrine that the Nazi extermination of European Jews stands apart from all other mass atrocities — has been hijacked to provide moral cover for the Israeli state. He argues that almost no major Holocaust scholar or institution has condemned Gaza, and that this silence exposes the field as something other than what it claims to be.

He leans heavily on Primo Levi, the Auschwitz survivor and chemist who wrote Survival in Auschwitz and The Drowned and the Saved. Levi was a fierce critic of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and was, Hedges says, persona non grata there. Levi’s central insight, as Hedges presents it: the line between victim and victimizer is razor-thin, and “we can all become willing executioners.”

“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.” — Primo Levi

Hedges then gives a long catalogue of mass atrocities he says the West has minimised — Tasmania’s aboriginal population, the German genocide of the Herero and Namaqua in what is now Namibia, the Armenian genocide, the 1943 Bengal famine, the dropping of nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki — and argues that millions of people in the global south are simply not buying the claim that one group’s victimhood is unique.

He also draws a sharper, more uncomfortable line: that Nazi race law was partly modelled on US Jim Crow. The Nuremberg Laws drew on American statutes designed to disenfranchise Black Americans; America’s denial of citizenship to Native Americans and Filipinos was emulated when Germany stripped citizenship from Jews; American anti-miscegenation laws inspired the prohibition on Jewish-Aryan marriage. (The “one drop” rule, he notes drily, was actually stricter than the Nazi standard of three Jewish grandparents.)

The genealogy of Israeli ultranationalism

Hedges, who was a Middle East correspondent for the New York Times for years, walks through the Kahanist lineage — the extremist rabbi Meir Kahane, assassinated in New York in 1990; Baruch Goldstein’s massacre of 29 Palestinians in Hebron’s Ibrahimi Mosque in 1994; the chants of “death to Arabs, death to Rabin” at Netanyahu rallies before Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination in 1995. He traces a line from Vladimir Jabotinsky’s revisionist Zionism (which Mussolini reportedly called “good fascism”) through Netanyahu’s father, who served as Jabotinsky’s assistant, to current cabinet figures like Itamar Ben-Gvir, who Hedges says hung a portrait of Goldstein on his living room wall.

The point is not that Zionism was always this — it’s that a fascistic strain was always present, and is now ascendant.

The closing — a domestic warning

The speech ends by collapsing the distance between Gaza and the United States. The same forces, Hedges argues, are dismantling US democratic institutions. He cites a New York Times internal memo telling reporters to avoid the words “refugee camps,” “occupied territory,” “ethnic cleansing,” and “genocide” when covering Gaza. He cites Brendan Carr, Trump’s FCC chair, proposing to revoke broadcasting licenses for outlets that fail to support the Iran war.

“We have enemies. They are not in Palestine. They are not in Lebanon. They are not in Iran. They are here among us… We can obstruct or surrender. These are the only choices left.”

Key Takeaways

Hedges’ core thesis: Gaza is a template, not an exception, and the same war machine is operating against Lebanon, Iran, and (more slowly) US civil society.
The Iran war, in his account, was sold to an unprepared Trump team by Netanyahu and was opposed within the Pentagon.
The most original argument is on “Holocaust uniqueness” — that treating the Shoah as singular has, paradoxically, given cover to a state now committing what Israeli scholar Raz Segal calls a “textbook case of genocide.”
Primo Levi is the moral spine of the talk: the victim-perpetrator line is thin, and survivorhood confers no special moral standing.
Nazi race law borrowed from American Jim Crow. This is not a Hedges invention — it’s well-documented (see James Q. Whitman’s Hitler’s American Model) — but it is rarely said out loud.
The Kahanist lineage now sits inside the Israeli cabinet.

Claude’s Take

This is a polemic, not analysis, and it should be read as one. Hedges is a former war correspondent (Pulitzer-winning, ex-NYT, now firmly outside the mainstream) with a clear and consistent worldview, and he is not interested in steel-manning the other side. If you want a balanced briefing on the Iran war, this isn’t it.

That said, several of his factual claims are real and verifiable. The American influence on Nazi race law is documented academic history. Raz Segal is a real Israeli Holocaust scholar who did publish “A Textbook Case of Genocide” in October 2023 and did have his Minnesota appointment rescinded. The Kahanist lineage of current Israeli cabinet members is on the public record. Primo Levi’s late-life criticism of Israel is real, if often glossed over.

Where Hedges is on shakier ground is the totalising frame — the move from “Israeli policy is genocidal” to “Western civilisation is genocide all the way down” to “the global elites are clinically psychopathic.” Each step is a bigger leap than the last, and by the end he’s making claims (Holocaust studies as a field is “dead”) that are rhetorical rather than empirical. The psychopath diagnosis applied to “global elites” as a class is the kind of move that feels satisfying in the room and falls apart on the page.

The talk is also operating in a counterfactual. The “war on Iran” he describes — beginning February 28th, three million displaced, 3 million more displaced in Iran — appears to be the actual context he is speaking into; whether the framing of who started it and why holds up over time is something to watch.

What’s worth taking from it: the discomfort. Hedges is asking whether the moral architecture the West built after 1945 — Nuremberg, the UN, the Universal Declaration — has any load-bearing capacity left, or whether it was always a story we told ourselves about ourselves. That question is worth sitting with even if you don’t accept his answers.

Score: 7/10. Powerful, well-sourced in its specifics, but the frame is so totalising it does some of his arguments a disservice. Worth watching for the historical material on Holocaust scholarship and the Kahanist genealogy, even if you discount the rhetoric by half.