A Genocide Foretold: Reporting on Survival and Resistance in Occupied Palestine (Paperback)

With intimate and harrowing portraits of the human consequences of oppression, occupation, and violence experienced in Palestine today, Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges issues a call to action urging us to bear witness and engage with the ongoing humanitarian crisis.

Hedges wrote the first section of the book when he was in Ramallah in July 2024, and he draws from his experience doing extensive reporting from the Middle East, including Gaza, for the New York Times.

A Genocide Foretold confronts the stark realities of life under siege in Gaza and the heroic effort ordinary Palestinians are waging to resist and survive. Weaving together personal stories, historical context, and unflinching journalism, Chris Hedges provides an intimate portrait of systemic oppression, occupation, and violence. The book includes chapters on:

• What life is like in Gaza City and Ramallah in the midst of approaching bombs and gunfire.
• The history of the dispossession of Palestinians of their land in relation to the ideology of Zionism.
• A portrait of Amr, a 17-year-old highschool student who is forced to evacuate his village with his family.
• Psychoanalysis of the state of permanent war that has led to the destruction of hospitals, telecommunications centers, governmental buildings, roads, homes universities, schools, and libraries and archaeological and heritage sites in Gaza.
• The ways in which the collective retribution against innocents is a familiar tactic employed by colonial rulers.
• A heartbreaking final chapter called “Letter to the Children of Gaza.”

Hedges, the Pulitzer Prize–winning former Middle East Bureau Chief for The New York Times, is an Arabic speaker who spent seven years covering the conflict. He wrote the first section of the book when he was in Ramallah in July 2024. A Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist, he is also the author of two bestselling books, War is a Force that Gives us Meaning and The Greatest Evil is War. In A Genocide Foretold he writes with an emotional depth that can only be achieved from spending many years on the ground in Gaza and the West Bank. A Genocide Foretold is a call to action, urging us to bear witness and engage with the ongoing humanitarian crisis.

Reviews

"An authoritative argument against the singularity of the conflict and an indictment of Western media narratives that present it as exceptional and beyond critique." —Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Chris Hedges writes with heart and extraordinary moral clarity about a genocide that has unfurled in front of our eyes. A Genocide Foretold indicts not only the racist bloodlust that has overtaken Israeli society, but the full complicity of the U.S. government and media, and the hypocrisies at the heart of the West’s most cherished illusions.” —Beh Ehrenreich, author of The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine

"With a searing urgency, Chris Hedges brings readers face to face with Israel’s devastation of Gaza. A Genocide Foretold is a scathing denunciation of the long violence of the Zionist project and its U.S. and European backers. The writing reflects his deep experience as a correspondent from Central America to Bosnia and his passionate moral outrage against both war and the hypocrisy that justifies it. Fast-paced and dazzling, the book gives first-hand accounts of the horrors of war and the courage of those resisting it."
—Aviva Chomsky, coeditor of Organizing for Power and author of Central America's Forgotten History

"Chris Hedges profoundly describes exactly what is happening in Palestine and talks on behalf of the victims. In his painful writings, he makes their voices heard. This is genocide as I lived it in Gaza for three months. The book is full of stories, information, and shocking realities. This is not just reporting from there or about them, it is a courageous challenge to all attempts to misinform us about what life looks like in Gaza. Profound, honest, painful, moving and real…the book takes us through history, geography, politics, and news and helps us better understand the Zionist occupation. We cannot escape after learning about it! Chris is telling us: now you know."—Atef Abu Saif, Minister of Culture of Palestine and author of Don't Look Left: A Diary of Genocide

"The impassioned discourse of Hedges, an ordained Presbyterian minister, is imbued with a sense of moral clarity similar to that of abolitionists such as John Brown, whose anti-slavery jeremiads drew from Christian liberation theology." —Ed Rampell in The Progressive

About the Author

Chris Hedges is the former Pulitzer Prize–winning Middle East Bureau Chief for The New York Times. An Arabic speaker, he spent seven years covering the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, much of that time in Gaza. Author of 14 books, his most recent are The Greatest Evil Is War and A Genocide Foretold. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University, Princeton University, and the University of Toronto. He has also taught for over a decade in the college degree program offered by Rutgers University in the New Jersey prison system. He holds a B.A. from Colgate University in English Literature and a Master of Divinity from Harvard University. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.