My promise to Palestine – ScheerPost

By Chris Hedges / Original to ScheerPost

Written speech:

I would like to start with a story that happened to me in Gaza on October 5, 2000. One day I was working on a report in Natzarim (Jewish settlement). There were Palestinian boys near me. The boys were throwing stones in the direction of the Israeli army. A soldier shot one of the boys – and the boy died. Four boys each lifted a limb and we ran. The incident affected me so much that I did not shave for three weeks. After three weeks, I visited the boy’s house to meet his family. I told his mother that I was with her son when he was killed. The mother told me that when her younger son heard that his brother had been killed, he went to the kitchen and then left the house. After ten minutes, she asked her husband where her son had gone. They went out to look for him and saw him on the street with a knife in his hand.

She asked him, “Where are you going?”

He replied: “I will kill Jews.” I have never been able to forget that child. I often wonder where he is. He should be a man in his thirties now. Is he still alive? Is he married? Does he have children? Are he and his family afraid of the bombings? Where have they sought refuge? God willing, I will write a book about Gaza with the cartoonist Joe Sacco, author of “Palestine” and “Footnotes in Gaza.” During that time, I will search for him, I will finish his story and the stories of many others. Israel is determined to erase them from existence and from history. That is my promise.

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Chris Hedges

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as head of the newspaper’s Middle East and Balkans bureau. Before that, he worked abroad for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitorand NPR. He is the host of the show The Chris Hedges Report.

He was part of the team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting for The New York Times’ coverage of global terrorism and received the 2002 Amnesty International Global Award for human rights journalism. Hedges, who holds a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School, is the author of the bestselling American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War Against America, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of the Spectacle and was a finalist of the National Book Critics Circle for his book War is a force that gives us meaningHe writes an online column for the website ScheerPost. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University, Princeton University, and the University of Toronto.

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