How The International Community Sold Out Gaza & Killed Itself In The Process

Chris Hedges and Norman Finkelstein

The greatest injustices in the world are often masked in volumes of complex and incomprehensible legal language that are not accessible to the general public. The genocide of Palestinians in Gaza is one horrific example of how the world’s highest legal institutions appear to have gone through the motions of upholding international law, but in reality, are riddled with corruption and political ambition that have enabled the Zionist entity to commit ongoing war crimes and ethnic cleansing.

In his most recent book, “Gaza’s Gravediggers: An Inquiry into Corruption in High Places,” which may be the ‘capstone’ to his life’s work of documenting the settler-colonial state of Israel, Professor Norman Finkelstein lays out in detail the facts about what is occurring in Gaza versus the flawed claims made by the United Nations and international courts. Finkelstein joins Chris Hedges to discuss the “shortcomings” and “outright fraud” in what he calls “pockets of corruption in the international system” in this episode of The Chris Hedges Report.

Finkelstein does the tedious work of individually exposing the discrepancies in court reports about Palestine and demonstrating their implausibility, a difficult task when you consider that, as he states, “There’s a very big mental distance between something intuitively not sounding right and trying to prove it.” Fortunately, there are numerous reports from a variety of bodies such as the United Nations and human rights groups that have extensively documented the atrocities taking place in Gaza. Finkelstein pulls on this body of work to contrast the evidence-free claims of careerist international legal officials with the overwhelming amount of reporting conducted on Gaza by the most credible humanitarian organizations in the world.

Hedges and Finkelstein discuss the ways World Court judges and United Nations commissioners twist the facts, pick and choose their sources and manipulate events to achieve notoriety or protect their careers. They then provide an analysis of United Nations Security Council resolutions, particularly Resolution 2803, which created the ‘Board of Peace’ that literally gave President Trump ownership of Gaza. This and the failure of the UN Security Council to condemn the US-Israeli attack on Iran, which Finkelstein calls “the most brazen, flagrant breach of the UN Charter,” lead to the regrettable conclusion that these institutions are “no longer [are] valid arbiters of international law.”

The world watches in horror as the United States and Israel brazenly commit war crimes and genocide, defying international law and then sanctioning those institutions, such as the International Criminal Court, that endeavor to hold them accountable. Despite daily images of destruction, starvation and death in Palestine, now extending from Gaza to the occupied West Bank and farther to Lebanon and beyond, only Iran and Ansar Allah have taken effective action to stop the atrocities. Western nations, meanwhile, keep the gears of Israel’s war machine turning. Also, ordinary people have organized and are taking action in what Chris Hedges describes as “the final line of defense between a world that respects the rule of law and a world of unmitigated barbarism.”

One group that has made significant gains is Palestine Action, which has specifically targeted the Israeli weapons producer, Elbit Systems, in the United Kingdom. Palestinian activist and co-founder of Palestine Action, Huda Ammori, joins this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to discuss the draconian steps taken by the UK government to criminalize and dismantle Palestine Action. Much to the chagrin of the Zionist elements of the Western establishment, every attack by the UK and its allies has resulted in greater public support for Palestine Action.

Ammori’s family has a long history of fighting Zionism in Palestine. She reflects on the brutal subjugation they endured and her lifetime of activism, saying, “It’s an obligation for Palestinians to resist their occupiers and for each generation to pick up the mantle.” The limitations of the political system, however, have only impeded activists’ efforts to facilitate the liberation of Palestine from the death grip of Israel and its Western-backers; before starting Palestine Action, she realized that direct action was a necessary next step. When Ammori and her partner, Richard Barnard, launched Palestine Action they achieved significant material gains.

It was this progress that brought the full weight of the state against them, including the proscription of Palestine Action as a terrorist organization and the banning of all forms of solidarity and support for them. Law enforcement have raided their homes and arrested thousands of activists. The state has also held activists for prolonged periods in jail, which they protested with hunger strikes, and blocked their efforts to raise funds. Ammori is challenging the legality of the proscription, now headed to the UK Supreme Court, in what is considered “an extremely important case, not just for Palestine Action as a group, but for our Free-Speech rights in Britain in general.”

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Transcript

Chris Hedges:

Professor Norman Finkelstein, one of our most important scholars on the conflict between the Palestinians and Israel, in his new book, “Gaza’s Gravediggers: An Inquiry into Corruption in High Places,” excoriates the international community and humanitarian organizations, including the United Nations, for their abject failure to uphold international law and halt the genocide in Gaza. At best, these institutions, he shows, are impotent, at worst complicit.

He implodes Israeli lies with incontrovertible facts and evidence, obliterating, for example, the charge by Israel that Hamas instrumentalized rape as a weapon of war. He sets the genocide in its proper historical context, illustrating that it did not begin on October 7th when Hamas and other fighters made an incursion into Israel, but is the culmination of decades of dispossession, discrimination, violence, and land theft by Israel.

Professor Finkelstein assiduously and methodically lays out the evidence gleaned from human rights reports and legal documents to, as he writes, “Make clear that Israel has embarked not on a war, but on a qualitatively different enterprise, the deliberate and systematic killing or persecution of people from a particular group identified as having a shared ethnicity, nationalist, etc., with the intention of partially to wholly destroying that group.” “This genocidal undertaking,” he states, “cannot be reconciled with the laws of war, but what’s more contradicts them.” He exposes those international officials who serve as quislings for Israel, imploding their fatuous assertions one by one. He makes clear that the Israeli genocide is a national project, broadly supported by the vast majority of Israeli society.

“This book,” he writes, “is the culmination of a life’s work.” He first dismantled the historical myths used to justify the settler-colonial state of Israel as a doctoral student at Princeton, “making him,” he notes wryly, “not only unemployed, but something quite different: unemployable.” Although treated like a pariah by academic institutions and the media, he is one of our nation’s most important forensic scholars, relentlessly exposing political, academic, and journalistic malfeasance in his service of justice and truth. “To tell the truth is revolutionary,” Antonio Gramsci wrote, “Nothing is more destructive for revolution than illusions, and nothing benefits it more than the clear and open truth.” This book is a sterling example of the standards Gramsci demanded.

Professor Finkelstein has spent decades battling against Israel and its powerful lobby, and he has paid a huge price, not just in terms of his career, but his emotional well-being. He says this will quite possibly be his last book. He’s exhausted. He needs a mental respite. If this is true, this book will be the capstone to a life of the mind that few can equal. Joining me to discuss “Gaza’s Gravediggers: An Inquiry into Corruption in High Places” is Professor Norman Finkelstein. It’s an amazing book and really, it’s always with the power of your research, and by the time you finish it there’s just no argument to be made against it. And I think one of the things that fascinated me or I thought was so important about the book is that even those institutions that perhaps, we can talk about the ICC and others, have attempted to at least acknowledge the genocide, they still fall short in terms of how they characterize Palestinian resistance. Let’s begin where the book begins. Well, you actually begin with that wonderful discussion, which you’ve spoken to me before about with Nat Turner’s slave revolt and you quote Charles Sumner on abolition. But why don’t we just set the context once again for what happened on October 7th, then go into this whole chapter you have called “Rape fantasies.”

Norman Finkelstein:

Well, the book begins actually with a prologue, which is an attempt to reduce to its bare minimum another book I had written, “GAZA: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom.” In that book, which I believe was published in 2018, I simply try to restore the context for the situation in Gaza, and I go into quite painstaking detail in that book. When I started this book, “Gaza’s Gravediggers,” I was determined not to do two things. Number one, I was not going to recapitulate “GAZA: An Inquest.” I figured the book is out there, the book published in 2018. For those who want to read it, they’ll read it. But I’m not going to try to recapitulate everything I went through there. So, it’s a very bare bones recapitulation of “GAZA: An Inquest.” That was one thing I decided not to do….

https://scheerpost.com/2026/11/05/how-the-intl-community-sold-out-gaza-killed-itself-in-the-process-w-norm-finkelstein-tchr

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