The charge of genocide against Israel over its war in Gaza (officially, but not widely, known as “Operation Iron Swords”) has been laid since the earliest days of the conflict in October 2023. For a long time Israel and its defenders have dismissed the charges as strident, unserious or mischievous, even or perhaps especially, after South Africa brought a genocide case against Binyamin Netanyahu’s government at the International Criminal Court later that year, a case which Joe Biden and his secretary of state Antony Blinken both described as “meritless”.
Despite the mounting evidence of a willingness and desire to exterminate Gazans coming from both Israeli soldiers on active duty and senior members of society, who have been issuing declarations with all the rhetorical discipline of a post-pub social media user, there are still those who tut away, like high-minded broadsheet opinion columnists desperate to plumb a line somewhere down the middle, at the notion that Israel could possibly be carrying out a genocide.
British-Israeli historian Avi Shlaim cites a litany of calls for massacres from Israeli politicians, entertainers and members of the public in his book Genocide in Gaza: Israel’s Long War on Palestine. These range from exhortations to leave “not a stone upon a stone” in Gaza, to “turn Gaza into a parking lot” and to “exterminate the roaches”. It’s more than just a few bad eggs.
Shlaim himself admits he was initially wary of using the term “genocide” but now has little compunction in putting it in the title of a collection of essays and introductions that appears to take over from where his similar 2009 volume, Israel and Palestine, left off. The two other books under review here similarly mention either “genocide” or “Nakba” in their titles.
Whether the serious centrist voices like it or not, the charge is very much out in the open now.
These essays, which date back to just after “Operation Cast Lead” in 2008-09, plot the deterioration of the Oslo Accords, as Israel was allowed to carry on as before in its construction of West Bank settlements, while the Palestinians made tangible, and painful, concessions.
Netanyahu’s Likud, the heir of the extreme maximalist Zionist Ze’ev Jabotinsky, cannibalised the Israeli body politic to make the country its ideological fief over the past five decades. Israel is now Jabotinsky’s land, more than eight decades after his death.
Shlaim shrewdly notes that Ehud Barak’s comment that “there is no Palestinian partner for peace” after the collapse of the Camp David summit in 2000 effectively finished Labor off as an electoral force, as it told Israelis they might as well now vote for the hard-right party bent on war.
Indeed, given how Israel has latched on to pretexts – some small; others, such as the October 7th attacks, undoubtedly traumatic – to start destructively punitive wars in Gaza and Lebanon, it is the Palestinians who feel there is no partner for peace on the other side.
The authors of all three books are unequivocal in their disgust at the Hamas and Islamic Jihad attacks on Israel on October 7th, 2023. However, each places it in the context of what Palestinians and particularly the people of Gaza have endured over decades
Though Genocide in Gaza is a beautiful volume and contains some fine essays, as well as works by other contributors, such as Peter Rhoades’s haunting drawings of the 2008-09 Gaza war, and similarly stark images of the current war by three Palestinian photographers, it could have done with some curatorial pruning. There is far too much overlap in content, and reading Shlaim make the very same point for the third, fourth or fifth time (often word for word) sadly dilutes the force of the book.
Irishman Fintan Drury, a one-time journalist covering the Middle East, in Catastrophe: Nakba II, gives his own personal reaction to and assessment of the pummelling of Gaza, an account that he admits at the outset will be avowedly pro-Palestinian. It’s a humane and briskly argued treatise that, despite its stated inclination, is even-handed in its analysis of Israeli society, despite his prediction in the introductory note that it will be profiled in some quarters as anti-Semitic.
Unlike many on the pro-Palestinian side in this country, Drury is genuinely interested in Israel and how it has become increasingly in thrall to far-right ideology, even before the trauma of October 7th hit.
His contention that the genocide in Gaza will be a second Nakba is persuasive, not least because the death toll has already far outstripped that suffered by Palestinians in 1947-1949. Even if Donald Trump’s wild plans for real estate deals in Gaza are unlikely to have legs, the licence given to Israel to try to empty the exclave of its inhabitants looks like it could materialise.
Drury is also rightly scathing of the failures of many western media outlets, particularly the BBC, in their default willingness to accept the Israeli line during the war (though such obliging coverage does appear to be belatedly abating in recent months). Some of the western governments that effectively countenanced the destruction of Gaza on account of the horror of the Hamas attacks have also begun to waver of late, but Drury is in no doubt that their culpability is long-established.
Drury is unfortunately let down at times by careless editing: the prose needs tightening in places, with a number of hapless syntactic repetitions, and there are also factual infelicities – the 2015 Charlie Hebdo attacks did not take place “almost two decades ago” and Tony Benn, whom Drury cites, was not speaking about the war with Iraq in the House of Commons in February 1998 but rather registering his opposition to the expected imminent allied bombing of Iraq, which ultimately didn’t take place until 10 months later. It might seem like churlish nit-picking to point these out but they do contribute to an overall impression of a slipshod production that mars what is at times an engaging read.
Gilbert Achcar’s The Gaza Catastrophe is, like Shlaim’s book, a collection of essays published over the past two decades combined with newer reflections written since the start of the war. Achcar, a Franco-Lebanese former professor of international relations at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, offers the best of these three books, written in a lively, often withering style, and providing a left-wing materialist perspective that has faded in prominence in the Arab world in recent times.
The earlier essays cover the election of Hamas in 2006, Israel’s manoeuvrings in exploiting peace talks following the occupation of the West Bank in 1967, and also what he calls the misuse of Holocaust memory, in a foreshadowing of Pankaj Mishra’s recent The World After Gaza.
The more recent ones are incisive, particularly in his assessment of Netanyahu, who, Achcar says, is not perpetuating the war simply to keep himself in power and out of prison (though that is a consideration) but because he is a true believer in the expulsion of Gazans and the annexation of the West Bank. For Netanyahu, the overarching historical stakes greatly outweigh even his own personal interest.
Achcar, like Shlaim, sees the current Israeli government as fascist, and goes even further, calling it “Nazi”. This might be a rhetorical exaggeration, but one he presumes is necessary to set it apart from other governments in the “Neofascist International” he mentions, given Israel’s wanton barbarism and cruelty in its war on Gaza.
The war, for Achcar, is “indisputably the worst episode in the Palestinian people’s long ordeal”, far worse than the 1948 Nakba, to such an extent that he suggests using a stronger Arabic word for catastrophe, Karitha, to name it. Like many contemporary observers, Achcar is terminally pessimistic about the fate of Gaza, seeing it as prey to two scenarios: a second, more final Nakba, or a mediated Oslo-style situation, which, like the original one, will benefit only Israel anyway.
The authors of all three books are unequivocal in their disgust at the Hamas and Islamic Jihad attacks on Israel on October 7th. However, each places it in the context of what Palestinians and particularly the people of Gaza have endured over decades, the cynical dispossession, the rampant poverty and the enforced humiliations of living under an apartheid system in the West Bank. There are also nuances proffered that will sit uneasily with and perhaps outrage some readers.
Drury contests the notion Hamas is a terrorist group, given it is also a broad social movement with widespread support (it is perfectly possible for it to be both, and also to be a grimly reactionary social movement that many in Gaza resent living under, however much they might support the resistance it incarnates).
Shlaim, meanwhile, rejects the urge by Zionists to place October 7th in the lineage of the Holocaust, saying it was an uprising motivated by anti-colonial resentment rather than anti-Semitism, another argument one could rebut by saying it can be both.
A similar argument is made by Achcar, who compares the Hamas attack to a massacre of Portuguese colonists by Angolan guerrillas in 1961 that the Salazar regime answered by slaughtering more than 50,000 Angolans, razing entire villages in the process. He says the Hamas attack was a strategic error as much as the Angolan one was, which forced the FLNA to change their tactics in the war of liberation.
These three books are only the latest in a slew of volumes to have emerged about the war in Gaza, which is rapidly being accepted in public opinion in many parts of the world as a genocide, with even Israel-friendly leaders such as Emmanuel Macron swerving the question rather than outrightly dismissing it. There will undoubtedly be many more to follow, including some that try to build a case for Israel in the prosecution of its war, something that the Israeli government has bothered to do only in the most cursory fashion in its dealings with international media.
And though there has been a definite shift in recent weeks in the way both European governments and public figures are talking about the war (the word “genocide” is no longer a hot potato for many artists and writers who previously steered clear of the Palestine issue), little of substance has been done to try to bring Israel to heel. And, given the steadfast support and influence Israel enjoys in Washington, and a number of competing issues elsewhere in the world, it may be a long time before Netanyahu and his government feel compelled to stop.
