Book review
Genocide in Gaza: Israel,Hamas and the Long War on Palestine
By Avi Shlaim
The Irish Pages, Belfast 2024
£14.79
Review by Menachem Klein
“As a Jew I feel that I have a moral duty stand up and be counted, to speak truth to power, to denounce the Netanyahu government in the strongest possible terms, and to stand by the Palestinians in their hour of need. This collection of essays is my modest personal contribution to the fight against Zionist fascism and to the struggle for justice for the long-suffering Palestinian people.” writes Avi Shlaim in his epilogue (P.383).
Indeed, the book clearly and straightforwardly presents the author’s critical perspective. Zionism and the state of Israel in general, and Netanyahu in particular, manage a generations-old struggle to occupy Palestinian land, uproot its native inhabitants, build Jewish settlements, and prevent the establishment of an independent Palestinian state.
This weighty volume of 435 pages is a collection of essays published between the years 2021 and-2024. As expected, reading a compilation of essays can bring one the irritation of frequent repetition of the main arguments.
However, in these essays, Professor Shlaim provides a historical perspective on Israel’s extreme right-wing government policies. The theoretical framework he uses to characterise Zionism and Israel’s policy is the concept of settler colonialism. It is used extensively by Palestinian and critical Western scholars. Yet, unlike those social science authors, Shlaim is not engaged in theoretical discussion, but in political and army operations that led Israel to implement its current indiscriminative criminal killing.
Following the quotation above, the author does not aim to publish a study, but, rather, his well-written strong opinions. The perspective from which he makes his judgment is that of an involved and interested outsider. Except for a few pages (Ps287-290) in a chapter co-authored with Jamie Stern-Winer, Shlaim does not try to demonstrate the mastering either of Israeli- or Palestinian-rich and detailed domestic discourse. Furthermore, in his book Israeli and Palestinian societies do not exist. There is no analysis of current trends in Israeli society or of the socio-political differences between the Palestinian diaspora, Israeli Palestinians, and Palestinians living in the occupied territories under the heavy pressure of Israel. Politics, after all, is built on social foundations.
Shlaim ends his book stating that “The only democratic solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea with equal rights for all its citizens regardless of religion or ethnicity” (Ps383-384). This is an alternative to the failed Oslo formula of the two-state solution. Today, it is popular among the diaspora Palestinians and their Western supporters. Much less is it endorsed by Palestinian communities living in historic Palestine since it means abandoning the hope of establishing an independent Palestinian nation-state separate from their oppressor’s political entity. Instead, a bi-ethno-national state will be established or, alternatively, a state that has no ethno-national signature but is the state of all its individuals.
Moreover, ‘one-state’ supporters do not explain who will be able to force Israel to dismantle its independence and discriminate Jewish identity, any more than at present no international actor either can or wishes to succeed in forcing Israel to stop its genocidal campaign in the Gaza Strip.
Menachem Klein is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Bar Ilan University. He was an adviser to the Israeli delegation in negotiations with the PLO in 2000 and was one of the leaders of the Geneva Initiative.