Avi Shlaim, an Arab Jew who grew up in Israel and served in the Israel Defense Forces, came to prominence as one of the so-called “new historians” in the late 1980s. This was a small group of Israeli scholars writing more critical interpretations of the history of Zionism and Israel.
Shlaim’s book Genocide in Gaza: Israel’s Long War on Palestine, which was published last year, argues that all the much vaunted reasons for Israel’s prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s genocidal war on Gaza – to save himself and his party from being ejected from office; to keep his ultra-right coalition partners on board and to prolong the postponement of the legal cases against him – hold water, but are only a partial explanation. Netanyahu is also, he contends, “a far-right, racist Jewish supremacist ... the one consistent theme in Netanyahu’s long and chequered career has been his ideological commitment to an exclusive Jewish state in all of Mandatory Palestine from the river to the sea. In the context of this long war on Palestinian statehood, the Gaza onslaught is not an opportunistic aberration, but a logical terminus.”
That war has been and continues to be a hideous journey of fundamentalist militarism. Netanyahu contended in 2018 that in the Middle East, “there is a simple truth. There is no place for the weak.” Military power trumps all in this overarching thesis. In his 1993 book, A Place Among the Nations, Netanyahu portrays the world as hostile to the Jewish state due to anti-Semitism. He draws heavily on a 1923 article by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the “spiritual father of the Israeli Right” whom his father, historian Benzion Netanyahu, advised. In this article, On the Iron Wall (We and the Arabs), Ze’ev argued there “is not even the slightest hope” of ever obtaining political agreement with the Arab inhabitants of Palestine, because “every indigenous people will resist alien settlers as long as they see any hope of ridding themselves of the danger of foreign settlement”. An Iron Wall of Jewish Military power was therefore deemed a necessity as a means to obtain an independent Jewish state in Palestine.
Netanyahu also titled one of the chapters in his book The Wall. The Hamas attack in October 2023, and the atrocities it committed, traumatically dented that wall, and the response was based on total eradication. Once again, iron featured, with the new military offensive titled Operation Swords of Iron. It was not a targeted attack on Hamas; it was and remains about collective punishment amounting to genocide and has come to include famine and a war on civilians, journalists and humanitarian and medical workers.
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The brutality of the colonial project arising from the devastation will of course ensure a new generation of resistance, given that the impact on Palestinian children will reverberate in the coming decades. Novelist Richard Flanagan’s 2023 book Question 7 ponders the plight of the indigenous people in his native Tasmania and the genocide against his ancestors. Tasmanian families, he observed “live in the shade of old stories that remain with us along with the new ones that accrue”. They inherited the legacy of imperialists who etched their colonial failings on the colonised, “to write on our bodies that we were the vulgar arriviste, the barbarian, the savage, that their judgement was our crime”.
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In his book The Idea of Israel (2014), Israeli historian Ilan Pappe suggested that when “there is no longer any moral dimension for the global support” for Israel, and when “the more functional side of this support starts to weaken” the reality of “a pariah state that maintains an apartheid regime” will assume more prominence.
But that requires an iron response to Israel’s war crimes. This will not come from America, and EU member states are also compromised, having sold arms worth €1.76 billion to Israel between 2018 and 2022, according to the Transnational Institute. After the Hamas attacks, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen visited Tel Aviv and asserted “I know that how Israel responds will show that it is a democracy”, suggesting a dangerous ignorance of history.
As for Britain, Nick Maynard, the British volunteer surgeon at Nasser hospital in Gaza, told RTÉ last month “my government is still supplying arms to Israel, part of the F35 jets; they are still running daily reconnaissance flights from Cyprus over Gaza, giving information to the Israelis ... They have failed to call out that there is indeed a genocide and multiple war crimes being carried out”.
And Maynard, like others trying to save lives in Gaza, is asking the question that should not be left to medics: “why is the world letting it happen?” Eighteen months ago, senior UN leaders referred to the situation in Gaza as “a crisis of humanity”, a “living hell” and a “bloodbath”. All that has happened since has exhausted the dictionary of condemnation, but the words remain unmatched by meaningful action.
