https://x.com/RyanRozbiani/status/1903959951724483030
maandag 24 maart 2025
‘We’re Witnessing the Last Gasp of Israeli Violence’
‘We’re Witnessing the Last Gasp of Israeli Violence’: In Conversation With Avi Shlaim
‘Zionism is in the process of destroying itself.’
by Sebastian Shehadi
21 March 2025
Professor Avi Shlaim. Jonah Braverman/Novara Media
Few Israeli historians have held the state’s national myths to account like Avi Shlaim. Emeritus professor of international relations at the University of Oxford, Shlaim is among the most celebrated historians of modern Palestinian and Israeli history.
Born into an Arab-Jewish family in 1945 Iraq and later moving to Israel, Shlaim’s academic journey is marked by his critical, nuanced and personal approach, shaped in no small part by his service in the Israeli army during the mid-1960s.
As one of the leading figures in the 1980s ‘New Historians’ movement, Shlaim helped dismantle some of the narratives around Israel’s founding, challenging traditional Zionist perspectives. His work on the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and Nakba, especially his seminal book The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World, offers a critical analysis of Israeli actions leading up to the war and its aftermath.
Professor Shlaim sat down with Novara Media at his home in Oxford to discuss his latest book, Genocide in Gaza: Israel’s Long War on Palestine. The landmark volume comes at a moment of catastrophic crisis for Palestinians in Gaza, when Israel’s campaign of displacement and extermination continues to enjoy military and diplomatic support from western governments.
As Shlaim himself writes, the book’s essays stem from a deeply felt (and historically inflected) sense of “moral duty to speak truth to power and to stand by the Palestinians in their hour of need”. With exactitude and ethical clarity, he records the many war crimes, including genocide, that Israel has perpetrated and normalised against the Palestinian people, whose right to self-determination and basic humanity have been relentlessly assaulted and died, in full view of the world. In doing so, the book offers an unflinching dissection of the racist and settler-colonial logic that frames Israeli political and military practices.
Genocide in Gaza also acts as a timely follow-up to Shlaim’s acclaimed 2023 memoir, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew, revisiting (and revising) the question raised in that volume as to whether terms such as ‘apartheid’, ‘fascism’ and ‘genocide’ should be applied to the Israeli state. Balancing the available evidence, and citing legal submissions by, among others, UN special rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese – who also provides the foreword to his new book – Shlaim commits to an incisive conclusion: Israel is committing genocide.
Before we get into the book, can you explain what made you first position yourself as ‘anti-Zionist’? I know that when you first arrived at Oxford, decades ago, you didn’t describe yourself as such. What changed?
It’s a long journey, but what changed me was archival research. I was radicalised in the archives. I was indoctrinated at school in Israel, and even more so, when I served in the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) in the mid 1960s. I believed that Israel was a small peace-loving country surrounded by hostile Arabs who wanted to throw us into the sea, meaning that we had no choice but to stand up and fight. I accepted this Zionist master narrative, until I became interested in the Arab-Israeli conflict as a historian. I spent a whole year going to the Israel state archives every day, looking at the records, records which told me a completely different story: that Israel was aggressive, that Israel was deliberately provoking fights with its neighbors and that Israel was not interested in peace.
When the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993, I was euphoric. I thought this was the real deal, that it would start a process of slow but irreversible Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories, and that there would be a Palestinian State. I remember speaking with Edward Said, who was a friend of mine, about this after both writing articles in the London Review of Books. Edward’s was called “A Palestinian Versailles – Oslo as an instrument of Palestinian surrender”. My article accepted all the shortcomings of the accord, but said it was a modest step in the right direction.
I was wrong. I wrongly believed that the Oslo process was irreversible. I was naive about Oslo. I’m naive about other things, but I’m not a coward. When – on the basis of the evidence – I reach conclusions, I don’t fudge the picture, I write it exactly as it is. That’s how I became radicalised – by calling out what I saw from Israel’s actual records as opposed to its propaganda. Netanyahu has now closed the reading room in Israeli state archives. When I go to Israel, I go on my Israeli passport and I’ve never been stopped. But now that I’ve been so outspoken, and that I have a new book called Genocide in Gaza, I don’t know what will happen next time I travel there.
Some argue that Israeli allies of the Palestinian cause should renounce their Israeli citizenship. How do you feel about this statement of protest?
I think it’s a complete non-starter to say that an Israeli is not a credible ally until he or she has renounced their citizenship. That said, I seriously considered renouncing my Israeli citizenship. I spoke to a woman in the Israeli consulate in London, and she said to me: “I know who you are, I know your views and I sympathise with them. But if you want my advice, it’s not worth renouncing your passport. The authorities will be vindictive and will not allow you to go back.” In other words, if I had given up my Israeli passport, I wouldn’t have been able to go to the archives.
In previous years you’ve held back from using the word ‘genocide’ in relation to Israel. What altered this exactly?
I hesitated before calling my book “Genocide in Gaza” because genocide is a very big word. But the evidence in front of my eyes was overwhelming and growing greater all the time. This is the first genocide which is livestreamed. Countries and leaders don’t usually say “we are committing genocide” and “we want to wipe out the enemy”. They usually conceal it, whereas the Israelis are outspoken about genocide.
For one of the chapters in the book, I refer to a database of genocidal statements. It’s shocking what has been publicly stated, not just by marginal figures, but from the likes of the Israeli president Isaac Herzog, who proclaimed that “there are no innocents in Gaza”. No innocents among the 50,000 people who were killed and nearly 20,000 children. There are quotes from Netanyahu that are genocidal, as well as from his former minister of defense, Yoav Gallant, who said “we are up against human animals”.
I hesitated to call things genocide before October 2023, but what tipped the balance for me was when Israel stopped all humanitarian aid into Gaza. They are using starvation as a weapon of war. That’s genocide.
Why are western politicians so reluctant to call a spade a spade? The answer is obvious: Israeli exceptionalism. Israel is above international law, and western leaders greenlight that. When UK foreign secretary David Lammy was asked if there is a genocide, he said that genocide is a legal concept and we have to wait for the court to pronounce. He is flat out wrong. What Israel is doing meets the UN Genocide Convention, which does not state that countries must wait for a court of law to take action. Britain and America are not just complicit in Israeli war crimes, but are active partners assisting Israel in its genocidal campaign against the Palestinians.
The moral absurdity of this situation has also had an interesting effect on me personally. I’m both a Jew and an Israeli, but I never identified myself as a Jew, as I’m not practicing. Since the genocidal assault on Gaza, however, I’ve wanted to move closer to Judaism because its core values are altruism, truth, justice and peace.
The Netanyahu government is the antithesis of these core Jewish values. The essence of Judaism is non-violence, but the current regime is the most violent government in Israel’s history. I, as a Jew, feel that I have a moral duty to stand up and be counted. My new book is my modest personal contribution to the fight against Zionist fascism, backed by American imperialism. It’s a personal statement.
What else makes this book different to what has come before it, either in terms of your work or the wider literature?
In 2023, I published an autobiography called Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab Jew. Underlying this whole book is a critique of Zionism. I’m a student of international relations, so I always knew that the Palestinians are the main victims of Zionism. But when I wrote this family history, I realised that there is another category of victims of Zionism who are not much talked about, and that’s Arab Jews.
In that book I said that I thought Israel had committed many crimes against humanity, such as apartheid and ongoing ethnic cleansing since the Nakba, but not genocide. I now say they are also committing genocide. I see Israel as a settler colonial state, and the logic of settler colonialism is the elimination of the enemy. This is what Israel has been doing all along.
The undeclared aim of Israel’s assault on Gaza since 7 October was ethnic cleansing, and there was a leaked government report outlining the depopulation of Gaza. Depopulating 2.3 million. This hasn’t happened because of Egyptian resistance, but that was the initial war aim. When this didn’t work, Israel moved a stage further towards genocide, towards killing and starving Gazans.
I’ve followed Israel’s policies in Gaza since Israel’s withdrawal from the Strip in 2005, but nothing prepared me for what Israel is doing now in its targeting of civilians. Death and destruction described cynically by Israeli generals as “mowing the lawn” -it’s chilling. Something mechanical that you do every so often. Something that inflicts death and destruction, all the while leaving the underlying political problem unresolved.
This current campaign in Gaza is quantitatively different from everything that has gone on before. If you add up all the Palestinian casualties in all the previous assaults on Gaza (of which there have been eight over the last 15 years), they’re a fraction of the casualties in this war.
How do you respond to Israeli justifications for its violence over the last 16 months?
Israel says it’s “acting in self-defense”, as do its Western allies. UK prime minister Keir Starmer was asked if Israel is justified in cutting off food and water and fuel to the people in Gaza and he repeated, “Israel has the right to self-defense.” This is the mantra. I would say to the Israeli apologists that, under international law, Israel has one right: to end the occupation and get out. Israel doesn’t have the right to self-defense as defined in Article 51 of the UN Charter. Israel is the occupying power in Gaza under international law. You don’t have the right to self-defense if the attack on you came from an area under your control.
Israel always justifies its attacks on Gaza by saying Hamas was firing rockets on its citizens and that it has a duty to protect its citizens. Hamas has accepted many ceasefire agreements and has a good record of honouring them. Israel has broken every single ceasefire agreement with Hamas when it no longer suited it.
Take, for example, when Egypt brokered the peace ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas in mid-2008. Hamas honored and enforced the ceasefire on the other more radical groups like Islamic Jihad until 4 November 2008, when Israel raided Gaza and killed Hamas fighters, thereby renewing hostilities. Hamas offered Israel the renewal of this ceasefire agreement on its original terms. Israel completely ignored this proposal. Israel had a diplomatic route to resolve the conflict but it didn’t take it, instead launching Operation Cast Lead. This is how Israel protects its citizens.
At what point does the west draw a red line? It seems that Israel can kill Palestinians without limit.
Genocide isn’t a matter of numbers. It is the intent to destroy – in whole or part – a religious or ethnic group. That said, the 50,000 people killed in Gaza is a huge underestimate. There are likely many thousands more buried in the rubble. The Lancet estimates that there are more like 180,000 casualties. I can’t imagine a point where Trump would ever say “that’s enough”.
Biden was completely ineffectual. He would occasionally criticise Israel for indiscriminate bombing of civilians, but he never stopped the arms flow, so Israel didn’t have to take any notice of him. He gave Israel a greenlight. Trump is different because he supports the project of the Israeli right, which is the ethnic cleansing of Gaza in the West Bank. And now we have the Trump plan for Gaza, which is for all the people of Gaza to move elsewhere to Egypt or Jordan, and for America to take over Gaza and turn it into a Riviera. He calls Gaza a “demolition site” that needs cleaning up. Note the imperial hubris.
Where are the next four years under Trump taking us?
The Netanyahu government says that the Jewish people has an exclusive right to self-determination in the whole land of Israel, which of course includes the West Bank. This government is more extreme than any before it. They claim exclusive sovereignty over the whole land of Israel. [Israeli finance minister Bezalel] Smotrich and [former Israeli minister of national security Itamar] Ben-Gvir don’t conceal it. They want ethnic cleansing to be accelerated across Gaza and the West Bank and settlement expansion to continue full tilt, with the ultimate aim being the formal annexation of the West Bank.
So far, Israel has not encountered any effective opposition from the European Union, Britain, America or the United Nations. The international community has been impotent, as it has been for over 75 years.
Have you received much abuse from pro-Israel corners over the last 16 months, given how outspoken you’ve been?
No. In fact, I’ve hardly had any hate mail since the war in Gaza began, and I’ve been more radical and public in my statements than ever before. On the other hand, I get a lot of fan mail. People who write to me and say: “Thank you. You speak for us, you give us a voice.” It’s very encouraging. I’ve somehow ended up on videos all over TikTok.
It’s interesting to me that I’ve not received any hate mail in the last 16 months, because I usually would. The climate of opinion worldwide is changing. Israel has lost the argument. BDS calls for the end of occupation, the right of return and equal rights for the Palestinian citizens of Israel. It’s a global non-violent movement. Israel has no answer.
How can you justify continuing your occupation and apartheid? You can’t – which is why Israel has embarked on a cheap global campaign to deliberately conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism. But people have become wise to it. And if you have an honest message to put across as I do, calling a spade a spade, people will listen.
Do you have any hope that a third party will one day oversee justice for Palestine?
The asymmetry of power between Israel and the Palestinian is so great that a voluntary agreement is not possible. The whole history, especially since Oslo, shows that they can’t reach an agreement that is equitable. Saying to Israelis and Palestinians “sort out your own differences” is like putting a lion and rabbit in a cage and telling them to “sort out your differences”. A third party is needed to push the two sides into a settlement. That body should have been the UN. But America has sidelined the UN and the EU, and established a monopoly over the peace process. But it never pushed Israel into a settlement.
In Israel, I can’t see that the impulse for change will come from within. I can’t see the Israelis waking up after 7 October and saying: “We were wrong all along. We really need to get around the conference table with the Palestinians.” This isn’t going to happen. The mood is in the other direction, completely.
There was a cleavage in Israeli society before the Hamas attack, over judicial reform – a very deep cleavage that almost led to a civil war. But then came the Hamas attack and the whole of Israeli society completely united behind this war. They think Israel is entitled to do anything it wants regardless of international law, and anyone who accuses Israel of anything is antisemitic. That’s the consensus in Israel today. Meanwhile, western governments have given Israel impunity, though they are beginning to change. Look at the positive moves that have come out of Ireland, Norway, Slovenia and Spain in siding with Palestine over the last 16 months.
That said, I don’t pin my hopes on governments. I pin them on civil society, on BDS, on the marches in London and elsewhere, and on the students and their encampments. The students are motivated by justice and morality. They’re the right side of history. The US and British governments are on the wrong side. That’s why Israel is so scared of BDS and the students. Israel has lost the argument. It’s a brutal, aggressive, militaristic society, and it’s bound to go down the way that South Africa went thanks to sanctions.
I believe that apartheid in the 21st century is not sustainable in the long term and therefore, that Zionism is in the process of destroying itself. Empires become really violent just as they are in decline, and I think this is what we’re witnessing now – the last gasp of Israeli violence. Once this is over, cleavages inside Israeli society will continue. Israel will get weaker from within and external support will decline. This combination of factors will lead to the disintegration of Zionism and settler colonialism. Israel is on the path of self-destruction, but it won’t happen overnight. It will still take many years.
Does this extraordinary moment make you feel hopeful, in some ways?
By supporting Israel without limitations, the west – and the US in particular – have destroyed the so-called rule-based international system. That’s a terrifying time, a more terrifying time than I can ever remember. Israel has shown its true face. We see just how vicious it is and what it is capable of doing.
The election of Trump has huge consequences because he doesn’t care about international law, the UN or Nato. He only cares about America first. He will use any means at his disposal to advantage America. It’s an imperial power without any political, moral or legal restraints.
What do you see taking shape after the fall of Israeli Zionism?
There’s still a broad international consensus behind the two-state solution. I used to support a two-state solution but Israel has killed it stone dead. Today, Israel doesn’t even talk about a two-state solution. On the contrary, it looks to openly resist the Palestinian state to the bitter end.
A two-state solution is no longer an option. Israel is continuing the policy of creeping annexation. As such, what is left to the Palestinians of the West Bank is a few isolated enclaves, not a basis for a viable state. And therefore, the choice is between one state with equal rights for all its citizens or the status quo: apartheid, ethnocracy and genocide. I’ve made a clear choice in favor of freedom and equal rights for all. This is what I – and many others – mean when we say, “From the river to the sea.”
Genocide in Gaza: Israel’s Long War on Palestine by Avi Shlaim is published by the Irish Pages Press.
Sebastian Shehadi is a freelance journalist and a contributing writer at The New Statesman.
Abonneren op:
Posts (Atom)
-
Ziehier Yoeri Albrecht, die door een jonge journalist van het mediakanaal Left Laser betrapt werd tijdens een privé-onderonsje met twee ... -
NUCLEAR ARMS AND PROLIFERATION ANTI-NUCLEAR ACTIVISM MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX A Women state legislators and advocacy group...
