Special for Africa ExPress
Emanuela Ulivi
4th June 2025
Questo articolo in italiano lo trovate qui.
Facing official versions on the war in Gaza and fueling the debate on whether genocide is taking place or not, Avi Shlaim, one of the New Historians who have been offering a critical reading of Zionism and Israel for the past few decades, puts forth his perspective in his book Genocide in Gaza: Israel’s Long War on Palestine (Irish Pages Press, 2025). The work includes some previously written essays and new chapters, in which the Oxford professor emeritus, born in Baghdad in 1945 into a Jewish family that moved to Israel in 1951, argues that the Israel-Hamas war did not begin on Oct. 7.
Rather, it must be placed in the context of the occupation of the Palestinian territories and a history that has effectively denied the Palestinians’ right to self-determination and to a statehood.
Shlaim’s reconnaissance harks back to the Balfour Declaration and its inclusion in the British Mandate over Palestine, which Britain unilaterally renounced. The British left, without implementing the partition plan envisioned by the United Nations, thus creating the conditions for the Naqba, the forced relocation of 750,000 Palestinians at the time the state of Israel was established in 1948.
Continuous Naqba
Since then, it has been for Shlaim, borrowing the expression coined by Hanan Ashrawi, a “continuous Naqba,” which has marked the history of the Palestinians with progressive dispossession by settlement colonialism that, unlike the subjugation of local populations carried out by colonial powers, has worked for the replacement of the natives.
With the advent of right-wing governments in Israel, even the “land for peace” formula, at the heart of negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians until the Oslo Accords, was supplanted by another equation, “peace for peace,” which saw on the one hand the acceleration of settlements in the West Bank, and on the other the Abraham Accords, i.e., the attempt to normalize relations with Arab countries without the need to resolve the Palestinian conflict.
Benjamin Netanyahu, son of Benzion – the advisor to Ze’ev Jabotinsky, founder of Revisionist Zionism and author of “On the Iron Wall (We and the Arabs),” a title traced moreover in the name of the operation launched by Israel in the West Bank in late January 2025 – head of Likud since 1993 and now for the sixth time head of government, does not continue the war in Gaza as many claim in order to postpone his judicial appointments, nor because he is a hostage of the messianic right. Netanyahu, Shlaim writes, is not a moderate right-wing politician, he is himself an extremist, a staunch proponent of Greater Israel, which includes Judea and Samaria, i.e., the West Bank, with an existential mission: to prevent the creation of an independent Palestinian state.
Wrong Party
In the same vein, Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from Gaza was anything but a contribution to peace as it was made out to be, it was rather a move in Israel’s interest: 8,000 settlers left the strip, and the following year, thanks to the Likud government, 12,000 new settlers settled in the West Bank, where the separation wall built by Sharon himself was actually a redrawing of the borders, which had more to do with land appropriation than state security.
In Gaza, when the Palestinian Authority’s legislative elections in 2006 – which, the author points out, were held democratically – won Hamas, the wrong party for Israel and the West, and formed a first government and then a second one of national unity in 2007 composed mostly of technocrats, not only did Israel and its allies not recognize them, Israel rejected the proposal of Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement, whose positions had become softer than the maximalist and anti-Semitic ones of 1988, to negotiate a long-term truce, which meant acceptance of a two-state agreement and implicitly Hamas recognition of Israel.
None, however, like the October 2023 offensive, which raises the specter of a second Naqba. Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories since 2022, who wrote the foreword to Avi Shlaim’s book, in the report Anatomy of a Genocide calls Gaza’s a tragedy foretold.
Genocidal intentions
But the conviction that there were genocidal intentions was not immediate for the author, who has never questioned the legitimacy of the state of Israel within its pre-1967 borders and has always supported the two-state solution, even if that is a now-buried perspective: better, he says, one state “from the river to the sea” where there are freedoms and equal rights for all.
Not only the killing of civilians on an industrial scale and the destruction of civilian infrastructure, but the blockade of humanitarian aid and starvation in Gaza show that it has gone far beyond self-defense.
Genocide, he writes, is the last resort of frustrated ethnic cleansers. Zionism and Judaism, however, he is keen to point out, are two different things, the former being an ideology, the latter a religion. The government headed by Netanyahu is the antithesis of Jewish values, which are altruism, truth, justice and peace.
Emanuela Ulivi
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Il sionismo e l’escalation verso il genocidio a Gaza secondo Avi Shlaim