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TAKING A STAND AGAINST ISRAEL’S GAZA GENOCIDE  
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Raymond Deane
July 12, 2025
Jacobin
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_ Avi Shlaim is one of Israel’s greatest historians. In his latest
work, Shlaim excoriates the genocidal violence that Israel has
inflicted on the people of Gaza and takes a fearless stand against
what he calls “Zionist fascism.” _

David Ben-Gurion reads the Declaration of the State of Israel beneath
a portrait of Theodor Herzl, on May 14, 1948, in Tel Aviv. , Rudi
Weissenstein / Wikimedia Commons

 

Review of _Genocide in Gaza: Israel’s Long War on Palestine_ by Avi
Shlaim (Irish Pages Press, 2025)

In 1988, three books [[link removed]] by
Israel’s “new historians” appeared that dismantled the myths
surrounding the Israeli state’s foundation forty years earlier: _The
Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1948_ by Benny
Morris, _Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1948–1951_ by Ilan
Pappé, and _Collusion across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist
Movement, and the Partition of Palestine_ by Avi Shlaim.

 

Of the three figures, Morris started out as a critic of Zionism who
contemplated emigration before changing his spots and joining the
Zionist establishment; Pappé remained true to his radical critique
and was forced into professional exile in Britain in 2007, while still
regarding Haifa as home; Shlaim initially embraced Zionism, yet chose
voluntary exile before gradually radicalizing his perspective.

A new collection of Shlaim’s essays, _Genocide in Gaza_
[[link removed]], is
a powerful indictment of the murderous onslaught that Israel has
launched against the people of Gaza. It also supplies evidence of the
evolution in Shlaim’s own thinking as he has become a more trenchant
critic of the Zionist project over the last century.

From Baghdad to Oxford

Shlaim was born in Baghdad in 1945. His prosperous family moved to the
infant state of Israel when he was five. In his recent memoir _Three
Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew_
[[link removed]],
he recalls the impact of his background:

If I had to identify one key factor that shaped my early relationship
to Israeli society, it would be an inferiority complex … I
unquestioningly accepted the social hierarchy that placed European
Jews at the top of the pile and the Jews of the Arab and African lands
at the bottom.

Having left Iraq, Shlaim’s family lost their social status as well
as “our proud sense of identity as Iraqi Jews.” The new Israeli
state sought to preserve “an Ashkenazi monopoly over the cultural as
well as political centres of power.” Shlaim was ashamed of speaking
Arabic, “the language of the enemy,” in public: “In my first
year in Israel, I hardly spoke at all until I was able to speak Hebrew
properly.”

Feeling “angry and alienated,” he gravitated toward the right wing
of Israeli politics. His hero was the future prime minister Menachem
Begin [[link removed]], “a
clever populist who skillfully played on my resentment of the
Ashkenazi establishment.”

In 1961, Shlaim moved to London as a student at the Jewish Free School
[[link removed]]. Although he found that
“considerable glamour and kudos were attached to being an
Israeli,” he failed to exploit this because he had “hardly
developed any kind of identity as an Israeli citizen.” Nonetheless,
between 1964 and 1966, he performed national service in the Israeli
army.

For Shlaim, this marked “the high point of my identification with
the State of Israel,” which “helped me to understand its powerful
stranglehold on the Israeli psyche”. He subsequently entered Jesus
College, Cambridge as a history student.

His patriotism revived during the 1967 Six-Day War, before a sense of
disenchantment “evolved slowly and painfully”: “After the 1967
war, I argued, Israel became a colonial power, oppressing the
Palestinians in the occupied territories.” Shlaim remained in
Britain, graduating from Jesus College in 1969, subsequently lecturing
at the universities of Reading and Oxford and becoming a prolific,
widely read author.

The Iron Wall

His 1988 book on Jordan’s King Abdullah aroused controversy because
of the word “collusion” in its title. This implied that
negotiations between Abdullah, the Zionist movement, and the British
colonial authorities were “consciously and deliberately intended to
frustrate the will of the international community,” which favored
the creation of an independent Arab state in part of historic
Palestine.

In 1989 he prepared a curtailed paperback edition
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under a new title, _The Politics of Partition_. He deleted the word
“collusion,” he tells us, “because it focused attention on the
more conspiratorial side of the Abdullah-Israel nexus,” and he hoped
that its omission might “go some way towards expiating my original
sin.”

With 2000’s _The Iron Wall_
[[link removed]], later revised and
expanded in 2014, Shlaim published an indispensable overview of the
so-called Arab-Israeli conflict. He borrowed its title from two 1923
texts by Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky
[[link removed]], the
founder of Revisionist Zionism and ideological ancestor of the modern
Likud party.

While Jabotinsky’s ideology was more maximalist in its territorial
demands than official Zionism, Shlaim clarifies that Jabotinsky’s
attitude towards the indigenous Arabs was essentially neutral rather
than hostile. He accepted as a matter of course that natives would
“resist alien settlers as long as they see any hope of ridding
themselves of the danger of foreign settlement.” Any such settlement
thus had to develop “behind an iron wall which they will be
powerless to break down.”

For Shlaim, “Jabotinsky’s iron wall encompassed a theory of change
in Jewish-Palestinian relations leading to reconciliation and peaceful
coexistence.” Mainstream Zionists, in contrast, saw the iron wall as
“an instrument for keeping the Palestinians in a permanent state of
subservience.” By exposing the cynicism of Zionist leaders such as
David Ben-Gurion
[[link removed]], Moshe Dayan
[[link removed]], or Shimon Peres
[[link removed]], Shlaim subverted
the illusion that they represented a positive antithesis to the
Revisionists.

The Gaza Genocide

In both editions of _The Iron Wall_, Shlaim described Israel in the
late 1950s as having been “untainted by a brush of colonialism.”
In his 2009 essay collection
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_Israel and Palestine_,_ _he maintained that the only “fair and
reasonable solution” was a two-state one. In _Three Worlds_,
however, he characterizes Zionism as having been “an avowedly
settler-colonial movement from the outset.” The outcome that Shlaim
now favors is “one democratic state between the River Jordan and the
Mediterranean Sea.”

The title of his latest work, _Genocide in Gaza_, demonstrates how
unapologetic Shlaim has become since the King Abdullah controversy. In
an interview
[[link removed]]
with the _Irish News _last April, he refers to the new collection as
his “Irish book,” because “Ireland is the natural friend of any
anti-colonial struggle.”

The publisher is Belfast-based Irish Pages Press
[[link removed]],
which previously published Shlaim’s essay “Israel and the
Arrogance of Power” in a volume titled _Islam, Israel and the West_
[[link removed]].
In “All That Remains,” a 2024 article from the new book, he
suggests that “a negotiated political compromise, as in Northern
Ireland, is the only way forward.” This is an outcome impeded by the
United States, the same state that in Ireland acted as “honest
broker.”

After a foreword in which UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese
recommends the book “with reverent sorrow,” there are twelve
essays of varying length, three of them written especially for this
collection. These are interspersed with a portfolio of maps, a
sequence of drawings by Peter Rhoades
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Israel’s 2008–09 attack on Gaza, and a sequence of photographs of
Gaza children compiled by Feda Shtia
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The book’s coda is a speech by Irish barrister Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh
[[link removed]] to the
International Court of Justice on behalf of South Africa as it charged
Israel with violating the Genocide Convention. While these
interpolations are welcome, the absence of an index — surely an
indispensable feature of any such work of reference — is
regrettable.

 

There is also some repetition between the various chapters. Shlaim
acknowledges this at the start of the book: “I had the option of
removing repetitions . . . decided to reprint each article exactly as
it appeared originally,” accepting advice from his publisher Chris
Agee that this “would be more honest and more authentic.”

Histories of Betrayal

Yet the order in which the essays appear is not strictly
chronological. Shlaim jumps in at the deep end with “Britain and the
Nakba: A History of Betrayal”_ _(2023), condemning his adopted
country’s “duplicity, mendacity and chicanery” toward Palestine.
He quotes jurist John Quigley’s rebuttal of the legality of
Britain’s Palestine Mandate (1923–48) and decries a 2023
government policy paper that granted Israel total immunity for its
crimes.

Shlaim follows this with “The Diplomacy of the Israeli-Palestinian_
C_onflict” (2023), an eighty-page report for the International Court
of Justice. The report states that Israel’s Jewish population
“usurped the land from the Arabs” and describes the 1947 partition
resolution as “a major mistake.” Shlaim goes on to insist that the
“Israeli Apartheid regime” of the present day can only be
understood “in the historical context of Zionist
settler-colonialism.” The third essay, 2024’s “Benjamin
Netanyahu’s War against Palestinian Statehood,” also describes
Israel as having “always been a settler-colonial state.”

However, the fourth chapter jumps back to 2009, when Shlaim’s
perspective was rather different. His reflections on Operation Cast
Lead, the Israeli attack on Gaza at the beginning of that year,
include a statement that he “has never questioned the legitimacy of
the state of Israel within its pre-1967 borders,” only rejecting
“the Zionist colonial project beyond the Green Line.” A newcomer
to these debates might find this shift confusing and, given that Cast
Lead crops up repeatedly in later chapters, perhaps this one could
have been omitted.

Having started with a denunciation of Britain, Shlaim tackles the US
role in his tenth essay, “Green Light to Genocide,” with Joe Biden
as the major target. Shlaim accuses Biden of being “personally
complicit, if not a full partner, in Israel’s genocidal war,” and
quotes a telling admission from his Secretary of State Anthony
Blinken: “We don’t talk about red lines when it comes to
Israel.”

The baleful role of the European Union and its leading states such as
Germany receives less attention. However, in the penultimate essay,
2021’s “The Two-State Solution: Illusion and Reality,” Shlaim
states that both the United States and the European Union “know that
apartheid is the reality on the ground” and that this reality is
incompatible with the two-state solution that they formally endorse.
They “continue to parrot their support” for the latter because
“they are afraid to admit that the root of the problem is the racist
and colonial nature of Israeli rule.”

One chapter, “Israel, Hamas and the Conflict in Gaza,”_ _is a 2019
submission by Shlaim to the International Criminal Court. The
historian cites the relatively obscure legal concept of “depraved
indifference” to characterize Israel’s conduct toward the people
of Gaza: “so wanton, so callous, so reckless, so deficient in a
moral sense of concern, so lacking in regard for the lives of others,
and so blameworthy as to warrant criminal liability.”

 

“Israel’s Road to Genocide” was cowritten for this book with the
British-Israeli researcher Jamie Stern-Weiner
[[link removed]]. It includes a
six-page catalog of “bloodthirsty statements by Israeli officials”
that offers horrendous proof of the “genocidal intent” that
Israel’s defenders have so often denied. Just a small sample:
“Burn Gaza now nothing less!” — “one sentence for everyone
there: death!” — “the children of Gaza have brought this upon
themselves!” — “Erase, kill, destroy, annihilate.”

Living in Three Worlds

In the book’s concluding pages, the Palestinian-British novelist
Selma Dabbagh [[link removed]] pays tribute to Shlaim “as
a person who has lived in three worlds — Iraqi, Israeli and British,
with a Jewish religion and an Arab ethnicity.” She describes him as
a humane, clear-sighted thinker, an estimation with which no
unprejudiced reader can disagree.

The inconsistencies of argument one finds in this volume serve to
emphasize the integrity of someone who has wrestled passionately with
his own contradictions. In his eightieth year, Shlaim stands as a
fearless advocate for what he describes as “the fight against
Zionist fascism” and “the struggle for justice for the
long-suffering Palestinian people.”

Raymond Deane is a composer, author, and activist based in Ireland and
Germany.

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