The Markaz Review:

By Rebecca Ruth Gould

Genocide in Gaza: Israel’s Long War on Palestine by Avi Shlaim
Irish Pages Press 2025
ISBN 9781739090227

The Gaza Catastrophe: The Genocide in World-Historical Perspective by Gilbert Achcar
University of California Press and Saqi Books 2025
ISBN 9780520423558

In the immediate aftermath of the Hamas-led attacks in southern Israel on October 7, 2023, world leaders rushed to offer Israel their unconditional support for whatever steps it might deem necessary to “bring Hamas to an end” and ensure Israel’s security. By Israel’s assessment, these “necessary steps” included genocide and the forced starvation of the Palestinian people; tactics viewed as simply part of the calculus, a price to be paid. US President Joe Biden explosively declared that the Hamas attack was “as consequential as the Holocaust.” In the UK, Labour leader and future Prime Minister Keir Starmer affirmed that Israel has the right to cut off water and power to Gaza’s besieged population.

Most striking in politicians’ statements of unconditional support for Israel’s genocide was the complete historical ignorance that characterized them. One instance of Hamas-led violence was presented as if it had occurred in a vacuum and the state of Israel had not been waging war on Palestinians since its founding in 1948. Such erasure of history has been a frequent strategy in efforts to suppress those who tell the story of the Gaza genocide, and it has serious consequences not only for the present but for the future of peace in the region.

While western politicians silence those who insist on seeing the genocide in its full historical context, scholars have been documenting Israel’s long-standing strategies for torpedoing diplomatic negotiations for decades. Two scholars in particular, British Israeli historian Avi Shlaim, who was born in Iraq, and political theorist Gilbert Achcar, born in Senegal and raised in Lebanon, have published books gathering their writings from the past few decades on the subject of Israel and Palestine. These writings shed significant light on the events leading up to October 7, 2023, and its longterm aftermath, not least because they do what politicians refuse to do: take history seriously.

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