Israel's actions have been driven by a genocidal logic integral to its settler-colonial project in Palestine, signalling a tragedy foretold.
Francesca Albanese
Doctrines of ethnic nationalism proliferated in nineteenth-century Europe. They divided humanity into primordial groups and advocated that political borders should so far as possible trace the boundaries separating these groups. Every extant nation should have its state and each state should be nationally homogeneous. Modern Zionism applied these premises to Europe's “Jewish Question†and reached an analogous conclusion. Zionist theoreticians argued that Jews in Europe were culturally stifled as well as physically persecuted on account of their anomalous position as a stateless nation. From this diagnosis it followed that the only viable remedy to the twin threats of assimilation and antisemitism was to normalise the Jewish condition by establishing a Jewish state. The Zionist mainstream settled on Palestine as the location of this state because of the territory's resonance in Jewish history and culture. How large should the state be, what should be its character, how could it be realised – such questions provoked heated controversies within the Zionist movement. But almost the full spectrum of Zionist opinion cohered around the essential goal of establishing a state in Palestine populated by an overwhelming Jewish demographic majority.
This objective almost inevitably provoked conflict in Palestine between Zionist newcomers and the territory's existing inhabitants, who were overwhelmingly not Jewish. Palestinian Arabs had no political stake in an endeavour that sought, as the leading Zionist diplomat Chaim Weizmann put it, to render Palestine “as Jewish as England is Englishâ€. On the contrary, Palestinians reasonably feared that Zionism could succeed only by dispossessing them of house and homeland. Palestinian opposition to Zionism was therefore as comprehensive as it was consistent. This fundamental clash of interests was spotlighted by Ze'ev Jabotinsky, the ever-candid leader of Revisionist Zionism. In his seminal 1923 article, “The Iron Wallâ€, Jabotinsky argued that Palestinians would never “voluntarily consent to the realisation of Zionism†because “every native population in the world resists colonistsâ€. This meant “Zionist colonisation must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population†behind “a power that is independent†of them. Zionism for many Jews was a movement for collective assertion as well as defence through national self-determination. Zionism for Palestinians was a violent colonial imposition.
Jews in, Arabs out
Writing in 1965, the Palestinian scholar and diplomat Fayez Sayegh identified a “divergence of Zionism from the norm of European colonizationâ€. Whereas European settlers had often subjugated native peoples in order to exploit them, the Zionist project sought to evict the native inhabitants of Palestine in order to replace them. The Australian historian Patrick Wolfe later drew this same distinction between franchise colonialism “dependent on native labour†and settler colonialism “premised on the elimination of native societiesâ€. The Zionist movement was a case of settler colonialism because it ultimately prized Palestinian land not labour as it sought not to subordinate Palestinians but to supplant them. Mass expulsion (or “transferâ€) of the Palestinians was therefore, as the Israeli historian Benny Morris writes, “inbuilt into Zionismâ€. On the one hand, “a Jewish state could not have arisen without a major displacement of Arab populationâ€; on the other hand, “this aim automatically produced resistance among the Arabs which, in turn, persuaded†Zionist leaders “that a hostile Arab majority or large minority could not remain in place if a Jewish state was to arise or safely endure.â€
In his presentation on Zionism before the November 1975 General Assembly of the United Nations, Sayegh conjured a vivid comparison. “As in the beating of a heartâ€, he said, the Zionist project comprised “two inextricable rhythmic operationsâ€: the “pumping-in†of Jews to Palestine and the “pumping-out†of Palestine's non-Jewish inhabitants. This twofold dynamic of Jewish expansion and Palestinian displacement has formed a relentless if irregular pulse animating more than a century of Zionist-Arab conflict. It began already under the British Mandate. Between 1917 and 1947, the Zionist movement brought hundreds of thousands of Jews from Europe into Palestine, increasing the Jewish presence there from below 10 percent to nearly one-third of the population. To facilitate Jewish colonisation, Zionist organisations energetically purchased land in Palestine. By 1947, more than 10 percent of the cultivable area was in Jewish hands. These territorial acquisitions often displaced Arab residents, usually to other locations in Palestine. Even as this “succession of microcosmic transfers†directly dislocated only a minority of Palestinians, still, the “piecemeal eviction†of tenant farmers both reflected “the underlying thrust†of Zionist ideology – the substitution of one people for another – and foreshadowed its catastrophic consummation.
In a 1938 diary entry, the leader of the Jewish community in Palestine (the Yishuv) and later Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, underlined the “necessity†of “removing the Arabs from our midstâ€. But he recognised that timing was critical. “What is inconceivable in normal timesâ€, he wrote, “is possible in revolutionary times.†When the 1948 Arab-Israel War broke out, Zionist forces seized the opportunity to bring about what Ben-Gurion euphemistically referred to as “great changes in the composition of the population of the countryâ€. During the war, some 700,000 Palestinians – two-thirds of the population – fled or were driven from their homes in what became Israel. Historians debate the extent to which this displacement unfolded according to a central plan. What cannot plausibly be denied is that Zionist massacres as well as expulsions were a major catalyst of Palestinian flight, that Zionist leaders welcomed the exodus, and that military commanders carried out evictions within an ideological context that had broadly legitimated population transfer as a strategic desideratum.
After the dust settled, Israeli authorities moved to consolidate Jewish domination within the new state whose expanded boundaries (established by armistice agreements in 1949 and known as the “Green Lineâ€) encompassed 78 percent of historic Palestine. Israel refused to allow the return of Palestinians displaced during the war and killed thousands of unarmed refugees who made the attempt. Multiple Arab communities within Israel were expelled long after the war was over, while more than four hundred Palestinian villages, towns, and neighbourhoods inside Israel were destroyed to make way for Jewish settlement. Property owned by Palestinian refugees as well as Palestinians who remained to become citizens of Israel was systematically confiscated. This vast expropriation left the Israeli state in possession or control of fully 93 percent of the land within the Green Line, which authorities allocated almost exclusively for use by Jews. In the half-century after independence, the state established more than seven hundred Jewish localities and zero Arab localities, excepting several townships built to facilitate the concentration and dispossession of Bedouin Arabs. Even as Israeli administrators relentlessly promoted Jewish immigration, they directed Jewish settlement strategically to encircle Arab villages and restrict the Arab minority to “small enclavesâ€. The overarching policy was to “Judaize†the entire territory by “concentrating the Arabs and dispersing the Jews.â€
Round two
Israel conquered the remaining 22 percent of Mandate Palestine in the June 1967 Arab-Israel War. The same dynamic of Jewish expansion, Arab displacement – Sayegh's “rhythmic operations†– then played out in the occupied West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and Gaza Strip. In the aftermath of the war, Israeli prime minister Levi Eshkol likened these occupied Palestinian territories (OPT) to a dowry and their Arab residents to a bride. “The trouble isâ€, Eshkol lamented, “the dowry is followed by a bride whom we don't want.†The 1967 War lasted only six days and Israel did not initiate hostilities with the primary objective of territorial expansion. Even so, by November 1967, about 200,000 Palestinians from the West Bank and 35,000 from Gaza – above 20 percent of the occupied Palestinian population – were in exile. The Israeli cabinet did not issue orders for an ethnic cleansing. But during the war and in its wake, Israeli leaders welcomed Palestinian flight and took measures calculated to expedite it, while military units directly cleared and demolished Palestinian settlements along the Green Line. “I hope they all goâ€, Defence Minister Moshe Dayan enthused. The threat of international censure eventually compelled Israel to formally authorise the return of displaced West Bankers. In practice, authorities kept the vast majority out. To the same demographic end, Israeli authorities refused to recognise as residents of the OPT approximately 270,000 Palestinians who were outside the West Bank and Gaza when the occupation began. Over the next half-century, Israel revoked the OPT residency rights of another quarter-million Palestinians, mostly after they travelled abroad.
From 1967, Israel extended its Judaizing policy from the area within the Green Line to the occupied territories. Over nearly six decades, successive Israeli administrations implanted more than 700,000 Jews in some 350 colonies established across the OPT. Israeli planners recognised and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) affirmed that this policy was a flagrant violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which stipulated that an “Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.†Jewish settlers benefited from government subsidies and the state allocated over 40 percent of the West Bank for their use. Meanwhile, Israel expropriated more than one-third of the West Bank from Palestinians, virtually barred Palestinians from building houses or infrastructure in nearly two-thirds of the West Bank, and pushed out Palestinian communities from areas earmarked for Jewish expansion. It was a similar story in Gaza, where Israel took control of nearly 60 percent of the land by 1990 and allocated one-quarter of the Strip for use by Jewish settlers even as they comprised just a half-percent of Gaza's population. A formidable phalanx of Israeli civil and military institutions was deployed to maximise Jewish control in the OPT and, simultaneously, to concentrate and confine Palestinians in dozens of crowded enclaves, disconnected from one another, with development outside them effectively banned. In July 2024, the ICJ found that Israel's “discriminatory policies and practices†in the West Bank and East Jerusalem – including its “settlement policy†and “encirclement of Palestinian communities into enclaves†– constituted unlawful “racial segregation and apartheidâ€.
From the outset, then, a central thrust of Zionist policy has been, as Human Rights Watch neatly summarises, to “maximise the number of Jews, as well as the land available to them†in areas desired for Jewish settlement, and at the same time to “minimise the number of Palestinians and the land available to them.†This demographic project unfolded inter alia through various forms of population transfer. Transfer was often preemptive, as when Israel prohibited Palestinians from entering, living in, or building on vast swaths of land in Palestine. Transfer was also retroactive, as when Israel demolished or expropriated the property of displaced Palestinians, prevented refugee return, and revoked Palestinian residency rights. And, on occasion, transfer was brutally direct, as in the wholesale expulsions of the 1948 Nakba. Israeli policy typically worked to concentrate Palestinians in dependent enclaves within Palestine, but when opportunities arose for displacement abroad, in 1948 and to a lesser extent in 1967, Israeli leaders exploited them. The endeavour to forcibly substitute one group of people for another is the essence of settler colonialism. In Israel – where a “virtual consensus†favouring transfer crystallised in the late 1930s, where almost all leaders after 1948 opposed Palestinian refugee return, where all governments since 1967 have participated in colonising the OPT, and where “almost all†civilian administration as well as military authorities are involved in enforcing “apartheid against Palestinians†– the settler-colonial impulse is not confined to one political party or ideological tendency but pervades and penetrates the state.
Containing resistance
As Jabotinsky prophesied, expanding Jewish settlement frequently provoked Palestinian opposition as well as resistance. Such opposition was typically overruled by means of discriminatory administration while resistance was suppressed by force. In the Mandate period, the Zionist leadership rejected the democratic principle of majority rule in Palestine so long as Jews comprised a minority, on the correct assumption that an Arab electoral majority would vote to end Jewish immigration and settlement. Between 1936 and 1939, British armed forces along with Jewish paramilitaries viciously crushed a Palestinian national revolt. After the 1948 War, Israel subjected some 90 percent of its Arab citizens to military rule. This emergency regime facilitated the destruction of Arab property and expropriation of Arab land until it was lifted in 1966, by which time the state's demographic objectives within the Green Line had been substantially accomplished.114 The pattern repeated in the OPT from the following year. Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip have lived under Israeli military rule since 1967: three-quarters of Israel's lifespan as a state. The occupation has been enforced through harsh repression including deportation, arbitrary detention, collective punishment, and unlawful killings. By one estimate, Israel jailed more than 800,000 Palestinians from the OPT between 1967 and 2016; those detained were “routinely subjected to tortureâ€.
From the mid-2000s, Israel's control policy in the West Bank relied on carrots as much as sticks. A subordinate “Palestinian Authority†(PA) patrolled and administered the main Palestinian population centres on Israel's behalf. The PA's economic dependence on Israel and the United States induced its political compliance, while broader public quiescence was purchased through foreign subventions – distributed by the PA to a bloated civil service and authoritarian security apparatus – as well as Israeli permits enabling tens of thousands of Palestinians to work for higher incomes in Israel. In Gaza, the emphasis lay heavier on the stick. Israeli officials had long viewed the enclave – crowded with impoverished refugees from the 1948 expulsion and their descendants – as a hotbed of resistance. After a mass civil revolt against Israeli military rule spread from Gaza across the OPT, beginning in December 1987 (the first intifada), Israel crushed the uprising then strengthened its grip on Gaza through various forms of confinement. By 2004, the head of Israel's National Security Council could describe Gaza as “a huge concentration campâ€. In January 2006, the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, won parliamentary elections in Gaza and the West Bank. Israel and its allies responded by subjecting the occupied Palestinian population – already enduring the “worst economic depression in modern history†– to “possibly the most rigorous form of international sanctions imposed in modern timesâ€. When Hamas seized control in Gaza the following year, Israel tightened the screws further as it put Gaza under a closure regime that has been enforced with varying degrees of intensity ever since.
The siege extinguished Gaza's economy and reduced its people to penury. “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a dietâ€, a senior Israeli official explained, “but not to make them die of hunger.†An Israeli officer stationed on the Gaza border distilled his mission there: “no development, no prosperity, only humanitarian dependency.†The unemployment rate soared to among the highest in the world, four-fifths of the population were forced to rely on humanitarian assistance, three-quarters became dependent on food aid, more than half faced “acute food insecurityâ€, and over 96 percent of the groundwater became unsafe for human consumption. The head of the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, observed in 2008 that “Gaza is on the threshold of becoming the first territory to be intentionally reduced to a state of abject destitution, with the knowledge, acquiescence and – some would say – encouragement of the international community.†The UN warned in 2015 that the cumulative impact of this induced humanitarian crisis might render Gaza “unlivable†within a half-decade. Israeli military intelligence agreed, whereas a subsequent UN analysis judged the projection overly optimistic. By 2018, Israel had reduced Gaza to what the UN high commissioner for human rights called a “toxic slumâ€, in which above two million people – half of them children – were “caged†from “birth to deathâ€. “If there is a hell on earthâ€, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said in May 2021, “it is the lives of children in Gaza.â€
Many in Gaza did not share this vision for their future, and so Israel found it prudent every few years to violently discipline them – what Israeli officials termed “mowing the lawnâ€. Some of these onslaughts responded to resistance emanating from Gaza: armed, as when Hamas fired projectiles into Israel in May 2021 following settler encroachments in occupied East Jerusalem, or unarmed, as in early 2018, when Palestinians demonstrated peacefully along Gaza's perimeter fence – scores were killed and thousands injured by Israeli snipers arrayed on the other side. But Israel's most devastating offensives, in 2008 and 2014, were motivated by broader political objectives: to inspire fear in the Arab world and to thwart Hamas “peace offensives†that threatened to make Israel's rejectionist diplomatic posture – its refusal to withdraw from Palestinian territory in exchange for peace – untenable. In the 2014 assault alone, Operation Protective Edge, approximately 1,600 civilians in Gaza were killed, including 550 children, and 18,000 homes were destroyed.
By October 2023, Israel had firmly entrenched what the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem characterised as a “regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Seaâ€. The coalition guidelines of the 37th Israeli government, formed the preceding year and led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, stipulated that “the Jewish people have an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the Land of Israel†– including the OPT – and committed to Jewish “settlement†across this territory. Large parts of the West Bank had been formally or de facto annexed, Jewish colonies were expanding at an unprecedented rate, the people of Gaza were trapped in suffocating stasis behind a prison fence, their compatriots in the West Bank were squeezed into dependent enclaves, and the Palestinian cause had all-but-vanished from Arab and international diplomatic agendas. In his September 2023 address to the UN General Assembly, Netanyahu hailed the bilateral agreements reached in 2020 and 2021 between Israel and four Arab states – the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco – as a “pivot of historyâ€, anticipated a “historic†treaty with Saudi Arabia, and ridiculed the “so-called experts†who had maintained that Israel-Arab normalisation was predicated on peace with the Palestinians. On the ground, Israeli officials knew the “humanitarian condition in Gaza†was “progressively deteriorating†– this being an intended policy outcome – and could predict that, “if it blows up, it'll be in Israel's direction.†But they apparently believed that, by oscillating “between [military] operations and providing that level of aid to Gaza†sufficient to prevent its complete “collapseâ€, Palestinian eruptions could be contained within tolerable limits. Hamas will “rise up from time to time and hit usâ€, Israel's former national security advisor acknowledged in 2018, but it can't do any “real damageâ€. The people of Gaza could be left to fester in their cage. Netanyahu boasted that Israel was entering a new “age of peace†without compromise, and Palestinians – who made up “only 2% of the Arab world†– had no “veto over the processâ€.
 “What was will not beâ€: Gaza crisis and opportunity
On 7 October 2023, Netanyahu's confidence was revealed as complacency when Hamas-led militants burst the gates of Gaza, overwhelmed multiple military installations, then rampaged across southern Israel. Unaffiliated residents of Gaza joined in. The operation was shocking in its boldness, the ensuing massacre for its brutality. Analysis by the Agence France-Presse (AFP) found that nearly 1,200 people were killed in the attack, overwhelmingly civilians, and 250 were taken hostage. If these figures are correct, this means Palestinians killed more Israelis in one day than during the five years of the second intifada, inclusive of the bloody suicide bombings. The shock of the casualties was compounded by the military and intelligence vulnerabilities Hamas exposed. A poorly resourced militia, constrained within a besieged and intensely surveilled ghetto, brushed past Israel's high-tech ramparts, overpowered the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) Gaza Division, and ran rampant for hours unimpeded by any coordinated military response. “We spend billions and billions on gathering intelligence on Hamasâ€, a former senior official on Israel's National Security Council rued. “Then, in a second… everything collapsed like dominoes.†The Hamas assault marked the first time since Israel's war of independence that Israeli territory was seized in battle and, all told, the “most traumatic day†in Israel's seventy-five-year history.
In retaliation for the Hamas operation and massacre, Israel turned Gaza into a howling wasteland. The onslaught was dubbed Operation Swords of Iron. Between October 2023 and July 2024, Israeli forces killed upward of forty thousand people, most of them women, children, and the elderly. The reported death toll included almost as many children as were killed across all the world's conflict zones over the preceding three years combined. Gazan hospitals developed the acronym “WCNSF†– Wounded Child No Surviving Family – as hundreds of extended family units were wiped out. Fully 90 percent of the population – 1.9 million people, including an estimated 800,000 children – was internally displaced, most multiple times and some up to ten times. Gazans were being shunted around like “human pinballsâ€, UN Secretary-General Guterres decried, “ricocheting between ever-smaller slivers of the south, without any of the basics for survivalâ€. Israel set records for killing UN staff, health workers, and journalists; littered Gaza with more unexploded bombs than anywhere in the world since the Second World War; and, according to former UN assistant secretary-general for human rights Andrew Gilmour, probably inflicted the “highest kill rate†of any military since the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Gaza became “the most dangerous place in the world to be a child†(UNICEF), “the most dangerous place for aid workers in the world†(International Crisis Group), “the most dangerous place to be a civilian†(International Rescue Committee), and, indeed, “the most dangerous place in the world†period (ACLED).
Targeting Palestinian civilians and civilian infrastructure was not in itself a novelty. A UN inquiry found that Israel's 2008 offensive, which visited upon Gaza what Amnesty International described as “22 days of death and destructionâ€, was a “deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorise a civilian population.†Five years later, Israeli soldiers confessedly inflicted “destruction on a whole other level†in Gaza as they unleashed “an insane amount of firepower†while “shooting at anything that moves – and also at what isn't movingâ€. In 2018, IDF snipers responded to overwhelmingly unarmed demonstrations along Gaza's perimeter fence by intentionally targeting children, journalists, health workers, and disabled persons with live ammunition. Indeed, long before October 2023, every political and military official in charge of Operation Swords of Iron – Prime Minister Netanyahu, Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi, Emergency War Cabinet member Benny Gantz, and their key advisors – was on record endorsing the intentional targeting of civilians as a tenet of Israel's military doctrine. After October 2023, however, the scale of destruction qualitatively increased: from 100–120 targets bombed per day (2014) to 430 targets bombed per day (October 2023), from 305 buildings damaged per day (2014) to 743 buildings damaged per day (October 2023–January 2024), and from 2.5 million tonnes of rubble generated (2014) to over 39 million tonnes of rubble generated (May 2024) – thirteen times the combined debris generated by all previous conflicts in Gaza since 2008. The American military historian Robert Pape concluded in January 2024 that Israel's ongoing assault amounted to “one of the most intense civilian punishment campaigns in historyâ€.
This radical ramping up of violence reflected a qualitative change in Israeli policy. Israel had previously sought to contain Hamas within an impoverished Gaza sealed off from the West Bank, Israel, Egypt, and the wider world. The 7 October assault made this “conflict management†approach a dead letter. But with crisis came opportunity. Israeli leaders had long been alive to the need for calibrating Israel's use of force to the political limits set by international public opinion. In 2008, Israel moved to break an unwanted ceasefire with Hamas on 4 November, when Americans were preoccupied with the presidential election of Barack Obama. More generally, a 2018 study found, “Israel authorities appear to time their attacks†on Palestinians so as to minimise the likelihood of coverage in US newscasts. Netanyahu himself is acutely sensitive to these dynamics. “Israel, when it fights, is subject to international pressuresâ€, he explained in a 2006 interview. “In the televised ageâ€, the “kinds of wars that we fight†are “not sustainable beyond a few weeksâ€. Following the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, Netanyahu – then deputy foreign minister – lamented that Israel had not carried out “large-scale†expulsions of Palestinians from the OPT while global media focused elsewhere. And during Israel's summer 2014 assault on Gaza, Netanyahu seemingly decided to launch a ground invasion when international attention was diverted by the downing of a Malaysian airliner over Ukraine.
The unqualified support extended Israel by the US, Britain, and the European Union following the Hamas attack signalled an unbuckling of external constraints. It was interpreted by Israeli planners as a green light to transform the “strategic reality†in Gaza and “change the Middle Eastâ€. Former national security advisor Meir Ben Shabbat argued that “the scale of the attack by Hamas provides legitimacy for Israel to take extraordinary measures.†An influential military think-tank advised that strong “international legitimacy and freedom of offensive action for Israel†now “enables high aggressivenessâ€. An unnamed political source informed veteran correspondent Ben Caspit that Israel “must take advantage of the opportunity†to “go all outâ€. And former parliamentarian Ofer Shelah, considered a dove, urged that Israel exploit the unprecedented “global legitimacy for any type of action†to unleash an “unprecedented degree of powerâ€. Israeli leaders had long despaired of their Gaza headache – Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin famously wished it would “sink into the sea†– and after 7 October saw the prospect of a permanent cure. Israel's strategy accordingly shifted from mowing the lawn in Gaza to salting the earth; from perpetually deferring the Gaza question to definitively resolving it. Israel would “act with full force†to “change the face of reality in the Gaza Strip for the coming fifty yearsâ€, Defence Minister Gallant pledged. “What was will not be.â€
From displacement to destruction
Since 2008, almost every escalation in Gaza had been triggered by Israel. By contrast, the 2023 hostilities, like the so-called Unity Intifada of May 2021, were initiated by Hamas, which by all accounts caught Israel unprepared. The Israeli response was accordingly characterised by an unusual degree of dissensus and improvisation. But a broad spectrum of elite opinion soon converged around two basic options. At the more extreme end were calls for annihilation. A British jurist representing Israel subsequently attempted to downplay examples of bloodthirsty statements by Israeli officials as a few “random quotes†of merely “rhetorical†significance. In truth, as researchers like Yaniv Cogan have diligently catalogued, demands for the destruction of Gaza echoed across Israel's political spectrum and down through civil society. Lawmakers from Israel's governing coalition called for “crushing Gaza on all its inhabitants†and “flattening†Gaza “without mercyâ€. They demanded that the “civilian population†in Gaza “leave the world†and that the IDF impose “one sentence for everyone there – deathâ€. Senior politicians underscored that “there are no innocents†in Gaza; “it's an entire nation out there that is responsible.†A deputy speaker of Israel's parliament bluntly enjoined, “Burn Gaza now nothing less!†while a parliamentarian from the ruling Likud Party – and former minister of public diplomacy – urged her followers to “invest your energy on one thing: wiping Gaza off the face of the earth.†Those “Gazan monsters†who do not flee abroad, she clarified, should “die horribly†at the hands of “a vengeful and cruel IDF … Anything less than that is immoralâ€. Opposition legislators chimed in: “there are no innocents in Gazaâ€, “the children in Gaza have brought this upon themselves!â€
Israeli media, meanwhile, were saturated with demands to “erase†Gaza and turn it into a “slaughterhouseâ€, its inhabitants “without exception… exterminatedâ€. One prominent television presenter enthused that “there are already more refugees and more dead in the Gaza Strip than there were in the original Nakba in 1948†and urged that “this important process must not be interruptedâ€. A journalist for one of Israel's most widely circulated newspapers opined that “every baby [in Gaza] will grow to become a terrorist. Erase, kill, destroy, annihilate.†A TV talking head defined “victory†in Gaza as “annihilation + deportation + occupation + judahization of the area + annexation.†An award-winning news anchor informed viewers that “Gaza should be erasedâ€. “Do not leave a stone upon a stone in Gazaâ€, former Likud MK Moshe Feiglin fulminated in a nationally broadcast interview. “Complete incineration. No more hope… Annihilate Gaza now! Now!†To be sure, Israel's Gaza policy also had its critics: a deputy mayor of Jerusalem charged that, if political leaders truly cared, “there would have been 150,000 dead already†in Gaza and “not a single building… left standingâ€. One municipal leader fantasised that Gaza would end up resembling Auschwitz.
Popular songs released in Israel since October 2023 featured such lyrics as “Good morning Gaza, another day, another dead Nazi… no survivors†and “We got into Gaza, we'll get out only when it's gone… you have no bread or water. Oh, and you don't have a home either.†One ditty on “turning Gaza into a parking lot†was performed for schoolchildren; another promising that “within a year we will annihilate everyone†was sung by children in a video circulated online by Israel's national broadcaster. The IDF Operations Directorate ran a social media channel entitled “72 Virgins – Uncensored†which published hundreds of posts in Hebrew. These included images of Palestinian captives and corpses captioned “exterminating the roachesâ€; footage of an Israeli soldier allegedly dipping machine gun bullets in pork fat, captioned “you won't get your virginsâ€; and video of an Israeli vehicle repeatedly driving over the body of a Palestinian militant, captioned “flatten themâ€. Likud MK Moshe Sa'ada observed a shift in Israeli public opinion with respect to Palestinians. Even left-wing kibbutzniks, he said, “are telling you to exterminate themâ€. The decimation of Gaza was no secret – Israel being a small country with a civilian army that is representative of and entrenched in civil society, whose soldiers effectively livestreamed the ransacking on social media – yet nine-tenths of Israeli Jews surveyed answered that Israel's operation was “about right†or had “not gone far enoughâ€.
Amidst this “genocide feverâ€, Prime Minister Netanyahu repeatedly invoked the Biblical injunction to “Remember… Amalek†– referencing a divine command to “smite†the enemy of Israel “and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.†According to B'Tselem, this was “a dog whistle that anyone who has gone through Israel's educational system will recognise†as an order to “wipe out Gazaâ€. Netanyahu's colleagues followed his lead as they evoked Amalek to oppose “any humanitarian gesture†for Gaza's civilians, demand the “total annihilation†of population centres, and advocate that Gaza be targeted with nuclear weapons. In July 2024, long after he and other senior officials had been censured by the ICJ for their dehumanising language, Defence Minister Gallant hailed the indiscriminate demolition of a Palestinian town as indexing the achievements of Israel's war against “Amalekâ€. It would seem that IDF forces operating in Gaza received the message loud and clear: one group in uniform filmed themselves chanting “we know our motto: there are no uninvolved civilians†and “wipe off the seed of Amalekâ€; another soldier recorded a video thanking God “we killed tens of thousands of Amalekitesâ€.
Alongside this chorus for annihilation, many officials advocated that Gaza's population be evicted. Thinning Gaza's population had long been an Israeli desideratum. After Israel conquered the Strip in 1967, the Eshkol government attempted to transfer large numbers of refugees from Gaza to Jordan, Egypt, the Gulf, and Latin America. Officials relied on economic incentives – keeping unemployment and poverty in Gaza high, then paying individuals to leave – for fear that a directly forced expulsion would put in jeopardy US support. The scheme foundered in the face of Jordanian obstruction as well as the emergence of popular resistance in Gaza. More generally, as the first part of this chapter showed, Zionist institutions have consistently employed various forms of population transfer to facilitate Jewish colonisation in Palestine. This process was typically gradual and piecemeal, while Palestinian opposition was usually overcome through a combination of economic appeasement and military repression. Whenever Palestinian resistance escalated above a tolerable threshold, however, as during the second intifada, the idea of expelling Palestinians en masse regained salience in Israeli public and political discourse. This pattern became visible again after 7 October. Just as Ben-Gurion in 1938 foresaw emptying Palestine of its Arab population amid the fog of war, so the Netanyahu government in 2023 attempted to exploit global indignation over the Hamas attacks to drive out the people of Gaza.
Calls for ethnic cleansing came from the highest echelons of Israel's political and military establishments. Cabinet ministers argued for encouraging Palestinians in Gaza “to leave†(Jerusalem Affairs and Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu), “the voluntary emigration of Gaza Arabs to the countries of the world†(Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich), the “voluntary resettlement†of Gazans “outside of the Strip†(Intelligence Minister Gila Gamliel), and “the emigration of Gaza residents†(Interior Minister Itamar Ben Gvir). Prime Minister Netanyahu himself commanded “the residents of Gaza: Leave nowâ€, reportedly instructed a close advisor to prepare a plan to reduce Gaza's population to the “minimum possibleâ€, and affirmed he was working to find countries willing to absorb Gaza refugees. Lawmakers from Israel's governing coalition urged a “Nakba†that would “scatter†Gazans around the world or else to a “refuge city†in the Sinai desert. “It must be emphasised that relocation is for those in Gaza who desire to leaveâ€, a senior Likud figure winkingly caveated – albeit “anyone who staysâ€, his parliamentary colleague clarified, “bears full responsibility for what will happen to himâ€. For any bleeding-hearts who objected, another coalition Knesset member pointed out that expulsion was a venerable Zionist tradition: “you fled? Don't come back. Just like in Tel Aviv, just like in many more places in the State of Israel.†One is almost nostalgic for the days when Israeli spokespeople denied the 1948 expulsion instead of braying for its sequel. On 13 October 2023, Israel's Ministry of Intelligence produced an official document recommending that Israel solicit US support for evacuating the civilian population of Gaza to Egypt. “We may be about to see massive ethnic cleansingâ€, one EU diplomat warned. As Israel drove the entire population of northern Gaza toward the Egyptian border, Israeli officials reportedly proposed that Egypt's World Bank debt be forgiven in exchange for hosting Gazan refugees while US Secretary of State Antony Blinken attempted to procure Arab government support for establishing “humanitarian corridors†into the Sinai. Egyptian authorities in particular refused to cooperate and, as of July 2024, continued to obstruct Palestinian flight.
One frequently cited rationale for these policies was the need to restore Israel's “deterrence capacity†vis-á-vis its regional adversaries, notably Hezbollah in Lebanon. Gaza has often served Israel as a demonstrative punching bag. In August 1955, IDF Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan argued that even “minor†Israeli reprisal operations in Gaza and elsewhere along the border were “very important†because of “their impact on the Arab assessment of Israel's strength – and on Israel's belief in her own strengthâ€. More recently, then-foreign minister Tzipi Livni bragged that Israel went “wild†in its 2008–2009 assault on Gaza. In so doing, a former senior Israeli security official explained, Israel showed “Hamas, Iran and the region†that it could be “as lunatic as any of themâ€. After the debacle of 7 October, Israeli officials sought to revive regional terror – if not of the IDF's military prowess, then at any rate of its deranged potency against civilians. “Hizbullah will only be deterred if it sees not only destruction in Gaza City, but a humanitarian disaster and absolute governmental chaosâ€, one influential strategist argued. “We will obliterate civilian infrastructureâ€, an IDF officer promised, because “Hezbollah feeds off our apprehension to land a decisive strikeâ€. The whole of Gaza “has to look like Beit Hanounâ€, an IDF company commander explained, referring to a town in northern Gaza levelled by Israel, so “there will be fear [among] all the surrounding nationsâ€.
A cruder motivation was revenge. On 7 October, Prime Minister Netanyahu pledged that Israel “will forcefully avenge this dark day†and quoted from Haim Bialik's poem on the Kishinev pogrom: “Revenge for the blood of a little child has [not] yet been devised by Satan.†Alas, Netanyahu omitted the poet's preceding line: “And cursed be the man who says: Avenge!†Netanyahu's wife, Sara, expressed “hope†for “a very great revengeâ€, while an officer in the IDF 162nd Armoured Division hailed vengeance as an “important valueâ€. “I'll give it to you straightâ€, another IDF soldier admitted. “We are all out for revenge.†Already on 10 October, B'Tselem warned that a “criminal policy of revenge is underwayâ€. Carmi Gillon, a former head of Israel's Shin Bet security service, agreed that Israel had “embarked on a war of revenge†and considered this wholly legitimate. Soldiers operating in Gaza justified everything from property destruction and looting to indiscriminate killing in these terms. A third rationale, fringe at first but increasingly voluble as Israel's campaign dragged on, was a desire to re-establish the Jewish settlements in Gaza dismantled in the unilateral disengagement of 2005. Even as Netanyahu himself dismissed the prospect, one-third of his cabinet reportedly endorsed it while an energised minority of IDF soldiers appeared inspired by the vision.
Whether Israeli decision-makers favoured annihilation or expulsion, and whether they did so for reasons of deterrence, vengeance, or settlement, the policy upshot and practical bottom-line was the same: Gaza was to be rendered permanently uninhabitable. Israel resolved to inflict what the IDF spokesperson termed a “massacre that collapses the Gaza Strip upon its residents†and reduce Gaza, as one Israeli defence official put it, “into a city of tentsâ€. “We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakbaâ€, Minister of Agriculture Avi Dichter explained. “Gaza Nakba 2023. That's how it'll end.†Hamas's leader “made a mistakeâ€, Defence Minister Gallant declared, and sealed the “fate of Gazaâ€. Even if Hamas agreed to return Israeli hostages, a former acting head of Israel's Civil Administration and counterterrorism advisor to multiple Israeli prime ministers assured, “Gaza will be turned into piles of ruinsâ€. “Nothing leftâ€, the Civil Administration's serving deputy head summarised. “Whoever returns here, if he returns here later, will see here scorched earth. No houses, no agriculture, no nothing. They have no future.†IDF Major General (Reserve) Giora Eiland – the former head of Israel's National Security Council, former IDF operations chief, and sometime advisor to Defence Minister Gallant – most clearly articulated the operative policy. In a series of articles and interviews, he argued that Israel should “create a humanitarian crisis in Gazaâ€, compelling the “entire population†to flee into exile while rendering Gaza “temporarily, or permanently, unfit for livingâ€. Israel should impose “a dramatic, continuous, and strict siege†as well as systematically destroying critical health and water infrastructure so that Gaza will become “a place where no human being can existâ€. The civilian population would be given two choices: “to stay and to starve, or to leaveâ€.
Gaza apocalypse
B'Tselem observed that Eiland's prescriptions were “an accurate reflection†of “the strategy pursued†in Gaza, where Israel unleashed “one of the most intense bombing campaigns in history†upon a population of two million people, half of them children, trapped in a crowded enclave less than one-quarter the size of Greater London. In the first week alone, Israel dropped more bombs on Gaza than the US did in Afghanistan each year between 2008 and 2019. By June 2024, Israel had carpeted Gaza with more than seventy thousand tonnes of explosives, surpassing the combined weight of bombs dropped on London, Dresden, and Hamburg in all of World War II. Every population centre was pulverised. North Gaza was left “an uninhabitable moonscape†as broad swaths of the territory were erased. “Beit Hanoun is not only deadâ€, a correspondent for Le Monde reported in November. “Beit Hanoun no longer exists.†Some 70 percent of Jabaliya refugee camp was destroyed, according to Palestinian officials. The largest urban concentration, Gaza City, became a “wasteland†stalked by “hunger and chaos†as critical infrastructure was “ravaged†and “whole districts†were “razed to the groundâ€. Among them were the upmarket Rimal quarter, substantially “reduced to rubbleâ€, and long-suffering Shujai'ya, where “nearly every building†for “block after block†was “flattenedâ€. Nine months into the onslaught, Israel continued to bombard Gaza City neighbourhoods long since reduced to “disaster zones with 85 percent of buildings destroyedâ€. Farther south, the city of Khan Younis was “flattenedâ€, “utterly destroyedâ€, “devastatedâ€. “The damage to infrastructure is insaneâ€, one UN official based in Gaza reported. “In Khan Younis, there is not one building untouched.†In May 2024, “Gaza's last refuge†became “Israel's next target†as Israel defied international outrage to assault Rafah. The southern border city was “shredded†as Israeli forces left it “unrecognizableâ€, “an empty huskâ€, a “flattened wastelandâ€.
By mid-2024, between 40 and 60 percent of all structures in Gaza had been damaged or destroyed, including more than 60 percent of homes, 85 percent of school buildings, 80 percent of health facilities, 80 percent of commercial facilities, 60 percent of cultural heritage sites, 60 percent of cropland, and every university. Some 60 percent of Gaza's roads, electricity distribution network, and water infrastructure was damaged or destroyed, including two-thirds of waste treatment and management facilities. In Gaza City, three-quarters of all buildings, 90 percent of water wells, and all brackish or seawater desalination plants were damaged or destroyed. “There is no Gazaâ€, a right-wing Israeli pundit who embedded with IDF forces in the Strip reported back. “Everything is in ruins, everything is over.†Israeli troops operating in Gaza also expressed satisfaction with the wreckage inflicted: “Gaza is in fucking ruins. What a wonderful viewâ€, “Shujai'ya should remain in ruins for eternityâ€, “Shujai'ya – rest in peace… 30 houses [gone]… How beautiful.†“Tell me, when you see Gaza like this, up in flames, what do you feel?†a commander stationed in Jabaliya was asked. “That we are finally destroying Hamasâ€, he replied. “Everyone here is an enemy!†“I can count on one hand the cases we were told not to shootâ€, an officer who served in the IDF Operations Directorate attested. “Even with sensitive things like schools, [approval] feels like only a formality.†“Yes, we set fire to houses. To as many as possibleâ€, the director of one of Israel's governing parties who did active duty in Gaza after 7 October acknowledged. “And we are proud of it.â€
In what might have been a first in the annals of modern warfare, Israeli forces systematically targeted hospitals as they “completely obliterated†Gaza's healthcare infrastructure. In northern Gaza, CNN reported, at least twenty of twenty-two hospitals were damaged or destroyed over the first two months of Israel's offensive. Fourteen were directly hit. Foreign doctors volunteering in Gaza returned with horror stories about Israel “deliberately targeting†healthcare workers, vehicles, and buildings. As the indiscriminate bombing of Gaza caused unrelenting “mass casualty events†– including from weapons designed to maximise injuries and deaths – Israeli restrictions on fuel and humanitarian aid forced medics to perform brain surgeries, amputations, and C-sections without anaesthetic, sedatives, gloves, disinfectant, or even clean water. “We do surgeries while the injuries are covered with fliesâ€, a doctor in Beit Lahiya testified. “The whole hospital is full of blood and insects.†By January 2024, more than one thousand children had undergone the amputation of one or both legs, many without anaesthetic. Already in October, Giora Eiland had warned that Israeli fuel restrictions would cause babies in Gazan hospitals to “die in incubators†and urged that Israel “not give in on this issueâ€. The authorities proved their mettle as premature babies in Al-Shifa Hospital duly perished. This still did not satisfy one Likud lawmaker who lamented that, while soldiers were rounding up “150 terrorists†in Al-Shifa's orthopaedic department, “300 terrorists were born in the maternity ward.†As headlines like “UN Rights Chief ‘Horrified' by Mass Grave Reports at Gaza Hospitals†(BBC), “Gaza's Largest Hospital Is ‘Death Zone' With Mass Grave at the Door†(Sky News), and “A Senior Gazan Doctor Died During Israeli Detention. Officials Refuse to Explain How†(Ha'aretz) became routine, the UN World Health Organisation (WHO) informed in March 2024 that only ten of thirty-six large-scale hospitals across Gaza were even “minimally functionalâ€. After the IDF “systematically dismantled hospital after hospitalâ€, Medicins Sans Frontieres (MSF) reported in July, “there is no health system to speak of left.â€
The incessant bullets, bulldozing, and bombardment were accompanied and compounded by a lethal blockade. At the outset of Israel's offensive, Defence Minister Gallant announced “a complete siege†on Gaza. “There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel… We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.†“Israel has imposed a total blockade on Gaza: no electricity, no water, just damageâ€, the Coordinator of Government in the Territories (COGAT) echoed. “Hamas became ISIS and the citizens of Gaza are celebrating… Human beasts are dealt with accordingly.†Israel blocked all aid as well as commercial traffic into Gaza until 21 October and “vastly reduced†it thereafter. When supplies did enter their effective distribution was prevented by repeated Israeli strikes on civilians gathered to receive them and, more generally, by the hellish conditions Israel had wrought. These restrictions were “catastrophic†for a population that – thanks to decades of economic strangulation by Israel – relied on imports as well as external aid to survive. The amount of water available for each person per day in Gaza shrunk by 94 percent to less than one-third the internationally accepted minimum standard for basic survival in emergencies. By April 2024, international agencies reported that famine was “imminent†in northern Gaza while the entire population was experiencing acute food insecurity – the “highest share†ever recorded. Conditions improved somewhat the following month when Israeli restrictions loosened in concession to international pressure, but a “high risk of Famine†persisted. Meanwhile, by obstructing humanitarian assistance, dismantling critical sewage, water, and health infrastructure, and concentrating hundreds of thousands of people in “overcrowded spaces†that were “unfit for human habitationâ€, Israel created in Gaza the “perfect environment†for the transmission of disease. Giora Eiland had again anticipated this scenario when he enthused, back in November, that “severe epidemics in the south of the Strip will hasten our victory.†Finance Minister Smotrich circulated Eiland's comments and endorsed their “every wordâ€. By the end of June 2024, nearly one million cases of acute respiratory infection and over half a million cases of diarrhoea had been reported. Poliovirus – an infectious disease that can cause fatal paralysis – was detected in multiple sewage samples the following month. UN experts repeatedly warned that spreading disease could eventually increase the death toll in Gaza by “multiplesâ€.
The crime of crimes
In the opening weeks of Israel's offensive, UN human rights officials as well as academic experts sounded the alarm that a genocide was unfolding. This concern came to global notice in December 2023, when the government of South Africa instituted historic proceedings at the ICJ accusing Israel of “committing genocideâ€. The following month, in a decision as politically remarkable as it was devastating for Israel's international legitimacy, the Court found by fifteen votes to two that South Africa's charge of genocide was plausible. South Africa brought its case on the basis of the 1948 Genocide Convention. This defined the crime of genocide as “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.†The Convention definition has been widely criticised by scholars on various grounds, including that its roster of victim groups is arbitrarily narrow, that it focuses on “physical†to the omission of cultural and social destruction, and that its drafters excluded acts of population transfer for purely opportunistic reasons. Furthermore, ICJ jurisprudence has established that, “in order to infer the existence†of genocidal intent “from a pattern of conductâ€, this must be “the only inference that could reasonably be drawn from the acts in question.†This is a formidable threshold to meet when genocide unfolds in the context of war, since posited military objectives can almost always be adduced as providing alternative rationales.
Beyond the legal context, the Oxford English Dictionary provides a more intuitive grasp of the concept. It defines genocide as the “deliberate and systematic killing or persecution of people from a particular group identified as having a shared ethnicity, nationality, etc., with the intention of partially or wholly destroying that group.†Israel has spent more than seventy-five years progressively confining Palestinians within, and when possible displacing them from, their homeland. After 7 October, Israel seized the political opportunity created by the Hamas atrocities to drive out Gaza's population. To this end, Israel unleashed unprecedented firepower with the candid objective of making Gaza permanently uninhabitable. By systematically destroying the prerequisites for human civilisation in Gaza while corralling its desperate population into unliveable encampments along the southern border, Israel hoped to force civilians to flee en masse across the border. When Egypt refused to open the gates, Israel did not significantly change course but continued its onslaught. Put otherwise, Israel continued to indiscriminately target civilians and civilian infrastructure with overwhelming force in order to render uninhabitable an area most of whose inhabitants were unable to leave. How else to describe this policy except as a “deliberate and systematic killing or persecution†intended to “partially or wholly destroy†the people of Gaza?
The conclusions of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry into Israel's conduct in Gaza merit careful consideration in view of the OED definition quoted above. The Commission found that Israel had “intentionally†directed “attacks against the civilian population†of Gaza, including “children†as well as displaced persons sheltering in “designated safe zonesâ€; “intentionally†caused “the near total destruction of civilian objects across the densely populated Gaza Stripâ€; “forcibly transferred the civilian population†from northern Gaza to the south with a view to its permanent displacement; “destroyed the water and electricity infrastructure in the Gaza Strip and much of the other key infrastructures… indispensable to the survival of the civilian population thereâ€; and employed “starvation of civilians as a method of warfare†by “cutting off access to food, water, shelter and medical care and wilfully impeding relief supplies.†Israel's “victims were overwhelmingly civiliansâ€, in an attack that “was directed against the civilian population†as a whole, as Israel committed against part of Gaza's civilian population “the crime against humanity of exterminationâ€. By July 2024, more than 100,000 Gazans, and perhaps three times as many, had fled to Egypt. Disease was spreading. Correspondence published in prestigious medical journal The Lancet conservatively estimated that direct and indirect deaths from the conflict to that point could eventually reach 186,000, or 8 percent of Gaza's population. The “extensive destruction†inflicted meant there was “no prospect of the return of the great majority of displaced residents of northern Gaza and Khan Younis in the foreseeable future.†Indeed, UN agencies estimated it would take fifteen years just to clear the rubble. A senior UN aid official summarised Israel's achievement thus: “Gaza has simply become uninhabitable.â€
“The question of genocideâ€, Patrick Wolfe observed, “is never far from discussions of settler colonialism.†The project to establish a state for newcomers in an area already populated by others inherently presumes a displacement of the indigenous inhabitants. Where expulsion fails, elimination offers an alternative route to the same end. As the legal scholar William Schabas writes, “genocide is the last resort of the frustrated ethnic cleanser.†The first part of this chapter showed that Israel is constitutionally antagonistic toward the Palestinian presence in Palestine; has continuously resorted to demographic engineering to reduce, contain, and overwhelm that presence; and has reflexively resorted to lethal repression to overcome the resistance such measures almost inevitably provoked. Given this record, it was not surprising when, as the chapter's second part documented, Israel responded to the 7 October massacre by inflicting overwhelming force on Gaza's civilian population with the intention of expelling it abroad. That response was consonant with, and rooted in, decades of consistent state practice and ideology. This is not to say the Gaza genocide was inevitable. Had the people of Gaza resigned themselves from despair to life in an open-air prison, or proven unable to muster the resources and ingenuity to challenge this fate, Israel would doubtless have been content to let them rot there in perpetuity. Meanwhile, the Zionist quest for a stable Jewish majority has at times led Israeli leaders as well as public opinion to oppose territorial expansion or support a political resolution of the conflict through partition.
Brigadier General Shlomo Brom, a former deputy to Israel's national security advisor, interpreted the events of 7 October as proof that Israel's strategy of force vis-à -vis the Palestinians had failed. “It is absurd to hope that Israel can indefinitely contain with its military might … millions of Palestinians who claim the right to self-determination and a free, normal lifeâ€, Brom wrote in the immediate aftermath of the Hamas attack. “Eventually the oppressed will rise against their oppressor.†But Brom's was an isolated voice. In general, the policy combining territorial expansion with ethnic supremacy was not discredited but doubled down on. As the IDF laid waste to Gaza, a large majority of lawmakers in the Knesset voted to classify “the establishment of a Palestinian state†as “an existential threat to the State of Israel†while government authorities accelerated land expropriation, Jewish settlement, and the forcible transfer of Palestinian communities in the West Bank. After 7 October, as before it, Israel appeared determined to render its conflict with the Palestinians zero sum. In the long run, this could only end by reducing the sum of either Palestinians or Israelis in Palestine to zero, one way or the other.
31 July 2024
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Avi Shlaim's Genocide in Gaza: Israel's Long War on Palestine is published by The Irish Pages Press. The book can be ordered directly at the publisher's website. (Online orders on this website are preferable and highly advantageous to the publisher, which receives only 15% of the cover price from Amazon).
