In the shadow of the live feed: Avi Shlaim’s ‘Genocide in Gaza’ Submitted by Hossam el-Hamalawy on Wed, 01/14/2026 - 09:10 The Oxford scholar’s book argues that Israel’s latest atrocities in the besieged territory are anything but an anomaly A Palestinian sits amid the destruction following Israeli air strikes on al-Shati camp in Gaza City on 28 October 2023 (AFP) Off Avi Shlaim’s Genocide in Gaza: Israel’s Long War on Palestine is a book written in the midst of catastrophe, not after its dust has settled. It is a work shaped by urgency rather than hindsight, driven by the need to establish a record while the destruction is still ongoing and the project of denialism is already taking form. The Oxford scholar writes with the awareness that what is not fixed in language now risks being softened, relativised, or erased altogether. Suffused with grief, the book does not, however, plead. It documents, argues and indicts. The author writes with the awareness that this is a war that has been livestreamed, normalised, and justified in real time. It comes as future denials of the genocide ongoing in Gaza are already being rehearsed. The book’s purpose is to interrupt that process, to leave behind a written record that resists erasure. Shlaim’s authority does not come from moral posturing but from a long, uncomfortable intimacy with his subject. Born in Baghdad in 1945 to an Iraqi Jewish family, Shlaim migrated in 1951 to the newly born Zionist state, served in the Israeli army, and moved to Britain in 1966 to study at Cambridge. When war broke out the following year between Israel and a coalition of Arab states, he returned briefly to Israel to serve, before resuming his life in the UK. That trajectory matters. Shlaim is not writing from outside the story, nor from the safety of abstraction. Over subsequent decades, he became one of the most prominent members of the group known as Israel’s “new historians”, scholars who challenged official state narratives using newly opened archives. His earlier work dismantled myths surrounding Israel’s founding, its wars with neighbouring Arab states, and its claims of perpetual victimhood. As a professor of international relations at Oxford, Shlaim built a reputation for archival rigour and a willingness to confront political orthodoxies. Genocide in Gaza marks a further step. This is not a book written primarily for fellow historians. It is a public intervention by someone who believes that scholarly detachment becomes a form of complicity when mass killing is rationalised in legalistic language. Settler colonialism without euphemisms At the heart of the book is a structural argument. Gaza is not treated as an anomaly, nor as a humanitarian tragedy that erupted suddenly after 7 October 2023. It is presented as a pressure chamber within a broader settler colonial system, one designed to contain, fragment and ultimately neutralise Palestinian political existence. Former Israeli prime minister accuses government of backing 'murderous' settler violence Read More » Shlaim returns repeatedly to the idea that Israeli policy has been guided not by conflict resolution but by conflict management. Gaza, in this framing, functions as a laboratory for control. Periodic assaults are not failures but features. The infamous military phrase “mowing the lawn” is cited not as a rhetorical flourish but as evidence of intent. It conveys routinisation, maintenance and the reduction of human lives to a technical problem. This insistence on structure is what gives the book its oppressive weight. Shlaim is not interested in moral shocks detached from history. He wants the reader to see continuity, to recognise how siege, blockade and repeated destruction form a single political grammar. Once that grammar is recognised, the language of surprise and regret collapses. The arithmetic of destruction Despite its moral intensity, Genocide in Gaza is grounded in painstaking detail. Shlaim catalogues the destruction not to overwhelm but to establish a pattern. Entire residential neighbourhoods flattened. Hospitals bombed or rendered inoperable. Universities erased. Water systems destroyed. Agricultural land poisoned or bulldozed. He lists not only deaths but the annihilation of the conditions necessary for life. When schools, bakeries, ambulances, mosques and sewage plants are destroyed, explanation through military necessity becomes strained to the point of absurdity The cumulative effect is chilling. When schools, bakeries, ambulances, mosques, archives and sewage plants are all destroyed, explanation through military necessity becomes strained to the point of absurdity. Shlaim introduces a grim lexicon that has emerged to name this totality of damage: domicide, scholasticide, ecocide, econocide. Genocide appears not as an isolated accusation but as the term that binds these processes together. What makes this section particularly powerful is Shlaim’s refusal to separate the humanitarian from the political. The destruction of infrastructure is not collateral damage but a means of rendering a population unviable. Hunger, displacement and disease are not side effects. They are instruments. Manufacturing legal impunity One of the book’s most valuable contributions is its treatment of international law not as moral theatre but as an arena of struggle. Shlaim dissects the near-automatic invocation of Israel’s “right to self-defence” by western governments and media outlets. He does so carefully, tracing how this phrase functions less as a legal claim than as a shield against scrutiny. He also argues that applying self-defence doctrine to an occupying power responding to violence from an occupied territory distorts the law beyond recognition. More importantly, it empties the law of its protective purpose. Israeli historian Avi Shlaim said on Thursday that Israel was 'on the road to fascism', blaming global impunity for the far right's ascent. Shlaim spoke at a screening of 'Under Fire: Israel's war on medics', a film about Israel's bombing of rescue workers in its war on Lebanon. pic.twitter.com/IsYYxyn1kg — Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye) April 26, 2025 Once self-defence is accepted as a blanket justification, almost any action becomes permissible, including siege warfare, collective punishment and the systematic targeting of civilian infrastructure. Shlaim’s critique is unsparing. He treats legal language as an active participant in violence, not a neutral descriptor. Words, in this context, do not merely explain events. They enable them. The British Empire and the long betrayal The book’s historical depth is most visible in its treatment of Britain’s role in Palestine. Shlaim devotes significant attention to the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the imperial mindset that produced it. He exposes the cynicism with which Britain promised a national home to one people while dismissing the political rights of another as inconvenient details. This is not a nostalgic exercise. Shlaim insists that imperial habits endure. A British soldier with a Bren machine gun in Jerusalem on 1 May 1948, a fortnight before the British Mandate in Palestine ended (AFP) The willingness to privilege strategic allies over colonised populations, to treat indigenous resistance as irrational violence, and to cloak power in moral language remains a defining feature of western policy. Gaza, in this sense, is not an exception but a continuation. There is an understated resonance here with Irish history, one that Shlaim does not belabour but allows to linger. Published by a Belfast press, the book implicitly invites readers to recognise familiar patterns of dispossession, rebellion and moral double standards. Hamas, resistance and colonial framing Shlaim approaches Hamas with caution, condemning the killing of civilians and expressing discomfort with the language of armed resistance. This position is ethically intelligible, but it risks abstracting violence from the conditions that produce it. Under international law, people living under military occupation retain the right to resist, including through armed struggle, provided such resistance is directed against military targets. To discuss Palestinian violence without foregrounding that legal and political reality is to begin the argument on uneven ground. Hamas calls on Israel to allow impartial investigation into 7 October attacks Read More » Moreover, the repeated invocation of “civilian” innocence in the Israeli context obscures the structural blurring of categories within a settler-colonial society that is heavily militarised. Universal conscription, the pervasive presence of reservists, armed settlers, and civilian participation in systems of occupation complicate the moral clarity often assumed in external commentary. This does not erase ethical constraints, but it does demand a more precise accounting of power, responsibility and coercion. Hamas, as Shlaim rightly notes, is not reducible to a military organisation. It is embedded in a social and political landscape shaped by siege, dispossession and repeated collective punishment. Where this analysis can be extended further is in recognising that armed resistance, however morally fraught, emerges not as an aberration but as a predictable response within a closed political horizon. The insistence on condemning resistance while treating the conditions of permanent domination as an unfortunate background risks reproducing the very asymmetry the book otherwise exposes. Annihilationist policies do indeed foreclose political futures. But so too does a framework that treats Palestinian violence as an ethical deviation rather than a structural consequence of colonial rule. Any serious reckoning must hold together legality, power and history, rather than isolate violence from the world that produces it. A book against forgetting Genocide in Gaza is not an easy book to read, nor is it meant to be. It is repetitive at times, uneven in tone, and unapologetically one-sided in its moral commitments. These are not flaws so much as consequences of its purpose. Shlaim is writing against erasure, against the smoothing out of catastrophe into manageable narratives. It belongs to the tradition of scholarship that understands neutrality, in moments like this, as a moral failure The book does not offer a blueprint for peace. It offers something more basic and more demanding: a refusal to lie. It insists that we name what is happening, trace how it came to be, and recognise who benefits from its continuation. In doing so, it leaves the reader with an ache rather than a solution, a sense that understanding, once gained, cannot be unlearned. This is a book written with sorrow and anger, but also with clarity. It belongs to the tradition of scholarship that understands neutrality, in moments like this, as a moral failure. Whether one agrees with all of Shlaim’s conclusions or not, his intervention is impossible to dismiss. He has placed a marker in the historical record and dared others to look at it honestly. Genocide in Gaza: Israel’s Long War on Palestine by Avi Shlaim is published by The Irish Pages Press and available for sale now Books Discover Post Date Override 0 Update Date Mon, 05/04/2020 - 21:29 Update Date Override 0