Review of Genocide in Gaza: Israel’s Long War on Palestine by Avi Shlaim (Irish Pages Press, 2025)
In 1988, three books 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, 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.
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, he recalls the impact of his background:
If I had to identify one key factor that shaped my early relationship to Israeli…
Auteur: Raymond Deane
