Achcar The Gaza Catastrophe

The Genocide in World-Historical Perspective
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-84925-092-4
Verlag: Saqi Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 256 Seiten

From a foremost expert on the Middle East, a searing indictment of the forces that led to the genocidal war on Gaza and its reverberations across the globe. The destruction rained on Gaza has been seen by many as a vengeful overreaction to the reckless Hamas-led attack on 7 October 2023. However, the new catastrophe befalling the Palestinian people is the continuation of a decades-long course in which Israeli politics, policies and military strategies have inexorably shifted to the right. Gaza was the final nail in the coffin of the Atlanticist 'international liberal order' before Donald Trump's return to the White House. The Gaza Catastrophe reckons with the lethal consequences and the significance of a war waged by an advanced military-industrial state - with full US participation and support from the West. Renowned political scientist Gilbert Achcar explores the dynamics of a complex historical process that culminated in the war on Gaza and wider conflict in the Middle East. He offers critical insights on the genocide's regional and international ramifications, as well as radical critiques of Zionism, Hamas and other state and non-state actors. This vital volume is essential to understanding the root causes of the violence destabilising the entire region and the wider world, as well as the conditions required to bring it to an end.

Gilbert Achcar is Emeritus Professor of Development Studies and International Relations at SOAS, University of London. His many books, published in more than twenty languages, include The Clash of Barbarisms: The Making of the New World Disorder; Perilous Power: The Middle East and US Foreign Policy, with Noam Chomsky; The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives; The People Want: A Radical Exploration of the Arab Uprising and The New Cold War: The United States, Russia and China, from Kosovo to Ukraine.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Achcar, Gilbert

Leseproben

Part I

Reflections on the Gaza Genocide and its World-Historical Significance

TWO PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS

The best way to answer this question is to resort to an allegory. Imagine a Native American who, having intended to set a few houses on fire in a nearby white settler colony, inadvertently sets off the gigantic blast of a huge buildup of explosive material, purposely amassed with the intention of inflicting death and mayhem on the native reservation to which the arsonist belongs. The same type of causality pertains in both the deadly attack of 7 October and the Gaza genocide.

The only indisputable relation between the 7 October attack and the dreadful history of European antisemitism lies in the fact that the atrocious fate of the European Jews was the main factor that led to the creation in Palestine, on the flank of the Arab Middle East, of the settler-colonial state of the Jews that Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, had called for.

That state has very sadly confirmed Herzl’s cynical assertion-cum-prophecy that antisemitism is “a movement useful to the Jewish character. It represents the education of a group by the masses, and will perhaps lead to its being absorbed. Education is accomplished only through hard knocks. A Darwinian mimicry will set in. The Jews will adapt themselves.”1

The Darwinian mimicry has indeed set in, to the point that Israel has become a state ruled by a coalition of neofascists (Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud) and neo-Nazis (the likes of ultraright ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich) that has perpetrated . What is more, it is history’s first genocide to be broadcast live on television.

GENOCIDE AND DENIAL

There is no need here to provide yet another account of the astounding extent of Israel’s almost total physical destruction of the Gaza Strip, and its extermination of a huge number of Palestinians, a majority of whom have been children and women (who are certainly non-combatants). A few such provisional accounts can be found in Part III below; and, most importantly, three thorough examinations of the record were released in December 2024: Amnesty International’s , Médecins Sans Frontières’ , and Lee Mordechai’s – this last one a database compiled by a former officer in the Israeli armed forces, presently teaching history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.2 It is sufficient to recall here that the number of deaths identified by the Gazan health services well exceeds 45,000 at the time of writing. To these must be added the 10,000 unidentified dead believed to lie under the rubble – an estimate that is very probably conservative, if only because this figure has not been revised for several months.

Consider now the letter by three public health experts who, in July 2024, sounded the alarm in the venerable medical journal , reminding the world that

Armed conflicts have indirect health implications beyond the direct harm from violence. Even if the conflict ends immediately, there will continue to be many indirect deaths in the coming months and years from causes such as reproductive, communicable, and non-communicable diseases. The total death toll is expected to be large given the intensity of this conflict; destroyed health-care infrastructure; severe shortages of food, water, and shelter; the population’s inability to flee to safe places; and the loss of funding to UNRWA, one of the very few humanitarian organisations still active in the Gaza Strip. In recent conflicts, such indirect deaths range from three to 15 times the number of direct deaths.3

If we follow the three experts in applying to the war on Gaza a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death, we could now say, after them, that it is not implausible to estimate that up to 220,000 or even more deaths have occurred or are about to occur as a consequence of the ongoing onslaught on the Strip. We are thus getting close to of Gaza, which was estimated at close to 2.4 million before the war. This is regardless of the variety of neologisms made with the suffix “cide” (killing) that went along with the Gaza genocide: ecocide, domicide, culturicide, educide or scholasticide, etc.

Even if we set aside the undeniable intentionality of the destruction of 66 per cent of the total structures in the Gaza Strip until early September 2024, including an estimated total of 227,591 damaged housing units,4 the intentionality of the human carnage that went along with this destruction can be denied only by those who wish to keep their eyes wide shut. For, if anything, the intentionality is made even more obvious by the multiplicity of means of mass murder, a combination of extremely intensive bombing and other uses of lethal firepower against densely populated urban zones, with the starvation of a whole population by deprivation of food and the finishing off of its sick and wounded by deprivation of healthcare necessities – all three means plainly documented by international organizations. The same combination of killing, starvation and deprivation of healthcare was at work in the Nazi extermination camps, albeit to an even more atrocious and murderous degree.

Let us now compare the foregoing with the well-known definition of genocide in Article II of the “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide”, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) on 9 December 1948, which stipulates that

genocide means 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;

a)   Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

a)   Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part …5

No intellectually honest and righteous person can fail to see the reality of genocide in the case of Gaza. Omer Bartov is professor of holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University. Born Israeli, he served in Israel’s armed forces, and was severely wounded in 1976. His testimony is important:

On 10 November 2023, I wrote in the : “As a historian of genocide, I believe that there is no proof that genocide is now taking place in Gaza, although it is very likely that war crimes, and even crimes against humanity, are happening … We know from history that it is crucial to warn of the potential for genocide before it occurs, rather than belatedly condemn it after it has taken place. I think we still have that time.”

I no longer believe that. By the time I travelled to Israel, I had become convinced that at least since the attack by the IDF on Rafah on 6 May 2024, it was no longer possible to deny that Israel was engaged in systematic war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal actions. It was not just that this attack against the last concentration of Gazans – most of them displaced already several times by the IDF, which now once again pushed them to a so-called safe zone – demonstrated a total disregard of any humanitarian standards. It also clearly indicated that the ultimate goal of this entire undertaking from the very beginning had been to make the entire Gaza Strip uninhabitable, and to debilitate its population to such a degree that it would either die out or seek all possible options to flee the territory.6

The recognition that Israel has perpetrated a genocide in Gaza is hence not a token of some “new antisemitism” – a phrase used by the neoconservative historian and Armenian genocide denier Bernard Lewis to designate anti-Israel stances among Arabs and Muslims.7 Rather, it is the refusal to recognize this plain fact that constitutes a new variant of genocide denial. And like all genocide denial, this one is upheld by the perpetrators and their supporters, whose number in the West is all the more significant, since the perpetrators of the Gaza genocide have the particularity of claiming the moral inheritance of the main victims of the Nazi genocide, carried out in Europe with the active or passive complicity (the latter, that of bystanders) of all countries of the present geopolitical transatlantic West.

GAZA BEFORE 7 OCTOBER 2023

This tragedy did not begin on 7 October 2023 – far from it.8 The Hamas-led attack crossed the Iron Wall, which is the name commonly given to the fence that Israel built around Gaza, turning the Strip into a huge open-air internment camp. That confinement was achieved with the complicity of Egypt’s dictatorial...