On Tuesday 18 February 2025, the Middle East Centre hosted the launch for St Antony’s Emeritus Fellow, Professor Avi Shlaim’s, new book ‘Genocide in Gaza: Israel’s Long War on Palestine’ (Irish Pages Press, 2025).
On Tuesday 18 February 2025, the Middle East Centre hosted the launch for St Antony’s Emeritus
Fellow, Professor Avi Shlaim’s, new book ‘Genocide in Gaza: Israel’s Long War on Palestine’ (Irish Pages Press,
2025). This is a recording of Avi Shlaim’s talk, chaired by MEC Director, Professor Eugene Rogan, and featuring
the Founder and Editor of Irish Pages, Chris Agee.
The book is a Times Literary Supplement book of the year 2024. Copies are available to purchase directly from
the publisher, The Irish Pages Press here:
irishpages.org/product/genocide-in-gaza
Book Abstract:
The brutal assault launched by Israel on the Gaza Strip in in response to the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023
was a major landmark in the blood-soaked history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This was the eighth Israeli
military offensive in Gaza since Operation Cast Lead of December 2008. But it was the most lethal and
destructive, making the enclave uninhabitable. In this book Avi Shlaim places Israel’s policy towards the Gaza
Strip under an uncompromising lens. He argues that these recurrent attacks — what Israeli generals chillingly call
“mowing the lawn” — are the inevitable result of Zionist settler colonialism whose basic objective is the
elimination of the native population. In this war, however, Israel has gone beyond land-grabbing and ethnic
cleansing to commit the crime of all crimes — genocide. Providing Israel with arms as well as diplomatic
protection at the UN, make America, Britain, and European Union not only complicit but partners in Israel’s war
crimes. Noam Chomsky observed that “Settler colonialism is the most extreme and vicious form of imperialism”.
There is no better illustration of this fundamental truth than Israel’s long and savage war against the Palestinian
people.
“Clear, forthright and cogent, Genocide in Gaza is essential reading for both those who understand little of
Palestine-Israel and those who have followed the unfolding horrors for decades. As a historian, Shlaim is
meticulous, thoughtful and robust. As a person who has lived in three worlds – Iraqi, Israeli and British, with a
Jewish religion and an Arab ethnicity – few understand it as well on a personal level. His political vision is clear-
sighted, his ideal humane.” Selma Dabbagh, novelist and human rights lawyer
