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ISRAEL, FROM GENOCIDE TO SELF-DESTRUCTION  
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Avi Shlaim
January 13, 2026
Jacobin
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_ The genocide in Gaza radicalizes Zionism’s long-standing colonial
project. But Israeli leaders’ open rejection of any future
possibility of a Palestinian state have undercut their own
international legitimacy. Interview by Bafta Sarbo. I _

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu holds a press conference
with President Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago on December 29, 2025, in
Palm Beach, Florida, Joe Raedle / Getty Images

 

It has been three months since the ceasefire was announced in
Palestine, imposed as a consequence of Donald Trump’s so-called
peace plan. In November, the United Nations Security Council ratified
this “peace plan,” intended to govern the organization and
reconstruction of the Gaza Strip. While it states that there should be
“a credible path to Palestinian self-determination and statehood,”
it contains hardly any concrete political measures to guarantee this
process.

Meanwhile, the destruction of Gaza continues: According to the BBC,
Israeli forces have demolished thousands more buildings since the
ceasefire began. Experts estimate that over 80 percent of buildings in
Gaza are destroyed or at least severely damaged. Over 10 percent of
the population is dead, injured, or missing.

Due to the brutality of Israel’s war conduct, the first observers
raised the accusation of genocide as early as October 7, 2023,
although this accusation was and remains controversial, especially in
Germany. One of the first to speak openly of genocide was Avi Shlaim,
an Israeli British historian of Iraqi Jewish origin. An emeritus
professor of international relations at Oxford University, he is one
of Israel’s new generation of historians who advocate a
historiography beyond the official Zionist national myth.

His latest book
[[link removed]], _Genocide
in Gaza: Israel’s Long War on Palestine_, received an especially
controversial reception in Germany last fall, around the time of the
ceasefire. In an interview originally conducted for the
German-language edition of _Jacobin_, Shlaim explains how far the
recent war and genocide in Gaza represented a continuation of
Israel’s historical policy.

Bafta Sarbo

For your newly published book, you wrote a special foreword for the
German edition. At the press conference in Berlin, your publisher Abi
Melzer talked about how the title has caused quite a stir among some
journalists in Germany. Could you explain why you chose this title?

 

Avi Shlaim

None of my previous books have been translated into German, so I was
especially keen to reach a German audience. Westend Verlag were
interested in publishing the German edition, but eventually they got
cold feet, and they suggested adding a question mark, so the title
would be “_Genocide in Gaza?_” I didn’t agree to add a question
mark, because in my mind, there is no longer any question as to
whether Israel is guilty of genocide. Abi Melzer, a German Jew and an
anti-Zionist, then decided to publish it with the original title,
without a question mark.

In the preface to the German edition, I said that it didn’t come
easily for me to accuse Israel of genocide. It seemed almost perverse
to accuse the Jewish state of committing genocide when the Jews were
the main victims of the Nazi genocide in World War II. Moreover, a
couple of years ago, I published an autobiography under the heading
_Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab Jew_. I’m an Arab Jew because I
was born in Baghdad, and I grew up in Israel. This book is a searing
critique of Zionism and especially of its treatment of the Jews of the
Arab lands. But I added that, for all its sins, Israel has never
committed genocide.

That was my position before the outbreak of the war in Gaza. Even at
the beginning of the war, it did not look to me as if Israel was
committing genocide. The turning point for me was when Israel used
starvation as a weapon of war on a massive scale. When Israel
suspended all international aid to Gaza, deprived the people of Gaza
of water and food and fuel and medical supplies, that convinced me
that this is genocide.

Then, there is the legal definition of genocide. In 1948, the
“Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of
Genocide” was concluded in order to prevent a repeat of what
happened to the Jews under Nazi Germany. The message of the Holocaust
was never again — never again for everybody, not just for Jews.

The convention defines genocide as acts committed with the intent of
destroying, in whole or in part, an ethnic, religious, or racial
group. What Israel has been doing in Gaza is an attempt to destroy a
whole ethnic group. The convention lists five criteria, five acts,
that constitute genocide, and Israel is guilty of all of them.

One is killing members of the group. Israel has killed about 69,000
people in Gaza and injured nearly 200,000. Second is inflicting mental
and physical suffering on the people. Third, creating conditions for
the group that make it very difficult to sustain life. Israel has made
Gaza unlivable. Fourth, preventing birth in the group. Israel has done
that by attacking the entire health system, including maternity wards
in hospitals. The fifth act is transferring children of the group to
another group. Israel is not guilty of that. But what Israel has done
is much, much worse. Israel has killed over 20,000 children in Gaza
and made 40,000 children orphans. So, in a very real sense, this is a
war on children.

I therefore conclude that Israel is indisputably guilty of genocide in
Gaza. This is not just my opinion; many leading Israeli experts on the
Holocaust, like Omer Bartov, Amos Goldberg, and Raz Segal, have
concluded that this is a classic case of genocide.

Bafta Sarbo

Could you elaborate on how this genocide especially affects
Palestinian children? You write hospitals in Gaza had to introduce a
new acronym, WCNSF (wounded child, no surviving family). You also have
drawings and pictures of wounded children in Gaza printed in your
book.

Avi Shlaim

The attack on children is particularly distressing, and the attack on
civilians is very deplorable, and Israel has done both. Killing
civilians is wrong if it’s committed by Hamas or if it’s committed
by Israel; it’s a terrorist act. I regard this war and the previous
seven Israeli military assaults on Gaza as acts of state terrorism.
The principal distinction made in international humanitarian law is
between combatants and noncombatants. Israel has blurred this
distinction. For example, Israel said that, if it gives civilians the
order to evacuate and they refuse the order, they become legitimate
military targets. Wrong. The forcible displacement of civilians is a
war crime in itself, and Israel has been committing this war crime on
an almost daily basis for the last two years.

Some civilians have been displaced ten times and even more. In many
cases, when civilians obey the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) orders to
evacuate, they then get bombed and killed from the air. So, there are
no safe zones in Gaza. There is nowhere where civilians can feel safe.

Over 70 percent of the casualties in this war have been women and
children. The deliberate assault on, the killing and maiming of
children, is particularly deplorable because they are totally
defenseless. President Isaac Herzog, at the beginning of the crisis,
said there are no innocent people in Gaza. The 20,000 children who
were murdered in Gaza are therefore not innocent by his definition.
The attack on children was accompanied by genocidal statements by
Israeli leaders saying, kill the snakes, because if children grow up,
they will become terrorists. That is the perverse Israeli moral
justification for killing children in Gaza.

Therefore, in my book, there is a particular emphasis on the war on
children. And as you pointed out, there is a whole section of
photographs about children during the war in Gaza and very distressing
images of real cruelty, even sadism. But the photographs also convey
the resilience and the courage of the children in Gaza.

Bafta Sarbo

For these war crimes, there has been an arrest warrant against
Benjamin Netanyahu. In your book, you describe how Netanyahu’s
actions throughout his whole political career have been aimed at
preventing a Palestinian state. To what extent would you say the
current course is the logical endgame to his whole political career?

 

Avi Shlaim

Benjamin Netanyahu grew up in a very nationalistic Zionist home, and
he’s always been on the right wing of the Zionist movement. He
personifies some of the most negative aspects of Zionism, like racism,
militarism, and Jewish supremacy, but, above all, the territorial
ambition of the Israeli right, which is Greater Israel. His political
career has been dedicated to preventing the emergence of a Palestinian
state alongside Israel.

But he is not alone: the Likud party has never accepted the case for a
two-state solution. The policy guidelines of Netanyahu’s current
government say that Jews have an exclusive right to sovereignty over
the whole Land of Israel, which for nationalists includes the West
Bank or, as they prefer to call it, Judea and Samaria. This is a stark
denial of any Palestinian national rights anywhere in historic
Palestine. This position of the Netanyahu government is more extreme
than the July 2018 Jewish Nation-State law, which said the Jews have a
unique right to self-determination in the State of Israel. This was a
claim to exclusive Jewish rights to statehood within the pre-1967
borders of Israel, but it didn’t lay the claim to Jewish sovereignty
over the West Bank.

Netanyahu, before the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, used to boast
that Israel has won, that the Palestinians are defeated, and that
without conceding anything to the Palestinians, Israel can have peace
treaties with Arab states. He was referring to the Abraham Accords,
the peace accords between Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain,
Morocco, and Sudan, which were brokered by Donald Trump in his first
term as US president in 2020. For Netanyahu, this was a major
diplomatic victory: peace with Sunni Arab states without making any
concessions on the Palestinian issue.

There used to be a collective Arab position on peace with Israel
embodied in the Arab Peace Initiative, which was adopted at the Arab
League summit in Beirut in 2002. It says Israel can have peace and
normalization with all twenty-two members of the Arab League in return
for an end of occupation and an independent Palestinian state on the
West Bank and Gaza, with a capital city in East Jerusalem. Netanyahu
has always rejected this offer and laid a claim to exclusive Jewish
sovereignty over the entire area, from the river to the sea. The
premise of this policy was that Hamas would be able to govern Gaza.
Hamas would be contained within Gaza as an open-air prison without
threatening Israel’s security.

But on October 7, Hamas launched the most devastating attack on
Israelis since 1948, so Netanyahu’s position was undermined. The
Hamas attack sent the powerful message that the Palestinians will not
be sidelined; the Palestinian issue will remain on the international
agenda; and resistance will continue to the Israeli occupation under
the leadership of Hamas. Netanyahu then changed his tune and reversed
his policy. Now he said that Hamas is completely unacceptable in any
form. His new war aim was the total eradication of Hamas. But this is
impossible because as long as there are people in Gaza, there will be
resistance. The proof is that after two years of relentless
bombardment, Hamas is still standing and still fighting.

Netanyahu’s other war aim is permanent Israeli military control over
Gaza. The undeclared war aim is to make Gaza uninhabitable. Netanyahu
has gone a long way toward achieving this aim by destroying over 80
percent of the housing and civilian infrastructure of Gaza; by
destroying the health care system; by the systematic destruction of
the educational system; and by drastically reducing the ability of the
Gazans to grow their own food. So far, he has succeeded in preventing
the birth of a Palestinian state.

You asked about whether this is the logical endgame of Netanyahu’s
career. In a sense, it is, although he’s gone too far and engaged in
genocide, which was never part of any previous Israeli plan. This is
really damaging in the long run because he’s destroyed any claim by
Israel to hold the moral high ground. This is encapsulated in the
International Criminal Court arrest warrant for him, because now the
prime minister of Israel is a war criminal, which means that Israel is
a criminal state. He has inflicted permanent damage to Israel’s
international reputation. He’s on trial for serious corruption
charges inside Israel, and he’s also a fugitive from international
justice. And he knows that if there is an election, his party would
lose, he would lose his immunity, and he’ll probably end up in jail.
The war in Gaza has been a strategic disaster for Israel, and a major
reason for pursuing it was Netanyahu’s desire to stay out of jail.

Bafta Sarbo

Could you elaborate on how, even before Netanyahu, there was never a
path toward Palestinian statehood?

Avi Shlaim

There is a very broad international consensus behind the two-state
solution. What that means in practical terms is an independent
Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank, with a capital city in
East Jerusalem; a state alongside, not in place of Israel. In
rhetoric, some [Israeli] Labor leaders accepted the two-state
solution, but in reality they have done nothing to bring it about. And
the proof is that under both Labor and Likud governments since 1967,
there has been a steady expansion of settlements, which means that
they’re not prepared to concede the whole of the West Bank to a
Palestinian state.

It has become fashionable to say the two-state solution is dead.
Israel killed it by building settlements, by annexing East Jerusalem
back in June 1967, and by building the security barrier on the West
Bank, which effectively annexes about 10 percent of the territory and
separates Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank. What is left is
isolated Palestinian enclaves on the West Bank, surrounded by Israeli
military bases and settlements. That’s not a basis for a viable,
territorially contiguous Palestinian state.

I would argue that the two-state solution is not just dead. It was
never born, because no Israeli government of any color since 1967 has
offered a concrete formula for a two-state solution that is acceptable
even to the most moderate Palestinian leaders. That’s [reason]
number one. Number two is that no American administration has pushed
Israel into a settlement, so the status quo persisted. Until now, all
American presidents, except Trump, supported a two-state solution.

It’s convenient for Western politicians like Joe Biden and Sir Keir
Starmer to say that they support a two-state solution. This sounds
reasonable. But they have done nothing to realize it. I am tired of
repeating that the two-state solution is dead. I have a German
research assistant, a former graduate student, and I asked her, “How
do you say it in German?” And she said, “Die Zwei-Staaten-Lösung
ist tot.”

Bafta Sarbo

After Hamas won elections in Gaza in 2006, Israel, the United States,
and the European Union responded not with recognition but with
economic warfare against Gaza. Could you describe the aftermath of the
2006 election — how Gaza was systematically economically and
politically underdeveloped?

Avi Shlaim

Israel and its friends maintain that the Hamas attack on October 7 was
a bolt from the blue and that history begins on that day. But the
conflict started at least as far back as June 1967. It’s not really
a conflict but a colonial occupation of Palestinian land. The real
issue is Israel’s military occupation. It’s the most prolonged and
brutal military occupation of modern times. That’s the real
background; the October 7 Hamas attack is an expression of Palestinian
resistance to the Israeli occupation. People don’t know the history
of this conflict between Israel and Hamas. The past is crucial for
understanding how we got here. It’s my job as a historian to put
Hamas’s behavior in its proper historical context.

I would like to single out a few key turning points in this conflict
and to start with the Hamas victory in the all-Palestine elections in
January 2006. It was a fair and free election throughout the occupied
territories, and Hamas won it. Israel refused to recognize the
democratically elected government and resorted to economic warfare.
Israel collects taxes on behalf of the Palestinian Authority, and it
can always withhold them in an arbitrary manner.

Israel did everything to make it impossible for the elected government
to govern. The United States and the European Union, to their eternal
discredit, sided with Israel in refusing to recognize this government.
The Western powers say that their aim is to promote democracy in the
Middle East. Here there was a shining example of democracy in action
under the most difficult conditions of military occupation, but the
Western powers completely disregarded the results of the election.
What in effect they were saying is that democracy is a good idea in
theory, but here the people voted for the wrong bunch of politicians
so that we cannot accept them as a legitimate government.

They implemented a series of economic and political measures designed
to undermine the Hamas government. In March 2007, Hamas formed a
national unity government with Fatah and offered Israel negotiations
on a long-term ceasefire of ten, twenty, or thirty years. Hamas’s
aim previously had been a unitary Islamic state from the river to the
sea, but once it was in power, it became more pragmatic, and it was
prepared to settle for a Palestinian state in the occupied
territories. Israel refused to negotiate, and the national unity
government collapsed in June 2007.

We now know from the Palestine Papers, a collection of 1,600 documents
of the peace process that were leaked to Al Jazeera, that there was a
plot against Hamas when it was in government. The participants in this
plot were Fatah, Israel, the United States, and Egyptian intelligence.
They formed a secret committee called the Gaza Committee. The aim was
to isolate, weaken and ultimately drive Hamas out of power. Israel and
America armed and encouraged Fatah to stage a coup against Hamas. In
June 2007, Hamas preempted a Fatah coup by seizing power in Gaza.

Since then, Gaza and the West Bank were kept firmly separate by Israel
to prevent a unified resistance movement. Once Hamas seized power,
Israel imposed the blockade on Gaza. A blockade is an act of
collective punishment that is proscribed by international law, and the
blockade of Gaza had been in place since 2007. This history is very
important for understanding the context for the Hamas attack on Israel
on October 7.

The leading expert on Gaza, Sara Roy, is a Jewish academic at Harvard.
The first of her five books about Gaza was called _The Gaza Strip: The
Political Economy of De-Development_. Her thesis was that Israel since
1967 pursued a systematic policy of preventing Gaza from developing
trade with the outside world, agriculture, and fishing industries.
Gaza was exploited as a source of cheap labor and a market for Israeli
goods. Gaza is not poor and underdeveloped because the people are lazy
or incompetent. It’s poor and underdeveloped because of the
systematic Israeli policy of de-development. And the last and most
crucial stage in this consistent policy is the physical destruction of
Gaza that has happened in the last two years.

Bafta Sarbo

Coming back to the systematic separation between the West Bank and
Gaza: While the world’s eyes are obviously on Gaza, what is the
situation like in the West Bank?

 

Avi Shlaim

The present government, headed by Netanyahu, has some extremist
coalition partners, in particular Bezalel Smotrich, the leader of
Religious Zionism, and Itamar Ben-Gvir, the leader of Jewish Power.
These are overtly racist, far-right, extreme, messianic, religious
Zionist parties. They are, above all, Jewish supremacist. The explicit
agenda is the eventual and formal annexation of the West Bank as part
of the Land of Israel, and they’ve been pursuing it since they came
into power in 2022.

In the last two years, the war in Gaza attracted most international
attention and diverted attention from the West Bank. This was
exploited by the right-wingers in this government in order to expand
settlements and to intensify the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank
that has been going on steadily for years. In the last two years, we
have seen a massive escalation of settler violence against the
Palestinians. And this is done with the encouragement of the
government and the protection of the army. You have to look at what
Israel has been doing in Gaza and on the West Bank in parallel. In
Gaza, it began with the aim of ethnic cleansing and degenerated into
genocide, and on the West Bank there has been a massive
intensification of violence against the population, with the aim of
the ethnic cleansing of the whole of Palestine.

Bafta Sarbo

You finished writing your book in October 2024. But at the press
conference in Berlin, you talked about your assessment of how
Trump’s peace plan came about. Can you explain why this so-called
peace plan came then and not earlier, when Israel attacked several
sovereign states?

Avi Shlaim

America gives Israel $3.8 billion a year in military aid and
diplomatic protection by wielding the veto in the Security Council to
defeat any resolution that isn’t to Israel’s liking. The problem
with American support for Israel is that it is not conditional on
Israel respecting international law or Palestinian human rights. Joe
Biden was a proponent of this policy of unconditional support for
Israel. During the war in Gaza, his administration, America gave
Israel $21.7 billion in military aid.

Trump continued this policy until Israel attacked Doha, the capital of
Qatar. When Israel had attacked Iran, America eventually weighed in
and also illegally attacked Iran. Iran is an enemy, but Qatar is a
close ally of the United States. Qatar had been playing a constructive
role in trying to broker a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. The
Hamas political leaders were based in Doha, and Israel tried to
assassinate the people who were negotiating a ceasefire. America’s
biggest military base in the Middle East is in Qatar. This attack
frightened not just the Qataris but all the Gulf rulers because
America failed to protect them. Trump forced Netanyahu to call the
Qatari prime minister and apologize for this attack and then gave
assurances that this wouldn’t happen again.

I cannot envisage that one day the Israeli public will wake up and
come back to its senses and say we were wrong to use force.

It was only in the aftermath of this attack on Doha that Trump put
effective pressure on Israel to have a ceasefire. But Trump’s
so-called peace plan for the Middle East is not a peace plan.

I don’t want to belittle the importance of this development. It
involved an end of fighting, the resumption of humanitarian aid to
Gaza, and an exchange of the Israeli hostages for Palestinian
prisoners, so three very positive developments came out of it. The
plan is very thin on details, but the details that are there envisage
an international board headed by Trump, and below it there would be an
executive committee of “nonpolitical” Palestinians — in other
words, not Hamas people, but handpicked people who are acceptable to
Israel, and they would have to run Gaza. The Palestinians will have no
agency and no say in running their own affairs. Nor is there any plan
for elections. The obvious thing at the end of a war is to allow the
people who live there to run their own affairs. But this is a colonial
project, with America and Israel imposing it on the Palestinians. It
doesn’t begin to deal with the underlying problem, which is the
Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

There’s another dimension to this. Israel is completely devastated
Gaza, and it will take years to just clear the rubble before you start
reconstruction. Trump’s plan doesn’t require Israel to pay any
reparations to the people of Gaza, nor does America plan to put any
money into the reconstruction. The idea is to get the rich Gulf states
to pay. And the question arises, why should any Arab government agree
to put money into the rebuilding of Gaza when the next Israeli assault
could happen any time, and we’ll be back to square one? So, there
are many unanswered questions.

Bafta Sarbo

If this is not a viable peace plan, how could a lasting peace be
reached? The far-right Israeli government is often criticized
domestically. Still, the actions in Gaza enjoy broad support among the
political opposition and the population in Israel. In fact, there’s
a big demand for a much tougher approach to Gaza. Do you see any
prospects for Israel to initiate positive changes from within?

 

Avi Shlaim

This is exactly the paradox today. Netanyahu is very unpopular in
Israel, but the war in Gaza is not. One public opinion poll showed
that more than 50 percent of Israelis think that the IDF did not use
enough force, that it should use more force. There is an Israeli
saying, “If force doesn’t work, use more force.” This is a
completely idiotic notion, because force doesn’t touch the
underlying political problem. The problem is colonial occupation by
Israel. Israel has launched eight military assaults on Gaza, starting
with Operation Cast Lead in December 2008. Israeli generals call these
assaults “mowing the lawn.” Mowing the lawn is something that you
do mechanically every now and again, but it doesn’t stop the grass
from growing, so you just have to keep going back and inflicting more
death and devastation on Gaza.

This government reflects the shift in Israeli society over the last
twenty-five years, since the Second Intifada — a shift to the right.
It represents the Israeli public and their views. So, I don’t see
any prospect of reform from within. I cannot envisage that one day the
Israeli public will wake up and come back to its senses and say we
were wrong to use force. It doesn’t give us security. It only leads
to more violence and bloodshed. If there is going to be any change in
Israel’s position, it would have to be as a result of external
pressure. And external pressure on Israel is building up; it’s
reflected in the growing number of countries that recognize Palestine.
Most significant were the British and French recognition. This means
that today on the Security Council, four permanent members — Russia,
China, and now Britain and France — have recognized Palestine.
America is the odd one out, still offering Israel diplomatic
protection. But this cannot last forever.

I believe that eventually Israel will go down the same way as South
Africa. America and Israel were the last supporters of the apartheid
regime in South Africa, and America will be the last supporter of the
Israeli apartheid regime. This is a long-term process, with Israel
losing international support and losing legitimacy.

In the meantime, the question arises, what is the solution to this
conflict? I used to support a two-state solution until Israel killed
it with settlements. So, now I advocate one state from the river to
the sea, with equal rights — with freedom, dignity, and equal rights
for all the people who live in this space. You may say that this is
pie in the sky — and I don’t care, because the real choice today
is not between a two-state solution and a one-state solution. The real
choice is between the status quo, colonialism, apartheid, Jewish
supremacy, brute force, which is totally unacceptable to me — and
another solution, which is the one-state solution, which is what I
believe in. What matters to me is not whether it’s one state or two
states but equality. You can’t have democracy if you have two
classes of citizens. And from the river to the sea, the Palestinians,
including the Palestinian citizens of the State of Israel, are
second-class citizens.

Therefore, what I want to see is equal rights for all the people who
live in this space. This involves the liberation not only of the
occupied Palestinian territories but of pre-1967 Israel as well.

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