During a sabbatical I spent in West Jerusalem in the late 1980s, my 7-year-old daughter was enrolled in an Israeli school. One day, she came home and could not find her tricycle anywhere. “Arabs must have stolen it,” she said. We later found the tricycle behind the building, but her immediate assumption gave me pause. Just a few months in, an Israeli school had already planted seeds of anti-Arab prejudice in her young mind. In response, I took her and her younger brother to Egypt for a week. Since then, I have never heard them express anything like that again.
I had originally considered taking my children to East Jerusalem instead of Egypt — it would have been much closer — but the First Intifada was raging at the time, with daily clashes between Palestinian demonstrators and Israeli occupation forces, and it was too dangerous to take children there.
Around that time, a friend of mine was called up for reserve duty. He told me about his experience chasing after children who threw stones at his armored vehicle. Tired of the senseless routine, he once brought a bag of candies with him. When the children began throwing stones again, he tossed the candies their way. They immediately stopped what they were doing and scrambled to collect these treats. The stones stopped flying — but my friend’s commander reprimanded him: “Don’t you know that Arabs understand only force?”
Some eight years later, during my next sabbatical in Jerusalem, I was deeply touched by a moment on the campus of Al-Quds University in the West Bank. After giving my lecture, my hosts stepped away briefly to check if the canteen was open. Here I was, standing alone in the middle of a campus, when a Palestinian student approached me and said in Hebrew, “Shalom! I’ve never seen a Jew with a kippah on his head who wasn’t also carrying a rifle.” His comment moved me. I had never associated my kippah with anything violent — if anything, quite the opposite. Yet the student was clearly referring to the settlers in his midst, who now rampage across the West Bank, terrorizing Palestinians and killing hundreds of them.
These three episodes shed light on the anti-Palestinian prejudice embedded in Israeli society and its troubling reliance on violence. As I write this review, the prejudice that I witnessed in the 1980s and ’90s has hardened into hatred and dehumanization, while the violence has turned into what experts and nongovernmental organizations generally agree is a genocide. Though I have been writing about Israel and Palestine for decades, I find myself observing a drastically worsening situation. This is what prompted me to read three new books published in the wake of the Israeli invasion of Gaza, triggered by the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023— though the destruction of Gaza in fact began in 2006, following the Israeli army’s withdrawal, and escalated dramatically after October 2023.
The authors’ perspectives differ as much as their backgrounds do, but it is noteworthy that all three grew up in former British colonies: South Africa, India and Israel. Peter Beinart’s “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza” reflects the author’s final break with Zionism. A prominent journalist, political scientist and professor of journalism at New York University, Beinart is a former editor of The New Republic and the author of four books. He frequently comments in American media and serves as editor-at-large for Jewish Currents. Foreign Policy has hailed him as among the “top 100 global thinkers.”
Another Foreign Policy “global thinker,” Pankaj Mishra, offers his perspective in “The World After Gaza: A History,” placing the topic within a broader historical and geopolitical context. Born and educated in India, Mishra is a prolific author and activist who has won prestigious awards for both fiction and nonfiction. A regular contributor to leading American and British periodicals, he has publicly debated ideological opponents such as Jordan Peterson and Niall Ferguson. Mishra exhibits a keen sensitivity to the self-loathing among Zionists and Indians who initially sought to emulate Europeans, becoming “more royalist than the king,” before they ultimately embraced the idea of a separate nation-state.
The fledgling state of Israel “absorbed,” as they say in the country, Avi Shlaim, who was uprooted at the age of 5 from the comfort of his parents’ wealthy home and transplanted into the alien environment of Israeli society. Now a renowned intellectual and one of the “New Historians” who challenged the dominant Zionist narrative in the 1980s, Shlaim is known for his meticulous scholarship. His works, including a study of Jordan’s complicity in dividing up Palestine with Israel, and a personal memoir, reflect his intellectual integrity. The book he co-edited, “The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948,” is an important contribution to our understanding of Palestine’s fate. His book under review here, “Genocide in Gaza: Israel’s Long War on Palestine,” collects previously published articles, including a submission to the International Court of Justice on the diplomatic history of the conflict since 1967.
Beinart’s and Mishra’s backgrounds in South Africa and India, respectively, inform their writings. Beinart draws parallels with South Africa’s history, and Mishra offers stimulating insights into the psyche of colonized peoples. Shlaim, having grown up in Israel, knows it from within, and only later develops a more critical perspective on it from the outside.
Curiously, Mishra and Shlaim both married into the periphery of Britain’s political class: Mishra is married to a cousin of former Prime Minister David Cameron, while Shlaim’s wife is the great-granddaughter of David Lloyd George, who was prime minister when the Balfour Declaration was issued. This coincidence, however, has no discernible bearing on their work.
Beinart, a practicing Jew, was raised in the tradition of National Judaism (in Hebrew, “dati-leumi”), a movement that blends the ritual aspects of traditional Judaism with Zionist ideology. Adherents of National Judaism have been at the forefront of settling the occupied territories and today constitute the most nationalist segment of the Israeli population. It is quite a feat to break with Zionism and become a vocal critic of Israel’s segregationist policies. Beinart also publicly reversed his earlier support for the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
His book opens with a letter to a former friend, in which he expresses the alienation he feels as an Orthodox Jew who is also anti-Zionist. He admits that each time he enters his synagogue, he is uncertain how he will be received. The predicament of a modern Orthodox, anti-Zionist Jew is deeply fraught — a reality this author can personally attest to. The social repercussions are significant, extending even to the children of those who dissent who attend Jewish schools. For most Orthodox Jews, whether in Israel or elsewhere, support for Israel is inseparable from their identity.
By contrast, most ultra-Orthodox Jews — who, unlike adherents of National Judaism, reject Zionism outright — and unaffiliated Jews, who rarely attend synagogue (as appears to be the case with Shlaim), tend to face fewer social consequences for their views. Beinart, however, still hopes that his rift with mainstream Judaism is not irreparable, writing, “our journey together is not done.” In contrast, Shlaim writes without concern for social backlash, guided solely by intellectual integrity.
Shlaim underwent Zionist indoctrination as a schoolboy in Israel but emancipated his views after moving to Britain. A consistent critic of Zionism and colonialism more broadly, he has produced excellent scholarly narratives. Mishra, though neither Jewish nor Protestant — there are far more Protestant Zionists in the world than Jewish ones — once also harbored sympathies for Israel. The recent events in Gaza shattered those illusions.
Mishra meticulously documents the colonialist practice of devaluing native lives, clearly evident in Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. To underscore how far Israel has strayed from Jewish ethical traditions, he cites a 1942 plea sent by Bundists (members of a Jewish socialist movement) from the Warsaw Ghetto to Winston Churchill: “Underground Jewish Labour Movement in Poland in tragic days of annihilation of entire Jewish population by German conquerors considers it her sacred duty to share request for freedom loving elements throughout the world to release Mohandas Gandhi most prominent leader of people of India who are striving to liberate their country.”
Mishra traces how Western genocides in Africa and Asia foreshadowed Hitler’s war of annihilation against the Soviet Union and the Nazi genocide of the Jews. He explains, for example, “how the killing sprees of the Einsatzgruppen in the East [Nazi-occupied areas of the Soviet Union] — shooting people by the edge of mass graves which the victims themselves had been forced to dig — were prefigured by the massacres in May and June 1940 of thousands of French African soldiers.” Today. Mishra argues, it is the Israeli military that continues this age-old Western tradition, deliberately executing groups of paramedics and other civilians.
Having been born and educated in a former colony, Mishra is particularly attuned to Israel’s self-image as, in Theodor Herzl’s words of 1896, “an outpost of civilisation as opposed to barbarism.” He understands why this framing appeals to former colonial powers in the West, a narrative often repeated by Israeli leaders.
In Mishra’s book, an entire chapter is devoted to Germany, which committed two genocides in the 20th century — one in Southwest Africa (now Namibia) and one in Europe — and is now, Mishra contends, a willing accomplice to another one in Gaza. He quotes Konrad Adenauer, the founder of the West German state, who wrote, referring to the Soviet army in East Germany, that “Asia stands at the Elbe” and that “the danger is great.” He also cites the prominent German historian Ernst Nolte, who claimed that the “Nazis came to commit ‘Asiatic’ deeds because of their justified fear of otherwise falling victim to them.” Mishra’s sharp analysis reveals how “the binary of the enlightened West and unenlightened East, once used to authorize the Nazi quest for Lebensraum in the East and then adapted to serve Cold War policy agendas, is the currency today of far-right nationalists across Israel, Europe and America.”
At the same time, Mishra shows why the excessive philosemitism currently prevalent in Germany has unsettled quite a few Jews for decades. He quotes the novelist Manès Sperber, who wrote to a colleague, “Your philosemitism depresses me, degrades me like a compliment that is based on a misunderstanding. … You insist on loving our entire people. I don’t request that, I do not wish for us — or any other people — to be loved in this way.” Similarly, Hannah Arendt, writing from the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, described Germans “displaying an unpleasant overeagerness. … Enough to make you throw up, if I may say so. One of them has already flung his arms around my neck and burst into tears.”
As a compensation for the Nazi genocide, West Germany conflated Jews with Israel and transferred billions to the Israeli state. It later declared support for Israel as a core national interest (a raison d’état) and continued to supply it with sophisticated weaponry. Yet Mishra goes on to show revealing data from a pre-1990 survey, which showed that West Germans were more antisemitic than East Germans, whose country — the German Democratic Republic — was officially hostile to Israel. This undermines the claim that anti-Zionism is inherently antisemitic, highlighting instead inconsistencies and contradictions in official Western attitudes toward Jews and Israel.
Links between Zionism and antisemitism are both long-standing and deeply intertwined. The recent world conference on antisemitism, convened by Israel in the midst of its genocidal campaign in Gaza, brought together the full gamut of far-right Western politicians. This controversial gathering repelled many of the initially announced participants, including, notably, the president of Israel. But the steady drift to the right in international support for Israel mirrors a similar trend within Israeli Jewish society itself.
Mishra notes that concerns about the “Nazification” of Zionism have been voiced since its beginnings. He reminds his readers that David Ben-Gurion, fiery founder and first prime minister of Israel, called his rival Ze’ev (born Vladimir) Jabotinsky “Vladimir Hitler.” The precursor of the Likud party, which claims political descent from Jabotinsky, was denounced as fascist early on by prominent Jewish intellectuals such as Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt. It is logical that Netanyahu, the current leader of Likud, directs the genocidal operations in Gaza.
Nowadays, as more Jews lead the struggle against Israel’s actions in Gaza, calls to excommunicate anti-Zionists “from within the Jewish people“ are growing insistently louder. Beinart observes that “In most of the Jewish world today, rejecting Jewish statehood is a greater heresy than rejecting Judaism itself. … We have built an altar and thrown an entire [Palestinian] society on the flames.” For Beinart, a former Zionist, the destruction of Gaza marks a turning point in Jewish history, one that demands moral reckoning for the cruelty inflicted by Israeli Jews and those who encourage them to ignore all moral norms and to justify such actions “in the name of survival.” He writes, “The false innocence, which pervades contemporary Jewish life, camouflages domination as self-defence.” He also hopes to bring Jews back to their original calling: “Except for a religiously observant minority, we no longer describe ourselves as a people chosen by God to follow laws engraved at Sinai. We instead describe ourselves as a people fated by history to perpetually face annihilation but, miraculously, to survive.”
For Beinart, this new consciousness represents a moral evasion that fuels the narrative of Jewish innocence and, consequently, erases the central Judaic concept of responsibility. This degeneration of Judaism has been visible for a long time. He quotes Arendt who, although not religious, concluded in 1963: “The greatness of our people was once that it believed in God. And now this people believes only in itself.”
Beinart argues that the challenge for many Jews is to acknowledge the suffering inflicted by Israel on the Palestinians: “The problem with our communal story is not that it acknowledges the crimes we have suffered. The problem is that it ignores the crimes we commit.” He recalls that the Palestinians in Gaza have long lived in an open-air prison, from which, as Gen. Moshe Dayan already observed in 1956, they could see the homes from which they were expelled, now inhabited by Israelis. Beinart emphasizes that it is not religious beliefs but rather pain, personal resentment and the elementary demand for justice that primarily motivate the violence of Hamas and other resistance groups. He cites several studies based on interviews with their leaders and members, which demonstrate that the violence suffered by Palestinians at the hands of Israelis is their primary motivation, only later reinforced by religious and political considerations. Late 20th-century rabbinical scholar Moshe Sober, affiliated with National Judaism, warned in his 1990 book “Beyond the Jewish State” against the movement’s increasingly bellicose tendencies: “The Palestinians will indubitably suffer more than the Israelis. That is the usual pattern in insurrections. But every dead Palestinian will only serve to strengthen their organization and every dead Israeli to weaken our establishment. It is a battle that cannot be won.”
A significant portion of Beinart’s book lays the groundwork for profound moral observations. Paraphrasing Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, he writes: “If we put down our amulets and look Gaza in the eye, we’ll never get its images out of our head. We’ll look at our prayer books, many of which include prayers for the [Israeli] army … and see Gaza’s burning, starving flesh. We’ll see it on the walls of our synagogues and Jewish Community Centers, at our Passover seders and Shabbat meals. The ground underneath us will grow unsteady.”
This brings to mind another sharp comment by Sober, who denounces the human propensity to manipulate divine will:
The notion that we can do whatever we please, succumb to any kind of temptation, or engage in any form of foolish self-aggrandizement without fear of penalty because we have an inside track to the Almighty is the plain opposite of religious faith. It is in fact an affront to the divine, whose authority to determine the course of history we are usurping. … Such blind faith is not really a faith in God at all, but rather faith in ourselves. It makes a tool out of the Almighty. It turns him into a kind of ‘secret weapon’ whose purpose is to guarantee our success at whatever we fancy. It is an idolatrous concept that masks what is actually an irrational belief in our own invincibility.
Beinart attempts to persuade Israel’s defenders with rational arguments and historical evidence, all the while recognizing that such arguments and facts are unlikely to influence them since support for Israel has become a pillar and core component of Jewish identity and faith for many: “Remove Jewish statehood from Jewish identity and, for many Jews around the world, it is not clear what is left.” Even those horrified by Gaza’s devastation argue that Israel has “no choice” — “ein berera” in Hebrew. Beinart is convinced that there is a choice: equal rights for all, which would liberate both the oppressed and the oppressors.
Even when Palestinian resistance is peaceful, it is quickly condemned by Israel and its supporters: “We demand that Palestinians produce Gandhis, and when they do, American Jewish organizations work to criminalize their boycotts and Israeli soldiers shoot them in the knees.”
Drawing on his South African experience, Beinart cites Nelson Mandela, who in 1964 stated that he could no longer preach nonviolence when the government used force against peaceful demands. Beinart points to other historical examples — Ireland, the American South and, of course, South Africa — and acknowledges that the ruling minorities often perceive equality as an existential threat: “White South Africans were just as afraid of being thrown into the sea as Israeli Jews are now.” Yet, he argues, according to numerous studies, oppression fuels violence, whereas equal rights and the possibility of political change reduce it.
Shlaim reinforces this point by showing that Israel’s leaders have long feared Arab moderation because it threatens their expansionist plans. He draws attention to an effective tactic in Israel’s diplomatic obfuscation: the demand for “secure and recognized borders” without ever specifying what these may be. Indeed, no Zionist (prior to the establishment of Israel) — and, later, no Israeli leader — has ever clearly outlined their desired borders for the state. After the 1967 war, Israel pursued territorial expansion by means of civilian Israeli settlements in the occupied territories, despite the Israeli Cabinet’s own legal counsel’s view that “civilian settlement in the administered territories contravenes the explicit provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention.”
Shlaim offers an important observation about the unique nature of the League of Nations mandate for Palestine: “The importance of including the commitment to a Jewish national home cannot be overestimated. It is what fundamentally differentiated the Palestine Mandate from all the other mandates for the Middle Eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire. The British mandate for Iraq, the French mandate for Syria, and the French mandate for Lebanon were all about preparing the local population for self-government. The Palestine mandate was about enabling foreigners, Jews from anywhere in the world, but especially from Europe, to join their co-religionists in Palestine and to turn the country into a Jewish-controlled national entity.”
He concludes that the so-called “‘sacred trust of civilisation’ [the way the League of Nations designated the mandate] had been finally, irreversibly and unforgivably brutalised and betrayed.” Shlaim underscores this betrayal by citing British Prime Minister Theresa May’s 2017 statement marking the centenary of the Balfour Declaration. May called it “one of the most important letters in history. It demonstrates Britain’s vital role in creating a homeland for the Jewish people. And it is an anniversary we will be marking with pride.” Shlaim adds that there was “no mention of the Palestinian victims of this important letter.” His condemnation of Britain’s pro-Zionist policies is eloquent and uncompromising throughout the book.
Mishra echoes this critique and links it with the habitual hypocrisy of the British ruling class: “On 17 December 1942 in the House of Commons, the foreign secretary Anthony Eden sonorously read out an Allied declaration condemning Nazi persecution of the Jews and promising punishment for the perpetrators. Later the same month Eden and his colleagues decided at a Cabinet meeting that Britain could not admit more than two thousand refugees.”
This decision to limit Jewish refugees to the U.K., Mishra notes, was relatively generous compared to other examples of Western indifference. In 1939, a Canadian official infamously uttered “none is too many” when asked how many Jewish refugees the country would accept. That same year saw the tragic fate of the passengers of the St. Louis. The ship was carrying Jewish refugees but was refused entry by the United States. They were forced to sail back to Europe where most of the passengers were murdered by the Nazis and their enthusiastic local collaborators.
In a footnote, Mishra highlights the efforts of Hiram Bingham, a diplomat at the U.S. consulate in Marseille in the late 1930s, who issued more than 2,500 visas, thus saving prominent Jewish intellectuals and artists, such as Arendt and Marc Chagall. The U.S. State Department eventually shut down this escape route and pressured the diplomat to resign. In contrast, the Mexican consul in Marseille, Gilberto Bosques Saldívar, issued 40,000 visas to refugees fleeing Nazi and fascist regimes. His government later rewarded him by appointing him as ambassador to several countries, including Cuba, where he was instrumental in persuading Fidel Castro to accept the Soviet-American resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.
It is impossible to understand Israel’s actions, Shlaim argues, without recognizing the nature of Zionism, which he then convincingly analyzes. He clearly states that the main Zionist objective was to occupy as much land as possible with as few Arabs as possible. In the words of Patrick Wolfe, a prominent scholar of settler colonialism, “the logic of elimination” guided the Zionist leaders from the very beginning, regardless of their rhetorical gestures or lip service, which Shlaim qualifies in Arabic as “kalam fadi,” or “empty talk.” Within Israel’s ruling circles, this was candidly expressed by then-Prime Minister Levi Eshkol during Cabinet discussions on annexing the West Bank after it was conquered during the 1967 war: “You like the dowry, but you don’t like the bride.”
Beinart shows that it was the killing and expulsion of Palestinians by Zionist militias that triggered the 1948 war with Arab states, and not the war that caused their exodus, contrary to the myth perpetuated by Israeli hasbara (propaganda) for decades. Comparisons with South Africa illustrate the nature of Jewish supremacy under Israeli control, particularly the justification of apartheid by “the right of the white nation to self-determination.”
Shlaim’s concise summary of Israel’s founding is particularly powerful:
From whatever perspective one chooses to view it, the establishment of the state of Israel in May 1948 involved a monumental injustice to the Palestinians. Three quarters of a million Palestinians became refugees, and the name Palestine was wiped off the map. Israelis call it ‘The War of Independence’; Palestinians call it the Nakba, or the catastrophe. The most horrific event in the suffering-soaked history of the Jews was the Holocaust. In the history of the Palestinian people, the most traumatic event is the Nakba, which is not in fact a one-off event but the ongoing process of the dispossession and displacement of Palestinian people from their homeland that continues to this day, in the unspeakable horrors being visited by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) on Gaza.
Shlaim’s book explains how and why the Zionist state has so far prevailed. It offers a meticulous, step-by-step reconstruction of the history of Israel’s steady advance toward occupying Palestine and emptying it of its native population. This by itself makes the book very useful as a reference source. It shows how Israel continued to settle Palestine with Zionist colonists, all while pretending to engage in negotiations with the Palestinians — a pretense that, at the time of writing this review, has been abandoned entirely.
Shlaim also quotes the legal opinion of a Foreign Ministry counselor (and Holocaust survivor) who wrote to Eshkol after the June 1967 war that “civilian settlement in the administered territories contravenes the explicit provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention.” He warned that “the international community would not accept settlement in any of the territories.”
Nearly 60 years later, the settlement project is considered illegal by most of the world, yet it continues unabated. Israel appears undeterred, frequently accusing the U.N. of antisemitism and declaring its secretary-general persona non grata. Israel’s representative at the U.N. symbolically shredded the organization’s charter before the General Assembly — flaunting Israel’s proverbial chutzpah more overtly than ever before. This act is especially ironic given that Israel was the first country to owe its very legitimacy to a U.N. General Assembly resolution, passed on Nov. 29, 1947.
The dismantling of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the emergence of a unipolar world put an end to the consistent international support for Palestinian rights. In 1975, the U.N. adopted a resolution qualifying Zionism as “a form of racism and racial discrimination.” This resolution also cited the political declaration adopted at the 1975 Conference of Ministers of Foreign Affairs of Non-Aligned Countries in Lima, Peru, which condemned Zionism “as a threat to world peace” and a “racist and imperialist ideology.” However, persistent lobbying by Zionist groups (both evangelical Christian and Jewish), led the General Assembly to revoke the resolution in 1991. The revocation took place nine days before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which voted alongside the former socialist bloc to remove the official label of racism from Zionism. This ended consistent support for the Palestinians on the part of most governments in the world.
Mishra highlights racism as a key factor in Western attitudes toward Palestinians. He quotes Alexis de Tocqueville, who wrote in 1831 that the “European is to men of other races what man himself is to animals,” and reminds the reader of the organic link between Nazism and Western imperialism. Judging by the patently disproportionate manner in which Israeli and Palestinian victims have been covered in the Western press, racism is alive and well. Israeli deaths often receive far more media coverage than those of Palestinians, and the Israeli narrative dominates Western legacy media. Mishra, like many others from the Global South, is acutely aware of this imbalance. Yet he goes further, identifying deeper structural alignments between pro-Israel forces — both Christian and Jewish — and those of the Western ruling class. He quotes James Baldwin, who observed after visiting Israel in 1961, “to me it was obvious why the western world created the State of Israel, which is not really a Jewish state. The West needed a handle in the Middle East.”
Though neither is American, Shlaim and Mishra provide important insights into how Israel navigates its relationship with the United States — its prime source of political and military support. Mishra devotes an entire chapter to “Americanising the Holocaust,” in which he examines the policy of weaponizing antisemitism to mobilize support for Israel. The Trump administration has taken this policy to new heights, going after pro-Palestinian activists on campuses whose names are supplied by Zionist militants. American universities are financially punished for allegedly “tolerating antisemitism,” even when their actions — such as Columbia University inviting police to disperse peaceful protests — suggest otherwise.
Beinart dedicates an entire chapter to the instrumentalization of the Holocaust in Zionist narratives. He presents statistics proving that Palestinian and pro-Palestinian students in the United States experience more violence than they commit. Sometimes, the violence is meted out by Zionist vigilantes, as happened, for example, in Los Angeles during the spring of 2024. Nevertheless, this fact does not impede U.S. authorities under Trump from imprisoning and deporting non-American, pro-Palestinian activists, or from severely restricting the freedom of speech rights of their American counterparts.
Mishra identifies “many dangers to democratic freedoms in the deepening links between Israeli governments, pro-Israel Jewish outfits and white supremacists in the United States and Europe.” The Israeli prime minister has publicly called for more punitive measures in the United States, while wealthy Jewish donors have threatened to cut financial support to universities. Such actions risk reinforcing the harmful perception that all Jews act as agents of Israel, pressuring U.S. authorities to disregard the Constitution and suppress basic rights, particularly those enshrined in the First Amendment. Israel has long exerted significant influence over U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Increasingly, nowadays, it is interfering in the country’s internal affairs, such as law enforcement and educational policies.
At the time of this writing, the United States is positioning itself as a mediator between Israel and Hamas, even as it continues to provide crucial military support to one side. (The same can be said about the American stance in the Ukraine conflict.) Regardless of who occupies the White House, the pro-Israel lobby makes sure that Israeli demands are satisfied by Congress, whose members overwhelmingly support Israel thanks to the financial largesse of the lobby.
Shlaim reminds readers that the Israel lobby, particularly the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, has “deep pockets, and it plays hardball, rewarding pro-Israel candidates with campaign contributions and destroying the careers of anti-Israel candidates. So great is AIPAC’s influence that Capitol Hill has been described as Israeli-occupied territory. Without doubt, it is the most powerful foreign policy lobby in Washington DC.”
Shlaim also explains how the lobby cultivates political loyalty from an early stage. For example, decades before becoming U.S. president, a young Sen. Joe Biden was spelling out his commitment to Israel: “Israel is ‘the best $3 billion investment we make’ he declared in the Senate back in 1986. ‘Were there not an Israel’ he added, ‘the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect our interests in the region.’”
For his part, Mishra adds that “Biden, during his Senate career, received $4.2 million from pro-Israel groups, more than any other senator in US history.” Apparently, Biden was even chastised by Prime Minister Menachem Begin, whom the British used to consider a terrorist, for suggesting that Israeli forces should have inflicted greater damage during Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982.
Israel’s disproportionate influence on the political process in the United States and other countries inevitably fuels genuine antisemitism, not only the kind that is politically invented. This, in turn, enables Israel to claim to be “the only safe place for the Jews.” Whether and when the American public will react to this brazen behavior of a foreign state thousands of miles away remains to be seen.
The habitual conflation of Israel and Jews, which Israel and its local agents actively promote, makes Jews less secure. “Most people around the world,” observes Mishra, have never met a Jew, but many now identify Jewishness as well as Israel with ferocious violence and injustice.” Just as many Jewish scholars and religious leaders have long warned, Israel may have become the greatest danger to Jews worldwide.
Shlaim argues that “what is happening in Gaza today is the cruel manifestation of Israeli state terrorism. Terrorism is the use of force against civilians for political ends. The cap fits and Israel must wear it. The Israeli politicians and generals who orchestrate the criminal assaults on the people of Gaza are no better than riffraff.”
Shlaim laments that, “as so often in the tragic history of Palestine, the victims were blamed for their own misfortunes. Israel’s propaganda machine persistently purveyed the notion that the Palestinians are terrorists, that they reject coexistence with the Jewish state, that their nationalism is little more than antisemitism, that Hamas is just a bunch of religious fanatics, and that Islam is incompatible with democracy.” Moreover, Shlaim argues that “one of Netanyahu’s most often repeated, and most morally repugnant claims, is that Palestinian nationalism is a direct continuation of Nazi antisemitism.”
Beinart, in criticizing the Zionist slogan “Israel’s right to exist,” argues that the “legitimacy of a Jewish state — like the holiness of the Jewish people — is conditional on how it behaves. It is subject to law, not a law in and of itself.” He draws analogies between Gaza’s destruction and colonial wars, though he avoids labeling it a genocide. Shlaim and Mishra are more straightforward because both rely on Wolfe’s insight, quoted by Shlaim: “ The question of genocide is never far from discussions of settler colonialism.”
What Israel has done to Gaza since October 2023 is certainly unprecedented in scale. But Shlaim reminds us that it did not alter Israel’s fundamental approach to the Palestinians: “Before October 7, Netanyahu supported using military might to induce Palestinians to permanently acquiesce in Jewish supremacy across the whole Land of Israel. This remains his project.” In 2017, Bezalel Smotrich, a member of the Netanyahu government, officially proposed a “Decisive Plan” outlining many of the violent measures currently applied by Israel in Gaza and the West Bank. The plan rejects the very idea of compromise with the Palestinians.
All three authors converge on a shared conclusion. As Shlaim writes in the final pages of his book, “the best hope for resolving the century-old conflict between Jews and Palestinians lies not in the partition of Palestine but in building one democratic state from the river to the sea with equal rights for all its citizens, regardless of religion or ethnicity.”
The writing style of these three books is lucid and fluid, making them accessible to nonexperts. Yet the tone of each author is different. Beinart appears cautious, perhaps aiming not to antagonize doubting soft Zionists and their liberal supporters. Shlaim’s account is less ambivalent; he seems unburdened by community sensitivities.
The three books also grapple with how one can remain human after witnessing such atrocities unfold in real time on millions of screens. Mishra captures the moral breakdown of powerless citizens watching mass murder day after day: “Israel’s annihilation of Gaza, provisioned by Western democracies, inflicted this psychic ordeal for months on millions of people — involuntary witnesses to an act of political evil, who allowed themselves to occasionally think that it was good to be alive, and then heard screams of a mother watching her daughter burn to death in yet another school bombed by Israel.”
Mishra argues that the genocide in Gaza is “the defining moment of the twenty-first century.” He highlights the chasm between the Western narrative of the Nazi massacre of the Jews as a unique atrocity and the collective memory of former colonized peoples, the world majority, who see in it echoes of their local genocides. Aimé Césaire wrote about the Western citizen in 1955: “.. what he cannot forgive Hitler for is not crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa.”
For many in the Global South, the genocide in Gaza is yet another instance of the centuries-long Western impunity for campaigns of mass murder against the nonwhites of the world. They do not see the Holocaust as exceptional but rather see unabashed hypocrisy in the Western ruling classes’ special leniency toward Israel. Mishra remarks that the participation of Western powers — most of them officially or unofficially racist — in the war against Hitler was a fight “against a creed they would all die to defend on their own soil.”
Israel’s carnage in Gaza is a harbinger of an overt return to the law of the jungle: Might makes right. Historical parallels are sobering. France in 1946-1954, in an attempt to restore its colonial rule, followed by the United States in 1955-75, determined “to contain communism,” inflicted over 3 million casualties on Vietnam. Decades later, the U.S. invasion of Iraq, which killed hundreds of thousands of people, was justified — falsely, as many had known — by a need to rid the country of weapons of mass destruction. Even such a specious fig leaf is no longer deemed necessary, thanks to Israel’s destruction of Gaza, coupled with Trump’s promise to empty the resulting “demolition site” of its inhabitants in order to turn it into a riviera.
The Gaza genocide reveals the moral bankruptcy of Western ruling circles in arming Israel and repressing dissent, and of their compliant media in camouflaging the horror. Israel follows in the footsteps of colonial powers who, from the 16th century onward, killed millions of people they deemed “savages” in Africa, America, Asia and Australia. Israel’s use of advanced technologies, such as targeting by AI and blowing up buildings using robots (and the boobytrapped pagers in Lebanon with their thousands of individual victims), shows the portentous dangers of such moral decay. This is another instance of amoral bureaucratic states using science and technology to perpetrate massacres, except that this time — unlike the Holocaust — the genocide cannot be hidden. Genocide has been normalized.
These three books enable the reader to perceive the dark forest behind the trees, to see the momentous implications of Israel’s behavior for the ominous emerging world order. Yet there is “hope in a dark time,” as Mishra titles his epilogue. The extreme violence of Israel and intensified Western bellicosity, however fragmented the West may appear, are signs of imperial decline. Britain in Kenya was exceedingly brutal in the 1950s, when the sun was setting on its empire. Many, including Shlaim, foresee an imminent end to the genocidal Zionist regime.
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