International relations scholar Gilbert Achcar, Professor Emeritus at SOAS, University of London, warns that Israel’s genocidal destruction of Gaza marks not only “the worst episode in the Palestinian people’s long ordeal” (p. 2) but also the final collapse of the decaying post-WWII liberal international order and the inauguration of a new global “age of neo-fascism” (p. 1), resplendent in it its gratuitous violence toward oppressed peoples. The Gaza Catastrophe is less a monograph than a collection of essays, a few penned prior to October 7, and the rest as the genocide unfolded across the last two years. When read together, however, they unravel the paradox of how a State ostensibly established as an answer to the Holocaust came to perpetrate “the first genocide … executed by a technologically advanced state since the final defeat in 1945 of the far-right Axis powers” (p. 8). In a short preface, Achcar promises to provide readers with three things: a sketch of the “tragic” historical process that culminated in the Gaza genocide; a close analysis of the events of October 7 and the ensuing cataclysm; and a reflection on the Gaza genocide within its regional and global context. Across fifteen absorbing chapters, he delivers all three.
The first part of the book offers a sobering historical account of Israel’s road to genocide. Repudiating the popular treatment of the October 7 attacks as emerging from a vacuum, Achcar situates the Gaza catastrophe within the ideological convergence of political Zionism and the international far right, along with the State of Israel’s gravitation towards unrestrained violence as a solution to its festering ‘Gaza Question’. Modern Zionism, despite being borne of protracted Jewish suffering in Europe, is presented not as a national liberation movement opposed to European racialism, but as another incarnation of “fanatical and colonialist nationalism” aligned with imperial power and committed to the dispossession of an indigenous population (p. 76). As Achcar convincingly shows, the post-Second World War incorporation of the Jewish people into “white America” as moral compensation for the Nazi Holocaust cleaved the fight against antisemitism from the global struggle against all forms of racial discrimination even as it catalyzed Israel’s alignment with Western structures of white supremacy and colonial domination. Israel’s ethnonationalist foundations have guided its treatment of the Palestinians ever since: a chapter on Israeli Palestinian negotiations since 1967 eviscerates conventional scholarly depictions of the Palestinian leadership as “never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity” for peace while tracing the racial logic behind Israel’s persistent rejection of Palestinian self-determination within a viable two-state settlement. A pair of chapters written in the wake of Hamas’ victory over Fatah in 2006 likewise detail Israel’s exploitation of Palestinian political factionalism as a pretext for refusing negotiations and escalating its periodic depredations against the Gaza Strip. Israel is shown to have pursued Jewish domination, territorial expansion, and political rejectionism in Palestine since long before October 7; drunk on the impunity afforded it by Washington, it propelled itself ever-faster towards genocidal neofascism.
Achcar’s historical appraisal puts Israel’s eruption of “murderous fury” in reaction to the October 7 attacks into perspective, along with its “historical pace of killing” and mass destruction in Gaza. More than just cataloguing horrors, however, Achcar frames Israel’s “bloody onward march” within its overarching objective of realizing a “Greater Israel.” Because each chapter was composed as the genocide unfolded in real time, one detects a refinement of his thought in response to developments on the ground. For example, a chapter written just weeks into the genocide perceptively predicts Israel’s plans to annex and recolonize Gaza, but rests on the faulty premise that Israel’s overarching “military goal” is to “eradicate Hamas” and “prevent it from controlling Gaza” (pp. 158, 162–163). Other chapters act as a corrective: resituating the IDF’s onslaught within the long history of Israeli plans for “expulsion” of the Palestinians, Achcar shows how support for ethnic cleansing migrated from the “far right” to the entire Israeli political spectrum (p. 165). Expulsion is thus not ancillary to Israel’s military operations in Gaza, but central. Washington is rightly indicted for its bipartisan facilitation of Gaza’s annihilation; as Achcar demonstrates, the Biden Administration’s calls for humanitarian restraint thinly masked its persistent thwarting of international pressure for a lasting peace. His castigation of the “wishful thinking” that led many to believe the Trump Administration was “arm-twisting” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu into a sustainable ceasefire in January 2025 has proven prescient (p. 200, 203); on March 18, 2025, just weeks after the book was completed, Israel unilaterally destroyed a precarious ceasefire in Gaza with a bloody massacre of nearly 500 Palestinians, the vast majority women and children.
Less convincing is Achcar’s critique of Hamas’s political strategy. He is no doubt correct that, by the summer of 2023, large portions of the Palestinian population in Gaza were fed up with Hamas rule due to the organization’s “increasingly repressive” administration of the Strip (p. 13). He inverts cause and effect, however, by blaming Hamas’ “counterproductive” rocket fire for sparking Israel’s “brutal and murderous” assaults on Gaza since 2006 (p. 16). To the contrary, careful scholarly analysis has shown that, while Hamas pragmatically moderated its political program in successive attempts to gain entry to the Washington controlled peace process, Israel repeatedly initiated hostilities against Gaza precisely to thwart the threat these Palestinian “peace offensives” posed to its stranglehold on the occupied territories (e.g., see Norman Finkelstein, Gaza: An Inquest into its Martyrdom, 2018). In omitting this record, Achcar produces a faulty assessment of Hamas’ October 7 attacks. Though he accurately locates the massacre within a “long, bloody series” of “desperate” indigenous “counter-offensives” against colonial depredations (pp. 136, 151), he also blames Hamas’ “irrational” and “mystical-religious” vision of total “victory” for “bringing about a catastrophe” upon Gaza of “historic magnitude” (p. 138–139). His appeal to mass popular resistance as a viable alternative to Palestinian armed struggle falls flat, however, insofar as it neglects to address the international community’s apathetic response to Israel’s brutal suppression of 2018’s nonviolent “Great March of Return” protests. No doubt, the 2023 Hamas massacre of unarmed Israeli civilians was both a morally unjustifiable response and a fatal strategic miscalculation. But like so many other anti-colonial revolts, its provenance appears less “mystical-religious” than plainly “rational-political”: trapped within an unrelenting Israeli siege, and closed off from any diplomatic horizon, Hamas sought to shake up the status quo and violently refocus global attention on Palestine.
The Gaza Catastrophe marks an early but essential contribution to what is sure to become a vast field of scholarship on the origins of the Gaza genocide and its place within world history. From the vantagepoint of 2025, Achcar’s conclusion is as persuasive as it is grim: the dismantlement of the international legal order at the hands of American empire and the attendant mass slaughter of the Palestinians, along with the return of Trump to the White House and the ascendence of the global far-right, leave “no room for optimism” (p. 212). What hope exists lies, not with scholarship, but only in the incipient mobilization of the Palestinian people, the Arab region, and the rest of the world against the designs of Washington, Tel Aviv and the “new neofascist international” (p. 213). Still, for those seeking to comprehend how we arrived at this global precipice and to draw lessons from our collective failure to prevent the Gaza cataclysm, Achcar’s book is, and will remain, essential reading.
