The British-Israeli historian and emeritus professor of International Relations at Oxford University Avi Shlaim has made studying the Arab-Israeli conflict his life’s work. He is the author of eight books, including the seminal The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World.
Prof Shlaim (78) is a severe critic of prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, but he has never questioned the legitimacy of the Israeli state within its legal, 1949 armistice borders. “The current war in Gaza is the darkest moment that I can remember,” Shlaim says. “By my count, this is the sixth major Israeli assault on the people of Gaza. I stress that it is an assault on the people of Gaza.”
Prof Shlaim speaks calmly and deliberately about a conflict that unleashes the most inflammatory rhetoric. The war between Hamas and Israel is at heart a political issue, he says. “Yet Israel only uses brute military force to deal with it.”
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“Every few years you move in with a lot of tanks, aircraft and artillery and you smash the place up,” Shlaim explains. “You bring death and destruction. You degrade the military capability of Hamas. You destroy houses and schools and then you leave without solving the problem, so the next war is always around the corner.”
Scale matters. It is because of the indiscriminate nature of the attacks on civilians, the bombing of residential buildings, the flattening of whole neighborhoods – because of the scale – that I use the word genocide
— Prof Avi Shlaim
Israel withdrew its ground forces from the Gaza Strip in 2005 but continued to control land, sea and air access to the densely populated enclave. “Gaza was converted into an open-air prison,” Shlaim says. “Today it is an open-air graveyard.”
Israel has moved “a stage farther” in this war, Shlaim says. He uses the word genocide, meaning the intentional destruction of a people in whole or in part.
Is the term perhaps too strong, I ask. “What about mass slaughter on an industrial scale?” Shlaim replies. “Scale matters. It is because of the indiscriminate nature of the attacks on civilians, the bombing of residential buildings, the flattening of whole neighbourhoods – because of the scale – that I use the word genocide.”
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When Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant announced what Shlaim calls “the medieval-style siege” of Gaza on October 9th, Gallant said, “We are fighting human animals”.
“This is very dangerous rhetoric. It is used not just about Hamas, but about Palestinians in general,” Shlaim says.
In his 1996 book, Warrant for Genocide, Norman Cohn established a link between the Nazis’ dehumanisation of the Jews and the Holocaust. “Israeli leaders are demonising the Palestinian people, and that is a precursor to ethnic cleansing and genocide,” Shlaim continues. He calls the opposition of western leaders to a ceasefire “a warrant for genocide” and accuses them of “complicity in Israel’s war crimes”.
Through the 1917 Balfour Declaration and its subsequent mandate over Palestine, Britain committed what Shlaim calls “the original sin” of “stealing Palestine from the Palestinians and giving it to the Zionists”.
Shlaim’s family spoke Arabic at home, ate Arab food and listened to Arab music. ‘We had much more in common with Muslim or Christian Arabs than we had with Ashkenazi Jews from eastern Europe,’ he says
Once Israel was established in 1947, the US became its “enabler”, Shlaim says. “The trouble with American support for Israel is that it is unconditional. It is not conditional on respecting Palestinian human rights or observing international law. Israel pays no price for its violations. This is why Israel gets away, literally, with murder, and today literally with mass murder, because America doesn’t hold it to account.”
In Three Worlds, Memoirs of an Arab-Jew, published this year, Shlaim recounts how his affluent Iraqi-Jewish family were torn from their happy life in Baghdad when he was a child. “Arab nationalism was one factor but the main factor, the more important factor, was Zionism,” he says.
Shlaim’s family spoke Arabic at home, ate Arab food and listened to Arab music. “We had much more in common with Muslim or Christian Arabs than we had with Ashkenazi Jews from eastern Europe,” he says.
Though he long felt like a second-class citizen in Israel, Shlaim came to see his dual identity as an advantage. “For my family and me, Muslim-Jewish coexistence was not an abstract idea, it was a reality which makes me able to think outside the box, to think about a better future for our region than the dismal reality that is unfolding today.”
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Shlaim envisions “one democratic state from the [Jordan] river to the [Mediterranean] sea with equal rights for everyone, regardless of religion and ethnicity.”
The two-state solution is as extinct as the dodo, Shlaim says. “Israel killed it stone dead with the settlements and the wall. Palestinian enclaves on the West Bank are all that are left, surrounded by Israeli settlements and military bases. The idea is no longer viable.”
No Israeli government ever offered a two-state solution “on terms acceptable to even the most moderate of Palestinian leaders,” Shlaim says. “And no US administration ever pressed Israel to move towards a genuine two-state solution.”
Yet Western leaders continue to parrot calls for a two-state solution. Adding hypocrisy to hypocrisy, they say the two sides must negotiate a solution. “The asymmetry of power is so great that no agreement can result. It’s like pushing a lion and a rabbit into a cage and saying, ‘You sort out your differences.’”