I finished reading The Gaza Catastrophe: The Genocide in World-Historical Perspective (£16.99 from Saqi Publishing) by Gilbert Achcar on the day it was reported that a former senior Israeli officer, referring to Hamas’s attack on October 7^th,  had said “50 Palestinians must die for every person killed that day and “it does not matter now if they are children.” Aharon Haliva merely proved the book’s thesis that Zionist Israel is willing to go to any lengths, no matter how much they evoke comparisons of occupied Europe in the 1940s, to clear the territory it seeks to colonise of its inhabitants.

 Few writers on the socialist left have the deep knowledge of the Palestinian struggle that Gilbert Achcar does. He is familiar with Arabic language and Israeli sources as well as materials in English which means that when he sets out how the ongoing genocide and physical destruction in Gaza are the necessary culmination of Zionist policy, he uses the words of its Israeli authors.

 This is an anthology of his writings over thirty years with contemporary commentary to relate the older articles to the ongoing genocide. As many of the pieces were written to respond to specific developments there is sometimes a bit of repetition of what he considers key ideas. However, taken as a whole, the book is a useful resource for anyone who wants internationalist, anti-imperialist explanations of the absurdity of the Olso “peace” agreement, the ridiculous mystical thinking of Hamas’s Al-Aqsa flood, the impossibility of a Israel tolerating any form of Palestinian state and how the genocide has been made possible by American imperialism.

Achcar does not hesitate to use the “N” word early on when describing how Israel has conducted its war against the population of Gaza, noting that “the same combination of killing, starvation and deprivation of healthcare was at work in the Nazi extermination camps, albeit to an even more atrocious and murderous degree.” He wrote this before the Israelis started shooting people at food distribution centres for sport in an echo of a scene from Schindler’s List and before a murderous heatwave had begun further tormenting people living in tents with the constant fear of sudden death.

 It is unsurprising that while all this is being done by an Israeli government which contains ministers who are indistinguishable from fascists, with the full knowledge and support of American imperialism, and some occasional handwringing from European imperialism that Achcar makes a case that we are living in a time of ascendant neofascism. His sections on how the ideas that were once confined to the most exterminationist radical fringes of Zionism are now the policy of Netanyahu’s government and American imperialism using the words of their authors are indispensable in rebutting the mainstream consensus in most European countries, especially for anyone still daft enough to engage with the British Labour Party

Not an optimistic conclusion

A point Achcar makes more than once is the obvious strategic dead end represented by attacking a nuclear superpower with “four slingshots” to use Sinwar’s analogy of a military campaign against Israel. This insight is lost on those British leftists who fail to acknowledge that Hamas was cultivated by the Israelis and Qataris as an alternative to secular, leftist organisations, albeit one that was based on real currents in Palestinian society and a popular revulsion against the nauseating and visible corruption and venality of the Palestinian Authority nominally headed by Abbas. Achcar argues that the real high point of Palestinian resistance, and the one with some possibility of success was the First Intifada of 1988. This mass movement managed to divide Israeli society, even provoking a crisis in the military leadership.

By contrast, the October 7^th attack failed in every respect. Many of the Hamas cadre were killed, it caused support for the Palestinian cause to initially haemorrhage because it is hard to justify randomly killing civilians and the Hamas leadership utterly miscalculated just how genocidally violent the Israeli response would be. Drawing on Franz Fanon he explains it in this way: “Except in cases of manifest irrationality, the barbarism of the weak is most often, logically enough, a reaction to the barbarism of the strong. Otherwise, why would the weak provoke the strong, at the risk of being crushed themselves? This is, incidentally, why the strong seek to hide their culpability by portraying their adversaries as demented, demonic and bestial.”

At the end of his analysis of the history, the forces and dynamics of what is happening it is unsurprising that Achcar is unable to offer a glibly optimistic conclusion beyond the observation that a revolutionary wave happened after the end of World War Two. At the moment that is the only straw that supporters of the Palestinian struggle and a democratic, secular solution in the region have to clutch at.