In defending and arming Israel over the last two years, Western governments have shown the hollowness of international law. The genocide will be remembered as a decisive moment in the collapse of liberalism.
In his book Gaza Catastrophe: The Genocide in World-Historical Perspective, Gilbert Achcar analyzes the background, dynamics, and global consequences of Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip since October 7, 2023.
In this interview with Jacobin, Achcar discusses the political radicalization of Israeli society, the strategic miscalculations of Hamas, and the open complicity of Western governments in the genocide unfolding in Gaza. He argues that the war has unmasked the so-called liberal international order — and further accelerated the global rise of neofascist forces.
- Elias Feroz
In your book, you don’t just condemn the Hamas attack of October 7, but place it in a broader historical context, and critique attempts to rationalize or justify the massacre. How do you assess the long-term consequences of that event for Gaza and the future of Israel–Palestine?
- Gilbert Achcar
Hamas’s October 7 operation — regardless of its nature and the atrocities committed that day — was, according to its organizers, intended as a first step toward the liberation of Palestine. Judged by that goal, it resulted in complete disaster. The Palestinian people now face a greater threat than ever before. We are witnessing a genocidal war by Israel that has already killed an enormous number of people.
We know the official figures for those directly killed by bombs, but if you include indirect deaths caused by the blockade, the halt of humanitarian aid, the deliberate orchestration of hunger, the cutting of water supplies, and the destruction of health care infrastructure by Israel, the real number is certainly far higher than the 60,000 officially cited. It could well exceed 200,000. That is a staggering toll.
This was followed by a full-scale Israeli assault that would not have been politically possible without the pretext of October 7 — just as 9/11 served as a pretext for the Bush administration’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. In Gaza we’ve seen something similar. A far-right government — the most far-right in Israel’s history — seized the October 7 attack as a pretext. For them it was almost like a gift from heaven, a golden opportunity to re-invade the Gaza Strip. All present government members had opposed the withdrawal from Gaza in 2005. Benjamin Netanyahu even resigned from Ariel Sharon’s government in protest. Now Netanyahu has used the opportunity not only to reinvade Gaza but to go much further: to push the population out.
What we are seeing is clearly the ethnic cleansing of a large part of Gaza, pushing Palestinians into one corner of the strip. The next step will likely be an attempt to organize the migration of Gaza’s inhabitants. At the same time, the Israeli government has given settlers in the West Bank — backed by the Israeli army — full license to attack the local population. So now we are also witnessing ongoing ethnic cleansing in the West Bank. The Palestinians are in the worst situation they have faced in a very, very long time.
- Elias Feroz
You describe Hamas’s grave miscalculation, in underestimating that Israel has a far-right government, openly advocating the expulsion of Palestinians and ready to launch a genocidal war. How did this context shape the consequences of the October 7 attack, and why did Hamas fail to fully consider this critical factor?
- Gilbert Achcar
We’re talking about the most extreme wing of the Israeli polity: Israel’s entire government today is far-right. Even before October 7, the Holocaust historian Daniel Blatman, writing in Ha’aretz, described Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich as neo-Nazis. Some are more extreme than others. But all ultimately share the same goal: to get rid of the Palestinians and establish an Israel that is palästinenserfrei (free of Palestinians) or araberfrei (free of Arabs) from the river to the sea. It is deeply shocking that people who claim the legacy of the Holocaust victims — the victims of the Nazi drive toward a judenfrei Germany — are now pursuing the goal of an araberfrei land.
Hamas likely believed the Israeli government was weak, given the mass protests regarding Netanyahu’s corruption trial, and counted on Iran’s backing. They expected their attack to trigger a broader Palestinian uprising and a regional war involving Hezbollah, Syria, and Iran. But this was a total miscalculation. Instead of dividing Israeli society, the attack unified it around a single goal: to crush Hamas. The result was an overwhelming consensus among Jewish Israelis in support of the Gaza war and the reoccupation of the Gaza Strip. Recent polls even show that a majority of Jewish Israelis now support the expulsion of Gazans from Gaza, if not the expulsion of Palestinians from Palestine.
Failing to recognize this — and instead claiming that the Hamas attack somehow “put the Palestinian question back on the table” — is simply absurd. The Palestinian issue is indeed back on the table, but not to affirm Palestinian rights. It is back in order to reach consensus on how best to liquidate the Palestinian cause. This isn’t progress for the Palestinian struggle — it’s a massive regression, a serious defeat. Israel today is more triumphant than ever, its regional power greater than ever, and all of this with full backing from the United States — support that hasn’t waned from Joe Biden to Donald Trump but has only intensified.
- Elias Feroz
You mentioned Daniel Blatman’s characterization of the Israeli government, establishing its relation to fascist or even neo-Nazi regimes. Can you explain why you think this comparison is accurate?
- Gilbert Achcar
Well, liberals and leftists have no problem calling the Alternative for Germany or the Freedom Party of Austria neo-Nazis. Compared to Ben Gvir and Smotrich, these groups are moderate.
Ben Gvir and Smotrich openly describe Palestinians as Untermenschen — quite literally. They explicitly call for their expulsion. That’s the equivalent of judenfrei: a land, Eretz Israel as they call it, free of Palestinians. They want to push them out. They are openly racist, and they believe in force — in Machtpolitik, imposing their views through power.
Let’s not forget: between 1933 and 1941, judenfrei for the Nazis meant expulsion. The years of the annihilation of the European Jews followed later. First, the Nazis expelled German Jews to Palestine. They concluded an agreement with the Zionist movement to transfer German Jews there. Palestine was the only place where the Nazis allowed Jews leaving Germany to take some capital with them. They didn’t want the German Jews to go to Britain or the United States, where they would support anti-Nazi lobbies. They wanted them to go to Palestine.
Smotrich and others of his ilk — and this is tragic — are descendants of people who were victims of the Nazi genocide. And yet they can reproduce the same far-right views and behavior that characterized the Nazis. But that’s how history is. Being a descendant of victims doesn’t mean you will necessarily be a freedom fighter. We’ve seen many oppressors come from the descendants of victims, or even formerly oppressed turning into oppressors.
- Elias Feroz
You write that, given Israel’s overwhelming military superiority, the only rational strategy for Palestinians is mass nonviolent struggle, as exemplified by the first intifada, which created a profound ethical and political crisis within Israeli society. In your view, what were the mistakes or limitations of the first intifada, and why has this strategy not yet resulted in lasting success for Palestinian rights or ending the occupation?
- Gilbert Achcar
Well, the first intifada peaked in 1988, especially during the first half of that year. It was a grassroots movement, organized through local and popular committees — a true mass mobilization that saw significant participation from women. People of all ages were present. The movement created a real moral crisis within Israeli society, and even within the Israeli army. It also generated considerable international sympathy for the Palestinian cause.
So why did it fail? First, because Israeli repression was intense. But more importantly, the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization] took over the leadership and hijacked the intifada. Yasser Arafat and the PLO redirected it toward their own project of establishing a so-called Palestinian state, which eventually led to the 1993 Oslo Accords. A key turning point was the shift away from the local leadership within the occupied territories to the PLO leadership in Tunis. From there, it began issuing official statements in the name of the intifada via radio, effectively sidelining the grassroots leadership. That marked a major step backward for the movement’s autonomy and direction.
Second, mass struggle doesn’t win in one shot. It happens in waves — each wave strengthens the movement and gradually weakens the adversary. It’s a question of the balance of forces. When your enemy is militarily much stronger and fully prepared to kill, it’s not in your interest to initiate armed attacks, even less so if your enemy is backed by a majority of the land’s residents due to the uprooting of your own people. If you do, they will crush you.
But if you engage in popular struggle, you gain moral superiority and can attract much broader support. In such a case, the enemy finds itself in a more difficult position: if it responds by massacring peaceful demonstrators, it becomes widely condemned. It loses legitimacy in the eyes of the international public. Israel, in particular, relies heavily on support from the West — militarily, politically, diplomatically, and it is therefore affected by Western public opinion.
To give a comparison: take the black population in the United States and in South Africa. In South Africa, black people formed an overwhelming majority, so it made sense strategically for them to resort to armed struggle against the apartheid regime along with mass struggle.
In contrast, the black population in the United States, as a minority, had no chance of winning through violence. The civil rights movement, with figures like Martin Luther King Jr, succeeded by using nonviolent mass struggle to expose the brutality of the system. That certainly played a much greater role in advancing the anti-racist struggle than those who called for armed struggle, like the Black Panthers. That path didn’t go far because it was a dead end. You can’t fight with weapons against an enemy that is vastly stronger than you. That only provides your opponent with a pretext — an excuse — to respond with overwhelming violence. They’ll kill far more people than they would if they were facing only peaceful protest.
It’s a matter of strategy. You must adapt your methods to your capacities. The means you use depend on your strength and the overall balance of forces. The belief held by Hamas — that armed violence would liberate Palestine — was completely delusional. And here we are. No matter how one tries to spin it, it is clearly a major disaster. The outcome of these events is an utter catastrophe. That being said, acknowledging the disastrous consequences of October 7 in no way justifies the genocidal war that Israel has since waged.
For the first year of the genocide, most Western governments did not even pretend to question Israel’s so-called right to self-defense — I say “so-called” because it is highly questionable that an occupier has a right to self-defense against the legitimate right of the occupied to resist occupation — even though Israel had killed very early on vastly more Palestinians than the number of Israelis killed on October 7.
But they went even further: Western governments, not only the United States but also the European powers, actively opposed calls for an immediate cease-fire for several months, and Washington still does. In doing so, they effectively endorsed the war — the genocidal war that was unfolding. When you oppose a cease-fire, you are in favor of the war continuing. That was their position. It is a shameful historical stance.
As I explain in my book, this moment marked the final nail in the coffin of the so-called rules-based liberal international order. This order has always been fiction — but never has that fiction been so starkly exposed as now. The double standard is blatant, and nowhere more so than in the striking contrast between how Western governments responded to Russia’s war on Ukraine and how they responded to Israel’s war on Gaza.
All of this has a huge historical impact. It paved the way for the continuing rise of neofascism globally. The Biden administration’s position played an important role in the defeat of the Democrats and paved the way for Trump’s return to the White House — this time with a much clearer neofascist agenda and behavior than during his first term.
This has further boosted the far right across the world — from Germany to France to Spain and elsewhere. We are now living, as I wrote in an article a few months ago, in what I call the age of neofascism. All of this is linked to liberalism’s total loss of credibility.
This is why the Gaza genocide, and Western governments’ attitude toward it, will be remembered as a historical turning point — a key moment that exposed and completed the collapse of Western, or Atlanticist, liberalism.
- Elias Feroz
You describe Zionism as a colonial project with “genocidal tendencies.” At the same time, you argue that Palestinian freedom requires the inclusion of Jewish Israelis and a transformation of Israeli society. How do you envision this transformation happening given the current political realities, and what concrete steps would be necessary to achieve freedom for both Palestinians and Israelis?
- Gilbert Achcar
It sounds utopian today, but we must keep a historical perspective. After the first intifada, from 1987 until the so-called second intifada in 2000, public opinion in Israel shifted in favor of peace and a settlement with the Palestinians. That was the time of the Oslo Accords. Although these accords were flawed from the start, Israeli society’s mood was quite different then.
Among Jewish-Israeli intellectuals, there was a post-Zionist movement seeking to overcome Zionism and achieve peaceful coexistence. But from 2000, this reversed after Ariel Sharon — who was at that time the most right-wing of prominent politicians in Israel — provoked the events that triggered the second intifada, where the Arafat leadership fell into the trap of armed struggle.
The Palestinian security forces used the light weapons that the Israeli state had let them have against Israeli troops. This trap allowed Sharon to win the election in February 2001. So he provoked the clash in September 2000, won the election on the wave created by this clash in February 2001, and launched what was the most violent attack on the West Bank since 1967. The present war is much more violent, but already the 2002 war launched under Sharon’s government was very brutal.
That’s why I’m saying it’s important for the oppressed to have a clear strategic vision, and to choose methods of struggle that are appropriate — instead of ones that end in catastrophe.
- Elias Feroz
You describe how extremist far-right Zionist groups, once marginalized and even labeled terrorist by Israel and Western countries, have become part of the Israeli government through Netanyahu. How do you view the ongoing military support for a government that includes these far-right factions?
- Gilbert Achcar
When Trump was elected for the first time, he broke with the bipartisan consensus that had defined US policy since 1967. He supported the annexation of the Golan Heights — something no previous administration had recognized — and did the same with East Jerusalem. He fully embraced the Israeli perspective.
Then came [Joe] Biden. During his campaign, he promised to reverse Trump’s policies — but he turned out to be a total liar. He didn’t reverse anything. And when October 7 happened, he fully supported the genocidal war. Israel would not have been able to wage this prolonged war without continuous US support — and that began under the Biden administration. It was Biden who provided Israel with massive 2,000-pound (one-ton) bombs.
When you drop such bombs in a densely populated area like Gaza, it’s clearly a genocidal weapon. You’re going to kill thousands of people, most of them civilians, including children. Forty percent of the victims are children.
Even if you believed that every single male victim was a Hamas member — which is obviously far from true — you’d still be left with 70 percent of the victims being clearly noncombatants: women and children. I mention women because, in Gaza, women are not fighters. Hamas doesn’t recruit female fighters. Thus, only a minority of the victims are fighters. Most of them hide in the tunnels that Hamas built. There are no such shelters for civilians, who are left on the surface, bombed and killed, while the fighters can shelter underground.
This is where the huge criminal responsibility of the Biden administration becomes clear — and it will be carried on, of course, by the second Trump administration. There were other genocides since 1945, especially in Africa. But this is the first genocide committed by an industrially advanced state and backed by the entire Western system, the whole Western bloc. That’s why this genocide is such an important historical watershed.
- Elias Feroz
You describe Western unconditional support for Israel after the October 7 attack as a form of “narcissistic compassion,” similar to the reaction in the West after 9/11, where empathy is extended primarily to “people like us.” How does this selective compassion influence public perception and political responses to the suffering of Palestinians?
- Gilbert Achcar
There is an identification with Israelis as a European people, seen as a part of the West within the Orient. Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern political Zionism, wrote in his manifesto, Der Judenstaat, that the Jews will construct “a stronghold of civilization in the midst of barbarism.” This is typical colonial discourse — the idea that “we” are civilized Europeans, and the “others” are barbarians.
This identification by Western states with Israel is also reinforced by the fact that Israel claims the legacy of the Holocaust. This allows Western governments to support Israel with little reservation, believing that, since they bear various degrees of responsibility for the genocide of the Jews during World War II, they have a moral obligation to support Israel.
This attitude reaches its peak with the German government. Germany was the main perpetrator of the genocide from 1941 to 1945, but the way the country interprets the lessons of the Nazi era and the Holocaust is completely wrong. If the lesson they draw is: “Because our predecessors committed genocide against the Jews, we must now support a so-called Jewish state that commits genocide against another people,” then they have clearly drawn the wrong lessons. By doing this, they are reviving the ideological climate of unrestricted violence that gave rise to Nazism — although now it appears in a new form of neofascism on a global level.
The correct lesson from the Holocaust — both the genocide of the Jews and other victims like homosexuals, people with disabilities, and the Roma — is to be constantly vigilant against all forms of racism, oppression, and aggressive power politics such as occupation. Importantly, these lessons must be applied consistently and not selectively.
They apply these values against Vladimir Putin because of his invasion of Ukraine, yet they don’t apply the same values to the Israeli government and its far-right leadership for what they are doing in Gaza. This is a huge contradiction. Beyond the moral issue, which is significant, Western governments are extremely shortsighted. Even from the perspective of their own interests, they are acting shortsightedly because they are contributing to global destabilization. They are creating conditions of violence that will inevitably spill over into Europe and even the United States.
Look at the violence of the 1990s — the Iraq war, the embargo on Iraq, the ongoing bombing — all this violence eventually backfired against Western countries and their allies, culminating in tragedies like 9/11. Anyone who thinks that what is happening today in Gaza won’t have serious future consequences is mistaken.
- Elias Feroz
You argue that the concept of “new antisemitism,” broadly attributed to Muslims and their defenders, is used to absolve the European and American far right of their own antisemitism, enabling a dangerous alliance grounded in Islamophobia. How has this dynamic affected Western responses to Palestinian suffering, and what are the broader consequences of this “racial double standard” you describe?
- Gilbert Achcar
The far right, especially in Europe and the US, often accuse movements like Black Lives Matter of anti-white racism. This is the same logic European governments use when they label Muslim populations — some of whom may hold antisemitic views but most do not — as antisemitic simply because they support the Palestinians against the Israeli government. That is not antisemitism.
The fact is that today’s far right — like Alternative for Germany or the Freedom Party of Austria — outbid everyone else in being more pro-Israel than the rest. Marine Le Pen in France does the same. This Western far right, despite its long history of antisemitism, has now become a strong supporter of Israel because they see Israel as an ally against their common target: Muslims.
The present alliance of neofascist forces is based on the new dominant form of racism in the West: Islamophobia. Instead of recognizing that antisemitism still exists mainly within these far-right traditions, Israel’s supporters ignore their antisemitic roots. They unrestrainedly repress the Palestine solidarity movement.
In Britain, where I am, Keir Starmer’s government has decided to ban as “terrorist” a group whose latest action was to throw red paint on Royal Air Force fighter planes. This action aimed at drawing attention to Britain’s role in the war on Gaza by supplying Israel with military hardware. Calling that terrorism is outrageous. Many civil rights defenders have protested this decision, explaining that if you start calling everything terrorism, you pave the way for the destruction of political freedoms.
If Nigel Farage’s right-wing party, Reform UK, were to win an election — which is no longer impossible to imagine — it could use such a law to further suppress political freedoms. So the so-called liberal Western governments are playing a very dangerous game that will likely backfire, even against themselves.
- Elias Feroz
You foresaw — well before it happened — that Israel might drag Iran into a confrontation that could make a joint US–Israeli offensive inevitable, especially under Trump. How do you interpret Iran’s role in the current escalation, and what does your earlier prediction tell us about the strategic calculus driving both Israel and the United States?
- Gilbert Achcar
Iran’s theocratic regime has used the Palestine issue as a major ideological tool to expand its influence in Arab countries. To bridge the divides between Persians and Arabs, and between Shia and Sunni, it has relied heavily on the Palestine cause. From the beginning, it was a key ideological card for the regime.
Tehran hence supported anti-Israel Arab forces — most importantly Hezbollah, which waged a real struggle against Israel’s occupation of Lebanon. Hezbollah was founded under Iranian patronage after Israel’s 1982 invasion and fought a long campaign against that occupation, thus gaining the status of key ally of Iran.
Iran took advantage of the US occupation of Iraq; as is well known, Iran was the main beneficiary of the US invasion and today has more influence in Iraq than the United States. It then intervened in Syria to support Bashar al-Assad’s despotic regime against the 2011 popular uprising, and that helped it extend its influence further.
This allowed Iran to create a corridor of power across the Arab region, joined by Yemen, where the Houthis took control of the northern part of the country in 2014, igniting a civil war.
Iran has thus been building a web of direct influence across the region, believing this would provide it strong protection. But instead, this made Israel see Iran as an even greater threat, especially when Iran began developing its nuclear program. This became an obsession for Israel, supported by Washington.
After Trump withdrew the United States from the Iran nuclear deal in 2018, Iran greatly increased its uranium enrichment to 60 percent. This level is clearly beyond what’s needed for peaceful purposes while remaining below what’s needed for military use. So Iran’s claim that it had no intention to build nuclear weapons was contradicted by this enrichment level. This contradictory stance backfired on Iran and was, in my view, another major miscalculation.
Israel then seized the opportunity created by the events of October 7 to first crush Hezbollah and then launch a full-scale attack on Iran with US support. Meanwhile, between these two, the Assad regime collapsed.
So all of this has been a heavy blow to Iran. Both the United States and Israel see Iran as a major enemy. Israel, because Iran openly declares itself Israel’s staunchest enemy. The United States, although it is not militarily threatened by Iran, because it sees it as a threat to US interests in the Gulf.
Both times that Trump was elected, his first foreign visit was to the Arab Gulf monarchies, and his last visit involved discussions about hundreds of billions of dollars in deals. So regardless of what they say — often hypocritically — the Gulf monarchies, while criticizing Israel’s attacks on Iran, are actually quite pleased because they fear Iran far more than they fear Israel.
That’s the point: the United States opposes the Iranian regime not primarily because of its nature or ideology — after all, the Saudi monarchy is even more repressive — but because of its geopolitical threat.
- Elias Feroz
Given the current situation in Gaza and the West Bank, and with the Israeli government pursuing what you describe as a policy of ethnic cleansing, what future remains for the Palestinian people?
- Gilbert Achcar
The reason Israel’s far-right government hadn’t carried out a full-scale expulsion of Palestinians earlier was because they knew it would provoke international condemnation and likely be blocked. But October 7 provided them with a window of opportunity — a chance to begin implementing this project with full force and extreme violence in Gaza, through what has become a genocidal war.
They can’t yet expel the Palestinian population out of Gaza because doing so requires a green light from the United States. Even under a Trump administration, this would be complicated by Washington’s relationships with the Gulf states, which fear the highly destabilizing effect of such an expulsion — especially given these states’ oil and financial leverage, which remains crucial not only geopolitically, but even for Trump’s personal and familial business interests.
There are now two dire scenarios confronting the Palestinians: On one end lies the prospect of total ethnic cleansing — their mass expulsion, which would mark the second major displacement of Palestinians out of their land since 1948. While a more limited expulsion from the West Bank occurred in 1967, what is now at stake is the removal of most Palestinians from both Gaza and the West Bank.
On the other end — a deeply concerning scenario that is nonetheless viewed by some as the “lesser evil” option — is the creation of a fake Palestinian state consisting of disconnected enclaves in the West Bank and Gaza. The rest of the land would be annexed by Israel, filled with settlers and military forces. This is already under discussion: the Trump administration and Netanyahu are reportedly negotiating with the United Arab Emirates, the Saudi kingdom, and Egypt a deal that would have those countries temporarily manage the Gazans as part of this so-called “state” until a Palestinian surrogate of Israel becomes able to replace them.
Of course, this would be no liberation. It would simply be a new way of organizing the open-air prison in which Palestinians have been confined since 1967 — a prison shaped by occupation, now redesigned to appear as a “political settlement” while preserving the core structures of domination in a much-aggravated form.