Genocide in Perspective

David Finkel

Gaza Catastrophe
The Genocide in World-Historical Perspective
By Gilbert Achcar
University of California Press, August 2025, 240 pages, $22.95 paperback.

“IN WHAT SENSE is Israel’s genocidal on­slaught on the Gaza Strip a consequence of the Hamas-led attack on 7 October 2023?”

Gilbert Achcar poses the question at the beginning of his new (August 2025) book Gaza Catastrophe. His answer encapsulates the catastrophe in one paragraph:

“The best way to answer this question is to resort to an allegory. Imagine a Native American who, having intended to set a few houses on fire in a nearby white settler colony, inadvertently sets off the gigantic blast of a huge buildup of explosive material, purposely amassed with the intention of inflicting death and mayhem on the native reservation to which the arsonist belongs. The same type of causality pertains to both the deadly attack of 7 October and the Gaza genocide.” (7)

The book pulls together much of the author’s writing before and since October 7, including background analyses spanning three decades from 1994 to 2024 — comprising a primer on the Zionist movement, the “peace process” debacle and the development of Hamas — and timely articles and columns written in the wake of October 7 (published at his website).

These sections are sandwiched between a major introductory chapter “Reflections on the Gaza Catastrophe and its World-Historical Significance,” and an Epilogue titled “Enter Trump.”

Regarding the expectation of Trump’s “arm-twisting of Netanyahu for the sake of peace,” Achcar writes:

“The period preceding Donald Trump’s inauguration and its immediate aftermath deserves a special mention in future history books as one of the most striking instances of a widespread epidemic of wishful thinking.” (197)

While Trump and Netanyahu (at the present moment) are not on the same page about launching war with Iran, the U.S. administration’s indifference to mass death, displacement and starvation in Gaza and rampant ethnic cleansing throughout Palestine is a daily-confirmed constant.

It must be said that this book is essential reading, but not pleasant for anyone. It will give no comfort to deniers of the genocide, or apologists for the administration of Joe Biden, whose mantra throughout his political career was “You don’t have to be a Jew to be a Zionist.”

Even while giving full and unconditional U.S. support to Israel’s carnage in Gaza, the wretched Biden was played by Netanyahu in a manner similar to how the loudmouth Trump is currently being played by Vladimir Putin over the torture of Ukraine.

Nor will Achcar’s account be pleasing to anyone with illusions about the role of Hamas in the Palestinian struggle, culminating in “7 October 2025: A Catastrophic Miscalculation.”

He reminds us how previously “the clearest illustration of the counterproductive character of Hamas’s violent strategy is what happened in May 2021, when the movement’s action aborted the Unity Intifada that had started in Jerusalem on the sixth day of that month, and over the following days rapidly spread to the West Bank, and even to Palestinian citizens of Israel.”

That upsurge collapsed after Hamas and Islamic Jihad launched some rockets toward Israel, which set in motion a predictable brutal repression and “aborted the budding Intifada, demobilizing the Palestinian youngsters who had set it in motion.” (20-21)

As for October 7, Achcar dissects the messianic delusions of the leadership of the military wing of Hamas, producing “what has been the most catastrophic miscalculation ever in the history of anticolonial struggle,” with its expectations of uprisings throughout Palestine and the entire region “which a rational mind can only perceive as a rather pitiful instance of taking one’s dreams for realities.” (22, 24)

At the same time, even for those of us who agree with Achcar’s Marxist approach and who thought we had few remaining illusions about what imperialism and setter colonialism do to the world’s people, the Gaza genocide — which is already an order of magnitude greater than the 1948 Nakba — has been absolutely shattering, and is nowhere near being concluded. And its implications, Achcar suggests, are truly “world-historical.”

In this brief summary, there isn’t space to cover Achcar’s exploration of the disintegration of what was called a “rule-based international order.” In his important previous book The New Cold War (2023), the author expressed some hope that the United Nations and the surrounding institutional framework represented at least hopeful steps toward a better future.

Today, in the wake of events including NATO expansion, Russia’s annexationist invasion of Ukraine and the rise of the far right globally:

“Western condoning of the Gaza genocide has indeed been the final nail in the coffin of that purported rule-based order. The Western promise of rule of law made in 1945 and renewed in 1990 is now dead…May this relapse of international relations into barbarism be reversed before it leads to a new global catastrophe.” (51)

July-August 237, ATC 237