interview with Gilbert Achcar
LAST MOMTHJ SAQI Books published Gilbert Achcar‘s new book The Gaza Catastrophe: The Genocide in World-Historical Perspective. Labour Hub interviewed the author about the book and the political events that gave rise to it. [In the United States, the publisher is the University of California Press. We have substituted U.S. publishers to the links to Achcar’s books referenced in this article.—The ATC Editors]
Labour Hub: Fifteen years ago, you wrote: “No national strategy in confronting the Zionist state is possible without relying on the combination of the Palestinian and Arab struggle with the effort to split Israeli Jewish society from within. This last goal requires Palestinian and Arab liberation forces to be able to address the Israeli Jews and detach a significant portion of them from the Zionist mindset.” Is this still a viable strategy, are we any nearer that goal and what concretely needs to happen to get closer to it?
Gilbert Achcar: Whether it is viable or not, allow me to first emphasise that this is the only possible strategy for bringing this long tragedy and the ordeal endured by the Palestinian people to an end that could usher in a true and lasting peaceful coexistence between Palestinians and Israelis. There is no alternative to that end: all other scenarios entail the continuation of occupation and violence or else an apocalyptic mayhem.
Now, to address more directly what is implied by your question, we are certainly not nearer such a goal, alas, but actually farther than at any previous time since 1948. That is due to the culmination of the long-term drift to the right of Israel’s society and polity, embodied in the present Netanyahu government — a coalition between the neofascist Likud party and the neo-Nazi gangs of Ben Gvir and Smotrich — and boosted by the disastrous effect of the 7th October attack on the Israeli public. The Jewish Israelis’ hostility to the Palestinian people has reached an all-time peak as attested by polls indicating that most of them support the expulsion from Gaza of its Palestinian inhabitants.
But Israel’s rightward drift has not been constant. In the wake of the 1988 Palestinian Intifada — a popular uprising organised by grassroots committees in Gaza and the West Bank — the Israeli society was positively impacted to the point that it brought back the Zionist Labourites to power and welcomed the Oslo agreements that they concluded with the Palestine Liberation Organization. Among Israeli intellectuals, we saw the development of a “post-Zionist” trend, advocating a shift from “Jewish state” to “state of all its citizens.”
This tendency was soon to be reversed by the dialectics of violence initiated by the Zionist far right (the murderous suicide attack of Palestinian worshippers by Baruch Goldstein in 1994), inaugurating a new cycle that would reach a first peak with Ariel Sharon’s most violent reinvasion of the Palestinian enclaves in 2002. Sharon surfed to power in 2001 on the wave that he himself had triggered by setting off in September 2000 the Second Intifada, which, unlike the first, took the form of armed clashes.
Nowadays, the prospect of a new pro-peace turn of the Israelis seems quite remote indeed, but it is no reason to abandon “optimism of the will” and the hope that an internationalist dialectics between Arabs/Palestinians and Israeli Jews might eventually prevail, rebounding from the present abysmal condition and facilitated by non-Israeli Jews, an increasingly important proportion of whom are being “detached from the Zionist mindset.”
LH: The militarization and rising authoritarianism of the Israeli state, while maintaining minimal democratic norms, albeit on a racialized basis – is this something that Western elites recognise in the trajectory of their own states, and perhaps therefore constitutes a significant factor in their support for Israel, despite the contempt in which Israel’s actions are held by so many of their own citizens?
GA: It depends on which Western elites you mean. For the neofascists who are on the rise almost everywhere in Western countries, yesteryear’s “cradle of liberalism,” the present Israeli state is certainly a beacon. Netanyahu has been a model for them for many years as well as an enabler, whitewashing their antisemitism and coopting them as allies of Israel on the common ground of anti-Muslim racism.
To say the same of the so-called liberal elites would be exaggerated: the likes of Keir Starmer, despite their apparently unstoppable drift to the right, have not yet reached a point where they would see in Netanyahu a model. They’d rather wish for the Israeli opposition to manage to defeat the present Israeli prime minister and get back to a semblance of liberalism — as fake as theirs. Note that the Israeli opposition is hardly better than Netanyahu’s coalition when it comes to war goals against the Palestinians (identified with Hamas) and Iran.
LH: For the last year and a half, some activists have participated in anti-war demonstrations, against Israel’s war on Palestine and against Russia’s war on Ukraine, with a banner saying “From Ukraine to Palestine, Occupation is a crime.” Would you agree that Russia’s unprovoked bombardment of Ukraine has encouraged and normalised Israel’s bombardment of Gaza — as Russia’s aggression is reciprocally normalised by Israel’s onslaught in turn?
GA: I don’t think that Israel needed any encouragement from Russia, or any other state for that matter. It has been claiming a colonial right over the land of Palestine long before Putin claimed a colonial right over Ukraine. From its inception, Israel is built on forceful occupation and annexation: it has waged war after war against the Palestinians and all its Arab neighbours.
The Israeli armed forces’ violence against civilians has steadily increased over time, with peaks reached with the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the repression of the Palestinian Intifada in 1988-1993, the 2002 onslaught on the West Bank and Gaza, the bombing of Lebanon in 2006, and the repeated onslaughts on Gaza since 2007.
So, if either of Israel or Russia normalised the other’s violence, it is the former rather than the latter. However, what has been much more important in encouraging and normalising Russia’s aggression on Ukraine is the US-UK 2003 invasion of Iraq, blatantly violating the so-called rules-based international order, as I showed in my book The New Cold War.
LH: Could a return of some semblance of a rules-based international order possibly emerge from a change of leadership in Washington? But is there any way that Atlanticist liberalism, which you argue is “now definitively discredited,” can possibly recover?
GA: I don’t think that Atlanticist liberalism can ever recover from its present agony. Reverting towards the rebuilding of a genuine rules-based international order — a semblance would no longer work — would take such a radical change of leadership in Washington that it wouldn’t usher in a renewal of Atlanticism, but the inauguration of a completely new chapter in world history, quite more progressive than what followed World War Two.
For now, the only genuine upholders of a rules-based international order are to be found in the Global South, with countries such as South Africa or China. Of the latter, let me emphasise that, despite its constant bashing in Western countries, it has been a constant upholder of the UN Charter in international relations — much more consistently so than any Western government. That applies to its original stance on Ukraine as well, as I pointed up some time ago.
LH: Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza is often characterised as the first live-streamed genocide in real time, which reinforces its undeniability. This month has seen commemorations of the Srebrenica genocide — also still not fully recognised by Western states as a genocide against the entire Bosnian people, and one in which these same states were arguably complicit. How useful do you think it is for campaigners in solidarity with Gaza to emphasise these parallels as part of a wider war on human rights, or is this a distraction from focusing on the specifics of Israel’s crimes?
GA: What campaigners have been principally emphasising is the double standard that makes Western governments acknowledge the massacre of some 3% of the population of Bosnia-Herzegovina as a genocide and refuse to acknowledge the qualification as genocide of the comparable proportion of Gazans killed since October 2023. In the same way, the double standard that led Western governments to severely condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 while they endorsed Israel’s invasion of Gaza in October 2023 has been very much commented on and was a key factor in the final discrediting of Atlanticist liberalism and its pretence of conforming to principles.
LH: As you say at the end, it’s hard to be optimistic about the situation, although as public pressure continues, Western elites are beginning to voice their concerns about Israel’s policy. Are there grounds to be more optimistic now than when you finished the book?
GA: I finished writing the book in February of this year. It ended on a deeply pessimistic prognosis about the outcome of the ongoing genocidal war on Gaza – not least because of the ‘second coming’ of Donal Trump to the White House. Nothing did happen since then, unfortunately, that would make me revise my pessimism regarding the foreseeable future.
The only source of hope that I can see — hope and not optimism, which is a distinction that is dear to me — is in the effect on the new generations of the ongoing catastrophes of the present world, from the climate’s increasingly catastrophic change to the Gaza catastrophe. Indeed, an increasing proportion of the young is revulsed at what is going on and bitter against those who enabled it, either as perpetrators or as bystanders.
I very much hope that out of this radicalisation, a new progressive movement will arise and develop, one that would assimilate the lessons of the failure of the 20th century’s left and lead the way towards the rollback of the present neofascist surge and a new drive towards another world than the increasingly ugly one in which we live.
Labour Hub, July 17, 2025