The following is an essay that first appeared in the July 24, 2025, issue of the London Review of Books (LRB), a prominent literary journal based in London, United Kingdom.
The author of the article is Adam Shatz, LRB’s U.S. editor. Shatz is also a contributor to The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and other publications. He is a visiting professor in the Human Rights Program of Bard College in New York.
In this review, Shatz raises important issues that deserve further discussion in light of the gruesome October 7, 2023, attack led by Hamas that targeted civilians in Israel, the genocidal war Israel unleashed in retaliation on the entire population of Gaza, and a new wave of violence by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and Zionist settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank. He doesn’t mince any words in describing the horrors the Israeli regime has been inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza for nearly two years.
“As much as forced displacement, killing, starvation and humiliation, the promotion of criminality… has become a defining feature of Israel’s rule inside Gaza,” Shatz points out.
“The regime of occupation, apartheid, ethnic cleansing and now genocide has eroded Israel’s moral capital, and opposition has not only grown, but has begun to make itself felt in a new generation of progressive activists and politicians,” says Shatz in concluding his essay.
“Even so, it’s extremely difficult to imagine the dismantling of Israel’s apartheid system, or to imagine a serious challenge to its domination emerging anytime soon. In a world of rising authoritarianism and ethnonationalism, where the rule of law has all but crumbled, the brutal, pitiless state run by Netanyahu looks more like a pioneer than an outlier.”
Shatz also examines political developments in the Mideast and beyond in the aftermath of the recent U.S.-Israeli war on Iran. He spells out the implications of last year’s Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which decimated the Iranian-backed Hezbollah and caused a substantial death toll among the broader civilian Lebanese population, and of the overthrow of the Assad dictatorship in Syria and continuous incursions and bombings of Syria by the IDF since Assad’s demise.
“Even without any evidence of a Syrian intent to attack, even in the presence of clear conciliatory signals from the al-Sharaa government, Israel has continued to go after supposed weapons caches and to occupy parts of southern Syria,” Shatz’s essay points out.
This was evident in the Israeli bombings of Syria’s presidential palace and defense ministry in Damascus on July 16, 2025, in response to armed clashes between Druse militias and Bedouin tribes in Suweida, in the country’s south.
About a year ago, on June 27, 2024, World-Outlook published another essay by the same writer, Author Adam Shatz on ‘Israel’s Descent.’
In introducing that article, World-Outlook noted that “we have expressed our own views on the Palestinian national liberation struggle, the history of Israel’s creation as a colonial settler state, and the character of the October 7 attack by Hamas, in several previous articles. These include The Palestinian Struggle and Lessons from South Africa, On the Character of the Oct. 7 Attack by Hamas, Why Opposition to Zionism is Not Antisemitism, and others.”
We also expressed our views recently on the imperialist assault on Iran in the editorial Oppose U.S.-Israeli War on Iran.
World-Outlook is publishing the review that follows for the information of our readers. The headline, text, and endnotes below are from the original. Photos and breakers (or subheadings) are by World-Outlook. Due to its length, we are publishing Shatz’s latest essay in two parts, the second of which follows.
— World-Outlook editors
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(This is the second of two parts. The first can be found in Part I.)
The World since 7 October
By Adam Shatz
In The Arabs and the Holocaust, published in 2010 and recently reissued, Gilbert Achcar, a Marxist scholar of Lebanese origin, wrote of the 1948 Nakba: ‘It cannot fairly be said that the “uprooting” of the Palestinians … has been exceptionally extensive or cruel.’ Measured against the standards of the French army in Algeria, ‘the Israeli army pales.’ As Achcar admits in his new book, The Gaza Catastrophe, it wouldn’t be possible to write these lines about Israel now.[1] The catastrophe of the last two years far exceeds that of the Nakba, and ‘deserves the strongest Arabic name for catastrophe: Karitha’.
The Karitha’s consequences are already being felt well beyond Gaza: in the West Bank, where Israeli soldiers and settlers have presided over an accelerated campaign of displacement and killing (more than a thousand West Bank Palestinians have been killed since 7 October); inside Israel, where Palestinian citizens are subject to increasing levels of ostracism and intimidation; in the wider region, where Israel has established itself as a new Sparta; and in the rest of the world, where the inability of Western powers to condemn Israel’s conduct – much less bring it to an end – has made a mockery of the rules-based order that they claim to uphold.
After the 1967 war, Isaac Deutscher recalled a German phrase, ‘Man kann sich totsiegen’ – ‘you can triumph yourself to death.’ The same is true of Israel’s wars today, and for largely the same reasons. ‘Unless Israel decides to forcibly expel hundreds of thousands or even millions of Palestinians into Egypt or Jordan,’ Yezid Sayigh, a Palestinian analyst based in Beirut, told me, ‘it can’t overcome the principal obstacle to total colonisation, which is the fact that the Palestinians are still there, in Gaza and the West Bank. Which is to say: Israel has set itself on a trajectory for which it has no solutions other than a final solution, and final solutions aren’t easy to implement.
I don’t think Israel will be able to go quite there in the way Hitler managed, but we’re closer to that situation than we ever were, and in the West Bank the settlers are emerging as the gauleiters of a new and far more brutal order.’ As Sayigh sees it, ‘in a world where the right and far right are on the rise everywhere’, Israel has found it easier to evade criticism since it discovered a growing number of admirers in the West, Latin America and India of its model of ethnonationalism, racial discrimination and reliance on brute force. Nor, he adds, has it faced much opposition from the liberal ‘centre’, which has presided over the growth of ‘a highly restrictive legal framework for dissent and public protest, not only with respect to Palestine, but also with respect to the militarisation of police, the increasing powers of the executive over the judiciary’.
It’s easy to satirise the racist absurdities and linguistic contortions of the Trump administration when it welcomes white South African farmers as ‘refugees’ from an anti-white ‘genocide’ (even as it continues to fund a genocidal war); or when Stephen Miller, noting the presence of ‘all the foreign flags’ at a demonstration in LA against deportations, calls the city ‘occupied territory’. But neither the Trump administration nor the far right has a monopoly on the abuse of the word ‘antisemitism’. As Mark Mazower writes in a forthcoming study, On Antisemitism: A Word in History, after 7 October ‘no one wanted to be called an antisemite, and yet if you believed the pundits, antisemites were everywhere, and it sounded like Manhattan was Berlin on the eve of Kristallnacht.’[2]
The false conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism
No word, in the last few years, has made such an outsized contribution to the attack on academic and intellectual freedom, or to acts of repression, arrests and deportation. ‘What was striking about the moment,’ Ross Barkan writes of pro-Palestinian protests after 7 October in Fascism or Genocide: How a Decade of Political Disorder Broke American Politics, ‘was how much had changed since [the Black Lives Matter protests of] 2020. In a little over three years, the most influential institutions in the worlds of academia, the arts and multinational finance had evolved from fully genuflecting in front of zealous young activists to trying to silence and crush them. The difference, obviously, was the cause these activists had taken up.’[3]
In the early 20th century, and well into the mid-century, the struggle against antisemitism was a left-liberal cause, allied with other movements combating ethnonationalism and racial discrimination, including civil rights. Today it is well on its way, particularly in the United States but also in parts of Western Europe, to being annexed by an authoritarian right that wants to dismantle democracy in favour of ethnonationalism. It’s no wonder Israel’s greatest admirers are Trump, Fidesz in Hungary and France’s Rassemblement National. Anti-antisemitism now serves the purpose antisemitism (and anticommunism) once did.
Trump and his allies continue to cultivate close ties with actual antisemites – Nick Fuentes, Kanye West, Andrew Tate et al – while Jewish leaders such as Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League see no cause for concern when Elon Musk gives the Hitler salute, and cheer on the attempt to deport Mahmoud Khalil, Mohsen Mahdawi and other student activists. Traditionally pro-Israel Jewish organisations have become crucial appendages of a movement that seeks to denationalise, and then deport, foreign-born dissidents, often on false allegations of antisemitism.
The question of Palestine now figures almost as prominently in American politics as the Jewish question did when European democracies faced the threat of fascism. Like the Jewish question, it has become entangled with other concerns: antiracism, intellectual freedom, citizenship, the right to assembly, cosmopolitanism, social justice, opposition to right-wing authoritarianism and neoliberalism.
The most vivid illustration of Palestine’s growing impact on US politics is Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the Democratic primary for New York mayor. Mamdani, a 33-year-old Muslim progressive, ran a brilliant campaign, emphasising how unaffordable the city has become for working people. By cross-endorsing with Brad Lander, a Jewish progressive, he won 56 per cent of the vote in the final round, decisively defeating Andrew Cuomo, the former governor of New York, who, despite having been disgraced following allegations of sexual harassment, was backed by much of New York’s establishment.
The New York Democratic machine and the New York Times, which has been running hit pieces on Mamdani unconvincingly disguised as reportage, dislike him because of his democratic socialist convictions, but the chief focus of their attacks has been his opposition to Israel’s occupation and his criticisms of the war on Gaza.
Since the last weeks of the campaign, Mamdani has found himself denounced as an antisemite, a jihadist, a supporter of the 9/11 attacks, because he spoke of ‘apartheid’ and ‘genocide’ in Palestine, and because he refused to say that he supported Israel’s ‘right to exist as a Jewish state’. (He said that he supports its right to exist as ‘a state with equal rights’ – a position that, from a conservative Zionist perspective, is tantamount to calling for Jews to be thrown into the sea.)
‘Zohran “little Muhammad” Mamdani is an antisemitic, socialist, communist who will destroy the great City of New York,’ Andy Ogles, a Republican congressman from Tennessee, wrote on X. ‘He needs to be DEPORTED.’ Trump, who also poured scorn on Mamdani on social media, said he would investigate the matter. The Kahanist group Betar, which has supplied the Trump administration with a list of students to be deported, urged Jews to evacuate the city immediately.
As Mamdani came under attack, ‘liberal’ centrists in his own party were nowhere to be found, and some echoed Republican invective. Yet he held his ground, supported by a team that included both Jewish and Muslim leftists. He was the number two choice of Jewish Democrats, an encouraging sign that, for a good portion of Jewish New Yorkers, Mamdani’s anti-Zionism isn’t a problem.
In fact, it may even be an asset, since, as Peter Beinart wrote recently, support for Israel has become ‘a symbol of the timidity and inauthenticity of party elites’. According to Gallup, only one in three Democrats has a favourable view of Israel. While the party’s leaders – notably Senator Chuck Schumer and Congressman Hakeem Jeffries of New York, both of whom hesitated at first to defend Mamdani against accusations of antisemitism and still haven’t endorsed his mayoral bid – oppose putting any conditions on US military aid to Israel, nearly half of Democratic voters think it should be reduced.
A similar dynamic can be observed in the UK, where a robust Palestine solidarity campaign is putting renewed pressure on the Labour government. Here, too, there has been increasingly fierce repression of dissent and protest. Palestine Action has been classified as a terrorist organisation and the duo Bob Vylan are facing a criminal investigation for leading a chant of ‘Death to the IDF’ at Glastonbury – meanwhile, the government continues to supply Israel with spare parts for the F35 planes it uses to bomb Gaza.
Israel’s genocide in Gaza can’t be spinned as Palestinian victory
As for the people of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem – not to mention the Palestinian citizens of Israel – it remains unclear, nearly two years on, whether their immense sacrifices in the war will bring them any closer to statehood or freedom. Achcar says that the 7 October attack was ‘the most catastrophic miscalculation in the history of anticolonial struggle’.
A strong case can be made that it has set back the Palestinian struggle for the foreseeable future. Al-Aqsa Flood united Israeli Jews behind the war instead of sowing divisions among them; it played to Israel’s advantage, its enormous military strength, and gave it a pretext not only to flatten Gaza and to expand its operations inside the West Bank, but to neutralise the Axis of Resistance: Hizbullah, the Houthis, Iran.
According to the retired Israeli major-general Yitzhak Brik, Hamas’s military wing in Gaza has returned to its pre-war strength, having recruited more fighters than Israel has killed since 7 October. Merely by surviving, it has ‘won’. Nonetheless, no matter how hard Hamas has tried to spin the war, one can scarcely portray a genocide as a victory for one’s people, even if it forces the world to pay attention to their plight.
The massacre of 7 October did, however, lay bare the illusion that Israel could continue to subjugate the Palestinians without provoking a response – the illusion that lay at the heart of the never-ending ‘peace process’. In their probing book on the failure of that process, Tomorrow Is Yesterday, Malley and Hussein Agha – former advisers to the US and the Palestinians, respectively – describe the Gaza war as ‘the past’s formidable revenge’.[4]
The ‘return of the past’, they write, has been a ‘harsh rebuke to the hopes many held for the future’, and they include themselves in this. But ‘the issue is not so much why things unfolded as they did. It is why so many persisted for so long in thinking it could be otherwise.’
Sidestepping the scars of 1948 in favour of the apparently more ‘manageable’ problem of the 1967 borders, ‘diplomats expended their efforts to get Palestinian and Israeli leaders to speak the desired, talismanic words, and then welcomed or excommunicated them based on whether they uttered them or not.’ The virtues of the peace process and the inevitability of a two-state settlement based on the 1967 lines were heralded in much the same way as the virtues and inevitability of ‘liberal democracy’ after 1989: in this ‘end of history’ dogma, there was no alternative. Meanwhile, those who refused to utter the talismanic words – Palestinian Islamists, but also right-wing settlers and religious Jews – prepared for a different future, one that looked more like ‘yesterday’.
For Israeli Jews, Hamas’s attack was not merely shocking, it was unfathomable – a regression to the intercommunal violence of the British Mandate. But, as Walter Benjamin wrote, the ‘current amazement that the things we are experiencing are “still” possible … is not the beginning of knowledge – unless it is the knowledge that the view of history that gives rise to it is untenable.’ Instead of questioning their view of history, most Israeli Jews took refuge in an older, fatalistic view, and interpreted the attack as a pogrom, a repetition of the persecution many of their ancestors had suffered in Europe.
‘It’s not genocide, it’s pesticide.’
The next step, dehumanising the Palestinians of Gaza, came easily, since it was an outgrowth of the anti-Arab racism inculcated in them from an early age. ‘If you feed Gazans, they eventually eat you,’ the Israeli stand-up comedian Gil Kopatz posted. ‘It’s not genocide, it’s pesticide.’ According to a survey commissioned by Penn State, more than 80 per cent of Israeli Jews now support the expulsion of Gazans. Compassion for Palestinians is taboo except among a fringe of radical activists. When Ayman Odeh, a Palestinian member of the Knesset, posted a tweet celebrating a recent prisoner exchange, he was denounced for seeming to equate the predicament of jailed Palestinians and Jewish hostages: ‘Your presence pollutes the Knesset,’ a colleague told him.
The authoritarian, increasingly fascist drift of Israeli politics, which long predates 7 October, is horrifying but not surprising. What is surprising, or at least striking, is that the war has provoked so little reflection among Western policymakers, who continue to cling to the notion that a two-state settlement will resolve the conflict – and that an Israeli leader could be persuaded to support the creation of a Palestinian state.
‘The Gaza war offered a chance for clarity, honesty and introspection,’ Malley and Agha write, ‘because it was when everything got out of hand.’ Instead, ‘the world after 7 October was built on lies,’ and America’s were the ‘most startling because least necessary’. Chief among them was the lie that the US was doing its utmost to protect the people of Gaza from the very weapons it was sending to Israel.
In many corners of the Middle East relief came more readily than despair at the thought of bidding Biden – or, as they saw it, Biden/Obama – farewell … What Arab leaders … resented was America’s moral vanity, feckless expressions of empathy, and convictions devoid of courage. If you are not going to lift a finger for the Palestinians, have the decency not to pretend to care. At least with Trump, they felt, they knew what they were getting.
Some of what they’ve got they like: Trump has lifted sanctions on Syria, negotiated directly with Hamas, even toyed with the idea of undoing some of the sanctions against Iran. When he described Israel and Iran as two countries ‘that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing’, he expressed a blunt truth, and it was appreciated by some in the region. ‘The fact that Trump does not feel indebted to the traditional foreign policy establishment means that his instincts have not been clouded by the cobwebs that have affected the thinking of successive Democratic and Republican administrations,’ Malley told me. But ‘he has not replaced antiquated beliefs with innovative thinking but with personal, capricious instincts.’
Malley and Agha argue that, for negotiations between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs to work, they will have to include ‘powerful groups who felt that what was discussed was at odds with their core beliefs’ – the rejectionists of both camps, from Palestinian Islamists to Jewish settlers and the ultra-Orthodox. They believe that something could come out of a more open-ended conversation, with no clear horizon, or ‘solution’.
These groups, they write, might even find a way of co-existing in the same land without renouncing their larger aspirations, as Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland have done since the Good Friday Agreement.
What would it take for such talks to occur? The Israelis, who are more isolated but also more powerful than ever, aren’t keen to have them. As the human rights lawyer Michael Sfard wrote recently in Haaretz, Israeli Jews have been ‘high on drugs full of swaggering slogans and floating in military ecstasy’ since the war with Iran; ending the suffering in Gaza or creating a Palestinian state are the furthest things from their minds.
They insist that they can never trust Palestinians after 7 October, while Palestinians have even less reason to trust them after the genocide they have visited on Gaza, to say nothing of the ongoing and increasingly violent campaign to colonise the West Bank, in which tens of thousands of Palestinians have been driven from their homes – the largest displacement there since 1967. Even if Israelis and Palestinians agreed to sit down together, who would broker the talks?
The asymmetry between the two sides is overwhelmingly in Israel’s favour, and the US has invariably acted as its advocate in negotiations. Malley and Agha know this, of course. The conclusion of their mostly grim and unflinching book feels, at times, like wishful thinking: what – and who – would compel any of these people to talk to one another, especially after the genocide in Gaza? Even if they did, what would this accomplish? The proposal is, to say the least, untimely. But the ground may be shifting, and, along with it, the balance of forces.
The regime of occupation, apartheid, ethnic cleansing and now genocide has eroded Israel’s moral capital, and opposition has not only grown, but has begun to make itself felt in a new generation of progressive activists and politicians. Even so, it’s extremely difficult to imagine the dismantling of Israel’s apartheid system, or to imagine a serious challenge to its domination emerging anytime soon. In a world of rising authoritarianism and ethnonationalism, where the rule of law has all but crumbled, the brutal, pitiless state run by Netanyahu looks more like a pioneer than an outlier.
11 July
(This was the second of two parts. The first can be found in Part I.)
NOTES
[1] Saqi, 256 pp., June, £16.99, 978 1 84925 091 7
[2] On Antisemitism will be published by Allen Lane in September.
[3] Verso, 208 pp., July, £17.99, 978 1 80429 938 8
[4] Tomorrow Is Yesterday: Life, Death and the Pursuit of Peace in Israel/Palestine will be published in September by Farrar, Straus.
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Categories: Palestine/Israel, World Politics