Jamie Stern-Weiner, (ed.), DELUGE: Gaza and Israel from Crisis to Cataclysm (OR Books, 2024).

Jadaliyya (J): What made you edit this book?

Jamie Stern-Weiner (JSW): Since Israel redeployed its military from Gaza’s interior to the perimeter, in 2005, it has kept the enclave in a condition of bare humanitarian subsistence while disciplining its occupied and besieged inhabitants through periodic massacres—in Israeli jargon, “mowing the lawn.” The resulting equilibrium was structurally unstable, if nothing else because Israel’s economic blockade rendered conditions in Gaza borderline unlivable. But Israel was able for many years to contain armed resistance in Gaza to levels it considered tolerable. It was clear almost immediately that the 7 October 2023 Hamas-led assault had decisively shattered this status quo, and that developments of long-term, qualitative significance were underway.

The book emerged from a conviction that any serious attempt to understand the significance and causes of the 7 October bloodshed, as well as the genocidal Israeli offensive that followed, had to begin by placing them in historical context. Few Western observers had followed the conditions in Gaza over the past decade—it apparently takes Israeli suffering to command that kind of attention—while much media coverage reinforced the resulting impression that the Hamas assault erupted out of the blue.

When UN Secretary-General António Guterres observed that 7 October “did not happen in a vacuum,” even this banal commonplace attracted controversy. In truth, it was an understatement: the present catastrophe has been decades in the making, while its architects have prominently included leading US and European institutions. The book presents an authoritative yet accessible guide to these critical contexts and uses them to explain the current crisis.

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?

JSW: The book has three main sections. The first establishes the critical backdrop to the current war—historical, economic, diplomatic, and strategic. In his sweeping history of Israel-Gaza relations since 1948, for example, Avi Shlaim argues that Israel has consistently employed violence as a means of first not last resort, in pursuit not of peaceful relations but Palestinians’ permanent subjugation. Sara Roy, the world’s leading authority on Gaza’s political economy, elucidates the strategic logic and devastating consequences of Israel’s seventeen-year-long Gaza blockade. And Colter Louwerse draws on original archival research to show how, were it not for US-Israeli opposition to a diplomatic settlement, the conflict could already have been resolved decades ago. 

The second section provides a snapshot analysis of developments since 7 October, in Gaza, the West Bank, and the wider region. Among the questions answered are: is Israel’s Gaza onslaught merely an escalation from previous rounds, or something qualitatively new? What did Hamas hope to achieve? Why has a second front not opened in the West Bank? And, how will the war end? Contributors include Palestinian human rights activist Musa Abuhashhash, leading Hamas scholar Khaled Hroub, Gazan journalist Ahmed Alnaouq, and Jadaliyya’s esteemed co-editor, the political analyst Mouin Rabbani.

The final section examines reverberations further afield, in Britain, Europe, and the United States. In the book’s closing chapter, for example, the firebrand socialist Member of the European Parliament, Clare Daly, presents a blistering indictment of European complicity in the Gaza genocide. She homes in on the pernicious role played by European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, who conducted a shadow foreign policy that bounced the rest of the European Union into unqualified support for Israel.

J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?

JSW: I have often written about Israel’s criminal conduct in Gaza—in 2018, for instance, I co-authored an article for Vice debunking justifications for Israel’s lethal suppression of the overwhelmingly nonviolent Great March of Return, and in 2020, I made the case that Israel cannot lawfully resort to force in order to prevent Palestinians breaking free of the Gaza prison.

My previous edited book on the Israel-Palestine conflict, 2018’s Moment of Truth, included a section devoted to Gaza, in which many issues were discussed that remain pertinent. Notably, the book featured a back-and-forth between Nathan Thrall and Ghaith al-Omari over whether and in what circumstances Hamas can be part of a diplomatic solution to the conflict, as well as an extended debate—which included a senior Hamas official squaring off against a Gazan academic—on the potential for armed struggle to end the Gaza siege.

My own research has focused in recent years on the politics of antisemitism, specifically, the ways in which that concept has been redefined to encompass legitimate, accurate criticism of Israel. I documented the diplomatic history of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Working Definition of Antisemitism and wrote a book-length critique of the contrived UK “Labour Party antisemitism crisis.” Deluge does not explore these topics in depth, although the instrumentalization of “antisemitism” to insulate Israel from critical scrutiny has, in fact, escalated the past half-year.  

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

JSW: The book features leading authorities on the conflict, and specialists will find new material here; for instance, the contributions by Louwerse and Yaniv Cogan both draw on original research. But all the chapters are accessibly presented, and the book as a whole is intended for the broadest possible audience. It is intended to be an intervention in an ongoing political, legal, and humanitarian catastrophe whose stakes, as South Africa’s application to the International Court of Justice made clear, could scarcely be more grave. Anyone frustrated by superficial and misleading headlines, wanting a deeper understanding of the ongoing horrors, and seeking a firmer foundation upon which to chart a less miserable path forward, will, I hope, find the book of use. 

J: What other projects are you working on now?

JSW: I am finishing up my doctoral research on the “New Antisemitism.” Warnings of a rampant “New Antisemitism” have been prominent since 7 October, but such claims are neither new—the notion was formulated already in the 1970s—nor strictly concerned with antisemitism. Instead, I argue, New Antisemitism discourse is better understood as part-and-parcel of the long-running international legitimacy war over Zionism/Israel dating back to the Mandate period. The key difference is that the “New Antisemitism” concept emerged after 1967, when a broad international consensus crystallized behind a two-state settlement of the conflict, and when the mainstream Palestinian leadership also embraced this framework. New Antisemitism allegations have therefore primarily served to delegitimize opponents of Israel’s occupation, not its existence.

Excerpt from the book (from the Editor’s Introduction, pp. 1-7, footnotes removed)

On October 7, 2023, hundreds of Palestinian militants burst the gates of Gaza, overwhelmed military installations, and rampaged across southern Israel. The operation was shocking in its boldness, the ensuing massacre for its brutality. But the conditions that led to the Hamas attack were long-standing. Gaza is a speck of coastline that is among the most densely populated areas on earth. Some 75 percent of its inhabitants are refugees driven from their homes to make way for the State of Israel in 1948, and their descendants. Israel occupied the Strip in 1967 and de facto annexed it without extending rights of citizenship to the inhabitants. After Palestinians revolted against Israeli military rule, in 1987, Israel crushed the uprising and then strengthened its grip on Gaza through various forms of confinement. By 2004, the head of Israel’s National Security Council could describe Gaza as “a huge concentration camp.”  In January 2006, the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, won democratic elections in Gaza and the West Bank. Israel and its allies responded by subjecting the occupied Palestinian population—already enduring the “worst economic depression in modern history” (Sara Roy, 2005)—to “possibly the most rigorous form of international sanctions imposed in modern times” (UN Special Rapporteur John Dugard, 2006).  After Hamas consolidated control in Gaza the following year, Israel tightened the screws further as it put Gaza under a comprehensive closure that has been enforced with varying degrees of intensity ever since.

The siege extinguished Gaza’s economy and reduced its people to penury. “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet,” a senior Israeli official explained, “but not to make them die of hunger.” The unemployment rate soared to among the highest in the world, four-fifths of the population were forced to rely on humanitarian assistance, three-quarters became dependent on food aid, more than half faced acute food insecurity, one in ten children were stunted by malnutrition, and over 96 percent of potable water became unsafe for human consumption. 

The head of the United Nations (UN) agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, observed in 2008 that

Gaza is on the threshold of becoming the first territory to be intentionally reduced to a state of abject destitution, with the knowledge, acquiescence and—some would say—encouragement of the international community.

The UN warned in 2015 that the cumulative impact of this “humanitarian implosion” (Amnesty International) might render Gaza “unlivable” within a half-decade. Israeli military intelligence agreed, whereas a subsequent UN analysis judged the projection overly optimistic.

Long before October 2023, then, Israel had turned Gaza into what the Economist termed a “human rubbish heap,” the Ha’aretz editorial board a “ghetto,” the International Committee of the Red Cross a “sinking ship.” It had reduced Gaza to what the UN high commissioner for human rights called a “toxic slum,” in which above two million people were “caged . . . from birth to death.” An Israeli officer stationed on the Gaza border distilled his mission there: “No development, no prosperity, only humanitarian dependency.” He might have added, forever.

Many in Gaza did not share this vision for their future, and so Israel found it prudent to periodically massacre them—what Israeli officials termed “mowing the lawn.” Some of these onslaughts responded to resistance emanating from Gaza; armed, as when Hamas fired projectiles into Israel in May 2021 following settler encroachments in occupied East Jerusalem, or unarmed, as in early 2018, when Palestinians demonstrated nonviolently along Gaza’s perimeter fence—scores were killed and thousands injured by Israeli snipers arrayed on the other side. But Israel’s most devastating offensives, in 2008 and 2014, were motivated by broader political objectives: to inspire fear in the Arab world and to thwart Hamas “peace offensives” that threatened to make Israel’s rejectionist diplomatic posture—its refusal to withdraw from Palestinian territory in exchange for peace—untenable. In the 2014 assault alone, approximately 1,600 civilians in Gaza were killed, including 550 children, and 18,000 homes were destroyed.

Expulsion. Annexation. Siege. Massacre. Injustice layered on injustice, atrocity compounding atrocity, sedimented savagery amounting in sum to a colossal crime against humanity—culminating in the blockade and bombardment of a refugee population, confined in a concentration camp, one-half of whom were children. It would surprise if suffering of this severity were a recipe for long-term stability. Israeli officials knew the “humanitarian condition in Gaza” was “progressively deteriorating”—this being the intended outcome of Israeli policy—and could predict that, “if it blows up, it’ll be in Israel’s direction.” But they apparently believed that by oscillating “between [military] operations and providing that level of aid to Gaza” sufficient to prevent its complete “collapse,” Palestinian eruptions could be contained within tolerable limits. Hamas will “rise up from time to time and hit us,” Israel’s former national security advisor acknowledged in 2018, but “[i]t can’t cause us any real damage.” If the timing, scale, and character of the October 7 attack came as a shock, the fact that people in Gaza would strike out at some point and in some fashion was not just predictable but priced in to Israel’s “conflict management” policy. Indeed, a former deputy to Israel’s national security advisor found in the Hamas-led assault, not proof of Gazans’ irrational barbarism, but confirmation of a historical universal: “Eventually the oppressed will rise against their oppressor.”

If what Amnesty International termed the “root causes” of the Gaza catastrophe were familiar, and if the resort to terrorism by Israel as well as Hamas had ample precedent, still, critical aspects of the crisis marked a departure:

First, there was a radical intensification in the magnitude of death and destruction inflicted. The authorities in Israel reported that Hamas-led militants killed some 1,200 people on October 7, including more than 800 civilians, and took 250 more captive. If these figures are correct, this means Palestinians killed more Israelis in one day than during the entire second intifada (inclusive of the bloody suicide bombings).

In retaliation for the Hamas operation and massacre, Israel turned Gaza into a howling wasteland. Over two months, Israeli forces killed more than 17,000 people, including more than 7,700 children. That’s almost as many children as were killed across all the world’s conflict zones over the previous three years combined. Gazan hospitals developed the acronym “WCNSF”—Wounded Child No Surviving Family—as hundreds of extended family units were wiped out. Nearly 85 percent of the population was internally displaced. More than 60 percent of homes were damaged or destroyed. Northern Gaza became “an uninhabitable moonscape” as broad swathes of the territory were erased. “Beit Hanoun is not only dead,” a correspondent for Le Monde reported in November, referring to a northern town, “Beit Hanoun no longer exists.” In what might have been a first in the annals of modern warfare, Israeli forces systematically targeted hospitals as they “completely obliterated” Gaza’s “healthcare infrastructure.” At the same time, Israel targeted water and sewage facilities and employed “starvation of civilians as a method of warfare” as it prevented deliveries of food, fuel, water, medicines, and electricity to the battered enclave. Inevitably, by mid-December, half the population of Gaza faced “severe hunger” while disease and lack of medical treatment threatened to increase the death toll by “multiples.”

Second, this ramping up of violence reflected a shift in Israel’s strategy. Before October 7, Israel sought to manage its conflict with the Palestinians by deploying economic “carrots” alongside military “sticks” to co-opt as well as deter Palestinian resistance. In the West Bank, many Palestinians came to acquire a material investment in the status quo. The emphasis in Gaza lay more on the “sticks”—those periodic bloodlettings—but there, too, a class of profiteers had congealed, even under the harsh blockade. Crucially, in the years leading up to 2023, Israeli planners thought that Hamas would prioritize control of a territory and ability to govern it over resistance. Hamas’s responsibility for providing public services in Gaza, together with its dependence on Israel for access to the resources needed to discharge this obligation, would induce the movement to abandon armed struggle and acquiesce in Israel’s overarching control.

The October 7 attack was an emphatic refusal of this role. Hamas would not become another Palestinian Authority, policing unlawfully annexed Palestinian territory on Israel’s behalf. Even as the Hamas assault made Israel’s conflict management approach a dead letter, the unqualified support extended by the US and EU in its wake gave Israel an opportunity to, as one member of Israel’s war cabinet declared, “change the . . . strategic reality.” Israel’s strategy accordingly shifted from mowing the lawn in Gaza to salting the earth; from perpetually deferring the Gaza question to definitively resolving it. To this end, Israel systematically destroyed the prerequisites for civilization in Gaza and sought to render the territory uninhabitable, while mobilizing US influence to persuade Egypt to accept masses of Gazan refugees. The refusal of Egypt and other Arab states to cooperate, together with mounting international pressure to limit the humanitarian disaster, may have precluded Israel from achieving these maximal objectives. But with half of Gaza reduced to rubble, half the population crammed into the southern city of Rafah, and Hamas not yet militarily vanquished, it was wholly unclear, at the time of writing, what a viable “day after” might look like. 

Third, the conflict may now have entered a zero-sum phase. The mainstream Palestinian leadership has for decades sought a two-state settlement of the conflict, while Hamas also attempted, after its election in 2006, to achieve this. Meanwhile, previous escalations in Gaza ended with the prospect, albeit never fulfilled, that the siege would be lifted and the possibility, however remote, that some kind of modus vivendi might be found. But after October 7, it is hard to foresee any Israeli government negotiating with Hamas on anything more substantial than a prisoner exchange. Hamas, for its part, may no longer be prepared to coexist with the State of Israel. On the one hand, Israel’s genocidal war will have multiplied ten-fold the bitterness and rage in Gaza, which was already substantial. On the other hand, if Hamas had previously reconciled to Israel’s existence as an immutable reality, the gravity of Israel’s operational and intelligence failures on October 7, together with Hamas’s impressive military performance, may have convinced them that Israel’s defeat is an option.