Genocide in Gaza: Israel’s Long War on Palestine

Emeritus Professor of International Relations at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of St Antony’s College, Avi Shlaim is a globally renowned historian of the modern Middle East. He held a British Academy Research Readership between 1995-1997; a British Academy Research Professorship between 2003-2006; he was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 2006; and he was awarded a British Academy Medal for lifetime achievement in 2017.

An Arab Jew, he was born in Baghdad in 1945; grew up in Israel; served in the Israel Defence Forces; and received his university education at Cambridge and the London School of Economics. He is based at the Middle East Centre at St Antony’s College, where his main research interest continues to be the Arab-Israeli conflict, mostly recently the genocide in Gaza. He became widely known as one of the “New Historians,” a small group of Israeli scholars who put forward critical interpretations of the history of Zionism and Israel, from the late 1980s onwards.

Avi Shlaim is a believer in the subversive function of history, in using archival sources to challenge the received wisdom and to dispel national myths. He believes that “The historian’s most fundamental task is not to chronicle but to evaluate… to subject the claims of all the protagonists to rigorous scrutiny and reject all those claims, however deeply cherished, that do not stand up.”