Jamie Stern-Weiner (ed.). Deluge: Gaza and Israel from Crisis to Cataclysm
(OR Books, 2024)
Publisher’s description: The Hamas massacre and the genocidal Israeli campaign which followed together mark a historic turning point in the Israel-Palestine conflict. The reverberations have also shaken politics far beyond, not least in Europe and the United States, where gigantic, round-the-clock protests for Palestinian rights pitted politicians against the public and exposed a growing statist authoritarianism.
In this groundbreaking book—the first published about the 2023 Gaza war—leading Palestinian, Israeli, and international authorities put these momentous developments in context and provide an initial taking-stock.
Why did Hamas attack? What is Israel trying to achieve? Did this catastrophe have to happen? And is there a way forward? The book’s expert contributors address these and other questions, which have never been more urgent.
Reviews:
Deluge: Gaza and Israel from Crisis to Cataclysm, edited by Jamie Stern-Weiner, is an invaluable book, for experts and novices alike. That it should be so is in part testimony to the abject quality of western media coverage of this subject.
The 13 authors featured here – ranging from celebrated academics such as Avi Shlaim, professor emeritus at Oxford University, to independent contributors such as “RJ”, a “researcher and humanist living in the United States” – are all firm supporters of the Palestinian cause.
But none of the chapters is a polemic. Rather, for the most part, the book constitutes a simple statement of bald facts of which many western readers will be shamefully ignorant.
Chapters by Shlaim and fellow academics Colter Louwerse and Khaled al-Hroub map the history of Gaza and Hamas. That of Hamas is inextricably bound up with the failure of its secular predecessor at the forefront of the Palestinian struggle, Yasser Arafat’s Fatah, which dominated the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO).
A powerful chapter on the “econicide” of Gaza by Harvard academic Sara Roy lays out in detail the Israeli policy of what she calls “de-development”.
Louwerse argues convincingly that, rather than being the product of Palestinian intransigence, Israeli violence has frequently been aimed at thwarting any possibility of negotiation and compromise.
None of the contributors to Deluge seeks to justify the slaughter of civilians that followed. But Ahmad Alnaouq’s chapter on the death of 21 members of his extended family in a single bombing – the most personal in the book – is a powerful indictment of the savagery of the Israeli response.
Chapters by Mitchell Plitnick, a former co-director of Jewish Voice for Peace, and Hangari paint a dispiriting picture of how allegations of antisemitism continue to be wielded to demonise and delegitimise the Palestinian solidarity movement in the US and the UK.
“The contest of Palestinian rights in the United States [has] been largely relegated to a battle over the very legitimacy of support for those rights,” writes Plitnick. White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre described the small handful of members of Congress calling for a ceasefire as “repugnant” and “disgraceful”. Middle East Eye