Gulcin Kazan Doger
20 January 2024•Update: 21 January 2024
- ‘Scale of the carnage and the killing and the indiscriminate attack on civilians and civilian neighborhoods would justify the term genocide,' says Avi Shlaim
- 'Talking about a second war of independence is meaningless because no one is threatening Israel's independence,' says Avi ShlaimISTANBUL
Israeli-British historian Avi Shlaim said the scale of destruction and brutality in Gaza is like that "Israel is conducting a second Nakba today."
Professor Avi Shlaim, faculty member of politics at the international relations department at Oxford University, evaluated the Israel-Palestine conflict and the displacement of Palestinians since 1948 in an interview with Anadolu.
"You do not have the right to defend yourself against the people that you occupy. It is the people who are under (Israeli) occupation who have the right to resist, including the right to armed resistance," he said.
Regarding whether Israel committed genocide in Gaza, Shlaim said: "What is absolutely clear is that Israel is carrying out the ethnic cleansing of the Gaza stream."
"I believe that scale of the carnage and the killing and the indiscriminate attack on civilians and civilian neighborhoods would justify the term genocide," he said.
He defined genocide. "There has to be the genocidal intent as well as the practice, and there is ample evidence from the statements by Israeli leaders that they have a genocidal intent," he said
"(Israeli) President Itzhak Herzog said that there are no innocent people in Gaza. Well over 7,000 children have been killed.
They surely are innocent people," he stressed.
Shlaim pointed out that the majority of casualties in Gaza are civilians, not Hamas fighters, and expressed concern about Israel's Defense Minister Yoav Gallant's statement: "We are fighting with human animals."
He stressed: "This is very worrying because dehumanizing the enemy paves the way to genocide. Israelis are dehumanizing not just Hamas, but the entire Palestinian people."
'Israel is conducting a second Nakba today'
Shlaim argued that Israel aims to evacuate residents from Gaza as much as possible and push them from the North Sinai border to Egyptian territories.
He said: "Israel has possibly displaced 1.9 of a total of 2.3 million Palestinians from north to south, possibly displaced them. That's a war crime."
"When you look at the scale of the destruction and the carnage that Israel is carrying out in Gaza today, carnage on an unprecedented scale, destruction of 60% of the houses in Gaza, using starvation as a weapon of war, then it's difficult to avoid the conclusion that today Israel is enacting a second Nakba," he said.
Describing the Nakba as not a one-time event, Shlaim stated, "Benjamin Netanyahu said his country is waging its second war of independence."
"The first war of independence happened in 1948. Talking about a second war of independence is meaningless because no one is threatening Israel's independence," he stressed.
Shlaim said the Hamas attack was about liberating Palestinian lands, not destroying Israel.
"So talking about a second war of independence is quite meaningless, but what is meant, in my opinion, is that, like the first war of independence brought about the Nakba, this current so-called war of independence will bring about the second Nakba," he added.
*Writing by Alperen Aktas
