{"id":304526,"date":"2025-10-13T12:01:34","date_gmt":"2025-10-13T11:01:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=304526"},"modified":"2025-10-07T07:08:25","modified_gmt":"2025-10-07T06:08:25","slug":"oxford-jewish-historian-avi-shlaim-israel-committed-genocide-palestinians-have-right-to-resist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2025\/10\/oxford-jewish-historian-avi-shlaim-israel-committed-genocide-palestinians-have-right-to-resist\/","title":{"rendered":"Oxford Jewish Historian Avi Shlaim: Israel Committed Genocide, Palestinians Have Right to Resist"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Jewish Historian Avi Shlaim<\/p><\/div>\n

27 Sep 2025\u00a0<\/em>– Jewish Oxford University historian Prof. Avi Shlaim has openly condemned Israel\u2019s policies and praised Palestinian resistance. In an interview with Haaretz, Shlaim repeatedly stressed that Palestinians, including Hamas, have the right to resist occupation.<\/p>\n

\u201cKilling civilians is wrong, period,\u201d he said. \u201cBut Palestinians live under occupation. They have the right to resist, including armed resistance. Hamas initially struck military bases and killed soldiers, police, and security forces. That is not a war crime.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shlaim criticized Israel\u2019s assaults following the October 7 resistance operation as \u201ccompletely insane and irrational.\u201d He added: \u201cEven if Israel has the right to self-defense, the response must be within the limits of international law. I condemn Israel\u2019s response to the attack.\u201d<\/p>\n

He argued that Israel\u2019s occupation has long violated Palestinian rights. \u201cThe establishment of the State of Israel involved a massive injustice to the Palestinians. During the 1948 war, Israel carried out ethnic cleansing in Palestine. In June 1967 Israel completed by military force the conquest of all historic Palestine. The Palestinians were the victims of the Zionist project.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shlaim also condemned Zionism itself. \u201cIn school, I learned the Zionist version of the conflict and accepted it without question. We thought of Israel as a small, peace-loving country surrounded by hostile Arabs. I believed we had no choice but to fight,\u201d he said. Over decades, his view changed. \u201cI used to justify my change of opinion by saying that I didn\u2019t change; my country did. Israel began life as a settler-colonial movement.\u201d<\/p>\n

He stated that Hamas is a legitimate expression of Palestinian and Arab resistance. \u201cHamas is an integral part of Arab society. There\u2019s no conceivable solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that excludes Hamas\u2026 Hamas already says its issue isn\u2019t with Jews \u2013 it\u2019s with Israel and Zionism.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shlaim also criticized Israel\u2019s blockade of Gaza. \u201cIsrael refuses to allow humanitarian aid to civilians and uses starvation as a weapon of war. If that\u2019s not genocide, I don\u2019t know what is. It\u2019s about intent. In World War II, Jews were defenseless victims of Nazi Germany. Today, the Palestinians are defenseless victims.\u201d<\/p>\n

He extended his critique to Israeli society. \u201cBenjamin Netanyahu is not a dictator. He was elected prime minister. Therefore Israeli society as a whole bears responsibility for these war crimes. Israeli society today has no inhibition about expressing racism. What used to be below the surface is now proudly voiced \u2013 by the leadership downward.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shlaim also highlighted the role of Western powers in the current situation. \u201cThe British laid the groundwork for the Nakba and betrayed the Palestinians. The Balfour Declaration ignored the rights of 90 percent of the population, who were Palestinian.\u201d<\/p>\n

The historian has actively supported removing Hamas from Britain\u2019s terror list. \u201cHamas exercises its right under international law to resist the Israeli occupation. I don\u2019t support Hamas in other ways, but I study its history and its struggle to restore Palestinian self-determination.\u201d<\/p>\n

Reflecting on his Iraqi heritage, Shlaim described his family as Arab first, Jewish second. \u201cWe experienced coexistence with Arabs. It wasn\u2019t some distant dream. It was a daily reality before the rise of Zionism and the establishment of the State of Israel.\u201d He also condemned the Israeli state for marginalizing Jews from Arab lands. \u201cOnce in Israel, we were subjected to a systematic process of de-Arabization and catapulted into an alien, Ashkenazi-dominated country.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI now think there is no longer a meaningful distinction between Israel proper and Israel in the West Bank. It\u2019s apartheid and Jewish supremacy. I\u2019ve shifted from the center to a radical stance,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

He concluded that Israel\u2019s actions will backfire. \u201cIsrael will come to regret the war against Hamas because Hamas\u2019 successors will be even more radical. Israel does not like moderate Palestinians; it sees them as a threat. It undermines them and paves the way for more extreme figures.\u201d<\/p>\n

Go to Original – qudsnen.co<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

27 Sep 2025\u00a0– Jewish Oxford University historian Prof. Avi Shlaim has openly condemned Israel\u2019s policies and praised Palestinian resistance. In an interview with Haaretz, Shlaim repeatedly stressed that Palestinians, including Hamas, have the right to resist occupation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":304527,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[87,865,88,427],"class_list":["post-304526","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-palestine-israel-gaza-genocide","tag-gaza","tag-genocide","tag-israel","tag-palestine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304526","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=304526"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304526\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":304528,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304526\/revisions\/304528"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/304527"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=304526"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=304526"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=304526"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}