Israel conducting 2nd Nakba, says Israeli-british historian
Istanbul, Turkey - 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 neighbourhoods 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 Defence Minister Yoav Gallant’s statement that ‘we are fighting with human animals’.
He stressed: “This is very worrying because dehumanising the enemy paves the way to genocide. Israelis are dehumanising not just Hamas, but the entire Palestinian people.”
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.