The Catastrophe Was the Point: Gilbert Achcar’s Dialectic of Gaza

Gilbert Achcar’s The Gaza Catastrophe is not a plea for sympathy. It is a political weapon. Written in the midst of genocide, it strips away the euphemisms, the diplomatic theatre, and the moral fog. This war, he argues, is a settler-colonial project. Accelerated to its most brutal form, with the full backing of the Western powers who claim to uphold human rights. Achcar names the system, maps its historical scaffolding, and indicts not only Israel but the global order that enables it. This is not a book of mourning. It is a call to act.

Gilbert Achcar’s The Gaza Catastrophe is not just another book on Gaza. It is an indictment. And not just of Israel, though the state’s name appears on nearly every page. It is an indictment of the global system that made genocide possible—legal, palatable, even bureaucratically inevitable. This is not a book about a tragedy. It is a book about a crime. And the crime, Achcar insists from the start, is not merely the act of destruction but the logic that made that destruction thinkable.

The title is deliberate. This is not a catastrophe. It is the catastrophe. And it is not accidental. It was the point.

Achcar’s Method: Naming the System

Gilbert Achcar’s work has always stood apart from the genre of liberal lamentation. A Marxist of the anti-imperialist school, Achcar writes not to diagnose tragedy but to expose its structure. Raised in Lebanon, and long based at SOAS in London, he brings to each crisis not only a deep historical memory but also a sharp analytic blade. The Clash of Barbarisms (2002) anatomised the post-9/11 global order long before the liberal centre caught up. The Arabs and the Holocaust (2010) challenged both Zionist instrumentalisation and Arab historical amnesia. In each case, the method is the same: deconstruct the ideological scaffolding, reveal the geopolitical architecture, and re-arm the left with conceptual clarity.

That same clarity runs through Israel’s War on Gaza, a short, urgent polemic released by Resistance Books in December 2023, written as the bombs were just falling and the euphemisms were being forged. There, Achcar laid out what many refused to name: that Israel’s bombardment of Gaza was not simply retaliatory, but exterminatory—“nothing less than genocidal.” He warned early that a second Nakba was not just a risk but a strategic objective. And he exposed the complicity of Western governments. Especially the United States and European Union. Not as diplomatic passivity but as active collaboration. “The refusal of Western governments to call for a ceasefire,” he wrote, “is making them accomplices to crimes against humanity.”

Israel’s War on Gaza was not just a chronicle, it was a political intervention. It sketched the outlines of a longer argument: that what we were witnessing was not a singular outrage, but the eruption of a world-historical contradiction. This was the settler-colonial state’s inability to contain the national consciousness of the people it has tried to erase. The Gaza Catastrophe builds upon that text but is more expansive, structured, and polemically precise. Across four parts, Achcar traces the long arc from Nakba to genocide, from liberal complicity to Atlanticist discredit, from the false promises of Oslo to the scorched politics of Netanyahu’s war cabinet. If the booklet was a warning flare, this is the political reckoning.

Achcar is unsparing in his analysis but never succumbs to despair. His method is dialectical, not moralistic. He does not ask what should be felt, but what must be done. In doing so, he cuts against the grain of performative outrage and moves us toward the terrain of political strategy. The Gaza Catastrophe is not only the title of this book. It is the reality unfolding before our eyes. And it compels us not just to observe, but to act.

I. Genocide as Strategy

The book opens with Reflections on the Gaza Genocide and its World-Historical Significance. Achcar is precise: this is genocide, not metaphorically but literally. He matches Israel’s actions (bombing civilian areas, denying food, flattening infrastructure) to the UN definition of genocide. He cites Gallant’s dehumanising language, the IDF’s operational doctrine, and the statements of Israeli ministers. The intent to destroy is not hidden. It is declared.

One of Achcar’s sharpest insights comes in his critique of Hamas’s military strategy: “This strategy is irrational: it makes little sense to assault one’s enemies on the very terrain upon which they hold insurmountable superiority.” He condemns Hamas’s reliance on armed struggle as mystical and counterproductive, writing that “there is no possible vindication for what has been the most catastrophic miscalculation ever in the history of anticolonial struggle.”

But the deeper argument is that Gaza reveals not just the nature of Israeli policy, but the exhaustion of the liberal world order. Achcar’s phrase for it (Atlanticist liberalism) captures the post-1945 consensus of US-led democracy promotion, humanitarian rhetoric, and rules-based multilateralism. Gaza, like Iraq before it, tears that mask off. Biden’s unconditional support for Netanyahu’s campaign, the UN’s paralysis, and the European Union’s silence are not diplomatic failures. They are structural facts. On 18 October 2023, Biden remarked: “If there weren’t an Israel, we’d have to invent one … You don’t have to be a Jew to be a Zionist.” Achcar connects this to what he calls “narcissistic compassion”—the Western tendency to extend empathy only to those perceived as culturally proximate. Biden’s “self-definition as a Zionist,” he argues, was “considerably sharpened” by the traumatic imagery of 7 October, particularly the Nova music festival. The genocidal campaign that followed, Achcar writes, unfolded under the political cover of that outrage.

And through that collapse, Achcar sees something else: the ascent of a new ideological configuration. The age of neofascism is not looming. It is here.

II. From Oslo to Obliteration

Part II: Background to the Catastrophe returns to the terrain Achcar knows best—historical excavation. But this is not liberal context-setting. It is structural diagnosis. He begins by interrogating Europe’s manipulation of Holocaust memory. Far from preventing future atrocity, the Holocaust has been politically instrumentalised to sanctify the state of Israel and silence criticism. Zionism, Achcar shows, became a project of “whitening,” aligning the Jewish settler-colony with the Western civilisational bloc.

He then turns to the failure of the peace process. Oslo, in his telling, was never peace. It was managed containment. And it unravelled as soon as Palestinians realised that land swaps meant annexation, and statehood meant permanent subjugation. Achcar details how Hamas rose in the wake of Oslo’s collapse, not as resistance alone but as the religious inversion of political defeat.

His critique of Hamas is sharp but political. He calls its strategy “mystical,” its armed struggle counterproductive, its ideology regressive. “Who really wants to confront a nuclear superpower with four slingshots?” he quotes Yahya Sinwar asking, the very man who launched the 7 October attack.

But he does not indulge in false balance. Gaza’s devastation is not a reaction to Hamas. It is a project long in waiting. “The Gaza genocide was ushered in by a combination of factors,” Achcar writes, including “the deliberate intent to inflict maximum damage… under the supervision of a coalition of neofascists and neo-Nazis… the Israeli military’s murderous fury, combined with the dehumanisation of Palestinians.”

III. Real-Time Reckoning

In Part III, Gaza, Nakba, Genocide, Achcar collects his political interventions written as the catastrophe was unfolding. These are not academic essays, they are urgent polemics, forged in real time. Their purpose is strategic: to name the genocide, to shatter euphemism, and to strip the liberal mask from the face of empire.

Achcar does not concede the terrain of language. His critique is sharpest when aimed at the “moral equivalence” peddled by Western media and political leaders: the idea that Hamas’s 7 October attack and Israel’s military campaign are equivalent acts of violence. “To equate the 7 October massacre with the Gaza genocide,” he writes, “is to deny the fundamental asymmetry between coloniser and colonised.”

He castigates liberal commentators and NGOs for evading the term genocide, noting how humanitarian language is deployed not to clarify but to obscure. In one of the most blistering interventions, he writes, “The ultimate obscenity is the moral equation between the Gaza genocide and the 7 October massacre.”

This section is also notable for its media analysis. Achcar is merciless in dissecting how phrases like “human shields,” “terror tunnels,” and “surgical strikes” serve to justify the unjustifiable. These euphemisms, he argues, do not merely sanitise violence, they license it. They form a vocabulary of complicity.

His goal is to re-politicise the discussion. Not to make people feel, but to make them think, and then act.

IV. The Imperial Convergence

The Epilogue, titled “Enter Trump”, functions not as a postscript but as a summation of Achcar’s structural argument: the genocide in Gaza is not an aberration of liberalism, but a symptom of its eclipse. The return of Trump, Achcar argues, is not the beginning of something new, but the consolidation of a neofascist formation already long in development.

Achcar begins by skewering what he calls a “widespread epidemic of wishful thinking” in the period preceding Trump’s 2024 re-election. Which was an irrational hope, shared even among liberal and left-leaning observers, that a second Trump presidency might bring Netanyahu to heel. Instead, Achcar reminds us that Trump was already the president who:

moved the US embassy to Jerusalem,
recognised Israeli sovereignty over the Syrian Golan Heights,
cut aid to UNRWA and the PA,
and helped broker the Abraham Accords.

None of these were anomalies. They were the point. As Achcar puts it, anyone “endowed with normal lucidity” should have expected continuity, if not escalation.

But Achcar goes further. He uncovers the backstage choreography of Trump’s influence over Netanyahu’s war policy. During the 2024 campaign, Netanyahu appeared to stall the US-brokered ceasefire proposal not out of domestic strategic calculation alone, but also to court Trump. A revealing quote from Netanyahu in July 2024—”we’re working on it”—comes immediately after his meeting with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. This was not accidental. It was tribute.

Achcar details how Netanyahu collaborated with Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff (a real estate partner and golfing companion) with deep links to both Trump and Gulf capital, to time the ceasefire’s implementation as a political gift to the president-elect. The genocide in Gaza thus becomes not merely a strategic campaign but also an electoral offering, aligning the interests of two authoritarian incumbents through a shared theatre of domination.

This is the culmination of Achcar’s thesis: that Gaza is the testing ground for a new mode of imperial governance, defined not by rules or norms but by “eager” cooperation among supremacist leaders. The genocide becomes a medium of diplomacy, an instrument not of peace, but of alignment among neofascists.

Achcar’s use of satire (phrases like “president’s old friend, former lawyer, fellow real estate speculator in cahoots with rich Arab oil states, and golfing partner”) sharpens the point: this is not aberration, but farce-as-structure. Gaza is not just a site of tragedy, but a stage on which a new international order declares itself.

In this reading, Trump is not an American deviation but a crystallisation. He represents the imperial convergence that Achcar has tracked throughout: Washington, Tel Aviv, and the Gulf monarchies, no longer hiding behind humanitarian rhetoric, but working openly as a bloc of racial capitalism and security-state coordination. This is where liberalism ends. Not in contradiction, but in collusion.

Appendix: Antisemitism, Zionism, and the Battle Over Definition

The appendix to The Gaza Catastrophe reproduces an important statement, co-authored by Gilbert Achcar and Raef Zreik, first published in The Guardian in 2020. It is not an afterthought. It is a political intervention, crafted to expose the ideological terrain on which the Israel–Palestine conflict is fought within Western discourse.

The backdrop is clear: increasing efforts, particularly in Europe and North America, to conflate antisemitism with anti-Zionism through the promotion and adoption of the IHRA definition of antisemitism. This manoeuvre, Achcar and Zreik argue, serves not to protect Jews from hatred, but to delegitimise the Palestinian cause and silence defenders of Palestinian rights.

“Confronted with mounting pro-Israel pressure for the adoption… of a definition of antisemitism assimilating any critique of Zionism and the Zionist state to a variant of antisemitism, there was a need for a statement by Arab intellectuals on this debate.”

The statement begins by affirming the necessity and urgency of combating real antisemitism: hatred of Jews as Jews, rooted in stereotypes, conspiracism, Holocaust denial, and racial hatred. But this, they argue, must be a principled struggle, not one “diverted” to serve the ends of a state.

“Antisemitism must be debunked and combated… no expression of hatred for Jews as Jews should be tolerated anywhere in the world.”

But the fight, they continue, is being instrumentalised by the Israeli government and its allies:

“In recent years, the fight against antisemitism has been increasingly instrumentalized… in an effort to delegitimize the Palestinian cause and silence defenders of Palestinian rights.”

At the core of the critique is the conflation of Judaism with Zionism, and of the State of Israel with the “self-determination of all Jews.” The IHRA definition, while claiming neutrality, collapses this distinction, implying that critique of Israel is necessarily antisemitic. This, Achcar and Zreik argue, is intellectually dishonest and politically dangerous.

“Through ‘examples’ that it provides, the IHRA definition conflates Judaism with Zionism… We profoundly disagree with this.”

They go further, offering a counter-principle: that support for Palestinian rights is not antisemitism, and that framing it as such undermines the fight against actual antisemitism.

“The fight against antisemitism should not be turned into a stratagem to delegitimize the fight against the oppression of the Palestinians, the denial of their rights, and the continued occupation of their land.”

The statement calls for a rejection of any framework that would “turn the victims into perpetrators” and concludes by affirming that Palestinians have a right to resist their oppression and to articulate their reality (politically, morally, and historically) without being silenced through the weaponisation of Jewish trauma.

In the context of The Gaza Catastrophe, the appendix sharpens Achcar’s broader thesis: that the ideological structures that enable genocide are not limited to military doctrine or settler logic. They are built into the very language used to define hate. By resisting the conflation of antisemitism with criticism of Israel, Achcar challenges a central discursive pillar of liberal Zionism and defends the right (indeed, the necessity) of naming genocide when it happens.

Neofascism: The Banality of Genocide

Achcar’s analysis is most piercing when he names the ideological logic animating Israel’s government: not merely the far right, but neofascism in structural alignment with a global current. In The Gaza Catastrophe, Achcar does not shy away from this term. He describes the governing coalition in Israel as “composed of the most extreme right-wing, religious-Zionist, and ultra-Orthodox forces in the country,” arguing that the genocide in Gaza is not simply the product of militarism or settler-colonialism, but the expression of a neofascist political project operating behind a democratic façade.

As he writes in “The Age of Neofascism and Its Distinctive Features”:

“Neofascism claims to respect the basic rules of democracy instead of establishing a naked dictatorship as its predecessor did, even when it empties democracy of its content by eroding actual political freedoms…”

In other words, elections may continue, but the system becomes hollow, devoid of representation for Palestinians and dissenting Israelis alike. In The Gaza Catastrophe, Achcar threads this into his world-historical analysis of genocide, noting that the ideological preconditions for the war on Gaza were not rhetorical but structural: the normalisation of supremacist Zionism, the judicial assaults on Israeli liberalism, and the embedding of openly genocidal actors in government.

Achcar situates the Israeli cabinet squarely within that neofascist logic: political parties once deemed terrorist, today in government; ideologues of ethnic cleansing elevated to ministerial posts. This is state-policed apartheid, electoralism as cover, and occupation as policy. The settler-colonial apparatus does not merely persist. It supremely intensifies under the conditions of neofascism.

He extends the lens beyond Jerusalem. In “Peace Between Neofascists and War on Oppressed Peoples”, Achcar observes:

“We are now witnessing a convergence between neofascists at the expense of oppressed peoples…”

This convergence is structural. In both The Gaza Catastrophe and his essays, Achcar shows how Washington, Moscow, and Tel Aviv now operate not in spite of liberalism but through neofascism’s ascendancy. He adds:

“The United States is a full partner in the genocidal war that is waged against the Palestinian people in Gaza…”

The genocidal logic in Gaza is, for Achcar, not incidental, but co-produced by imperial alliance, mediated through arms transfers, diplomatic cover, and the racialised framing of Palestinian resistance.

His essay “Neofascism and Climate Change” further elaborates how this mode of governance is biopolitical, denying environmental reality, targeting migrants, and using ecological crisis as cover for racial exclusion:

“Neofascism is pushing the world towards the abyss with … hostility… to indispensable environmental measures,” doubling down on “exclusionary sovereignty.”

Achcar’s analysis thus speaks to settler-colonial regimes as inheriting not only racial logic, but ecological denial. This is a dangerous fusion in Gaza’s siege-zone future. A place where war, displacement, and climate collapse converge under the logic of exclusionary rule.

In the context of The Gaza Catastrophe, Achcar’s neofascism theory clarifies the continuity between the Israeli far right and the global far right—between Smotrich and Trump, Ben‑Gvir and Putin. This is not metaphor, it is developmental logic.

He writes:

“We entered the age of neofascism… which is worse because the most important imperialist power is leading the neofascist coalition.”

Achcar’s political position is thus dual: analytically international, materially local. Israel’s genocide is not unique in its horror, but it is unique in its democratic façade. The machinery of Hamas’s destruction is fully coherent with the age of neofascism: AI targeting, zero-casualty doctrine, racist rhetorical cover, and global arms support.

This diagnosis is neither rhetorical excess nor historical panic. It is structural acuity. Neofascism, in Achcar’s hands, is not a signifier of extremism. It is state technique, an ideological ecosystem in which genocide becomes policy.

Conclusion: Against Euphemism, Against Empire

The Gaza Catastrophe is a book without comfort. It does not end on an optomistic note, nor does it offer faith in international law. Its power lies in its clarity. Achcar does not mourn. He names, and in a moment where naming is itself subversive, that is no small act.

The catastrophe was not a policy error. It was a strategic decision. The rubble of Gaza is not a warning from history. It is a revelation of the present.

This is the system. It must be opposed. Not with outrage alone. But with politics, combining pessimisim of the intellect with optimism of the will, and nurtured by hope.

Simon Pearson is on the Editorial Board of the Anti*Capitalist Resistance and is a Midlands-based political activist.