Avi Shlaim and Peter Oborne

Influential historian of the Middle East Professor Avi Shlaim and political journalist Peter Oborne discuss themes of genocide in Gaza and Britain’s complicity in the destruction wreaked on the territory.

Shlaim is an Israeli and British historian of Iraqi-Jewish descent and emeritus professor of international relations at the University of Oxford. His previous book, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew, won the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize. In Genocide in Gaza: Israel’s Long War on Palestine, Shlaim argues that Israel has committed genocide in the prosecution of its war in Gaza. He says the latest Israeli attack on Gaza is the most lethal and savage in the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Shlaim argues that the attacks on Gaza over the years are the inevitable result of Zionist settler colonialism, which he says aims to eliminate the native population.

Oborne is a former chief political commentator at the Daily Telegraph and Spectator and author of The Assault on Truth. In Complicit: Britain’s Role in the Destruction of Gaza, he says both the Conservatives and Labour converged to back a criminal assault and, in doing so, occupied disturbing ground with the far right. Oborne says the British media has colluded with this rather than challenge it. He says almost everything the public was told about the war was untrue and he explains the methods used to paint peaceful demonstrations as ‘hate marches’.

Discussions are chaired by Professor Eugene Rogan, professor of modern Middle Eastern history at the University of Oxford and author of The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East, 1914-1920.