GAZA CONFLICT 2021

A scholar of the Middle East surveys the 2021 Israeli-Gaza conflict in this political book.

With a Ph.D. centered on 20th-century terrorism from King’s College London and as the author of multiple books on Palestine, Schanzer and his perspective on the Middle East have been featured everywhere from cable news to congressional hearings. In this book, he turns his attention to the 11-day war between Israel and Hamas in May 2021. In an accessible, concise narrative geared toward the general public, the volume begins with a history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with a special focus on the rise of Hamas. Central to the author’s motivation in writing the book is his belief that the Western media failed to accurately cover the war. In addition to the media downplaying “the brutality of Hamas” and neglecting to acknowledge “how far Israel went to protect its own people” through defensive rather than offensive tactics, the volume argues that the role of Iran in stoking the conflict was insufficiently analyzed by Western journalists. While Schanzer’s narrative shows Hamas and Iran as the root instigators of the war, he also emphasizes that Israel’s conflict with the wider Arabic world is actually “shrinking.” With fluency in both Arabic and Hebrew and backed with an impressive network of endnotes, the author provides readers with a diverse range of perspectives from Middle Eastern media sources as well as his own interviews with American and Israeli officials. But critics of Israel’s Palestinian policies may be skeptical of the book’s conclusion that Israel “has consistently gone out of its way both to shorten the length of its conflicts…and to minimize casualties” as well as its dismissal of the “unproductive debates about whether Israel is justified in its military control over the West Bank” and the Gaza Strip. And while acknowledging that “the Israeli government deserves some blame here,” its fault, according to Schanzer, is almost exclusively in public relations blunders. Strangely absent from the work’s analysis is any meaningful commentary on Benjamin Netanyahu’s spring 2021 trial, which occurred simultaneously with the Gaza conflict, a war that many at the time believed could bolster his political career.

A well-reasoned, if one-sided, overview of Israel’s most recent war with Hamas.