PART I. CONTEXTS
1/ Israel’s War on Gaza – Avi Shlaim
2/ Econocide in Gaza – Sara Roy
3/ Is Hamas to Blame for the Failure to Resolve the Israel-Palestine Conflict? – Colter Louwerse
4/ Rule Number One of Nonviolent Resistance: It Can’t Work If It’s Misrepresented as Violent – R. J.

PART II. CATACLYSM
5/ Targeting Civilians: Its Logic in Gaza and Israel – Yaniv Cogan
6/ Just Like That: Life and Death in Gaza – Ahmed Alnaouq
7/ Nothing Fails Like Success: Hamas and the Gaza Explosion – Khaled Hroub
8/ The Quiet Front: Reflections from the West Bank – Musa Abuhashhash
9/ All Shook Up: Regional Dynamics of the Gaza War – Mouin Rabbani
10/ Into the Abyss – Nathan J. Brown

PART III. SOLIDARITIES
11/ Breakthroughs and Backlash in the Belly of the Beast – Mitchell Plitnick
12/ Palestine Solidarity in Britain – Talal Hangari
13/ Sins of Commission: How Europe Was Bounced into Supporting Israel’s War Crimes in Gaza – Clare Daly MEP

• Social media promotions with contributors and endorsers: Some of the contributors and endorsers have already posted about the book, allowing for a combined exposure of 1 million people: Clare Daly (@ClareDalyMEP, 377.8k Twitter followers, 539k Instagram followers, 116k Facebook followers), Norman Finkelstein (428.1k Twitter followers), Mouin Rabbani, and Ahmed Alnaouq. There will be continued promotion through the network of contributor and endorsers, including Cornel West (1 million followers on Twitter).
• Pitch television, radio, and podcast interviews to Democracy Now!, Al Jazeera’s UpFront, The Dig, Intercepted, Citations Needed, On the Media, Rumble with Michael Moore, The Young Turks Show, NPR Politics podcast, Stuff You Should Know, Radiolab, The Ezra Klein Show, Useful Idiots, Bad Faith, Breaking Points, Empire Files, American Prestige, and more. 
• Pitch op-eds, excerpts, and reviews to a wide array of publications including Against the Current, Associated Press, Chicago Tribune, Common Dreams, Current Affairs, Guernica Magazine, Intercept, Los Angeles Review of Books, Mondoweiss, N+1, New York Magazine, Publishers Weekly, Slate, The Atlantic, The Baffler, The Drift, The Grayzone, The Nation, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, Vox, and more.
  Excerpts already published: Avi Shlaim’s chapter in the Middle East Eye and Jamie Stern-Weiner's introduction in Jacobin and in Danish translation in Eftertryk.

After Hamas-led militants massacred Israeli civilians and soldiers on October 7th, prominent observers argued that the group’s ideological intransigence left Israel with no option but to eliminate it. US President Joe Biden rejected calls to “stop the war” because “[a]s long as Hamas clings to its ideology of destruction, a cease-fire is not peace.” Senator Bernie Sanders dismissed the prospect of “a permanent ceasefire with an organization like Hamas which is dedicated to destroying the State of Israel.” “People who are calling for a ceasefire now,” former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton asserted, “don’t understand Hamas.” The group “will sabotage any efforts to forge a lasting peace, and will never stop attacking Israel.”

The practical corollary of this reasoning was set out with disarming frankness by the Economist. In an editorial published November 2nd, that august journal acknowledged that “Israel is inflicting terrible civilian casualties” in Gaza, accepted that Israel “has unleashed a ferocious bombardment against the people of Gaza,” recognized that a prolongation of Israel’s offensive would cause “the deaths of thousands of innocent people” in Gaza—and concluded that “Israel must fight on,” because “while Hamas runs Gaza, peace is impossible.” Given its lethal-cum-genocidal implications, the claim that no lasting truce or peace agreement with Hamas is possible merits careful scrutiny.

Attempts to blame Palestinian recalcitrance for the intractability of the Israel-Palestine conflict are not new. On the contrary, Israeli spokespeople long ago elevated into a public relations mantra the aphorism of Abba Eban, Israel’s one-time foreign minister: “The Palestinians have never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity” for peace. The main problem with this claim is that it is flatly contradicted by the historical record. Palestinian leaders have sought for decades to resolve the conflict on terms approved by the international community. By contrast, Israel and the United States have consistently rejected those terms in favor of Israel’s territorial expansion. Furthermore, Israeli military offensives have often been directed not at combatting Palestinian terrorism but, on the contrary, at dispelling the “threat” of a peace agreement. Whenever Palestinian leaders moved toward accepting the international consensus framework for resolving the conflict, Israel responded with violence calibrated to force them back into militant rejectionism.

To neutralize these Palestinian “peace offensives,” Israel sought first to bypass Palestinian leaders as interlocutors, then to violently provoke them, and finally to coopt and contain them. Israel followed this playbook with both the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Hamas, in roughly the same sequence. In each case, Israel initially refused even to engage with Palestinian overtures. When moderate PLO and Hamas pronouncements threatened to win them international legitimacy, and thereby to undermine the tenability of Israel’s non-engagement policy, Israel in both cases conducted brutal military attacks aimed at derailing Palestinian diplomacy. Finally, Israel maneuvered both the PLO and Hamas into positions of subordinacy. Each organization found itself responsible for administering occupied territory and dependent on Israel for the resources and stability needed to do so. Israel thereby sought to reconcile the PLO and Hamas to its regime of domination over the Palestinian people without having to make any political or territorial concessions.

In the West Bank, Israel’s policy proved remarkably successful. By subcontracting the task of repression to the PA, Israel eroded the Palestinian leadership’s legitimacy and thus its desire and capacity to mobilize popular resistance to Israel’s occupation. By 2023, Israel believed that it had engineered a similar equilibrium in Gaza, with Hamas administering a besieged prison camp on Israel’s behalf. At first glance, Hamas appeared to be “pacified”: insofar as the Islamist movement prioritized its rule in Gaza, its resistance could be “contained.” It is now evident that the Israeli assessment was complacent. Fenced off from any diplomatic horizon and trapped within an unbearable and interminable siege, Hamas resolved to disrupt Israel’s equilibrium and violently refocus international attention on Palestine.

The bottom line is this. If, over the past half-century, Israel and its allies had desisted for but a moment in not merely missing, but actively spurning and sabotaging prospects for a just resolution to the Palestine Question, the 2023 massacre of Israeli civilians and incipient genocide in Gaza need never have happened. Indeed, the Israel-Palestine conflict would almost certainly have been resolved decades ago.