Verso Palestine Pamphlets – serie

Consent to the obliteration of Gaza has created an enormous gulf in the global moral order. History will record how Western governments and large sections of their elites have supported the war waged by Israel against Palestinians after Hamas's attack on 7 October 2023 and silenced voices calling for a ceasefire, a just peace and a respect of international law. Not only buildings have been devastated and civilians massacred, but also language and thought have been damaged. Providing an archive of the first six months of the war nourished by multiple sources, the book examines how the past of occupation and oppression of Palestine has been negated, how a vocabulary and a grammar of facts have been imposed, how accusations of antisemitism have produced censorship and self-censorship, how mainstream media have been restrained and biased. It addresses the acceptance of the unequal worth of lives and the differential treatment of deaths. It questions the invocation of the existential threat for Israel and the debt contracted because of the Holocaust. It analyses how the geopolitical and economic stakes in the Middle East and the growing rejection of Muslims and Arabs have contributed to the abdication of values and principles claimed as foundational.

Israel's pulverization of Gaza since October 7, 2023 is not only a humanitarian crisis, but an environmental catastrophe. Far from the first event of its kind, the devastation Israel has inflicted on Palestine since October 2023 has merely ushered in a new phase in a long history of colonization and extraction that reaches back to the nineteenth century. In this book, Andreas Malm argues that a true understanding of the present crisis requires a longue durée analysis of Palestine's subjugation to fossil empire. Returning to the British empire's first use of steam-power in war, in which it destroyed the Palestinian city of Akka, Malm traces the development of Britain's fossil empire and shows how this enduring commitment to fossil energy continues to drive Western support for the destruction of Palestine today.

Why has Palestine become a defining fault line of contemporary politics?Challenging mainstream narratives that reduce Palestine to ancient hatreds, humanitarian tragedy, or legal abstractions, Resisting Erasure places Israeli settler-colonialism within the broader historical arc of imperialism, race, and fossil capitalism in the Middle East.Resisting Erasure is a succinct and far-reaching critique of the socio-economic and political forces that sustain the Israeli settler-colonial project. An essential introduction for anyone looking to understand what Palestine reveals about the world - and what it demands of us today.