HubMP2012

Gaza and the New Age of Genocide

Martin Shaw introduces his new book, published this month.

 October 10, 2025

As readers of Labour Hub will be aware, Labour Party Conference passed a resolution recognising that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza. As a genocide scholar, I have been arguing this since October 2023. As genocidal statements by Israeli leaders were followed by huge bombardments of civilian areas and hospitals, it was already becoming clear that Israel intended to destroy Palestinian society in Gaza. By the end of last year, the genocide view had become a consensus among genocide scholars and human rights organisations.

In my book The New Age of Genocide, published this month, I argue that the Gaza genocide is a major departure, because it’s being perpetrated by a self-styled ‘Western’ state, supported throughout by the United States, the UK, Germany and others. Before, Western countries proclaimed their determination to prevent genocide. Now they are helping Israel to carry it out.

The UK is not only selling arms to Israel; the RAF has carried out surveillance over Gaza which is being shared with them and has almost certainly been used to target civilians. Defence minister Maria Eagle even boasted about this surveillance at an Israeli Embassy party in May. Under Keir Starmer, Labour has doubled down on its support for Israel as its genocide has got worse and worse. Even while the government was going through the motions of criticising the humanitarian situation, it banned the direct-action group Palestine Action. Starmer has even called some pro-Palestinian protests ‘un-British’.

My book analyses the historical record of Britain’s relationship with genocide, linking Gaza with colonial genocide and ambiguous responses to the Holocaust. But its main focus is Gaza and Palestine: one chapter analyses the current genocide, while another looks at the longer history of the country, including the Nakba, the expulsion of 1948, as a process in which Israel has deliberately, in stages, destroyed Palestinian society in order to expand Jewish settlement and control.

However, the book also puts Israeli genocide in a wider perspective. The 2020s have seen Russia try to eliminate a distinct Ukrainian state, society and culture, achieving this in its occupied regions. China, under Xi Jinping, continues to suppress Uyghur identity in Xingjiang. With Donald Trump endorsing the expulsion of the Palestinians to create a ‘Gaza Riviera’ – although he may be rowing back from that now, under Arab pressure – all three great power leaders have genocidal mentalities. All of them disregard international law, and Trump is actually trying to destroy the International Criminal Court.

I argue, therefore, that genocide has gone from being something which mainly happens in places that great powers and global media ignore – like Myanmar, Sudan and Ethiopia – to places where great power interests are at stake. It has returned from the margins to the centre of world politics. And with Western powers as perpetrators rather than bystanders, its political significance in countries like Britain has changed dramatically.

The book is written for the general reader as well as students and academics. Full details are here. You can order with a 30 percent discount if you use the code AGENDA30 at the checkout.

Martin Shaw is the author of several books on genocide, including What is Genocide?, as well as The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and Political Racism: Brexit and Its Aftermath. He is Emeritus Professor of International Relations and Politics at the University of Sussex. His website is martinshaw.org and he is on Twitter and Substack @martinshawx.