Why Is All This Happening?

Media accounts of Israel’s bloody onslaught on Gaza generally look for an explanation in the recent, the local and the particular: October 7, Hamas, Netanyahu, Biden, Sinwar, Trump, Smotrich and Ben Gvir. But for these, they imply, peace might have prevailed.

Toufic Haddad looks instead at a much bigger picture…

Dr Toufic Haddad is a Palestinian-American academic and author of Palestine Ltd: Neoliberalism and nationalism in the Occupied Territory (2016), which Naomi Klein hailed as a ‘terrific and timely book … a key resource for anyone fighting for justice in the region’.

He has worked across the Occupied Palestinian Territories as a journalist, researcher, consultant, editor and publisher. From 2020 to 2024, he was director of the Kenyon Institute in Jerusalem. He has written for The National, Al Jazeera, Counterpunch and International Socialist Review among many others.

He is currently based at Edinburgh University, where he is conducting research aiming to reposition the Gaza genocide within broader historical, legal, racial, political and economic dynamics and debates.