Disposable Palestinians

"This rigorous analysis of Israel's genocidal culture of war is a must read for the international community. Abu-Manneh also demonstrates how a change in Palestinian liberation strategy, rooted in the democratic experience of collective struggle, is both urgent and possible."
Amira Hass, Haaretz Correspondent for the Occupied Palestinian Territories and author of Drinking the Sea at Gaza

"Disposable Palestinians is a powerful and original reading of the historical and material conditions that made the Gaza genocide possible. Yes, we all know that the Oslo Peace process was a colossal failure. But in this reading, it also laid the foundation for the genocide to come: an occupation regime of exploitation is transformed into one of exclusion, and war becomes Israel's primary mode of rule. Bashir Abu-Manneh's book is exceptional, an essential read for anyone who wants to understand the unfathomable and spiraling violence of the Israeli state, and to ask: Where should the Palestinian struggle go from here?"
Nadia Abu El-Haj, Barnard College and Columbia University

"Disposable Palestinians shows the architecture under the rubble, namely how the exploitation of the Oslo process led to Gaza's extermination campaign, and how 'self-defense' became the alibi for both. Rigorous, unsentimental, and indispensable for anyone who still believes international law is worth fighting for. Abu-Manneh reads the Oslo Accords not as a broken promise but as a working machine: one that converted a regime of dispossession into a regime of exclusion, and exclusion, in time, into extermination. For those of us trained to think in the vocabulary of the Fourth Geneva Convention and the Rome Statute, this book supplies what our instruments too often lack: a genealogy of how 'self-defense' became the alibi of conquest, and how impunity is manufactured twice: once in Tel Aviv, once in Washington. Abu-Manneh has produced a work of sharp moral clarity that insists, rightly in my view, that the restoration of rule of law depends on the return of Palestinian collective agency. A necessary book for anyone who still believes that international law is a language worth defending."
Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories