American book documents Palestinian genocide from the Nakba to Gaza

A pictorial book published by Harvard University documents the genocide of Palestinians in a historical context spanning from the Balfour Declaration of 1917 to the Gaza war, through a visual narrative combining history, anthropology, and art.

Published by Harvard University in the United States in 2026, a pictorial book titled "The Book of Genocides" by American-Armenian author and artist Dana Mashoyan Walrath devotes a separate chapter to the history of Palestinian displacement and the genocide war in the Gaza Strip. The book is based on Raphael Lemkin's conception of genocide and combines history, anthropology, and art through an illustrated narrative covering ten cases of genocide over five centuries. Walrath presents the "Palestinian genocide" within a historical context beginning with the Balfour Declaration of 1917, through the British Mandate, to the Nakba and operations of displacing Palestinians and destroying their villages. Walrath documents the displacement of about 800,000 Palestinians during the Nakba, the erasure of 531 villages and 11 urban neighborhoods, and links these events to what is happening in Gaza: practices of humiliation, starvation, home demolition, killing of children, and targeting of hospitals and journalists. Walrath said in an interview with The Guardian that the book project began a decade ago with nine cases of genocide and a tenth chapter on Palestine, Afghanistan, Vietnam, the Congo, and Ukraine, but the violence in Gaza prompted her to dedicate a separate chapter to Palestine, considering that the genocide began in 1948. The book also covers other genocides such as the genocide of indigenous peoples in the Americas and Australia, the Armenian genocide, and genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia.