Irish Book Week Non-Fiction Book of the Year

Shortlist 2025

Catastrophe: Nakba II

Catastrophe: Nakba II

By Fintan Drury

The Nakba or ‘Catastrophe’ occurred between 1947 and 1949 and saw 15,000 Palestinians massacred and more than 700,000 expelled from their homeland by Israel. Today, we’re witnessing a second Nakba – one being played out in front of our eyes.

In Catastrophe: Nakba II, Fintan Drury offers an unflinching exploration of Israel’s genocidal campaign. Through extensive research, he argues that the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023 was the inevitable result of almost eight decades of violent oppression of indigenous Palestinians. In his view Israel’s response was totally disproportionate and without the active sponsorship of the US and other major Western powers could not have happened.

Provocative, eye-opening and unapologetically direct, this book is a call to understand the unique suffering of the Palestinian people.

About Fintan Drury...

Fintan Drury was a journalist with RTÉ in the 1980s. Before co-anchoring Morning Ireland for its first three years, he was a correspondent in Northern Ireland and reported from Britain, Europe, Africa and the USA. In 1985 he volunteered in the then largest refugee camp in the world, in Darfur, with GOAL. A longtime activist on migration, he’s written extensively on the subject. In 2016 he volunteered in a refugee camp in Athens, which led to a fifteen-part series in The Irish Times on the diary of a Syrian refugee. Fintan now lives and works in Dublin; he is chair of SARI (Sport Against Racism Ireland).

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