Review: The World After Gaza by Pankaj Mishra
The West’s skewed relationship with Israel and Jews, from violence on Jews to capitulation to Israel’s excesses, is the crux of this book
In the summer of 1942, at the height of the Holocaust, mass roundups and deportations of Jews were documented by diarists across Nazi-occupied Europe. The detailed entries from this period capture the horror, uncertainty, and daily struggles faced by Jewish people as the systematic process of extermination accelerated. Ghetto diaries describing life in Vilna, Lvov, Bialystok, Theresienstadt, Kovno, Lodz and Warsaw document human life in a state of spiritual decomposition and moral disintegration under the pressure of survival and the German policy of reprisals. The elderly died in the streets, children were orphaned, food supplies diminished, wealthy Jews turned in a matter of weeks into paupers, people sank into madness, black markets thrived and families broke apart.
In his latest book, The World After Gaza, Pankaj Mishra infers that “the collective memory of the Shoah (Holocaust) in Europe as well as Israel did not merely spring organically from what transpired between 1939 and 1945, it was belatedly constructed, often very deliberately, and with specific political ends”. This gradually became the raison-d’être of Zionism and the Jewish State which, in the words of Israeli columnist Boaz Evron, removed “any moral restrictions [on Israel], since one who is in danger of annihilation sees himself as exempted from any moral considerations which might restrict his efforts to save himself”.
For decades now, the Hebrew word Shoah meaning ‘catastrophe’, denoting the Nazi genocide, the borrowed usage of which has spread since Claude Lanzmann’s film of that name appeared in 1985, has been the benchmark to judge the capacity for human evil. The horrors of the Holocaust became the justification for the perpetuation of Zionist acts of genocide against the indigenous people of Palestine. “The extent to which people identify it as such and promise to do everything in their power to combat antisemitism serves, in the West, as the measure of their civilization,” Mishra writes, while the spectacle of stone-faced Western elites ignoring, justifying, and turning their back on the slaughter and starvation of Palestinians in Gaza, fills him (and us) with horror. The victor-victim, protagonist-antagonist binaries not only serve as mirror images, but also are mixed up and held upside down because history ties both the Jews and Palestinians in a bond of solidarity, a solidarity forged on victimhood.
The inverse and skewed relationship of the West with Israel and Jews, from violence on Jews to the capitulation to Israel’s excesses, is the crux of Mishra’s book. Mishra recounts how the so-called Western democracies would refuse to lower their barriers of immigration to Jews escaping Nazism, leaving tens of thousands of them to find a safe haven in China; how one country after another in Europe would deliver its Jewish population not only to the Nazi death camps but also would engage local collaborators in Poland, Ukraine and the Baltic States to hunt down Jews cowering in basements, attics and woods, and how Walter Benjamin, one of the most brilliant writers of the twentieth century, committed suicide for fear of being handed over to the Nazis by Spanish border guards. The Nazi Judeocide was perpetrated in Europe; its victims were overwhelmingly European Jews. What the West once did to the Jews, Mishra means to suggest, is now being done to the Palestinians.
Mishra further excoriates the West for its negligent disregard for, and insufficient attention to, the numerous late-Victorian holocausts in Asia and Africa, and the nuclear assaults on Hiroshima and Nagasaki compared to the Holocaust, the paradigmatic genocide (“the Shoah gives unlimited moral legitimacy to Israel”). Medieval violence and intolerance toward minorities (heretics, Moriscos, Jews, lepers, witches) had benighted Europe and Catholicism has been held guilty for making its people brutal in the period between the fall of Rome and the birth of Luther. Episodes of violence against minorities, such as attacks on Muslims in the former Yugoslavia, or on “foreigners” (often Muslim) in Germany, France, and Italy, or on Jews in Russia, happened as late as in the 20th century. “All Western powers worked together to uphold a global racial order,” which Mishra attributes to the “evils of western colonialism” in which “it was entirely normal for Asians and Africans to be exterminated, terrorised, imprisoned and ostracised.” Mishra perceives many more people – increasingly within as well as outside the West – have come to embrace a counternarrative, in which the memory of the Shoah has been “perverted” to enable mass murder, while “obscuring” a larger history of modern Western violence outside the West.
Mishra, however, is not free from moral obfuscation when he keeps room for ambiguity about what Israel’s violence signifies – whether it is “legitimate self defence, just war in tough urban conditions, or ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity” – and stops short of calling it a genocide despite the disproportionate blowback following the gruesome massacres and hostage-taking in Israel on October 7 by Hamas and other Palestinian groups, in which nearly 20,000 people were killed in two months, including more than 7,000 children, and over 60 percent of homes were damaged or destroyed. Israel targeted the wounded and infirm, newborns and near-dead, as Gaza’s healthcare system – hospitals, clinics, ambulances, medical personnel – came to the brink of total collapse. “But it was clear from the start,” Mishra avers, “that the most fanatical Israeli leadership in history would not shrink from exploiting a widespread sense of violation, bereavement and horror.” The author has been criticised elsewhere for spending “little time” discussing the October 7 attack and “how it heightened Israel’s sense of vulnerability”.
Mishra draws on Douglas Murray’s book The War on the West that promoted a narrative favourable to the universal advance of Western-style liberal democracy that treated the world wars, along with Nazism and communism, as “monstrous aberrations”. But The World After Gaza raises questions that deepen our anxieties as to whether Western liberal democracy is a source of liberty or of crushing neo-colonial oppression, whether Islamism is a pluralist and anti-imperialist freedom struggle or a violent, sexist, and religiously intolerant terror movement or whether Israeli Zionism is a tolerant and plural democratic movement or a genocidal Jewish tyranny.
The World After Gaza does not end happily. Mishra does not see “the arc of the moral universe” bending “towards justice” as “powerful men have always made their massacres seem necessary and righteous”. But his book is an abiding moral history that brings to bear upon a host of Israeli and Palestinian intellectuals (such as Edward Said), Black American writers like WEB Du Bois and James Baldwin, the Austrian writer Jean Améry (brutally tortured by the Gestapo before being sent to Auschwitz), the Italian writer Primo Levi (who had known the barbarities of the death camp at the same time as Améry), besides a number of Holocaust survivors and historians.
Mishra shows that the skewed use of Milan Kundera’s famous dictum, “the struggle of man against power” as “the struggle of memory against forgetting” is a diabolical weapon. “When does organised remembrance become a handmaiden to brute power, and a legitimiser of violence and injustice?” he wonders. The ability to speak truth to power is called courage; the steadfast refusal of the powerful to see the truth can only be called cowardice.
Prasenjit Chowdhury is an independent writer. He lives in Kolkata.