Pankaj Mishra’s "The World After Gaza" is a history of how the Holocaust became Europe’s moral touchstone and how it has obscured discussions of other genocides, along with the modern state’s abilities to orchestrate them. There are, of course, many other volumes on the current genocide, looking at it from different angles. I picked Mishra’s because, for as long as I have been following his work, he almost always seemed to find the right words to describe a situation. And after more than a year of genocide, of talking and tweeting, I feel I have run out of words, I have lost the words. As Afua Hirsch, the Black and Jewish British writer, says in one of the blurbs: "We all owe Pankaj Mishra a debt for crafting eloquent and undeniable words from the horrors we are struggling to witness." Mishra’s triumph in this book is making words mean something again and bringing words from the past to witness what is happening today.
The book gives a detailed history of how Europeans, Jews and non-Jews have been guarding the central place of the Holocaust in the world moral economy, to veil the histories of other genocides and dispossession. Its central thrust is that Israel’s genocide has made different communities, which had been pacified with the promise of a "liberal consensus," realize that white (supremacist) values are not to be challenged. Mishra points out that the global south sides instinctively with Palestinians, and sees their own historical dispossession in their fate. That the West can so easily dismantle the rich edifice it has been promising to the "developed world," like democracy and the rule of law, when it comes to protecting colonial interests, is now apparent to many. "It is Gaza that has quickened their understanding of a decrepit world which no longer has any belief in itself and which, concerned merely with self-preservation, tramples freely on the rights and principles it once held sacred, repudiates all sense of dignity and honour, and rewards violence, lies, cruelty and servility," the book explains.
Mishra is an argumentative Indian if there ever was one and that his book should have been written by him is no surprise. When you read the prologue, however, you realize that the book is not just an international scholar commenting on the world, but a very personal story. Describing the shifts in India’s relationship with Israel, Mishra reveals that as a young man, he had Moshe Dayan’s (Israeli minister of defense during the 1967 Six-Day War) poster on his bedroom wall. While this sounds like a scene from a counterfactual reality, Mishra explains very clearly how a certain generation of Indians saw Israel as an underdog standing up to colonial powers, through a reinvention of their nation as muscular warriors rather than the downtrodden subaltern.
Every observation Mishra makes about the current Israeli ethos, then, chimes in with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s current rhetoric of perpetual war with Muslims. As such, the book diagnoses the transformations that can happen in a nation’s self-image and the genocidal lengths they will go to maintain it. As I check social media sites while I read the book, one post about the current India-Pakistan tension jumps at me: "one Hindu nation in the entire world and we are not safe even here." Mishra has captured the current moment, of fascists always claiming that they are the beleaguered ones.
Mishra asks one of the leading questions of the book in the prologue: "Has the Western focus on the crimes of Nazi and communist totalitarianism deliberately obscured closer examination of the West’s original sin of white supremacy?" The answer is a resounding yes. As Mishra suggests throughout the book, Israel’s genocide in Gaza has emphasized the fact that the prism through which we should read the 20th century is not the Holocaust, but decolonization and oppressed nations will make sure we do so. As he decentralizes the Holocaust as a moral touchstone, he also provides voices from the non-European world as to how Europeans murdering European Jews should be read, quoting Ali Sheriati and Jamal ad-Din Al-Afghani.
In the "Afterlives of the Shoah" chapter, Mishra gives a very detailed account of how Europeans and Americans reacted after World War II ended and the Jews in concentration camps were freed. He documents how Americans and Europeans were indifferent to the survivors and came to appreciate Israel only when it defeated the Arab armies in the Six-Day War, in another expression of the West’s moral of "might is right." The moment that American and European colonialists recognized Israel as a partner is the moment when Jewish intellectuals, including Hannah Arendt and Albert Einstein, realized that the wrong kind of lessons had been drawn from the Shoah. "Was the country’s elevation, to resounding approbation from Western powers, of survival into the sole value and purpose of human life, the main lesson of the Shoah? If so, what distinguished the legacy of the Shoah from nineteenth-century social Darwinism – the toxic core of European nationalisms and imperialisms (including Germany’s) competing for Lebensraum?" asks Mishra.
That the wrong lessons were drawn from the extermination of Jews on European soil is echoed once again by Zygmunt Bauman, "Polish-born Jewish philosopher and refugee from Nazism who spent three years in Israel after the Six Day War before fleeing its mood of bellicose righteousness." Mishra relates how Bauman criticizes the Holocaust being represented as a matter between the Jews and their haters without questioning "the conditions that made acts of mass cruelty possible." I want to quote this mindset at length, because Gaza has brought to the fore how the technology that promises to make life on earth heaven has been consistently used to wipe out life. I type out these words of Mishra for you as OSINT accounts broadcast targets in Yemen, and the U.S. takes them at face value and bombs what turn out to be civilian areas.
"Technology, the rational division of labour and deference to norm-setting authority had enabled ordinary people to contribute to acts of mass extermination with a clear conscience, even with the frissons of virtue." These frissons of virtue were in evidence everywhere on social media in the early days of the genocide. I remember a cultural critic I admired posting that he had called the police because someone had graffitied "F*** Israel" on a wall in his neighborhood.
There are too many words from the distant and recent past that chime with our AI-operated genocide era. Mishra’s 1981 Robert Alter quote: "Attempt to base identity on a sense of dread or – if we are utterly honest about these matters – on the special frisson of vicariously experiencing the unspeakable, in all the material comfort and security of our American lives’ took me to that moment in the genocide when Jewish American celebrities started asking 'would you hide me' while Palestinian children were being burned alive."
Mishra teases many obvious parallels between the American and Israeli "way of life." In a 1986 novel, Philip Roth, the American chronicler of the 20th century par excellence, draws attention to how "the American Jews get a big thrill from the guns." Massacring indigenous people to settle their lands is the foundational ethos of the two countries. Mishra reveals that there were always dissenting voices as Israel bulldozed its way through Arab villages. He recounts moments where Zionists found each other too genocidal: for instance, the founder of the Israeli state, Ben Gurion, called the founder of Zionism, Jabotinsky, "Vladimir Hitler." However, none of these criticisms and discussions are remembered in the sanctification of Zionism today. A strong bond that ties Israelis and Americans is their obliviousness to their own history (of ideas).
The one false note of the book, for me, is the epilogue, where Mishra rightfully lauds the efforts of young people opposing genocide with self-denying acts. He then calls Israel "the portent of the future of a bankrupt and exhausted world." This is where we must each revert to our own belief system and assess if we believe such a world is inescapable. Despite Mishra’s final defeatism, many reading the book and I urge you to do so, will continue to have hope for Gaza now and not "the world after Gaza."
