The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting,” Milan Kundera wrote in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. “But when does organised remembrance become a handmaiden to brute power, and legitimiser of violence and injustice?” asks Pankaj Mishra in his latest book The World After Gaza. The collective memory of the Shoah (Holocaust) was “belatedly constructed, often very deliberately, and with specific political ends,” Mishra writes. Rather than being a struggle against power, this politicisation of memory allows the state of Israel, “a cruel settler-colonialist, and Jewish supremacist regime”, to do what it does against the Palestinians with impunity. And the West, which upholds the memory of the Shoah across societies and political groups, continues to back Israel irrespective of its actions.
A Holocaust survivor holds a photo of herself (circled), at the Commemoration Ceremony of the 80th Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz, in Oswiecim, Poland. | Photo Credit: AP
‘Victim and victimiser’
How did Israel, founded by a people who were victimised by Nazism, become an “inhuman victimiser?” How can the liberal “gentile” West not be bothered by the mass violence Israel is committing against the Palestinians? In The World After Gaza, Mishra seeks to understand the shrinking grey zone between the victim and the victimiser.
Major General Moshe Dayan, Defence Minister of Israel. | Photo Credit: The Hindu Archives
Mishra, who grew up in India in a Brahmin Hindu nationalist family, had admired the state of Israel as a young boy. Mishra’s ideas about Israel would change later as he began writing about the world’s conflicts and suffering. Yet, nothing prepared him for “the brutality and squalor of Israel’s occupation” he witnessed during a visit to Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories in 2008. He noticed tools of the occupation and segregation — “The snaking wall and numerous roadblocks meant to torment Palestinians in their own land...; and the racially exclusive network of shiny asphalt roads, electricity grids and water systems linking the illegal Jewish settlements to Israel.” After Israel’s latest war against Palestinians began, triggered by Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack in Israel killing 1,200 people, Mishra says he “felt almost compelled to write this book to alleviate my demoralising perplexity before an extensive moral breakdown.”
Palestinians break their fast with the Iftar meals during the month of Ramadan, amid a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, in Rafah. | Photo Credit: Reuters
Extension of colonialism
Israel’s violent policies and the support Israel gets from the liberal freedom-loving West might appear to be contradictory. But for Mishra, Israel’s policies are a continuation of the policies of erstwhile colonial regimes. “For two centuries, western countries subjugated peoples across Asia, Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific, fuelled by the Social Darwinist belief now sacralised by Israel that a race, people or nation that did not dominate would instead be dominated,” he adds.
A man walks past the rubble of homes destroyed by the Israeli army’s offensive against Hamas in Jabaliya, northern Gaza Strip. | Photo Credit: AP
The West sees Israel as an extension of its own past. Israel, Mishra writes quoting Yuri Slezkine, produced a warrior culture of remarkable power and intensity — the “only place where European civilisation seemed to possess a moral certainty, the only place where violence was truly virtuous.” The Jew, James Baldwin once wrote, “is a white man.”
Palestinian children gather to receive food cooked by a charity kitchen, during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza Strip. | Photo Credit: Reuters
So Mishra doesn’t see any contradiction in Europe’s and America’s most authoritarian, and often anti-Semitic, politicians, movements and personalities being some of the most fervent upholders of the memory of the Shoah, and defenders of Israel. “Hitler and Mussolini had presented themselves as guardians of a superior Western civilisation,” he writes. “Many white nationalists today aim for the same moral advantage by offloading the scourge of antiSemitism on Muslims, and by claiming to stand in solidarity with Israel.”
Displaced Palestinians living in tents amid destroyed buildings in the west of Al-Shati camp, west of Gaza City. | Photo Credit: AP
But what has Israel become? It continues to occupy Palestinian and Syrian territories in violation of international law and UN Security Council resolutions. Israel is today ruled by a far-right coalition, which has the backing of “the far-right maniacs” in the West. “A radical Zionist vanguard, fired with millenarian zeal, eliminationist Arab racism and Jewish supremacism became one of Israeli society’s animating forces,” Mishra writes. But none of these bothers the conscience of the world.
“The profound rupture we feel today is a final rupture in the moral history of the world since the ground zero of 1945 — the history in which the Shoah was the universal reference for a calamitous breakdown of human morality,” writes Mishra.
A quibble
Both the book’s strength and weakness are its style of writing. The World After Gaza is not a book that is structured around an argument and written with historical facts and analytical insights. Instead, it takes the reader through waves of history, from the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 to the October 7, 2023 attacks and from the racist crimes of the West to the apartheid regime of Israel, with abundant quotes from Holocaust survivors, philosophers, critics, historians and politicians. It’s like a stream of consciousness novel in non-fiction. But sometimes, in the plethora of references and quotations, the main argument seems to get lost. Mishra, known for his well-structured, argumentative essays including his ripostes to Niall Ferguson or Jordan Peterson, lacks his usual moral punch in the book. Also, The World After Gaza has very little to offer about the world after Gaza — it’s almost entirely about the world before Gaza. Yet, it is a compelling read on the moral faultlines of a violent past and present.
The World After Gaza; Pankaj Mishra, Juggernaut, ₹799.
stanly.johny@thehindu.co.in
Published - March 14, 2025 09:01 am IST
