The world after Gaza A history

Pankaj Mishra

Book - 2025

"The World After Gaza takes the current war, and the polarized reaction to it, as the starting point for a broad reevaluation of two competing narratives of the last century: the Global North’s triumphant account of victory over totalitarianism and the spread of liberal capitalism, and the Global South’s hopeful vision of racial equality and freedom from colonial rule. At a moment when the world’s balance of power is shifting, and the Global North no longer commands ultimate authority, it is critically important that we understand how and why the two halves of the world are failing to talk to each other. As old touchstones and landmarks crumble, only a new history with a sharply different emphasis can reorient us to the world and... worldviews now emerging into the light. In this concise, powerful, and pointed treatise, Mishra reckons with the fundamental questions posed by our present crisis — about whether some lives matter more than others, how identity is constructed, and what the role of the nation-state ought to be. The World After Gaza is an indispensable moral guide to our past, present, and future."--Blurb.

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Published
New York : Penguin Press 2025.
Language
English
Main Author
Pankaj Mishra (author)
Physical Description
292 pages ; 22 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 281-292).
ISBN
9798217058891
  • Prologue
  • Part 1. Afterlives of the Shoah
  • Israel and the Incurable Offence
  • Part 2. Remembering to Remember the Shoah
  • Germany from Antisemitism to Philosemitism
  • Americanising the Holocaust
  • Part 3. Across the Colour Line
  • The Clashing Narratives of the Shoah, Slavery and Colonialism
  • Atrocity Hucksterism and Identity Politics
  • Epilogue
  • Select Bibliography
Review by Kirkus Book Review

Against selective readings of history--and the horrors they enable. Mishra, who has employed his crystalline prose in novels and nonfiction alike, methodically unpacks the "extensive moral breakdown" that preceded what he describes as "the blithe slaughter of innocents in Gaza." As for the slaughter of Oct. 7, 2023, he says Israel's leaders did not "shrink from exploiting" the cold-blooded attack. Formative travel and extensive research upended Mishra's formerly "languid view of Zionism as vindication and shield of the eternally persecuted." A frequent contributor to respected political magazines by the early 2000s, he tried to publish his reporting about "the brutality and squalor of Israel's occupation," which he witnessed in the West Bank in 2008. But, he says, he encountered "pre-censorship in even liberal periodicals." This, Mishra believes, was informed by the publications' fear of being labeled antisemitic--the result of a decades-long effort by various political actors to establish the Holocaust as "the sacred core of Israeli nationalism." Soon after World War II, he finds, scholars worried that the Holocaust was being forgotten. But with the 1961 prosecution of Adolf Eichmann, it was front-page news once more. This was followed, in 1967 and 1973, by wars that Israel won despite appearing "existentially threatened by its Arab enemies." Thereafter, American politicians, stung by defeat in Vietnam, saw "an apparently invincible Israel as a valuable proxy in the Middle East." Meanwhile, the sentimentalization of the Holocaust in popular novels and Hollywood films dovetailed with the Israeli nationalist position that "those who have been or expect to be victims should pre-emptively crush their perceived enemies." At heart, this is an exhaustively sourced plea for historical literacy that opens up what Mishra calls "a broader vista of human fraternity and solidarity" and recognizes that across the globe, people victimized by "historical mass crimes of genocide, slavery and racist imperialism" wonder why "their own holocausts…have not been much regarded in history." A clear-eyed look at the Holocaust as justification for Israel's wars. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.