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El mundo después de Gaza. Una breve historia
Tras la Segunda Guerra Mundial, el nuevo orden global se conformó sobre todo en respuesta al Holocausto. Ese fue el acontecimiento de referencia de la atrocidad y, en el imaginario occidental, el genocidio por excelencia. Su memoria orienta gran parte de nuestro pensamiento y, fundamentalmente, constituye la justificación básica del derecho de Israel a establecerse como Estado y defenderse. Pero en muchas partes del mundo, asoladas por otros conflictos y experiencias de masacres masivas, el Holocausto no es tan singular, incluso cuando su espantosa atrocidad sí lo sea. Porque fuera de Occidente, sostiene Pankaj Mishra, la historia dominante del siglo XX no es el Holocausto sino la descolonización.
El mundo después de Gaza toma la guerra actual, y la polarización en torno a ella, como el punto de partida para una amplia reevaluación de dos narrativas sobre el siglo pasado: el relato triunfal del Norte Global con su victoria sobre el totalitarismo y la expansión del capitalismo liberal, y la visión esperanzadora del Sur Global de igualdad racial y libertad respecto al dominio colonial. En un momento en el que el equilibrio del poder mundial está cambiando y el Norte Global ya no tiene la máxima autoridad, es de vital importancia que comprendamos cómo y por qué las dos mitades del mundo no logran comunicarse entre sí.
En este ensayo conciso, poderoso y directo, Mishra aborda las cuestiones fundamentales que nuestra crisis actual plantea: ¿importan más unas vidas que otras?, ¿cómo se construye la identidad en nuestras sociedades multiculturales? y ¿cuál debería ser el papel del Estado-nación? El mundo después de Gaza es una guía moral indispensable para nuestro pasado, presente y futuro.
El mundo después de Gaza toma la guerra actual, y la polarización en torno a ella, como el punto de partida para una amplia reevaluación de dos narrativas sobre el siglo pasado: el relato triunfal del Norte Global con su victoria sobre el totalitarismo y la expansión del capitalismo liberal, y la visión esperanzadora del Sur Global de igualdad racial y libertad respecto al dominio colonial. En un momento en el que el equilibrio del poder mundial está cambiando y el Norte Global ya no tiene la máxima autoridad, es de vital importancia que comprendamos cómo y por qué las dos mitades del mundo no logran comunicarse entre sí.
En este ensayo conciso, poderoso y directo, Mishra aborda las cuestiones fundamentales que nuestra crisis actual plantea: ¿importan más unas vidas que otras?, ¿cómo se construye la identidad en nuestras sociedades multiculturales? y ¿cuál debería ser el papel del Estado-nación? El mundo después de Gaza es una guía moral indispensable para nuestro pasado, presente y futuro.
256 pages, Paperback
First published February 11, 2025
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7513 people want to read
About the author
Pankaj Mishra
120 books723 followersPankaj Mishra (पंकज मिश्रा) is a noted Indian essayist and novelist.
In 1992, Mishra moved to Mashobra, a Himalayan village, where he began to contribute literary essays and reviews to The Indian Review of Books, The India Magazine, and the newspaper The Pioneer. His first book, Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town India (1995), was a travelogue that described the social and cultural changes in India in the context of globalization. His novel The Romantics (2000), an ironic tale of people longing for fulfillment in cultures other than their own, was published in 11 European languages and won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum award for first fiction. His book An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World (2004) mixes memoir, history, and philosophy while attempting to explore the Buddha's relevance to contemporary times. Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan and Beyond (2006), describes Mishra's travels through Kashmir, Bollywood, Afghanistan, Tibet, Nepal, and other parts of South and Central Asia.
In 1992, Mishra moved to Mashobra, a Himalayan village, where he began to contribute literary essays and reviews to The Indian Review of Books, The India Magazine, and the newspaper The Pioneer. His first book, Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town India (1995), was a travelogue that described the social and cultural changes in India in the context of globalization. His novel The Romantics (2000), an ironic tale of people longing for fulfillment in cultures other than their own, was published in 11 European languages and won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum award for first fiction. His book An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World (2004) mixes memoir, history, and philosophy while attempting to explore the Buddha's relevance to contemporary times. Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan and Beyond (2006), describes Mishra's travels through Kashmir, Bollywood, Afghanistan, Tibet, Nepal, and other parts of South and Central Asia.
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December 1, 2024
Pankaj Mishra's brilliant moral-political treatise may as well have been called 'The World before Gaza', for he here casts his rigorous eye on the historical events that have paved way for the escalation – and indeed, the silent sanctioning – of cold-blooded genocide of Palestinians at the hands of Israeli forces over the last 14 months.
He begins with a re-evaluation of how the collective memory of the Holocaust – as the ultimate atrocity of humankind – has come to shape the post-war moral and political imagination in the West. In this, he contends with the two major competing narratives of the twentieth century: the West's triumphant quashing of the totalitarian threats Nazism and Communism, and the ongoing and often thwarted post- (and de-)colonial project of racial equality.
Scrupulously researched, The World After Gaza demonstrates how the motivation for the West's involvement in quashing Nazi Germany, far from a moral imperative of rescuing European Jewry from annihilation, rested in the Allied powers' interest in preventing an influx of Jewish refugees in their own lands: Britain and the United States were, contrary to the now-popular saviour narratives, less than willing to admit Jewish refugees into their borders during wartime; Britain was in fact reluctant even to allow Jewish refugees of the Holocaust into British-administered Palestine despite Balfour and the ostensible motive for the creation of Israel.
As the book goes on to show, the Nazi extermination of six million Jews was seen as a mere 'detail' of the war, with Europe and even Israel abjuring the memory of the Shoah until the 1960s, when the Arab-Israeli war prompted the latter to focus on memorialising the Holocaust and using the manufactured fear of a second Shoah (manufactured because they were too evidently stronger than their opposition) to acquire military, monetary support from diaspora Jews elsewhere. Meanwhile, the shame of the Suez Crisis and the American defeat in East Asia meant that the West began seeing Israel as an important proxy in the Middle East. In the 1980s, European philosemitism in former sites of anti-semitism (exemplified by Germany, which fast went from being seen as the immoral and totalitarian enemy to a legitimate liberal democracy allied against the next big threat: the Soviets) became a requirement for membership of the European Union.
But while the project of Israelisation took hold, and even as the Holocaust was taking a central position in Western collective memory, it came to be challenged by decolonisation and the rise of other forms of collective self-identification. Quoting Aimé Césaire, Mishra argues that
Mishra argues that apart from the colour line, the American discourse of progress after the Cold War rendered Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism as the sole measures of evil, and
Indeed, 'Never Again' became more distorted, propagandistic, and visibly racialised as the traditionally anti-semitic and once-again powerful far-right in Europe and elsewhere began identifying with and supporting Israel. Anti-refugee and violently xenophobic rhetoric was now levelled at people of colour (seen as a threat by the Whites who were once their masters, and who once levelled it just as forcefully against European Jews). In Part III of the book, Mishra explores this formation at length, examining the relationships between the Jewish consciousness and the emancipation of Asia, Africa and the Caribbean and also looking at the global media's complicity in the destruction of Gaza. It all comes together in his identification of why anti-semitic far-right alliances with Israel have come to be in a world where critical race theory and decolonisation are seen as a threat, and where Arabs have carefully been constructed as the most hated 'other':
The World After Gaza is not only essential reading for all who continue to show courage in the face of a crushing mainstream, or those who, like Mishra, are undertaking a personal journey of reckoning with our present, but also for those who seek to better understand the history of the West and close the gaps in the knowledge that the countless other books about the World Wars and the Holocaust fail to serve.
He begins with a re-evaluation of how the collective memory of the Holocaust – as the ultimate atrocity of humankind – has come to shape the post-war moral and political imagination in the West. In this, he contends with the two major competing narratives of the twentieth century: the West's triumphant quashing of the totalitarian threats Nazism and Communism, and the ongoing and often thwarted post- (and de-)colonial project of racial equality.
Scrupulously researched, The World After Gaza demonstrates how the motivation for the West's involvement in quashing Nazi Germany, far from a moral imperative of rescuing European Jewry from annihilation, rested in the Allied powers' interest in preventing an influx of Jewish refugees in their own lands: Britain and the United States were, contrary to the now-popular saviour narratives, less than willing to admit Jewish refugees into their borders during wartime; Britain was in fact reluctant even to allow Jewish refugees of the Holocaust into British-administered Palestine despite Balfour and the ostensible motive for the creation of Israel.
As the book goes on to show, the Nazi extermination of six million Jews was seen as a mere 'detail' of the war, with Europe and even Israel abjuring the memory of the Shoah until the 1960s, when the Arab-Israeli war prompted the latter to focus on memorialising the Holocaust and using the manufactured fear of a second Shoah (manufactured because they were too evidently stronger than their opposition) to acquire military, monetary support from diaspora Jews elsewhere. Meanwhile, the shame of the Suez Crisis and the American defeat in East Asia meant that the West began seeing Israel as an important proxy in the Middle East. In the 1980s, European philosemitism in former sites of anti-semitism (exemplified by Germany, which fast went from being seen as the immoral and totalitarian enemy to a legitimate liberal democracy allied against the next big threat: the Soviets) became a requirement for membership of the European Union.
But while the project of Israelisation took hold, and even as the Holocaust was taking a central position in Western collective memory, it came to be challenged by decolonisation and the rise of other forms of collective self-identification. Quoting Aimé Césaire, Mishra argues that
Hitler seemed exceptionally cruel only because he presided over 'the humiliation of the white man': the 'fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa'.The question then was, what gave the Holocaust weight over the crimes committed in Hiroshima and Vietnam, over the institutions of slavery, colonisation and plunder, and over the genocides of Armenians, Cambodians, and Native Americans?
Mishra argues that apart from the colour line, the American discourse of progress after the Cold War rendered Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism as the sole measures of evil, and
the racism of American and Western societies, which Hitler had learned and borrowed from, was taken out of its original location, the institutions of slavery, colonialism and imperialism, and presented as a case of ugly individual bigotry.During the Cold War, the overplaying of the dangers of communism was further used to distract from the underlying causes and consequences of widespread decolonisation. Philosemitism and Israelisation strengthened with the colonial powers losing their potency, as did the resurgence from the 1990s onwards of the kind of ethnonationalism that resulted in the Holocaust in the first place.
Indeed, 'Never Again' became more distorted, propagandistic, and visibly racialised as the traditionally anti-semitic and once-again powerful far-right in Europe and elsewhere began identifying with and supporting Israel. Anti-refugee and violently xenophobic rhetoric was now levelled at people of colour (seen as a threat by the Whites who were once their masters, and who once levelled it just as forcefully against European Jews). In Part III of the book, Mishra explores this formation at length, examining the relationships between the Jewish consciousness and the emancipation of Asia, Africa and the Caribbean and also looking at the global media's complicity in the destruction of Gaza. It all comes together in his identification of why anti-semitic far-right alliances with Israel have come to be in a world where critical race theory and decolonisation are seen as a threat, and where Arabs have carefully been constructed as the most hated 'other':
There is among majoritarian movements a strong sense of identification with an ethnonational state that unleashes lethal force without constraints; it explains, much better than any calculus of geopolitical and economic interests, the stunning complicity of many in the West in an absolute moral transgression: a genocide.The book ends with a lamentation of – and an expression of wary hope for – what will become of the loneliness of the Palestinians, and of the world after Gaza. Though Mishra begins and ends with a formulation of current events in occupied Palestine as a 'war' despite also recognising the genocide– a centrist, pacifist and even Gandhian position that is sometimes confusing and also colours, I think, his understanding of post- and de- colonial movements – what holds in the middle makes a strong case for the Palestinian cause in a world that continues to turn a blind eye, to repeat history as it has time and time again.
The World After Gaza is not only essential reading for all who continue to show courage in the face of a crushing mainstream, or those who, like Mishra, are undertaking a personal journey of reckoning with our present, but also for those who seek to better understand the history of the West and close the gaps in the knowledge that the countless other books about the World Wars and the Holocaust fail to serve.
March 26, 2025
Jerry Seinfeld posed with a machine gun at an IDF training facility in the West Bank (on stolen land) and has also “taunted pro-Palestinian protestors.” The Atlantic Magazine has a long history of hating all things Russia, but did you know in May 2024, the Atlantic “carried a piece casting doubt on the number of people killed in Gaza by Israel and claiming that ‘it is possible to kill children legally’.” How is killing children ever possible legally? Weighing in on such a bizarre subject, according to Menachem Begin’s account published in the Times of Israel, Joe Biden as senator in 2020 “commended the Israeli war effort and boasted that he would have gone further, even if it meant killing women and children.” Biden’s sociopathic line was so over-the-top than Begin (a former terrorist in the Irgun) responded to Biden, “No Sir, according to our values it is forbidden to hurt women and children …This is a yardstick of human civilization, not to hurt civilians.” Fast-Forward, no wonder why Biden had no problem with Israel’s recent genocide. The author tells us that Timothy Snyder and (frequent contributor to Atlantic Magazine) Anne Appelbaum both are NOT objective sources but are known as over-the-top anti-communist historians in the Richard Pipes and Robert Conquest mold. Pipes and Conquest both even supported Contras during their 1,300 terrorist attacks on the Nicaraguan people. The highly questionable Atlantic Magazine also ran an article that dared call decolonization a “toxic, inhumane ideology” that corrupts young minds. Imagine the danger of teaching young minds that making people do things at gunpoint is somehow wrong! Why, that goes against the teachings of Hitler, Pol Pot, Pinochet, and Charles Manson! According to the author, “Elon Musk wants to ban the word ‘decolonization’ altogether.” Maybe Elon should write for the Atlantic. [Glenn Greenwald and Max Blumenthal both call Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg a known neo-con hired to push neo-con talking points. In the past week (March 2025) Jeffrey had the chance to report on the US planned illegal war in Yemen, but as a faithful neocon, he shut up to let that war crime unfold smoothly. Neo-con uber alles…]
Hannah Arendt felt the Eichmann trial was an Israeli effort to show the world that Jews who weren’t Israelis would “let themselves be slaughtered like sheep” - a way of insulting the entire diaspora. Ben Gurion hoped that the trial would help conflate Arabs with Nazis by focusing on Mufti al-Husseini of Jerusalem. Ben Gurion said, “We don’t want the Arab Nazis to come and slaughter us.” A delusional thought from a man who looked like he just stuck his finger in a light socket. “In 2015, Netanyahu claimed it was (Mufti) al-Husseini who persuaded a dithering Hitler to proceed and ‘burn’ the Jews.” In the 1960’s it became vogue for Israelis to pretend a second Shoah was always coming around the next bend, turning the Shoah into “the sacred core of Israeli nationalism.” Thus, Israel’s future lay in manufactured paranoia, inflexibility and eternal victimhood. Sounds like my first wife.
Germany: Die Welt claimed that ‘Free Palestine is the new Heil Hitler’ and Die Zeit alerted German readers to the evidently outrageous fact that ‘Greta Thunberg openly sympathizes with the Palestinians’.” British historian Mary Fulbrook “calculates that of the nearly one million people who ‘were at one point or another actively involved in killing Jewish civilians, only 6,656 were convicted of Nazi crimes.” That’s fewer than the number of people employed by just Auschwitz. In the end “only 164 individuals had been sentenced for the crime of murder – of six million Jews.” Why are Israel supporters INFINITELY more upset by peaceful Pro-Palestinian protestors than the fact that the crimes of the ENTIRE Holocaust were paid ONLY by 164 former Nazis [and the entire Palestinian people]? In only Germany, Britain, the US, Israel, and topsy-turvy world, does faux-anti-Semitism (students peacefully opposing active genocide) rank as more viscerally upsetting than REAL anti-Semitism (killing millions of Jews in a past genocide).
Britain: “In 1939, British soldiers fired on Jewish refugees, including women and children, on an overpeopled hulk as they attempted to land on Tel Aviv beach.” Poland: There happened a mass murder of Jews, and “in 1946 in the Polish town of Kielce, 180 kilometers south of Warsaw, a mob of antisemites killed forty of the two hundred Jews who had survived the mass murder of the town’s 25,000 Jewish inhabitants.”
Edward Said, who I thought was a perfect progressive, this book points out he once “called campus security when students protesting the war in Vietnam disrupted his class at Columbia.” I can’t find verification of that story anywhere else on the web – I sure hope it’s not true. Pankaj calls Edward “dandyish”.
Kylie Jenner “lost nearly a million followers after announcing her support for Israel.” How great that her supporters see that Israel is committing crimes beyond the world of just fashion. James Baldwin said in 1970, “I’m not anti-Semitic at all, but I am an anti-Zionist. I don’t believe they have the right after 3,000 years to reclaim the land with western bombs and guns on biblical injunction.”
“Israeli soldiers, interviewed by CNN, claimed they can ‘no longer eat meat’ after crushing hundreds of Palestinians under bulldozers, and noticing how ‘everything squirts out’.” Next time life has got you down, remember that somewhere in Israel are former soldiers still haunted by having to shove Palestinian bodies around with their bulldozers after (and sometimes before) they were dead. Couldn’t they just kill innocent civilians and then just LEAVE the bodies on the ground like the Khmer Rouge? So sad!
This book was ok; I expected so much more after the Rashid Khalidi blurb on the back of the book. But as you see, only a page and a half of useable information. Most of the book was endless intellectual name-dropping w/o reasons why those names were even dropped. Norman Finkelstein has written a few better books than this one where he also discusses many famous authors on Israel/Palestine and discusses the points in their books in depth. This book ignores the history of Zionism, Nakba, 67’ war, the Lebanon war, the two Intifadas, Hamas, international law, Israel’s war crimes, to the point I wonder why it was even written. I learned far more from Ahed Tamimi’s book “They Called Me a Lioness” and she is not even a writer and was only in her teens when she wrote it. I’ve now reviewed 80 books on just the subject of Israel/Palestine since the infamous October 7th Hamas invasion, so it’s sad when an “acclaimed” book offers little actual NEW information.
Hannah Arendt felt the Eichmann trial was an Israeli effort to show the world that Jews who weren’t Israelis would “let themselves be slaughtered like sheep” - a way of insulting the entire diaspora. Ben Gurion hoped that the trial would help conflate Arabs with Nazis by focusing on Mufti al-Husseini of Jerusalem. Ben Gurion said, “We don’t want the Arab Nazis to come and slaughter us.” A delusional thought from a man who looked like he just stuck his finger in a light socket. “In 2015, Netanyahu claimed it was (Mufti) al-Husseini who persuaded a dithering Hitler to proceed and ‘burn’ the Jews.” In the 1960’s it became vogue for Israelis to pretend a second Shoah was always coming around the next bend, turning the Shoah into “the sacred core of Israeli nationalism.” Thus, Israel’s future lay in manufactured paranoia, inflexibility and eternal victimhood. Sounds like my first wife.
Germany: Die Welt claimed that ‘Free Palestine is the new Heil Hitler’ and Die Zeit alerted German readers to the evidently outrageous fact that ‘Greta Thunberg openly sympathizes with the Palestinians’.” British historian Mary Fulbrook “calculates that of the nearly one million people who ‘were at one point or another actively involved in killing Jewish civilians, only 6,656 were convicted of Nazi crimes.” That’s fewer than the number of people employed by just Auschwitz. In the end “only 164 individuals had been sentenced for the crime of murder – of six million Jews.” Why are Israel supporters INFINITELY more upset by peaceful Pro-Palestinian protestors than the fact that the crimes of the ENTIRE Holocaust were paid ONLY by 164 former Nazis [and the entire Palestinian people]? In only Germany, Britain, the US, Israel, and topsy-turvy world, does faux-anti-Semitism (students peacefully opposing active genocide) rank as more viscerally upsetting than REAL anti-Semitism (killing millions of Jews in a past genocide).
Britain: “In 1939, British soldiers fired on Jewish refugees, including women and children, on an overpeopled hulk as they attempted to land on Tel Aviv beach.” Poland: There happened a mass murder of Jews, and “in 1946 in the Polish town of Kielce, 180 kilometers south of Warsaw, a mob of antisemites killed forty of the two hundred Jews who had survived the mass murder of the town’s 25,000 Jewish inhabitants.”
Edward Said, who I thought was a perfect progressive, this book points out he once “called campus security when students protesting the war in Vietnam disrupted his class at Columbia.” I can’t find verification of that story anywhere else on the web – I sure hope it’s not true. Pankaj calls Edward “dandyish”.
Kylie Jenner “lost nearly a million followers after announcing her support for Israel.” How great that her supporters see that Israel is committing crimes beyond the world of just fashion. James Baldwin said in 1970, “I’m not anti-Semitic at all, but I am an anti-Zionist. I don’t believe they have the right after 3,000 years to reclaim the land with western bombs and guns on biblical injunction.”
“Israeli soldiers, interviewed by CNN, claimed they can ‘no longer eat meat’ after crushing hundreds of Palestinians under bulldozers, and noticing how ‘everything squirts out’.” Next time life has got you down, remember that somewhere in Israel are former soldiers still haunted by having to shove Palestinian bodies around with their bulldozers after (and sometimes before) they were dead. Couldn’t they just kill innocent civilians and then just LEAVE the bodies on the ground like the Khmer Rouge? So sad!
This book was ok; I expected so much more after the Rashid Khalidi blurb on the back of the book. But as you see, only a page and a half of useable information. Most of the book was endless intellectual name-dropping w/o reasons why those names were even dropped. Norman Finkelstein has written a few better books than this one where he also discusses many famous authors on Israel/Palestine and discusses the points in their books in depth. This book ignores the history of Zionism, Nakba, 67’ war, the Lebanon war, the two Intifadas, Hamas, international law, Israel’s war crimes, to the point I wonder why it was even written. I learned far more from Ahed Tamimi’s book “They Called Me a Lioness” and she is not even a writer and was only in her teens when she wrote it. I’ve now reviewed 80 books on just the subject of Israel/Palestine since the infamous October 7th Hamas invasion, so it’s sad when an “acclaimed” book offers little actual NEW information.
February 6, 2025
mandatory reading; for a present that is horrifying, for the way in which history that is ongoing needs to be written and understood– the myriad threads that Mishra weaves together include the treatment of Jews in East and West Europe before, during, and after WWII, in the Middle East where they were not blond and blue eyed, the role of the Allies and USA in the Holocaust and the utter lack of guilt and responsibility on their part + parallels with Vietnam, Germany's totally perverse absolution of the guilt + parallels to their colonial history (hardly ever spoken about), India's own hindutva nationalism sharing deeply in the zionist psyche, leaving us reeling today in an abyss of moral & political decrepitude – the colour line stronger than ever, the decolonial project still far too distant in the horizon
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September 20, 2025Most of the negative reviews down there seem to revolve around a central feature – they wanted this book to be one thing, and it was another. This isn’t a book about Gaza so much as the rest of the world’s relationship with the Israeli state in the shadow of the Holocaust, the story of how Mishra went from a teenager with a poster of Moshe Dayan in his bedroom (and tbf, he did look like a massive badass), and how that explains our refusal to call a genocide a fucking genocide. And the grim, and unfortunately inevitable conclusion – that this genocide will continue until completed, given the smiling nod of American politicians on both sides of the aisle, and the stern finger-wagging but ultimate refusal to act of politicians throughout the rest of the world. Being a witness to history is awful, and being an ordinary person in Gaza is an order of magnitude worse.
February 27, 2025
I enjoy Mishra’s journalism, but this book fell flat. It did so because I expected it to be more than journalism, and a book that would live up to its grand title. It’s perplexing how inappropriate the title is. Most of the book is about the uses and abuses of Holocaust memory, with various asides and tangents along the way. What does the world look like after the atrocities in Gaza? The few words at the end of the book on this seem to suggest something bleak. It would have been interesting to dwell on this at greater length, rather than simply running through the greatest hits of Palestinian and Israeli histories before finally giving a few thoughts. One of the most prominent tangents is Mishra’s personal story of having once been enamoured by the image of Israel as a strongman nation that ‘gets it done’ (the context being that he was raised in a Hindu nationalist household). This was interesting and, of course, unique to Mishra’s book. Everything else piggybacks on other books that I often wished I were reading instead. In journalism, this piggybacking is an effective practice. The journalist digests complex information and reconstitutes it, producing something pithy and relevant. But this can’t sustain a book—not one that promises so much. The essays don’t hang together well, and one feels that Mishra talks about whatever he wants to talk about, with little sense of the wider direction or purpose of the book. This being said, it’s still insightful at many points, and made me aware of some further reading.
May 24, 2025
Shoah, shoah, shoah—that’s what this book is all about. The title is misleading because it is not really about Gaza. I picked up this book after seeing Mishra speak powerfully about Israel’s assault on the Palestinians in a YouTube interview, expecting a similarly bold analysis. What I got was something far more cautious—measured, even evasive.
Mishra’s reluctance to engage directly with Israel’s atrocities is understandable. In today’s climate, showing any empathy towards the Palestinian plight risks being smeared as an antisemite. Rather than addressing Gaza directly, Mishra devotes the bulk of the book to a broader intellectual project: dissecting how Holocaust memory has been politicized, and how its moral weight has been used—consciously or unconsciously—to shield Israel from criticism and accountability. It’s a thoughtful and meticulously researched argument, but one that feels disconnected from the urgency of the moment. It's not until the final pages that Mishra confronts Gaza's fate head-on, delivering his stark prediction: “Israel will most likely succeed in ethnic-cleansing Gaza, and the West Bank as well.”
As a primer on Shoah, AKA the Holocaust, historiography and its political ramifications, this book succeeds. Mishra’s thesis is concise yet illuminating, and his recommended reading list have been added to my TBR. But if you’re looking for insight into Gaza’s current agony—or a bold moral stance—you’ll leave disappointed. This book grapples with the past to avoid confronting the present. And in a moment when Palestinian lives are under siege, that evasion feels like its own kind of silence.
Mishra’s reluctance to engage directly with Israel’s atrocities is understandable. In today’s climate, showing any empathy towards the Palestinian plight risks being smeared as an antisemite. Rather than addressing Gaza directly, Mishra devotes the bulk of the book to a broader intellectual project: dissecting how Holocaust memory has been politicized, and how its moral weight has been used—consciously or unconsciously—to shield Israel from criticism and accountability. It’s a thoughtful and meticulously researched argument, but one that feels disconnected from the urgency of the moment. It's not until the final pages that Mishra confronts Gaza's fate head-on, delivering his stark prediction: “Israel will most likely succeed in ethnic-cleansing Gaza, and the West Bank as well.”
As a primer on Shoah, AKA the Holocaust, historiography and its political ramifications, this book succeeds. Mishra’s thesis is concise yet illuminating, and his recommended reading list have been added to my TBR. But if you’re looking for insight into Gaza’s current agony—or a bold moral stance—you’ll leave disappointed. This book grapples with the past to avoid confronting the present. And in a moment when Palestinian lives are under siege, that evasion feels like its own kind of silence.
September 1, 2025
Pankaj Mishra puts words to the moral apocalypse we are living through right now. How is it possible that Western democracies, forever invoking universal human rights and international law, are openly supporting a genocide while violently repressing criticism?
In this pamphlet, Mishra examines the claim that Zionist colonialism is justified and necessary as a consequence of the Holocaust. With great erudition, he highlights Jewish voices that rejected apartheid and called for equality, including Hannah Arendt, Albert Einstein, and Primo Levi. My favorite example: fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising taking time to send a protest note to the UK government demanding Gandhi's release.
I feel like I don't need to review this book, because I already shared so many quotes and facts from it in my feed. In the last year, there have been many sharp pamphlets exploring the meaning of the genocide in Gaza, and this has been my favorite so far. Yet Mishra, like many similar authors, lacks an anti-capitalist perspective, and thus doesn't quite get to the core of Western hypocrisy.
Since at least 1914, the capitalist system has outlived whatever progressive role it played in human history. The organization of society in nation-states is in ever-greater contradiction with the global mode of production. That is why humanity is not advancing towards truly universal human rights — capitalism is dragging us towards an abyss. The only way to escape from these horrors is a workers' revolution. But that's a topic for a different book.
In this pamphlet, Mishra examines the claim that Zionist colonialism is justified and necessary as a consequence of the Holocaust. With great erudition, he highlights Jewish voices that rejected apartheid and called for equality, including Hannah Arendt, Albert Einstein, and Primo Levi. My favorite example: fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising taking time to send a protest note to the UK government demanding Gandhi's release.
I feel like I don't need to review this book, because I already shared so many quotes and facts from it in my feed. In the last year, there have been many sharp pamphlets exploring the meaning of the genocide in Gaza, and this has been my favorite so far. Yet Mishra, like many similar authors, lacks an anti-capitalist perspective, and thus doesn't quite get to the core of Western hypocrisy.
Since at least 1914, the capitalist system has outlived whatever progressive role it played in human history. The organization of society in nation-states is in ever-greater contradiction with the global mode of production. That is why humanity is not advancing towards truly universal human rights — capitalism is dragging us towards an abyss. The only way to escape from these horrors is a workers' revolution. But that's a topic for a different book.
March 12, 2025
The book is interesting, rich and well-written; however, it is more about the collective trauma from the Holocaust than about Gaza and the aftermath of the conflict on the world stage.
November 20, 2025
Saggio approfondito e dettagliato sulla storia di Israele e dei suoi rapporti "particolari" con l'Occidente. Molto interessante la rivisitazione dell'olocausto da parte dello scrittore. Di Gaza e dei paesi limitrofi in realtà non c'è molto, come se non esistessero... "Israel does not live in the same atmosphere of free criticism which every other state in the world must endure."
March 16, 2025
A thoughtful and nuanced essay on the significance of Gaza as a point of intersection between two contrasting “cultures of memory”: the Western mythos of liberal democracy’s triumph over the malignant—and wholly external—forces of fascism, racism, and genocide, necessitating the stewardship of the West over the redemption of global society from the paradigmatic evil of the Nazi Holocaust; and, for the global south, the painful historical consciousness of colonial oppression and exploitation, and the promise of decolonization, conceived not only as the political independence of many Asian and African states from former colonial regimes, but more broadly as the achievement of parity in power, prosperity, and dignity in a world order which, well into the twentieth century, was avowedly constructed and legitimized in terms of racial hierarchy.
The bitterly antithetical reactions to the obliteration of Gaza, and the larger debate over the history of Palestine and the nature of the Israeli regime, are largely the product of these radically divergent ways of remembering and making use of the last century. The decentering of the Western narrative, in which Israel symbolizes the defeat of Nazism, the expiation of Western guilt, and the only bastion of defense against a second Holocaust, coupled with the furious attempts in Europe and America to suppress pro-Palestinian speech and activism, portend a paradigm shift as the relative power of the West over the “rest” diminishes, while the West resorts to increasingly dramatic and overtly coercive methods to maintain its centrality in the global system.
Relating the construction of a sanitized history of the Second World War, which allowed the West to offload its own legacy of militarism, eugenicism, antisemitism, and racial supremacism onto the now-defeated Third Reich, the transformation of Jewishness in the Western mind from a symbol of a mistrusted leftist cosmopolitanism into a more familiar exemplar of a nation struggling for survival in a zero-sum social Darwinian world, and the parallel development of Israeli and Indian ethnoreligious extremism, Mishra explores the dangers and possibilities that accompany the search for solidarity in a time of rapid change and dislocation.
The bitterly antithetical reactions to the obliteration of Gaza, and the larger debate over the history of Palestine and the nature of the Israeli regime, are largely the product of these radically divergent ways of remembering and making use of the last century. The decentering of the Western narrative, in which Israel symbolizes the defeat of Nazism, the expiation of Western guilt, and the only bastion of defense against a second Holocaust, coupled with the furious attempts in Europe and America to suppress pro-Palestinian speech and activism, portend a paradigm shift as the relative power of the West over the “rest” diminishes, while the West resorts to increasingly dramatic and overtly coercive methods to maintain its centrality in the global system.
Relating the construction of a sanitized history of the Second World War, which allowed the West to offload its own legacy of militarism, eugenicism, antisemitism, and racial supremacism onto the now-defeated Third Reich, the transformation of Jewishness in the Western mind from a symbol of a mistrusted leftist cosmopolitanism into a more familiar exemplar of a nation struggling for survival in a zero-sum social Darwinian world, and the parallel development of Israeli and Indian ethnoreligious extremism, Mishra explores the dangers and possibilities that accompany the search for solidarity in a time of rapid change and dislocation.
August 4, 2025
After listening to Mishra promote his book at Hay, I made sure to read this book. It’s academically written similarly to a thesis, parts of this i enjoyed - other parts I got slightly lost/confused. This is a book made for a book club, there is so much content inside it to be unpacked and discussed and it would thrive on being unravelled and hearing different opinions on arguments within his work. I feel I need to read / listen to this book again to truly soak in the contents of it, as it was so rich in information (incredibly well researched), that I fear some went over my head rather than went in. It is less on the ‘world after gaza’ and more about the history of Zionism / the fallout and imagery surrounding the Shoah (holocaust). Very interesting read and hoping a friend reads it so we can discuss! Some interesting things I pulled out of it:
‘During Israel’s assault on Gaza, Netanyahu announced that he is fighting the ‘new Nazis’ in Gaza in order to save ‘Western civilisation’, while others in his cohort of Jewish supremacists kept up a supporting chorus denouncing the people of Gaza as ‘subhuman’, ‘animals’ and ‘Nazis’. Hitler himself was convinced, when Jews were conferenced as subhuman and animals, that the fate of Western civilisation rested on his shoulders, his capacity to destroy the enemy within’ p. 148.
‘The historian Bernard Wasserstein, whose own mother was detained in Palestine, records in Britain and the Jews of Europe, 1939-45 (1979) how on the second day of the war in 1939, British soldiers fired on Jewish refugees, including women and children, on an overpeopled hulk as they attempted to land on Tel Aviv beach … In late 1940, British authorities in Palestine deported 1,580 Jews, nearly half of them women and children, to Mauritius, where survivors of a typhus epidemic on board their ship was interned in a camp surrounded by barbed wire and guards’ p. 152 - interesting in the British treatment of Jews and how this behaviour is being repeated towards Palestinians now.
‘The hallmark of the good Jew became the depth of his or her commitment to Israel. Failure to fulfill religious obligations, near-total Jewish illiteracy, even intermarriage, we’re all permissible; lack of enthusiasm for the Israeli cause became unforgivable’ - Novick as quoted in the book, p. 166. - there is a lot of pressure within the Jewish community to not criticise Israel or the Israeli government, something that is proving more difficult with the mass starvation made public in Gaza.
‘During Israel’s assault on Gaza, Netanyahu announced that he is fighting the ‘new Nazis’ in Gaza in order to save ‘Western civilisation’, while others in his cohort of Jewish supremacists kept up a supporting chorus denouncing the people of Gaza as ‘subhuman’, ‘animals’ and ‘Nazis’. Hitler himself was convinced, when Jews were conferenced as subhuman and animals, that the fate of Western civilisation rested on his shoulders, his capacity to destroy the enemy within’ p. 148.
‘The historian Bernard Wasserstein, whose own mother was detained in Palestine, records in Britain and the Jews of Europe, 1939-45 (1979) how on the second day of the war in 1939, British soldiers fired on Jewish refugees, including women and children, on an overpeopled hulk as they attempted to land on Tel Aviv beach … In late 1940, British authorities in Palestine deported 1,580 Jews, nearly half of them women and children, to Mauritius, where survivors of a typhus epidemic on board their ship was interned in a camp surrounded by barbed wire and guards’ p. 152 - interesting in the British treatment of Jews and how this behaviour is being repeated towards Palestinians now.
‘The hallmark of the good Jew became the depth of his or her commitment to Israel. Failure to fulfill religious obligations, near-total Jewish illiteracy, even intermarriage, we’re all permissible; lack of enthusiasm for the Israeli cause became unforgivable’ - Novick as quoted in the book, p. 166. - there is a lot of pressure within the Jewish community to not criticise Israel or the Israeli government, something that is proving more difficult with the mass starvation made public in Gaza.
September 26, 2025
How did Zionism originate, evolve, and reach the stage it now has where it perpetrates atrocities as gruesome as those Jewish people have themselves endured?
Where do colonialism, racism and nationalism intersect and coalesce? What kind of future does a whole generation of young people pushed into moral adulthood by the words and actions (and inaction) of its elders in politics and journalism, and forced to reckon, almost on is own, with acts of savagery aided by the world’s richest and most powerful democracies?
How do we collectively address the urgent ethical task of linking the different histories of suffering to each other, of exploring together a collectively calamitous past? And what can orient us to the challenges of an inescapably pluralist future and the common fate of climate change?
Pankaj Mishra dives deeply into the historical, geopolitical and cultural forces that have brought us to this inflection point as a species. I thought the economic factors ought to have received greater attention.
Where do colonialism, racism and nationalism intersect and coalesce? What kind of future does a whole generation of young people pushed into moral adulthood by the words and actions (and inaction) of its elders in politics and journalism, and forced to reckon, almost on is own, with acts of savagery aided by the world’s richest and most powerful democracies?
How do we collectively address the urgent ethical task of linking the different histories of suffering to each other, of exploring together a collectively calamitous past? And what can orient us to the challenges of an inescapably pluralist future and the common fate of climate change?
Pankaj Mishra dives deeply into the historical, geopolitical and cultural forces that have brought us to this inflection point as a species. I thought the economic factors ought to have received greater attention.
August 25, 2025
This book left me uneasy in the best way. Mishra writes with anger and urgency and reading it felt like having my perspective shaken open. It’s not a comforting read but it makes you feel the weight of injustice and the silence around it. Hard, necessary, unforgettable.
April 28, 2025
this book is a must-read and if you happen upon it, try listening to the audiobook.
The narrator's casually mispronouncing world-famous politician's names, yet getting everyone else's name (no matter how obscure) was one of my favourite things.
I will probably re-read some chapters especially chapter 2.
The downside of this book is its bleak ending which I am not sure I could disagree with, yet I am horrified by the thought of it every waking moment. I hope this book could be a wakeup call to all the world before we finish up going down the path of Fascism and losing our humanity to tribal wars and racism.
The narrator's casually mispronouncing world-famous politician's names, yet getting everyone else's name (no matter how obscure) was one of my favourite things.
I will probably re-read some chapters especially chapter 2.
The downside of this book is its bleak ending which I am not sure I could disagree with, yet I am horrified by the thought of it every waking moment. I hope this book could be a wakeup call to all the world before we finish up going down the path of Fascism and losing our humanity to tribal wars and racism.
February 12, 2025
A book of this caliber comes out only rarely. It is brilliant and courageous , at the same time it is disturbing and thought provoking. Some, in denial mode, will downplay it's importance which in itself would be vindication of its brilliance.
Read
April 24, 2025largely a history of zionism, the holocaust, the memory of the holocaust, colonialism, and the ghosts of everything. densely populated web of people and ideas but always feels tangible and easy to keep reading. connects a lot of dots! i recommend
April 13, 2025
I don’t think any book has ever made me this angry. I found his purported scholarship to be misleading and obfuscating reality. I am disgusted.
February 28, 2025
This is definitely a history though it's not necessarily the one I went in expecting! I imagined there would be more of a focus on the history of Palestinian resistance/that which is allied to it, tracking it's positionality in the postcolonial movement, but that's pretty minimal. The main focus of this book is tracing the two separate & conflicting ideas of History: that which descends from the Holocaust into Western supremacist neo-imperialism that is disguised by the propagandized White defeat of the world's greatest evil & claims to higher values resulting (Israel therefore the West's great moral victory, as a European colony in the morally/intellectually inferior Global South) — versus — that which descends from the overthrow of colonialism and the ongoing effects/exploitations of the Global South by the West along with it's puppets (including Israel in the latter, not as a postcolonial state but rather a current-day colonial entity).
Which is not to say that Jewish history/diaspora cannot be read into postcolonial theory, something the author does do, positioning the Holocaust as a (uniquely industrialized) horror in line & accordance with the worldwide atrocities committed and developed by the imperial powers who participated in the massacre of Europe's Jewish population. Currently this is not agreed upon by mainstream ideology, though this idea has never been excluded from said postcolonial theory. Excerpt: Aimé Césaire insisted in Discourse on Colonialism (1955) that Hitler seemed exceptionally cruel only because he presided over 'the humiliation of the white man': the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa. Reading about the Congo under Belgian rule while living in Nazi-occupied Warsaw in the early 1940s, Czeslaw Milosz wrote bitterly of how Europeans were now experiencing for themselves 'the roundups, the slap in the face of an interrogator, suffocation in jam-packed barracks, death under the heel of a criminal of a higher race. The historian Geoff Eley has described how the Nazis' Polish policy 'fits into the larger repertoire of practice associated with the pre-1941 "colonial ordering of the world"'. Europe's history of imperialism, Wendy Lower writes in Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine (2005), 'shaped the policies and behavior of Nazi leaders and their functionaries who tried to colonize Ukraine during World War II.’
This book is a history of Jewish transformation, 1900s to today, and charts evolving Zionist/anti-Zionist ideas via the Jewish diaspora literary canon (in which the author is extensively read). The loci of Jewish identity shifts around Israel, around the Holocaust: 'With Israel's existence reconceived in the 1960s as a preparation for another Shoah, continuous aggression seemed the only feasible solution to the Palestinian question. Bellicosity came to be perceived as necessary, not only to quell Palestinian claims on Israeli territory, but also to avenge the powerlessness of European Jews during the Shoah and wash off the shame of their passive victimhood. The Shoah thus became the sacred core of Israeli nationalism; and it rendered political negotiation meaningless, while serving to justify the grossest forms of violence and dispossession as self-defence. / The sanctification of the Shoah and Israeli power has made the most well-intentioned forms of liberal' Zionism seem a cynical deception, one more way of buying time for a non-existent 'peace process' while claiming the intellectual prestige and moral superiority of liberalism.'
There were a handful of concessions to imperial language which I found unnecessary (ideas of terrorism, naming a pre-40s Jaffa 'Tel Aviv') and honestly the dedication being to JVP the American-Jewish organization seemed strange to me. Given how much this book owes to Jewish thought & philosophy however I am not so surprised, that's clearly where the author is coming from.
Speaking of: the author also discusses his personal experiences in how India's Hindutva fash relates to Israel, to postcolonial theory, and how it exploits the latter in it's nation-building propaganda within South Asia itself. Hindu nationalists and Turkish Islamists brazenly use narratives of hereditary victimhood to dress up authoritarian and exclusionary politics as emancipatory, and to forge a hyper-masculine new national identity out of their narratives of humiliation, helplessness and insecu-rity. Narendra Modi claims that Hindus were enslaved for a thousand years, by Muslim invaders for 750 years, and then for an additional 250 years by white British colonialists - and then uses this lachrymose version of Hindu history to justify the degradation of Muslim and Christian minorities, the destruction of mosques and British-built buildings. Modi has launched a commemorative politics closely mimicking that of Israel: he announced in 2021 that 14 August will be remembered annually as Partition Horrors Remembrance Day to remind Hindus of their suffering during the partition of British-ruled India in 1947. Modi's supporters have also appropriated Edward Said, depicting dissenters as colonised minds and imperialist tools.
Interesting to me as a Bengali Muslim. There are good tidbits detailing historical relationships between Muslims, Hindus, and the Jewish peoples of the subcontinent both prior to the advent of Israel and following. Overall a good read for what it is though it's unfairly blank on the development of Gaza itself.
Which is not to say that Jewish history/diaspora cannot be read into postcolonial theory, something the author does do, positioning the Holocaust as a (uniquely industrialized) horror in line & accordance with the worldwide atrocities committed and developed by the imperial powers who participated in the massacre of Europe's Jewish population. Currently this is not agreed upon by mainstream ideology, though this idea has never been excluded from said postcolonial theory. Excerpt: Aimé Césaire insisted in Discourse on Colonialism (1955) that Hitler seemed exceptionally cruel only because he presided over 'the humiliation of the white man': the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa. Reading about the Congo under Belgian rule while living in Nazi-occupied Warsaw in the early 1940s, Czeslaw Milosz wrote bitterly of how Europeans were now experiencing for themselves 'the roundups, the slap in the face of an interrogator, suffocation in jam-packed barracks, death under the heel of a criminal of a higher race. The historian Geoff Eley has described how the Nazis' Polish policy 'fits into the larger repertoire of practice associated with the pre-1941 "colonial ordering of the world"'. Europe's history of imperialism, Wendy Lower writes in Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine (2005), 'shaped the policies and behavior of Nazi leaders and their functionaries who tried to colonize Ukraine during World War II.’
This book is a history of Jewish transformation, 1900s to today, and charts evolving Zionist/anti-Zionist ideas via the Jewish diaspora literary canon (in which the author is extensively read). The loci of Jewish identity shifts around Israel, around the Holocaust: 'With Israel's existence reconceived in the 1960s as a preparation for another Shoah, continuous aggression seemed the only feasible solution to the Palestinian question. Bellicosity came to be perceived as necessary, not only to quell Palestinian claims on Israeli territory, but also to avenge the powerlessness of European Jews during the Shoah and wash off the shame of their passive victimhood. The Shoah thus became the sacred core of Israeli nationalism; and it rendered political negotiation meaningless, while serving to justify the grossest forms of violence and dispossession as self-defence. / The sanctification of the Shoah and Israeli power has made the most well-intentioned forms of liberal' Zionism seem a cynical deception, one more way of buying time for a non-existent 'peace process' while claiming the intellectual prestige and moral superiority of liberalism.'
There were a handful of concessions to imperial language which I found unnecessary (ideas of terrorism, naming a pre-40s Jaffa 'Tel Aviv') and honestly the dedication being to JVP the American-Jewish organization seemed strange to me. Given how much this book owes to Jewish thought & philosophy however I am not so surprised, that's clearly where the author is coming from.
Speaking of: the author also discusses his personal experiences in how India's Hindutva fash relates to Israel, to postcolonial theory, and how it exploits the latter in it's nation-building propaganda within South Asia itself. Hindu nationalists and Turkish Islamists brazenly use narratives of hereditary victimhood to dress up authoritarian and exclusionary politics as emancipatory, and to forge a hyper-masculine new national identity out of their narratives of humiliation, helplessness and insecu-rity. Narendra Modi claims that Hindus were enslaved for a thousand years, by Muslim invaders for 750 years, and then for an additional 250 years by white British colonialists - and then uses this lachrymose version of Hindu history to justify the degradation of Muslim and Christian minorities, the destruction of mosques and British-built buildings. Modi has launched a commemorative politics closely mimicking that of Israel: he announced in 2021 that 14 August will be remembered annually as Partition Horrors Remembrance Day to remind Hindus of their suffering during the partition of British-ruled India in 1947. Modi's supporters have also appropriated Edward Said, depicting dissenters as colonised minds and imperialist tools.
Interesting to me as a Bengali Muslim. There are good tidbits detailing historical relationships between Muslims, Hindus, and the Jewish peoples of the subcontinent both prior to the advent of Israel and following. Overall a good read for what it is though it's unfairly blank on the development of Gaza itself.
July 11, 2025
Een verhelderende, verfrissende, niet-westerse, niet-koloniale kijk op de genocide door Israël in Gaza. Weinig hoopgevend, maar Pankaj Mishra duwt waar het pijn doet voor wie nog gelooft in de al lang doorprikte morele en politieke superioriteit van westerse landen, die Israël nietsontziend inzetten als voorpost voor hun tanende koloniale macht. Wat in Gaza gebeurt, is lang niet de eerste en helaas wellicht ook niet de laatste genocide ten bate vanwesterse hegemonie.
October 8, 2025
Rezension folgt...
3,5 Sterne
3,5 Sterne
September 4, 2025
Muestra ideas interesantes y una perspectiva oriental del tema judío y el tema palestino-israelí (incluyendo en alguna ocasión agentes como la India que le suma cierto interés). En ocasiones se siente que falta unidad y que el hilo conductor, aunque presente, no termina de ligar bien por momentos.
Notita del Deivid: 7/10
Notita del Deivid: 7/10
April 15, 2025
The title is misleading because it is not really an account of the suffering of the people in Gaza but rather a history of Jewish consciousness in dealing with the Holocaust. Mishra portrays the conflict from a decolonisation lens as an attempt of Israel as part of the Global North/Western white countries to continue the colonisation/oppression/settler project so their control over resources, narrative, and future can be maintained. The main message is that the Israelis as a victim of Holocaust has instead commit a Holocaust on the Palestinians.
It's an original and though provoking work with many unusual angles that we rarely see from debates we see nowadays in public online spaces, such as the various nuances that Zionism is portrayed, accepted, and criticized (did you know that the British and American government used to be almost anti-Zionist around World War II? Rashid Khalidi should take note of that and revise his narrative). However, in many sections it lacks a unifying narrative structure that at the end it feels jumbled and disjointed, like a collection of notes that the writer has been making in preparation of the book but still lacks that final touch of narration that you add in the final draft. Mishra lies heavily on diversity of voices and quotations, but that stretches his narrative to the point of breakdown, the kind of problem I also encounter when reading his Age of Anger.
I also think that despite his original angle of approach, he is mistaken in his whole criticism of the rise of right wing politics as the resurgent attempt of Global North/Western Civilization in which Israel is now firmly a part of. I think he doesn't give enough credit to immigration, rise of radical islam terrorism, fiscal policy/debt, or rise of violence as genuine problems that the left failed to address. Mishra also failed to take into account the resurgent acts of terrorism worldwide, not only as Muslim response to a perceived aggression against Islam but as a genuine anti-West/Semitic Jihad. Any country wouldn't stop attacking Gaza if their country is attacked like that and hostages are held, like on the 7th of October.
On the whole, I think it could have been a more promising book. I expected more discussion on politics such as the consequences of Israel and US' defiance of the ICC court orders, what does it mean on the nationalist independence movements worldwide in Kashmir, Papua, or Catalonia. Nevertheless, point taken, and this book is excellent food for thought. The fact that this book has induced me to ramble on this long on a book review is a plus point.
It's an original and though provoking work with many unusual angles that we rarely see from debates we see nowadays in public online spaces, such as the various nuances that Zionism is portrayed, accepted, and criticized (did you know that the British and American government used to be almost anti-Zionist around World War II? Rashid Khalidi should take note of that and revise his narrative). However, in many sections it lacks a unifying narrative structure that at the end it feels jumbled and disjointed, like a collection of notes that the writer has been making in preparation of the book but still lacks that final touch of narration that you add in the final draft. Mishra lies heavily on diversity of voices and quotations, but that stretches his narrative to the point of breakdown, the kind of problem I also encounter when reading his Age of Anger.
I also think that despite his original angle of approach, he is mistaken in his whole criticism of the rise of right wing politics as the resurgent attempt of Global North/Western Civilization in which Israel is now firmly a part of. I think he doesn't give enough credit to immigration, rise of radical islam terrorism, fiscal policy/debt, or rise of violence as genuine problems that the left failed to address. Mishra also failed to take into account the resurgent acts of terrorism worldwide, not only as Muslim response to a perceived aggression against Islam but as a genuine anti-West/Semitic Jihad. Any country wouldn't stop attacking Gaza if their country is attacked like that and hostages are held, like on the 7th of October.
On the whole, I think it could have been a more promising book. I expected more discussion on politics such as the consequences of Israel and US' defiance of the ICC court orders, what does it mean on the nationalist independence movements worldwide in Kashmir, Papua, or Catalonia. Nevertheless, point taken, and this book is excellent food for thought. The fact that this book has induced me to ramble on this long on a book review is a plus point.
March 22, 2025
Läs den!
August 20, 2025
Very interesting and illuminating. Def. recommend, learned a lot.
October 15, 2025
The title it’s actually on point. 🙇
October 26, 2025
Over the past three years I’ve seen a lot of people, myself included, ask “How did this happen?” and this book is a GREAT way to get the ball rolling. It explains very clearly how jewish people after the second world war were in a social and political position to establish an ethnostate, and the frameworks set up by the British provided a way to easily segregate and oppress the indigenous Arab population, and how global politics have led Israel to being a global superpower and major militaristic state. Very insightful read.
September 19, 2025
"It is no exaggeration to say that the ethical and political stakes have rarely been higher. The atrocities of Gaza, sanctioned even sanctified by the free world's political and media class and brashley advertised by its perpetrators, have not only devastated an already feeble belief in social progress. They challenged too, a fundamental assumption that human nature is intrinsically good, capable of empathy."
Pankaj Mishra
Pankaj Mishra
October 22, 2025
Review to come. Some notes for further reading and study:
- Night of the Scorpion
- Philosopher Karl Jaspers' concept of "Metaphysical guilt"
Part One: Afterlives of the Shoah: Israel and the Incurable Offense (32:40)
- Jews in the international left (Part One ~38:40) notably in Soviet Russia
- In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Struggle Between Jews and Zionists in the Aftermath of World War II describes "the narrow Zionist centric view of David Ben Gurion who was exasperated by the great majority of diaspora Jews who refused to become Zionists and move to Palestine to contribute to his nation building project..."
- The Counterlife ("Israel was supposed to be the place where to become a normal Jew was the goal. But the ones who come from America are either religious or crazy or both.")
- Zygmunt Bauman, Polish born Jewish philosopher and refugee from Nazism spent three years in Israel before fleeing its "belicose righteousness" after Six Day War. Despaired at "privatization of the Shoah"
- The Odessa File ("cheap paperback" ... "vengeful Nazis collaborate with Arabs to destroy Israel") ... see comparisons to Zionism and Hindu nationalism in authors memory ~1:17:00
- The Last Kings of Shanghai: The Rival Jewish Dynasties That Helped Create Modern China
- The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian
- Film: Korczak (1990) (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099949/)
- Black Skin, White Masks
- Nazis' 1937 forced sterilizations of children fathered by African fathers
- The Origins of Totalitarianism ("Many subordinate peoples in Asia and Africa saw well before Arendt wrote about them in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) the links between Western Imperialism in Asia and Africa and Nazi Imperialism in Europe.")
- Rabindranath Tagore (Indian critic of the nation state)
- Ahad Ha'am ("pioneering Hebrew writer and opponent of Herzl who likewise deplored the nationalist tendency to find the path of glory in the attainment of material power and political dominion")
- The Pity of It All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch 1743-1933 ("account of the extraordinary jewish infatuation with German culture which ends with the advent of Hitler in early 1933 and premonitions of doom. The books last works describe Hannah Arendt fleeing Berlin in the summer of that year through on a train south through the rolling countryside in the opposite direction taken two years early by the boy Moses Mendelssohn on foot on his way to fame and fortune in enlightenment Berlin.")
- Film: Europa Europa (1990) (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099776/) based on Europa, Europa: A Memoir of World War II (a german Jew who survived murder of his family only by suppressing his Jewishness and posing as an Aryan in which capacity he dated a viciously antisemitic young woman and became a star member of the Hitler Youth)
- Film: Schindler's List (1993) (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108052) ("peculiarly American vision in which adversity elicits moral courage and feats of heroism from ordinary individual sand the human spirit ultimately triumphs, for some survivors at least" ~2:15:00)
- After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives
- "The acrimonious spats between Arab students from Libya, Jordan, Iraq, and Syria on my university campus in Delhi in the early 1990s as Yassir Arafat stood in solidarity with Saddam Hussein revealed how Palestinians were disadvantaged by their lack of effective leaders and allies against internationally connected and resourceful Zionists. I could see too the insidious racism that had helped prioritize the interests of the West's chosen nation in the middle easy while demeaning Palestinian suffering in Western eyes." ~1:58:00
- My Palestine: An Impossible Exile
- A Tale of Love and Darkness (author struck by "how Arabs had barely existed in the yes of Israel's foremost writer...")
- Once Upon a Country: A Palestinian Life (on this absence, author remarks "...it wasn't a product of malevolence or ill-will. Uppermost in the Jews' mind were the Nazi death camps they had narrowly escaped...")
- On "sadistic gratification" of settlers: "Often with American accents in shooting Palestinian villages and destroying their cars, farms, homes, and water tanks." ~2:06:00
- On the "support of American antisemitic evangelicals" ~2:09:00
- Israel collaboration with Turkish governments to deny Armenians right to describe as genocide events in 1915-16 ~2:09:00
- Primo Levy's writings for this author a "touchstone as I started to learn about the most dramatic turnaround in Jewish history, the propelling of a small minority from a marginal passive and despised existence in the west into the very heart of the modern world, complicit in almost all its fateful developments and historic antagonisms ... urgent moral and existential necessity after the Shoah ... pathologies of survivalist nationalism." ~2:17:00
- Hans Kohn (early zionist, pioneering scholar of nationalism, worked for peaceful coexistence)
- From Beirut to Jerusalem ("the holocausting of the Israeli psyche" and "reversing it with healthy and proper leadership")
- The Destruction of the European Jews originally difficult to publish, but "picture changed entirely" in 1975 or so as Shoah came to be "essential component of Israeliness and Jewishness"
- Israel and the Daughters of the Shoah: Reoccupying the Territories of Silence
- Film: Exodus (1960) re:
- internalization of the racists arraignment from Christian Europeans indicting them as cowards and weaklings ~2:24:00
- "Severe Verdict" (?) by Hannah Arendt 2:25:00 on role of Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people
- Primo Levy on collaborators and the demand for "moral perfection" ~2:27:50: "No one is authorized to judge them. No one who lived through the experience of the lagar (Sp?), and even less those who did not."
- Zionist logic: "Israel's right to exist as an ethno national state exerted in perpetuity against Palestinian claims safeguarded the rights of jews living in the diaspora to live without fear of another Shoah."
- Elie Wiesel
- Yehuda Amichai
- Amos Elon
- Amos Oz
- A.B. Yehoshua
- Opinion: Silence of American Jews Supports Wrong Side (https://www.nytimes.com/1988/02/21/op...)
- Article: "The Need to Forget" (1988) (https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org....)
Part Two: Remembering the Shoah: Germany from Antisemitism to Philosemitism (2:50:39)
- The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945
- Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland
- Golden Harvest: Events at the Periphery of the Holocaust
- Film: Judgement of Nuremberg (1961) (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0055031/)
- The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany
- Night
- The Jewish Century
- Adenauer's Germany and the Nazi Past (2002)
- Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution (2018)
- "Many young people growing up in West Germany felt they were "surrounded by Nazis" ... by the mid 1960s they had begun to see not just personal continuities but structural ones. The federal republic was a fascist or at least pre-fascist state. The student movement emerged as a protest against these real and imagined continuities. Indeed a powerful myth emphasized German suffering after the war. It stressed that Germany was a nation of victims, particularly POWs in Soviet hands and
those expelled from Eastern and Central Europe ... [author of [book:War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany|1106882] ] describes how rising anti-Communism in Germany drew conveniently on Nazi stereotypes of the Russian mongol..." ~3:10:00
- My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin (1998)
- ~3:24:00 "sordid details" in classified files of the German chancellery and intelligence
- Author found in said archives enough "to show in Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass MurdererEichmann before Jerusalem (2014) that Adenauer enlisted the CIA to delete a reference to [administrative lawyer Hans Globke] in Life magazine."
- Herero genocide (southwest Africa/namibia)
- Tip and Run: The Untold Tragedy of the Great War in Africa (2007)
- Hitler's African Victims: The German Army Massacres of Black French Soldiers in 1940 (2005)
Americanizing the Holocaust
Part Three: Across the Color Line: The Clashing Narratives of the Shoah, Slavery and Colonialism
Atrocity Hucksterism and Identity Politics
Epilogue: Hope in a Dark Time
- Night of the Scorpion
- Philosopher Karl Jaspers' concept of "Metaphysical guilt"
Part One: Afterlives of the Shoah: Israel and the Incurable Offense (32:40)
- Jews in the international left (Part One ~38:40) notably in Soviet Russia
- In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Struggle Between Jews and Zionists in the Aftermath of World War II describes "the narrow Zionist centric view of David Ben Gurion who was exasperated by the great majority of diaspora Jews who refused to become Zionists and move to Palestine to contribute to his nation building project..."
- The Counterlife ("Israel was supposed to be the place where to become a normal Jew was the goal. But the ones who come from America are either religious or crazy or both.")
- Zygmunt Bauman, Polish born Jewish philosopher and refugee from Nazism spent three years in Israel before fleeing its "belicose righteousness" after Six Day War. Despaired at "privatization of the Shoah"
- The Odessa File ("cheap paperback" ... "vengeful Nazis collaborate with Arabs to destroy Israel") ... see comparisons to Zionism and Hindu nationalism in authors memory ~1:17:00
- The Last Kings of Shanghai: The Rival Jewish Dynasties That Helped Create Modern China
- The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian
- Film: Korczak (1990) (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099949/)
- Black Skin, White Masks
- Nazis' 1937 forced sterilizations of children fathered by African fathers
- The Origins of Totalitarianism ("Many subordinate peoples in Asia and Africa saw well before Arendt wrote about them in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) the links between Western Imperialism in Asia and Africa and Nazi Imperialism in Europe.")
- Rabindranath Tagore (Indian critic of the nation state)
- Ahad Ha'am ("pioneering Hebrew writer and opponent of Herzl who likewise deplored the nationalist tendency to find the path of glory in the attainment of material power and political dominion")
- The Pity of It All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch 1743-1933 ("account of the extraordinary jewish infatuation with German culture which ends with the advent of Hitler in early 1933 and premonitions of doom. The books last works describe Hannah Arendt fleeing Berlin in the summer of that year through on a train south through the rolling countryside in the opposite direction taken two years early by the boy Moses Mendelssohn on foot on his way to fame and fortune in enlightenment Berlin.")
- Film: Europa Europa (1990) (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099776/) based on Europa, Europa: A Memoir of World War II (a german Jew who survived murder of his family only by suppressing his Jewishness and posing as an Aryan in which capacity he dated a viciously antisemitic young woman and became a star member of the Hitler Youth)
- Film: Schindler's List (1993) (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108052) ("peculiarly American vision in which adversity elicits moral courage and feats of heroism from ordinary individual sand the human spirit ultimately triumphs, for some survivors at least" ~2:15:00)
- After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives
- "The acrimonious spats between Arab students from Libya, Jordan, Iraq, and Syria on my university campus in Delhi in the early 1990s as Yassir Arafat stood in solidarity with Saddam Hussein revealed how Palestinians were disadvantaged by their lack of effective leaders and allies against internationally connected and resourceful Zionists. I could see too the insidious racism that had helped prioritize the interests of the West's chosen nation in the middle easy while demeaning Palestinian suffering in Western eyes." ~1:58:00
- My Palestine: An Impossible Exile
- A Tale of Love and Darkness (author struck by "how Arabs had barely existed in the yes of Israel's foremost writer...")
- Once Upon a Country: A Palestinian Life (on this absence, author remarks "...it wasn't a product of malevolence or ill-will. Uppermost in the Jews' mind were the Nazi death camps they had narrowly escaped...")
- On "sadistic gratification" of settlers: "Often with American accents in shooting Palestinian villages and destroying their cars, farms, homes, and water tanks." ~2:06:00
- On the "support of American antisemitic evangelicals" ~2:09:00
- Israel collaboration with Turkish governments to deny Armenians right to describe as genocide events in 1915-16 ~2:09:00
- Primo Levy's writings for this author a "touchstone as I started to learn about the most dramatic turnaround in Jewish history, the propelling of a small minority from a marginal passive and despised existence in the west into the very heart of the modern world, complicit in almost all its fateful developments and historic antagonisms ... urgent moral and existential necessity after the Shoah ... pathologies of survivalist nationalism." ~2:17:00
- Hans Kohn (early zionist, pioneering scholar of nationalism, worked for peaceful coexistence)
- From Beirut to Jerusalem ("the holocausting of the Israeli psyche" and "reversing it with healthy and proper leadership")
- The Destruction of the European Jews originally difficult to publish, but "picture changed entirely" in 1975 or so as Shoah came to be "essential component of Israeliness and Jewishness"
- Israel and the Daughters of the Shoah: Reoccupying the Territories of Silence
- Film: Exodus (1960) re:
- internalization of the racists arraignment from Christian Europeans indicting them as cowards and weaklings ~2:24:00
- "Severe Verdict" (?) by Hannah Arendt 2:25:00 on role of Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people
- Primo Levy on collaborators and the demand for "moral perfection" ~2:27:50: "No one is authorized to judge them. No one who lived through the experience of the lagar (Sp?), and even less those who did not."
- Zionist logic: "Israel's right to exist as an ethno national state exerted in perpetuity against Palestinian claims safeguarded the rights of jews living in the diaspora to live without fear of another Shoah."
- Elie Wiesel
- Yehuda Amichai
- Amos Elon
- Amos Oz
- A.B. Yehoshua
- Opinion: Silence of American Jews Supports Wrong Side (https://www.nytimes.com/1988/02/21/op...)
- Article: "The Need to Forget" (1988) (https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org....)
Part Two: Remembering the Shoah: Germany from Antisemitism to Philosemitism (2:50:39)
- The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945
- Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland
- Golden Harvest: Events at the Periphery of the Holocaust
- Film: Judgement of Nuremberg (1961) (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0055031/)
- The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany
- Night
- The Jewish Century
- Adenauer's Germany and the Nazi Past (2002)
- Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution (2018)
- "Many young people growing up in West Germany felt they were "surrounded by Nazis" ... by the mid 1960s they had begun to see not just personal continuities but structural ones. The federal republic was a fascist or at least pre-fascist state. The student movement emerged as a protest against these real and imagined continuities. Indeed a powerful myth emphasized German suffering after the war. It stressed that Germany was a nation of victims, particularly POWs in Soviet hands and
those expelled from Eastern and Central Europe ... [author of [book:War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany|1106882] ] describes how rising anti-Communism in Germany drew conveniently on Nazi stereotypes of the Russian mongol..." ~3:10:00
- My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin (1998)
- ~3:24:00 "sordid details" in classified files of the German chancellery and intelligence
- Author found in said archives enough "to show in Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass MurdererEichmann before Jerusalem (2014) that Adenauer enlisted the CIA to delete a reference to [administrative lawyer Hans Globke] in Life magazine."
- Herero genocide (southwest Africa/namibia)
- Tip and Run: The Untold Tragedy of the Great War in Africa (2007)
- Hitler's African Victims: The German Army Massacres of Black French Soldiers in 1940 (2005)
Americanizing the Holocaust
Part Three: Across the Color Line: The Clashing Narratives of the Shoah, Slavery and Colonialism
Atrocity Hucksterism and Identity Politics
Epilogue: Hope in a Dark Time
May 17, 2025
It is almost two years since Hamas invaded Israel from Gaza on the fateful day of October 7, 2023, and brutally murdered 1200 people. The author of this book has very little to say about that barbaric act. Instead, he writes about the devastation in Gaza as being entirely Israel's doing. He completely evades the crucial point: the devastation in Gaza is entirely due to Hamas, an Islamic terrorist group, hiding in places like hospitals, mosques, among civilians, and even UNRWA offices. Hamas is ruthless in using Palestinian civilians as human shields. To date fifty-two thousand Gazans have died because of Hamas using them as human shields. Hamas doesn't care. It took 250 hostages and returned several alive and several dead. It is now May 2025 and Hamas, despite such a devastation of Gaza, refuses to return the remaining 58 hostages back to Israel. The author of this book has nothing to say about this. In fact he likely inspires Pro-Palestinian demonstrators across the Universities in the USA by making Israel look like an evildoer. This book makes me sick. It is obsessed with the Shoah (Holocaust) but really has nothing useful to say about antisemitism and how the world can be supportive of the Jews and avoid another holocaust. Or how the terrible ongoing conflict in Israel-Palestine could be resolved. Instead, as mentioned above, he starts the book with a portrayal of the Israelis as ruthless destroyers of Gaza. The "World after Gaza?" He doesn't even have anything useful to say about Israel after Gaza. A history? A most useless 'history' of the conflict I've ever read. I'll say it again: this book is an exercise in futility and made me sick. Can't believe it got published.
February 25, 2025
This was a very thought provoking read that made me think outside of my normal parameters and helped me see part of the world through a different non-American lens. There is still more I want to understand, but this was a big step forward in trying to see a more global perspective.
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