Women mourn the death of their relatives at the Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir el-Balah, Gaza, on 28 June 2024 (AFP)
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There are photos and videos of dead Palestinian children on social media every day.
Having turned Gaza into a wasteland, killing tens of thousands in the process, Israel has this month broken the ceasefire returned to kill more.
The end goal is surely ethnic cleansing, the removal of Palestinians from Gaza framed as the removal of Hamas from power.
Western countries have aided and abetted this war, arming Israel, providing it with intelligence and covering for it diplomatically and rhetorically.
Asked in the House of Commons about Israel’s unilateral breaking of the ceasefire and its subsequent killing of 400 people – many of them children - in the space of a few hours, British Foreign Secretary David Lammy’s response was typical of the way the West has dealt with Gaza: he quibbled over the language being used and then talked about the Hamas-led attack of 7 October.
“Much has happened in the world in recent years: natural catastrophes, financial breakdowns, political earthquakes, a global pandemic, and wars of conquest and vengeance,” the Indian author Pankaj Mishra writes in the prologue to his new book, The World After Gaza.
“Yet no disaster compares to Gaza – nothing has left us with such an intolerable weight of grief, perplexity and bad conscience…. A whole generation of young people in the West was pushed into moral adulthood by the words and actions (and inaction) of its elders in politics and journalism, and forced to reckon, almost on its own, with acts of savagery aided by the worlds’ richest and most powerful democracies.”
How did we get to this point? And how has the western-backed decimation of Gaza changed not only the geopolitical landscape, but the hearts and minds of people around the world?
The World After Gaza takes on these questions, expertly drawing on a dizzying array of sources to examine the way in which two of the 20th century’s defining events – the Holocaust and decolonisation from western empires – have been used and interpreted, and how these historical currents have taken us downstream to a place where Israel’s war on Gaza is being covered for by western liberals and cheered on by far-right antisemites.
Media pave path to destruction
Meeting the day after Israel broke the ceasefire, Mishra, who is 56, slight and elegantly dressed, tells Middle East Eye that while he expected the war to continue, he still finds the world to be a “much bleaker place” than he had imagined even while writing the book.
“When you’re confronted with those images of dozens and dozens of dead children killed in a single hour by the Israeli Defence Forces you still are shocked, appalled, demoralised, plunged into despair,” he says. “You are again forced to ask yourself: what is this hell that we are being asked to inhabit today and probably for the foreseeable future?”
This mix of feeling – of being demoralised, hopeless but also not surprised – applies also to the way the western media has covered the destruction of Gaza.
Men riding a horse-drawn cart carrying chopped wood watch as a smoke plume erupts from an Israeli air strike in central Gaza on 25 March 2025 (AFP)
") rgba(220, 220, 220, 0.5); top: -15px; left: 0px;">“It's very easy to be shocked by the way institutions like The New York Times, the Atlantic, the BBC, and various others have disgraced themselves in the last 15 months,” Mishra says. “But I think it's also important to see the longer histories of the way in which these institutions have covered the rest of the world.”
The Indian author points to the New York Times coverage of the Japanese in the 1940s – “comparing them to monkeys swinging from trees, setting the stage really for the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki” – as well as to how the British press covered large parts of the world during the age of empire and to the lies spread about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq as ways in which the western media has in the past paved the way for the destruction of certain people.
Mishra places Gaza in this context of a “particular regime of suppression, evasion and censorship that is profoundly institutionalised within these outfits”. As an essayist working for western publications, Mishra is bound up in this system.
Today, he says that “if you are going to remain a person with a conscience, then you've got to reconsider many of your alliances and professional relationships, or you stay within those institutions and become dead inside.”
In December 2023, Bloomberg published what was to be Mishra’s last column for them. In February 2024, the Barbican’s cancellation of his talk on “The Shoah after Gaza” – a talk that led to The World After Gaza - exposed a huge rift in Britain’s cultural institutions between bosses supporting Israel and artists and workers hoping to stand in solidarity with Palestinians.
The coverage of the war, and the political climate around it in the West, has often felt perverse. The contortions required to frame Israel’s onslaught as self-defence are barely fathomable. At the same time, anyone protesting this is demonised, detained and even deported.
And still the West holds itself up as a beacon of equality and freedom. These claims, which go back at least as far as the late 17th century and the beginning of the Enlightenment, have always jarred with western imperialism, capitalism and the use of force to maintain these orders around the world.
Redefining Jews in the world
For Mishra, an Indian writer, growing up in a recently decolonised country as part of a Hindu nationalist family that idolised Israeli military men and was supportive of Zionism, this has all made for fertile terrain, both emotionally and politically.
In novels such as The Romantics (1999) and Run and Hide (2022), and works of non-fiction including Age of Anger (2017) and From the Ruins of Empire (2012), he has explored the political, intellectual and emotional ramifications of the relationship between the West and the world it once colonised, as well as between the mirage of freedom conjured up by global elites and the reality of a deeply unequal, often bitterly angry planet.
The World After Gaza is, in some ways, an urgent culmination of these themes, since Gaza’s destruction – and the West’s hand in it – can be seen as the most brutal expression of western indifference to those “darker peoples” on the other side of W.E.B. Du Bois’ “colour line”.
This indifference is in stark contrast to the West’s guilt and preoccupation with the Holocaust. It is Palestinians, after all, who have had to pay the price for European antisemitism, which existed for many centuries before the systematic murder of six million Jews by the Nazis. Many of those Nazis, Mishra reminds us, were not punished for what they did, going on to live lives of comfort and sometimes influence in post-war Germany.
It is in this persecution, though, that Mishra makes an important argument for a kinship that “connects the Jewish experience to the experiences of colonised peoples”.
Members of South African Jews for a Free Palestine group and pro-Palestinian supporters protest against a South African Zionist Federation Conference in Cape Town in March 2025 (AFP)
") rgba(220, 220, 220, 0.5); top: -15px; left: 0px;">“We are too accustomed now to seeing Jews as part of this undifferentiated sort of mass of the white population of Europe,” Mishra says. “For a very long time, especially intensely in the late 19th century, Jews were often described and denounced in the same terms that colonised people were – as weak, cowardly, unmanly, parasites breeding too much.
“So, what I'm trying to do in this book is to bring those experiences into conversation, so that for young people they can start to see the Jewish populations of the world as part of their history instead of seeing them as part of western history.”
'When people talk about speaking truth to power, what they don't realise is that power already knows the truth. It's not interested in listening to it at all'
- Pankaj Mishra
This is crucial as it applies to Israel. Mishra talks about the “very dangerous process” of conflating Jewishness with the state of Israel, a process that Benjamin Netanyahu and countless other propagandists for Israel actively engage in.
Mishra tells MEE he believes that the way in which Netanyahu has “conflated the defence of Israel with the defence of Jews everywhere” is “profoundly antisemitic”.
“It is terrifying to me because you can see very clearly the consequences of this kind of conflation, people blaming Jews worldwide for what the state of Israel is doing. You will remember people blaming Muslims for what bin Laden was doing at one point. And we know the consequences of that.”
When it comes to a related phenomenon – that of far-right support for Israel – Mishra says that this is “only a surprise if you associate Israel with Jewishness”.
“We should focus on ideological, emotional and psychological affinities between people who are ruthlessly despotic in the state of Israel today and people elsewhere who want to be more like the people in Israel today,” he says.
“Israel will take its supporters wherever it finds them today,” he adds, referencing American evangelical Christians, Argentinian President Javier Milei, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
The role of the Holocaust
The Holocaust and the way its memory has been used and abused is crucial to where we are today.
Mishra argues that while in the West the Holocaust is seen as the defining event of the 20th century – out of which the now all-but-destroyed post-war liberal rules-based order was constructed – in much of the rest of the world it is decolonisation that is central. And as the world was decolonising, so Israel was being founded as a settler colonial state.
This colonial reality is something Mishra saw with his own eyes in 2008, when he visited the West Bank. “Nothing really prepares you just for the sheer hideousness of the structures of occupation in the West Bank, the way in which those structures have been devised," he says. "There's something truly fiendish about them."
“But when I go there and I see the occupation, I am appalled because I see something that is going on in 2025 that should have stopped in the 1940s, which is Palestine should have been decolonised a long time ago.”
Israeli tanks enter the Jenin camp for Palestinian refugees in the occupied West Bank, on 23 February 2025 (AFP)
") rgba(220, 220, 220, 0.5); top: -15px; left: 0px;">The Indian author says that when it comes to the Holocaust, his book seeks to answer the question of “how collective memory is something very deliberately constructed”. He points out that survivors of the Holocaust were initially treated “with great contempt” in Israel - the first Israeli prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, referred to them as “human debris” not fit to construct the strong state he envisioned.
In the 1960s, this changed. “The Holocaust starts to become central to Israeli national existence at the same time that Israel becomes the strongest military power in the Middle East, able to simultaneously take on various Arab countries and defeat them,” Mishra tells MEE.
“And at the same time, the state enters this kind of state of paranoia that a second Holocaust could happen at any moment. The people surrounding us, the Palestinians or other Arab populations, there are potential Nazis amongst these populations who are hell bent upon exterminating us,” Mishra says.
This paranoia is used to insist that Israel must keep expanding “in order to avoid another Auschwitz”. This is the “logic of this particular Holocaust narrative today… a kind of crazed survivalist mentality that makes you commit the most extreme atrocities but helps you justify them”.
Not being Jewish enough
Two particularly influential Jewish intellectuals and Holocaust survivors are used by Mishra to stand against this twisting of the Shoah’s legacy: the Austrian-born essayist Jean Amery and the Italian writer Primo Levi, both of whom are believed to have ended their own lives.
In his MEE interview, Mishra describes Levi as a “big influence on the book”. Deported to Auschwitz in 1944, he came out barely alive in 1945 and returned to Italy via eastern Europe, writing about his experiences in If This is a Man and The Truce.
Like Amery, Levy was initially more or less a supporter of Israel – indeed, Amery felt very hurt by fellow leftists who turned against Israel and Zionism in the 1960s and 1970s. But as the 1970s went on, and as Israel’s became ever more violent and more ethnonationalist, both men shifted positions.
As Levi grew older, Mishra says, he realised that the “particular narrative of victimhood” around the Holocaust is “being instrumentalised and weaponised. And also, at the same time, simplified enormously.
“When it comes to Israel, he can see very clearly that Israel is starting to exploit this narrative a great deal. And this all comes to a head in 1982 when Israel invades Lebanon,” leading to the massacres at the Palestinian refugee camps Sabra and Shatila and to a bombing campaign described as a “holocaust” by then-US President Ronald Reagan.
Lebanese civil defence teams prepare to remove the bodies of Palestinians massacred in the Sabra refugee camp in September 1982 (AFP)
") rgba(220, 220, 220, 0.5); top: -15px; left: 0px;">“Levi was one of a great number of Jewish intellectuals who were appalled by this and had been distressed by Israel’s descent into ethnonationalism. He is at Auschwitz when he hears about Lebanon, and he immediately demonstrates against what is happening and becomes a much more outspoken critic of Israel,” Mishra says.
On a trip to the US shortly after, Mishra says Levi is appalled by “the way surviving the Holocaust has been turned into a kind of industry”, and is particularly dismayed by Elie Wiesel, the most famous survivor and a staunch supporter of Israel.
“Levi kills himself partly because there are people in America attacking him for not being Jewish enough,” Mishra says.
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“I mean, you know, the grotesque irony of Primo Levi being described as not Jewish enough. Why was he described as not Jewish enough? Because he wasn't a great supporter of the state of Israel towards the end of his life. He was a very strong critic, in fact.”
This heaviness of feeling saturates our world after Gaza. Mishra references the philosopher Karl Jaspers, who wrote about “metaphysical guilt”, which he defined as the “solidarity among men as human beings that makes each co-responsible for every wrong and every injustice in the world”.
“I don’t expect to have an impact on people who are in power right now,” Mishra says of his writing.
“I think it's an extremely naive expectation. When people talk about speaking truth to power, what they don't realise is that power already knows the truth. It's not interested in listening to it at all.” Instead, Mishra says, “you should aim what you want to say to the people who might be in power in 20 years' time”.
This is where hope, if there is any, can be located. In college campuses and on the streets, in communities across the world that do not subscribe to the version of events put forward by western elites.
“It’s best,” Mishra says, “to appeal to people who are not so invested in these regimes of falsehood and mendacity.”
