The World After Gaza
By Pankaj Mishra
Penguin Random House
ISBN: 979-8217058891
304pp.

Pankaj Mishra draws on his strength as an academic and takes a scholarly deep dive into the literary thought that has shaped Western political and moral imagination post-World War II. He believes that the modern-day global order was created as a response to the Nazi Holocaust. In the West, the Shoah has been the benchmark of atrocity, the memory of which served to create Israel’s settler colonial state.

The World After Gaza examines the many aspects of Jewish statehood, the sanctified position of the Holocaust and how the West never really evolved when it came to equity for the ‘other’. However, as we know, the Holocaust was not the first and most certainly not the last display of human cruelty.

Mishra begins his book on a personal note, where he describes growing up in a Hindu-nationalist household in the 1970s. India was the first non-Arab country to recognise the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) as the sole representative of the Palestinian people in 1974. He describes how most Hindu nationalists (especially upper-caste Hindus) were happy to break away from the government-mandated official consensus, as set up by Nehru.

Hindu nationalists felt a natural affinity with the Zionist cause, “a similar experience of marginality and humiliation.” He perceives their radical ideology as a longing “to overcome what they perceived as a shameful lack of manhood among Jews and Hindus.” Mishra provides context as he traces the cruel, exploitative route of two centuries of British colonial rule in the Subcontinent. He is acutely aware of the insidious racism of the West as he confronts the magnitude of the ghettos, the death squads, and the concentration camps littered across Europe. The callousness on display is familiar to Mishra, where his ancestors have felt the trauma of colonisation.

Pankaj Mishra’s latest book is a personal coming to terms with his pro-Zionist upbringing as well as the roots of the Western ideology that not only led to colonialism and the Nazi Holocaust but the impunity that Israel enjoys in the West

This is why he admits to finding Zionist logic hard to resist. A logic that dictates that the safety of the Jewish people can only be........

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