It is the misfortune of Jews that they so often find themselves the subject of obsessive fixation. By his own description, Pankaj Mishra is a lifelong obsessive. As a boy in India in the 1970s, the writer grew up in a Hindu-nationalist family that revered Jews, despite not knowing any. In that spirit, Mishra placed a portrait of the Israeli general Moshe Dayan, the hero of the Suez Crisis, on his bedroom wall.
If I had known Mishra then, I would have warned him that philo-Semitism is not a healthy condition; that, in his future, he would realize that Jews, like every cluster of humans, have their flaws; and that he shouldn’t take his disappointment personally. This moment arrived for him during a trip to the West Bank in 2008, where he witnessed the ugliness of Israeli occupation, which left him feeling a “bit foolish” and “resentful.”
Obsessions, especially when they overtake an agile mind, are destabilizing; swooning and repulsion are the alternating registers of a mind consumed. And repulsion is the animating sentiment of Mishra’s new polemic, The World After Gaza.
The title suggests the grandiosity of his ambitions. To merely denounce the war, or to call for the end of American military support for Israel, would have been small beer. Instead, he wants to make the case that Israel today is a symptom of what ails the planet, “a case study of Western-style impunity,” and a “portent of the future of a bankrupt and exhausted world.”
The underlying problem with the West, Mishra argues, is its sanctification of the Holocaust. He blames Jewish leaders, along with their philo-Semitic supporters in the Western elite, for defining the Holocaust as the epitome of evil and insisting that the world incessantly remember the Nazi genocide, a practice he calls “atrocity hucksterism.” (Full disclosure: I think that the Holocaust was the epitome of evil.) By fetishizing the Holocaust, they diverted attention from the suffering of others and “obscured closer examination of the West’s original sin of white supremacy.” And then he asks: “When does organised remembrance become a handmaiden to brute power, and a legitimiser of violence and injustice?”
Mishra has a habit of couching incendiary accusations in rhetorical questions, but his answer to this one is unambiguous. From the first page, Mishra seems intent on demonstrating that Israelis are, in fact, the new Nazis. His book opens with a long description of the Warsaw Ghetto, quoting at length from the poet Czesław Miłosz’s description of the screams of Jews he heard drifting over its walls. Mishra then abruptly juxtaposes a scene from Gaza, flush with heavy-handed language that bludgeons home his comparison. He calls Israel’s war an “industrial-scale slaughter” and a “livestreamed liquidation.”
Although any decent human should mourn the deaths of Palestinian civilians, Mishra races past the specious underpinnings of his analogy. To cite the obvious: Unlike Hamas, the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto never launched an armed invasion of Nazi Germany. They didn’t rape or murder or kidnap Germans, let alone German babies, or in any way engage in violent activity that might morally justify a military response. The Jews of Warsaw never used human shields. They never published a charter calling for German genocide. Mishra mentions Hamas’s attack in passing, but he never wastes his breath chastising the group.
Later in the book, Mishra concedes that anti-Israel protesters justifiably wield such comparisons in the service of trolling. He writes, “Since the Shoah was coded as the greatest evil, incomparable and unprecedented, those describing Zionism as a genocidal ideology aim to defuse the symbolism of the Shoah and represent the destruction of Gaza as the true evil of our times.” It shouldn’t require minimizing the senseless loss of life to acknowledge that the death of more than 46,000 Gazans, some number of whom were Hamas combatants, isn’t the same as the systematic extermination of 6,000,000 Jews. But by hyperbolically analogizing, Mishra seems to be intentionally salting Jewish wounds. This is hardly the stuff of the more ethical world that Mishra claims to desire.
Even on his own terms, this rhetorical turn is gratuitous, because imagining a more measured version of Mishra’s argument is so easy. It would go something like this: Benjamin Netanyahu has exploited memories of the Holocaust to justify brutal tactics in Gaza. Although Mishra agrees with that more restrained claim, it doesn’t suit his inflated goals.
His attempt to blame the plight of the wretched of the Earth on the Shoah’s central place in Western culture is unmoored from evidence. He writes about the “deepening links between Israeli governments, pro-Israel Jewish outfits and white supremacists in the United States and Europe.” But American white supremacists traffic in anti-Semitism and tend to blame Jews for the migration crisis. (In 2023, Elon Musk circulated a version of that claim.) And although American Jews have shifted slightly rightward in recent years, polling suggests that they remain a reliable constituency of the Democratic Party, far more liberal than other white voters. Mishra loves to mine the writings of postwar Jewish intellectuals for a damning quote—a racist protagonist in a Saul Bellow novel is one of his primary data points—but he can’t be bothered to cite the present-day leaders of Jewish organizations.
(Mishra does quote The Atlantic, as evidence of “a strenuously willed affiliation with the Shoah” that “diminishes” American journalism about Israel; and he also attacks The New Republic, which I once edited, for becoming a “purveyor of racism and Islamophobia” in the 1980s.)
As he depicts Jews parochially clinging to their victimhood, Mishra skirts some pretty important countervailing pieces of evidence. It was Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish lawyer, who in the 1940s coined the term genocide, which he helped to enshrine in international law, in a quest to prevent other ethnic minorties from suffering the fate of the Jews. Mishra flays Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor who won a Nobel Peace Prize—quoting Alfred Kazin, who called him a “Jesus of the Holocaust”—while neglecting to mention Wiesel’s opposition to South African apartheid and his record of advocating for interventions to prevent genocides in Bosnia, Rwanda, and Darfur. (He also popularized the slogan “No human being is illegal.”’) And I wonder if Mishra has ever set foot in a synagogue aligned with Reform or conservative Judaism, the two largest denominations in the United States. After the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, they festooned their buildings with banners in support of Black Lives Matter, in the name of Tikkun Olam, healing the world.
Mishra inadvertently proves the thesis of Dara Horn’s book People Love Dead Jews. He writes with loving care about the Holocaust, referring to it by its Hebrew name, the Shoah, and he exudes nothing but sympathy for interwar writers such as Isaac Babel and Joseph Roth. But as he describes the Jewry that emerged from the ashes, he mostly finds unredeeming qualities. Mishra keeps reaching for his shelf to pull the books in which he’s underlined passages from intellectuals, many of them Jewish, denouncing Jews. Among the accusations he recycles: Jewish intellectuals in the U.S. became “too comfortably conforming to the American ruling class”: They “clung to the Holocaust and Zionism for a sense of identity and purpose”; “the Jew profits from his status in America.” Citing the unpleasant Holocaust survivors portrayed in an Isaac Bashevis Singer novel, he notes, “Oppression doesn’t improve moral character.” There are many more such accusations. Each might be justifiable in context. But sewn together, they resemble nothing better than a grotesque effigy.
Like so many other intellectuals who have taken up the banner of Palestine, Mishra is unclear about what he really wants. He describes the two-state solution as a “pretence,” without offering a viable alternative. After reading his book, I had no clue how downgrading the historical import of the Holocaust would enhance the struggle against racism. In the final paragraphs of the book, he applauds the campus protesters for their defiance, even though he admits “they risk permanently embittering their lives with failure.” To howl into the wind without any plausible vision of a better world isn’t heroic or ethical; it’s a gesture of nihilism, and so, too, is this book.
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