Growing up in a Hindu nationalist household in India in the 1970s, the critic and author Pankaj Mishra felt great admiration for Israel, even as India’s leaders championed the Palestinian cause. Encouraged by his grandfather, an ardent nationalist, he absorbed stories of Israel’s quest for statehood, respecting the determination of the Zionist movement to overcome formidable odds to create a state for the Jews, one that would grant them both safe harbor in a hostile world and an army with the unflinching will to strike its enemies. He even hung a photo of Moshe Dayan, Israel’s eye-patch-wearing defense minister during the 1967 Six-Day War, in his bedroom.
Mishra describes this education and his emergence from it in “The World After Gaza,” an exploration of the entwined threads of history, memory, identity and politics that he hopes will illuminate the significance of the war between Israel and Hamas. Even as his mind has changed, what has been consistent for Mishra is the way the violence in the Middle East has always been more than a narrow sectarian fight in one part of the globe. Tied up in the legacies of the great wars, the collapse of colonialism and the shadow of the Holocaust, it has always been freighted with other conflicts that act as mirrors. The deeper he delves, the more kaleidoscopic his reflections become.
To the Hindu nationalists around him, Israel’s resounding successes highlighted India’s failures. “In comparison,” he writes, “Hindu nationalism seemed like a tragedy: Deprived of a united country by Muslim separatists, softheaded Gandhi (and Nehru) allowed a catastrophic partition of British-ruled India in 1947 that led to the slaughter and rape of countless Hindus.”
But literature led Mishra to outgrow the lessons his family imparted to him. Reading critics of nationalism like the Indian playwright and Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore and the cultural Zionist Ahad Ha’am, he soured on what he now sees as an ideal of ethnic domination, in India and in Israel. This change in his beliefs accelerated during a visit to the West Bank in 2008, where he witnessed Palestinian suffering under the control of Israel’s military. He was “unnerved,” he writes, that their “persecutors were the West’s former victims,” and felt deep racial overtones that shook a writer from a formerly colonized land. Mishra saw the Palestinians as “people who looked like me, and who now endured a nightmare that my own ancestors had put behind us.” He returned home with an “awakened, affronted sensibility.”
This outraged, post-colonial attitude animates “The World After Gaza.” The book was written before the current cease-fire between Hamas and Israel began last month, but that likely would not have diminished the opprobrium he heaps on the Israeli government and the United States, which he criticizes for providing Israel with weapons that have devastated civilian life.
Mishra’s book is more than a memoir of personal growth. He hopes to “alleviate my demoralizing perplexity before an extensive moral breakdown” and appeal to “a solidarity between human beings” that transcends racial and ethnic divisions.
To accomplish his ambitious goal, Mishra has armed himself with a vast bibliography. Some of his ruminations are carefully wrought, as when he presents the fitful and growing awareness of the horrors of the Holocaust before, as he sees it, Hollywood gloss distorted the tragedy and Israel’s defenders made it into an adaptable shield to deflect criticism of Israel. Elsewhere, quotations from various luminaries cascade down the page and his prodigious reading overwhelms his argument.
In often meandering chapters, he cites Holocaust survivors and historians; Israeli and Palestinian intellectuals; and Black American writers like W.E.B. Du Bois and James Baldwin. Even Woody Allen makes a surprising cameo, writing an opinion piece in The New York Times in 1988 to express his outrage at Israel’s forceful efforts to put down the first Palestinian uprising. “Are we talking about state-sanctioned brutality and even torture? My goodness!” Allen wrote.
The point seems to be to surprise readers with criticisms of Israel from unexpected sources as a way of opening them up to alternate ways of understanding history. Mishra’s scope is always wide. He spends little time discussing the Oct. 7 attack and how it heightened Israel’s sense of vulnerability. He focuses more on the effects on a generation of young people who witnessed what he calls “acts of savagery aided by the world’s richest and most powerful democracies.” The result has been part of a broader trend, he argues, of a growing number of people across continents who consider decolonization the most important event of the 20th century. In addition to political independence, he writes, this process offered the “seductive and perpetually renewable promise of equality,” and many of these people now see Israel as among the colonizers.
For Mishra, decolonization has played itself out largely in racial terms. It is “the physical and intellectual emancipation of the vast majority of the human population from the white man’s world” — although, he writes, “the Jew is not a white man in any simple sense,” not least because, as Mishra notes, “much of Israel’s population consists of Jews of Middle Eastern ancestry.” And yet, in his telling, Israel, in its treatment of Palestinians, has crossed from one side of the color line to the other, becoming an oppressor.
Decolonization is a tremendously large frame in which to fit the last eight or so decades of human history, and while it broadens Mishra’s realm of inquiry, it results in few new insights into the violence in the Middle East. After billing decolonization as “an unstoppable revolution,” he concludes that it might not make much difference anyway and predicts that Israel will eventually expel the Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza.
That struck me on my first reading as a dramatic and risky prediction. But now, President Trump has called publicly not just for removing two million Palestinians from Gaza, but also for the United States to take control of the territory and develop it into “the Riviera of the Middle East.” The Palestinians, Trump expects, will be “thrilled” by the idea.
One might expect that after arguing so forcefully that decolonization had profoundly altered global perspectives, Mishra might also predict a new and effective resistance to mass displacement or at least hope that his appeal to a more complicated view of the past could inspire change. But his pessimism seems to outstrip his optimism. He speaks admirably of the campus protesters who supported the Palestinians; they might help the people of Gaza feel less lonely in their sorrow. Is this what he means by solidarity? If so, it may be little comfort to those who continue to live under the profound burdens of their shared histories.
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