The World After Gaza—a Review

Saul Bellow, Martha Gellhorn, and Mary McCarthy maligned the Palestinians or Arabs while Simone Weil and Hannah Arendt, among many others, including Primo Levi, recognized the sufferings of all people no matter their skin color. A new book by Pankaj Mishra explores divisions and prejudices in the world of letters and the acquiescence and implication of literary giants and ordinary people in the genocide in Gaza.

The World After Gaza by Pankaj Mishra
Fern Press (2025)
ISBN 9781911717492

Selma Dabbagh

“I felt almost compelled to write this book,” Pankaj Mishra reveals in his prologue, “to alleviate my demoralizing perplexity before an extensive moral breakdown, and to invite general readers into a quest for clarifications that feel more pressing in a dark time.” The clarity sought has been sought for a while. He later summarizes the two baffling questions he asked himself prior to his first visit to Israel and the Palestinian Occupied Territories in 2008 as follows:

How did Israel, a country built to house a persecuted and homeless people, come to exercise such a terrible power of life and death over another population of refugees (many of them refugees in their own land) and how can the Western political and journalistic mainstream ignore, even justify, its clearly systematic cruelties and injustices?

The World After Gaza is unlike any other work I have read on Palestine/Israel. Mishra’s voyage around Zionism, the Shoah, antisemitism, philosemitism and “the colour line,” is personal, historical, philosophical and revolutionary. I have previously been advised by Palestinian writers to stay away from the Holocaust, as it is not our history, as it is a European affair, not a Palestinian one. It is also policed terrain when it comes to freedom of expression, with the provisions, for example in the IHRA definition of antisemitism, curtailing discussion of aspects of it. Mishra however, whilst not falling foul of these injunctions on intellectual debate, insists on the centrality of the Shoah, in recent decades. It has, among other things, “set the standard of human evil. The extent to which people identify it as such and promise to do everything in their power to combat antisemitism serves, in the West, as the measure of their civilisation.” Mishra stares unflinchingly not only at Zionist ideology, but at the role that intellectuals and writers in the 20th and 21st century have played, or have played into, the genocide in Gaza whose visceral horrors thread through the book, reminding the reader just how much our psyches have been scarred by the violence and cruelty of the past eighteen months.

Mishra writes of the father holding the headless corpse of his child in Rafah, as well as the revulsion he felt at the Tiktok “infotainment” of Israeli civilians and soldiers mocking the killing and suffering they have carried out, or are deliberately blinding themselves to. Even watching this from afar, he writes, has inflicted a “psychic ordeal,” on millions of people who have become “involuntary witnesses” to acts of “political evil.” He lists the denial of access of food and medicine; the hot metal sticks inserted in the rectum of naked prisoners; the destruction of schools, universities, museums, churches, mosques and even cemeteries; the puerility of evil embodied by IDF soldiers dancing around in the lingerie of dead or fleeing Palestinian women.

I have often thought that Mishra, as a thinker and a writer, has filled part of the intellectual chasm left by Edward Saïd’s death in 2003. There is the texture, intellectual muscularity and range of Edward Saïd’s Reith Lectures of 1993, published under the title, Representations of the Intellectual, in The World After Gaza. Both contain investigations that are at once public and private, and are driven by a quest for freedom and justice in the world. They are meditations that refer to the role of politicians and leaders, but pay greater attention to the writing of philosophers and novelists, in their public works, private letters, in their marginalia and in their asides.

Readers may be familiar with versions of some of the chapters which have appeared as long essays in the London Review of Books. In February 2024, the Barbican in London refused to host Mishra’s lecture, “The Shoah After Gaza.” The event had to move to St. James Church in Clerkenwell. When interviewed afterwards by the Guardian, Mishra commented that “powerful people who have supported the Israeli regime are doubling down on their untenable position. That breeds a pervasive sense of fear and panic that infects even cultural institutions.” Shocked, but not surprised, he said that “the whole point of culture and the arts is to embrace diversity, different viewpoints and protect imaginative freedom.”

In The World After Gaza, Mishra seeks to understand his own early fascination with the military figure of Israeli leader Moshe Dayan, whom he had revered growing up in a family of Brahmin Hindu Nationalists in India. Mishra takes us through the genesis of early Zionist thought, the intertwining of its roots with the European ethno-nationalistic impulses that in themselves gave rise to the powerful antisemitism that propagated the sentimental longings, ideological justifications, not to mention the political and financial backing that allowed for Zionism to become the political force that became Israel — now a nation that is, according not just to Mishra, but anyone who cares to look, committing “war crimes on a daily basis.” The embracing of nationalistic movements with clearly antisemitic objectives by Zionist thinkers, is charted through from Vladimir Jabotinsky (1880-1940) who “fulsomely endorsed Ukrainian nationalism in the early twentieth century even as it became identified with anti-Jewish pogroms,” to the current day, with Israeli leaders cozying up to the far-right in Eastern Europe.

The questions The World After Gaza investigates, summarized in the “how did Israel become what it is?” exploration that Mishra asked himself in 2008, is far more than a charting of the increasing takeover of Palestinian land for exclusive Jewish use, or a documentation of wars and leadership; it probes the intellectual framework for the venture, the methods of creation of a narrative, the co-optation of mass suffering of the Shoah into a self-justifying raison d’être for the State of Israel, as well as the forcible stamping out of any opposition to it. Ethnonationalism and the type of the “bellicose righteousness” has increasingly defined the Israeli state. By the mid-twentieth century, “technology, the rational division of labour and deference to norm-setting authority,” Mishra writes, “had enabled ordinary people to contribute to acts of mass extermination with a clear conscience, even with frissons of virtue.” It is to this “norm-setting authority” that Mishra plays closest attention. How were writers and intellectuals complicit in setting these norms and turning away from suffering, in this case the Palestinians, when it came to viewing the evidence of what the Zionist project had become? What part did these erudite, well-informed minds play in dehumanizing Palestinians and other “people of the periphery too weak and backward to be consequential in world history”?

The list of those writers seduced by the new state building project of Israel is long and glittery. Saul Bellow’s novels fell functionally in line with Israeli state propaganda. Martha Gellhorn felt entirely at liberty to vent her contempt for the Palestinians specifically, and the Arabs more generally. Mary McCarthy found the Arabs of Libya to be “odious,” and the list goes on. Many volumes would be required to chart and analyze those writers who without hesitation relegated a people “without Chagalls or Freuds” as Saïd put it, to a destiny of dispossession, disenfranchisement and genocide. Mishra’s analysis of some of this literature of norm-setting to enhance one people at the expense of another, to feel intensely one people’s suffering and be entirely numb to, if not to expect or welcome, the pain of another peoples, is sensitive and soul searching. There are many avenues for further research in The World After Gaza and this is one of them.

During times as dark as these, for all of us who have had to endure the “psychic ordeal,” of witnessing the assault on Gaza and more so, for the Palestinians particularly those in Gaza, a craving for hope is not only desirable, but the only responsible option, or as a friend in Gaza wrote to me, the only thing they have left. Mishra provides inspiration through unearthing the powerful voices of dissenters, those writers who did not fail to see the connections between the suffering of peoples no matter how much melanin their skin contained, or what religious heritage they were born into. There are many who I personally had not been aware of, others whose work I knew, but was not familiar with their stance on Palestine/Israel. Here, their lives and work are rightfully given a place in history by Mishra: Boaz Evron, Natalia Ginzberg, Ahad Ha’am join the ranks of Simone Weil and Hannah Arendt in being able to see beyond the pull of their religious heritage to speak out against all suffering of all peoples. Appreciated too is the mention of the pioneering journalism of Dorothy Thompson (1893-1961), whose career and memory deserve resurrection.

Mishra handles each one of these thinkers with care. It is rarely a monolithic emotive or intellectual compulsion that drives these thinkers, but a painful, often contradictory one. The scientist, writer and Auschwitz survivor, Primo Levi’s emotions towards Israel were complex and conflicted. He is said to have found pride when the cover of one of his books matched that of the Israeli flag, yet in a letter to a friend, Mishra tells us, he once wondered if he “belonged to the Jewish people at all.” He was not the only Jewish writer who post-1948 became increasingly more critical of the Israeli state after the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, upon the revelations of torture of Palestinian detainees in Israeli prisons and the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, Jean Améry (1912-1978) was another writer who found these political developments too much for him to reconcile with the dream he had been seduced by. They refused to close their eyes. They both understood where this could lead and what violence, pain and suffering entailed. Both men had survived the concentration camps, Améry had fought in the resistance to Nazi Germany and had been tortured.

The World After Gaza is a book of magnitude and grace. Mishra’s skills as a novelist enable him to provide vivid portraits of men and women struggling (and sometimes failing) to rail against the injustices of their eras. In doing so, we find not only a lament for what has gone wrong, a warning against the complicity that convenience can give rise to and an elegy for the world order that we are at risk of losing, but also a guide as to what we can be, each of us, individually.