Past and Present in Pankaj Mishra’s The World After Gaza
You’re obviously looking at a photo of the book.
The World After Gaza!
Cunning title! It implies a sea change in the way of the universe before the Hamas attacks of October 7 and after Israel’s genocidal campaign in that tiny space where apocalypse dwells. But much of what the reader actually encounters on the page, with such wonder and somberness, are the historical continuities between now and then.
Now, in the aftermath of the past one year and a half of horror in Gaza. Then, in past spans of horrors. Specific horrors: the tyrannies of colonialism, of slavery, of the Shoah. All of them the ugly progeny of Western dominion; all of them expressions of “the color line,” as coined by W.E. Du Bois:
…the extent to which racial difference is ‘made the basis of denying to over half the world the right of sharing to their utmost ability opportunities and privileges of modern civilization.
Put more starkly by Franz Fanon to his fellow travelers: “When you hear someone insulting the Jews, pay attention, he is talking about you.”
The manifestations of these Western legacies, which are the intimately experienced forces and counterforces of our modern existence, are the material of Mishra’s argument. They are myriad, interlocking, at times violent, at others subtle and lurking, in their persistent antagonisms both disheartening and inspiring.
Israel would have to be the most gripping of these. Home to a people, in their own right a master race of conquerors and subjugators, it has epitomized the Western supremacy that once cast out or slaughtered Jews as outsiders and undesirables.
This ostensibly confused identity has yielded peculiarities in the Jewish state infinitely more complicated than the old, much examined paradox of victim-as-victimizer. The most notable of these qualities is an unabashed xenophobic, ethnonationalist character that makes Israel today the pinup for far right Western parties given to antisemitic tropes and conspiracies about Jews on the home front.
It’s quite the achievement to be the idol of bigots whose hatred for your kith and kin in their midst is very keen and malevolent.
But then Israel, historically, was always comfortable allying itself with racist systems, like South Africa’s apartheid regime. It didn’t even have much of a problem dealing with Nazis barely a few years after the Holocaust. In the 1950s, the liaison between the Israeli foreign ministry and Germany’s Chancellor Konrad Adenauer was none other than Hans Globke, a Nazi and a close advisor to the German leader.
It’s not Israeli pragmatism in a devilish world that prompted such sordid dealings, it’s affinity, a shared visceral attitude towards the other, even similar ideas about what to do with them. There are many dimensions to this complicity, colonialism being one of them.
And so, naturally, Israel’s own victims would be the same as the West’s, rendering decolonization, as a counterforce, the shared aspiration of the dispossessed across maligned continents. Unavoidably, decolonization has haunted Israel, much like it has the West: a perpetual yearning for freedom, because of the perpetual craving for empire. A “fraternity of liberation” in response to a fraternity of exploitation.
It is true that, in a deceptively hopeful post World War II age of learned lessons, never agains, peace, and prosperity, Western atonement for its copious sins against the other as neighbor and as subject everywhere else in the world appeared earnest. But for those inhabiting the other side of the “color line” it was hard to buy into this hype before Gaza. That epoch was just too marred by pervasive Western hypocrisies, insidious racisms, and newfound paths to imperialism. After Gaza, it has become impossible.
Mishra meticulously weaves into a movingly compelling tale the details of this unbearably rich chronicle of the will to dominate and shun, and to resist and break free; to erase ugly truths and conjure myths, and to excavate the facts and lay bare the fictions. His achievement is to demonstrate the intersecting histories of colonialism, antisemitism, and racism as practiced and felt in every corner of this earth.
This preeminent intellectual’s other accomplishment is to compose a mosaic of who we were and are in these histories, in all our contradictions, flaws, pretensions, complicities, and heroisms. Much of what he shares is not new to the learned reader, but there is a distinct purpose to the book’s illuminations: the continuum between the past and present, notwithstanding the radical jolts that announce the end of an era and the dawn of a new one.
It was perhaps inexorable that The World After Gaza would be told through the villains and sages of this epic story. Those committing the misdeeds and those courageously bearing witness to them: a group violating every exalted claim, a group exposing it.
In setting the stage for the dramas sure to unfold on the page, Mishra meaningfully opens the book with the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, an event that best captures the force of Nazi atrocities and the counterforce of Jewish resistance. Israel’s successive generations of leaders always preferred to brag about the muscular in the Jewish response to the Nazi campaign of extermination.
But inconveniently for the Jewish state, a heroic commander of the uprising, Marek Edelman, was one such sage who read very accurately and presciently its trajectory. To Anna Grupińska, a Polish journalist with Czas, he described Israel in 1985 as “a chauvinist, religious state…It is a disaster, after three million were murdered in Poland, they want to dominate everything.”
Well before Edelman, as early as 1968, Israel was Nazifying, declared Yeshayahu Leibowitz, one of its most celebrated philosophers. Well before him, in 1948, Hannah Arendt, along with peers no less renown than her, affirmed in a letter to the New York Times that Israel has all the features of a fascist state. Well before her and the birth of the state itself, Hans Kohn, an avid Zionist and nationalist, very quickly recognized, in the 1920s, the malignity of the creed, declaring in a letter to a friend, after the murder of two Palestinians in Jerusalem, that “95 percent of the Yishuv [the new Jewish community of settlers in Palestine] support such murders.” He lasted only nine years in Palestine.
In other words, the Israel we confront today is the Israel of yesteryear, and those who were poised to love it most were the ones who called it out first.
The West we behold today is the one we beheld in yesteryear, notwithstanding the fancy dress-up.
The human race across “the color line” today is no different than the one of yesteryear, however different the panoramas that compose our world.
As he tells it, one of Mishra’s motivations for writing the book is:
…the faith that there is such a thing as solidarity between human beings as human beings, and it does not end at the color line.
And hence the “hope for the world after Gaza.”
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On Another Note