‘The World after Gaza’: Israel & Gaza, as seen in light of the Holocaust
Pankaj Mishra exposes how the killing of six lakh Jews by Hitler turned into an industry and then a matter of faith
Updated At : 08:39 AM Mar 09, 2025 IST
The World after Gaza by Pankaj Mishra. Juggernaut. Pages 280. Rs 799
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Book Title: The World after Gaza
Author: Pankaj Mishra
In the spate of books after the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack and the brutal retaliation by Tel Aviv, India was one prominent black hole that had little to say. India’s foremost writer on post-colonialism, Pankaj Mishra, has stepped in to fill the gap.
For a person who grew up in a typical upper caste, middle class family, his early veneration of Zionism was par for the course. As he admits, his Hindu nationalist family respected Israel, he had a picture of former Israeli Defence Minister Moshe Dayan in his bedroom and felt that Israel’s ways with its neighbours should be the prototype for Hindu majority rule in India.
This despite Independent India’s founding fathers turning from sympathisers of Jews, as they suffered decades of European hounding, to backers of the Palestinians after they witnessed first-hand the injustices that informed the formation of the first Jewish nation.
But a dozen years after his paperback ‘Butter Chicken in Ludhiana’ emerged as a sleeper hit, Mishra travelled to Israel in 2008 and his views took a 180-degree turn. For the readers of his subsequent tomes, including ‘Bland Fanatics — Liberals, Race and Empire’, ‘A Great Clamour — Encounters with China and Its Neighbours’, and, most importantly, ‘From the Ruins of the Empire — The Revolt against the West and the Remaking of Asia’, it was clear that Israel, one of the West’s crucial fortresses, would be up for scanning.
But what sets this book apart is Mishra’s expose on how the killing of six lakh Jews by Hitler turned into an industry and then a matter of faith, beginning with the West Germans who had much to hide — a Nazi there had 15 per cent chance of being persecuted as compared to the one in the communist East Germany. For the average Indian at least, he provides a unique window into the mollycoddling of Israel. How it wasn’t just one tiny brave nation standing up to the might of the Arab armies, if they can be called so.
The German “moral licence in perpetuity to Israel” was slow in coming and gathered pace only after the term Holocaust (Shoah in Hebrew) entered ordinary English usage in the 1960s. Till then, Shoah was not seen as an atrocity separate from the other atrocities of World War-II. With quotes sprinkled from a wide array of intellectuals, Mishra provides a fascinating insight into how the collective memory of Shoah in Europe and Israel was belatedly constructed, often very deliberately with specific political ends.
This backstory about “Philosemitism” is essential if we are to understand the fractured global response to Israel’s continuous brutalisation of Gaza, or what he calls “Atrocity Hucksterism”, in which Holocaust was an excuse for the “industrial-scale slaughter”.
On the way, Mishra also delves into how nationalisms of India and Israel acquired an overtly religious and millenarian dimension at around the same time in the ’80s, and how both post-colonial states adopted repressive methods that even western colonialists selectively implemented. Along the way, too, there are little dinks that showcase nuggets that pepper the known aspects of history.
However, like an honest analyst, Mishra does not come up with a facile solution. He is also pessimistic about the current opposition to Israeli savagery turning into something substantial, and feels the full-throated endorsement of its actions will continue wherever white nationalists have “infected political life”.
— The writer is a senior journalist
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