by Jeanne Trubek
Pankaj Mishra’s book, The World After Gaza, a History, addresses questions many of us have:
How did Israel become what it is?
How did a people who had experienced such suffering and persecution become the persecutors of the Palestinians?
How does this history fit into the history of the world during the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries?
Born in India, Pankaj Mishra is well aware of the violence that occurred in that nation as a result of British imperialism, Hindu nationalism, and partition. In “The World after Gaza” Mishra traces his personal development– particularly his understanding of Israel– from a youthful admiration of Israel as a safe state created for Jews after World War II and the Holocaust to a strong disapproval of Israeli government violence against Palestinians, which he sees as another example of European colonization of a non-white land. The change in Mishra’s view began with a shock when he visited the West Bank for the first time in 2008:
“Nothing prepared me for the brutality and squalor of Israel’s occupation (of the West Bank), the snaking wall and numerous roadblocks … meant to torment Palestinians in their own land … the racially exclusive network of shiny asphalt roads, electricity grids and water systems linking the illegal Jewish settlements to Israel.” (page 84)
After visiting the West Bank, Mishra went on a quest to learn how the current situation had developed. Although the Zionist movement began in the late 19th century, Mishra focuses on developments since World War II. He notes that in the years immediately after the end of the war, there was little interest in Zionism or in the resettlement of the Jews from Europe who had survived the Holocaust (Shoah). That changed in the late ‘50s when many books, films, and articles began to appear in Western society and when the trial of Adolf Eichmann took place in Israel. Although the atrocities of the war were well known, the west had not fought to liberate the Jews during the war. Post-war, guilt wracked the west and post-war (West) Germany quickly became an ardent supporter of Israel and an ardent lover of all things Jewish. The United States followed suit and became the strongest military and economic supporter of Israel. All of this was taking place at a critical historical moment—that is, as the rest of the world shook off colonialism; people around the world were rising up against their oppressors.
It was not until the Six Day War in 1967 that the United States took a strong interest in the defense of Israel. With the Yom Kippur War in 1973, the United States began to see Israel as a strong supporter in the Middle East. Continued cultural events (the miniseries Holocaust, the movie Schindler’s List) built support for the wars among the US population. The 9-11 terrorist attack in2001 resulted in an over-the-top response from the United States, including waging war on countries in the Middle East that had had nothing to do with the attack. Anything Arab became the latest western threat.
Mishra looks at all of these events from the perspective of someone who grew up in a formerly colonized country, as someone who saw how the United States and many West European countries look at people from non-white countries, from the Global South—that is as prey, as not worthy of respect, as merely a source for the economic wealth of the colonizing countries. From that vantage point, Israel is just one more perpetrator—in this case of European Jews taking over an area formerly occupied by Arabs, Muslims, and Christians and other Jews. What the people of Gaza are doing now is fighting their oppressors to get their country, Palestine, back. Mishra’s conclusion: “The world as we have known it, moulded since 1945 by the beneficiaries of slavery, colonialism and anti-colonial nationalism, has been crumbling…Yet again political, corporate and media institutions show, this time across a broader swath, a contemptuous face to individual conscience, to judgements of right and wrong.”
The World After Gaza, A History Pankaj Mishra, Penguin Press, New York, 2025
