From one of our foremost public intellectuals, an essential reckoning with the war in Gaza that reframes our understanding of the ongoing conflict, its historical roots, and the fractured global response The postwar global order was in many ways shaped in response to the Holocaust. That event;became the benchmark for atrocity, and, in the Western imagination, the paradigmatic genocide. Its memory orients so much of our thinking, and crucially, forms the basic justification for Israel’s right first to establish itself and then to defend itself. But in many parts of the world, ravaged by other conflicts and experiences of mass slaughter, the Holocaust’s singularity is not always taken for granted, even when its hideous atrocity is. Outside of the West, Pankaj Mishra argues, the dominant story of the twentieth century is that of decolonization.; As old touchstones and landmarks crumble, only a new history with a sharply different emphasis can reorient us to the world and worldviews now emerging into the light. In this concise, powerful, and pointed treatise, Mishra reckons with the fundamental questions posed by our present crisis -- about whether some lives matter more than others, how identity is constructed, and what the role of the nation-state ought to be. <The World After Gaza< is an indispensable moral guide to our past, present, and future....

Autorentext
Pankaj Mishra is the author of Age of Anger: A History of the Present, From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia, and several other books of nonfiction and fiction. Mishra won the 2024 Weston International Award, as well as the 2014 Windham–Campbell Prize for nonfiction. He writes regularly for The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, and The London Review of Books, among others.

Zusammenfassung
*“Courageous and bracing, learned and ethical, rigorous and mind-expanding.” —Naomi Klein

*“This profoundly important and urgent book finds Mishra, one of our most intellectually astute and courageous writers, at the peak of his powers.” —Hisham Matar

“A triumphant work of empathy in a polarizing conflict.” —Anand Giridharadas
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*Named a Best Book of the Month by TIME • Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2025 by The Guardian, Bustle, Foreign Policy, and Literary Hub

An essential reckoning with the genocide in Gaza that reframes our understanding
of the crisis, its historical roots, and the fractured global response**

The postwar global order was shaped in response to the Holocaust. It became the benchmark for atrocity and, in the Western imagination, the paradigmatic genocide. But outside of the West, Pankaj Mishra argues, the dominant story of the twentieth century is that of decolonization.

At a moment when the world’s balance of power is shifting, and the Global North no longer commands ultimate authority, it is critically important that we understand how and why the two halves of the world are failing to talk to each other.

As old touchstones and landmarks crumble, only a new history with a sharply different emphasis can reorient us. In this concise, powerful, and pointed treatise, Mishra reckons with the fundamental questions posed by the devastation in Gaza—about whether some lives matter more than others, how identity is constructed, and what the role of the nation-state ought to be. The World After Gaza is an indispensable moral guide to our past, present, and future.

Leseprobe
Prologue

Think of the vast amount of brutality, cruelty and
lies which are able to spread over the civilized world.
Do you really believe that a handful of ambitious
and deluding men without conscience could have
succeeded in unleashing all these evil spirits if their
millions of followers did not share their guilt?
Sigmund Freud

On 19 April 1943, a few hundred young Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto took up whatever arms they could find and struck back at their Nazi persecutors. Most Jews in the ghetto had already been deported to extermination camps. The fighters were, as one of their leaders Marek Edelman recalled, seeking to salvage some dignity: ‘All it was about, finally, was our not letting them slaughter us when our turn came. It was only a choice as to the manner of dying.’
After a few desperate weeks, the resisters were overwhelmed. Most of them were killed. Some of those still alive on the last day of the uprising committed suicide in the command bunker as the Nazis pumped gas into it; only a few managed to escape through sewer pipes. German soldiers then burned the ghetto, block by block, using flamethrowers to smoke out the survivors. The Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz later recalled hearing screams from the ghetto ‘on a beautiful quiet night, a country night in the outskirts of Warsaw’:

This screaming gave us goose pimples. They were the screams of thousands of people being murdered. It travelled through the silent spaces of the city from among a red glow of fires, under indifferent stars, into the benevolent silence of gardens in which plants laboriously emitted oxygen, the air was fragrant, and a man felt that it was good to be alive. There was something particularly cruel in this peace of the night, whose beauty and human crime struck the heart simultaneously. We did not look each other in the eye.

In a poem Milosz wrote in occupied Warsaw, ‘Campo dei Fiori’, he evokes the merry-go-round next to the ghetto’s wall, on which riders move skyward through the smoke of corpses, and whose jaunty tune drowns out the cries of agony and despair. Living in Berkeley, California, while the US military bombed and killed hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, an atrocity he compared to the crimes of Hitler and Stalin, Milosz again knew shameful complicity in extreme barbarity. ‘If we are capable of compassion and at the same time are powerless,’ he wrote, ‘then we live in a state of desperate exasperation.’

Israel’s annihilation of Gaza, provisioned by Western democracies, inflicted this psychic ordeal for months on millions of people–involuntary witnesses to an act of political evil, who allowed themselves to occasionally think that it was good to be alive, and then heard the screams of a mother watching her daughter burn to death in yet another school bombed by Israel.

The Shoah scarred several Jewish generations; Jewish Israelis in 1948 experienced the birth of their nation state as a matter of life and death, and then again in 1967 and 1973 amid annihilationist rhetoric from their Arab enemies. For many Jews who have grown up with the knowledge that the Jewish population of Europe was almost entirely wiped out, for no reason other than it was Jewish, the world cannot but appear fragile. Among them, the massacres and hostage-taking in Israel on 7 October 2023 by Hamas and other Palestinian groups rekindled a fear of another Holocaust.

But it was clear from the start that the most fanatical Israeli leadership in history would not shrink from exploiting an omnipresent sense of violation, bereavement and horror. Israel’s leaders claimed the right to self-defence against Hamas, but as Omer Bartov, a major historian of the Holocaust, recognised in August 2024, they sought from the very beginning ‘to make the entire Gaza Strip uninhabitable, and to debilitate its population to such a degree that it would either die out or seek all possible options to flee the territory’. Thus, for months after 7 October, billions of people beheld an extraordinary onslaught on Gaza whose victims, as Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh, an Irish lawyer and South Africa’s representative at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, put it, were ‘broadcasting their …