In his own words, Pankaj Mishra wrote his latest book not to describe the atrocities in Gaza, which have been well documented, but "to ask some very basic questions: How can human beings treat other human beings this way? And to also ask people today, or readers today: How can we allow this to happen? How could we allow something like Gaza to happen?"
The World After Gaza, based off Mishra's 2024 essay for the London Review of Books, uses the historical context following World War II to deliver a meaningful reminder: The West did not welcome Holocaust survivors with open arms. In fact, the global powers treated them as a nuisance and looked to relocate them elsewhere. The current-day narrative, that the West immediately recognized the Holocaust was an atrocity, is a comforting fiction. As is, Mishra argues, the idea that the international standard of laws and norms set in 1945 can remain legitimate after having been abandoned in service to Israeli objectives.
Last week, I spoke with Mishra about the basis for his book, the memory of the Holocaust, and what Gaza portends. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
In the prologue, you write that you "felt almost compelled to write this book 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." As I read the book, I kept thinking about how there's been an obligation to speak in the past year-plus, and how Zionism has such a hold on American politics that even recognizing facts or just bearing witness feels radical, or can lead to serious personal consequences. In the process of putting together this book, was there any instigating moment that led to your obligation to speak?
Certainly this feeling that criticizing Israel's conduct in the war, or even pointing to a simple fact, like the current war did not start on Oct. 7—saying something simple like that could get you into trouble or face resistance from your editors. There was no specific incident as such, but I did feel that the shutters were slowly coming down and that I was much better off doing my own thing, rather than trying to write for publications that I normally write for. Then the book grew out of a lecture I delivered for the London Review of Books. I had already agreed to give this lecture, and then it became very clear that this was going to be the subject.
But I know people who felt themselves under similar pressures. Of course, we've seen those people ostracized, punished, some of them very publicly, others privately admonished. I think I've known for a very long time, and this is also something that compelled me to do it. This regime of censorship is not unknown to me at all. It's not something that I came to know soon after Oct. 7, because in my previous attempts to write about the subject, I encountered the same kind of regime. This time, I just felt that most people—most politicians, most journalists, the media classes that were supporting Israel in this instance—had really said goodbye to any basic notions of ordinary decency, that this was the worst possible episode of the moral collapse we have seen again and again in the last few decades when it comes to justifying, condoning, aggressively defending Israel's behavior. I think some new limits, some new threshold was reached on this occasion. But to answer your question, I think it was a combination of things: the sheer barbarity of the Israeli assault on Gaza, the crackdown on dissenters, on people who wish to criticize this Israeli craziness, in not just the U.K. but also in the U.S.—also in Germany, very importantly, a country that I visit often, and I often write for the local periodicals there. I think all of that was preying upon my mind before I sat down to write this book.
To what extent have you seen this compulsion or obligation to speak shared by your peers, either in media or academia? In conversation with some of your peers, how has this come up?
Actually, it's hard to say this, but I don't really have that many peers, if you mean people you've kind of grown up with writing [and] reading. I come from India. I occupy a very marginal position and I always have, even though I've been writing for a long time and writing for mainstream publications. But I don't really have too many people in these places that I know or hang out with. I've just not been to the same sort of places that many of these people have been to. In terms of educational institutions, I don't move in the same circles. I don't move in the same networks. So my experience of these spaces is actually quite limited.
What I can speak of is the experience of people who are from my part of the world, from India, or from other parts of Asia and Africa. And I know for sure that they've been deliberately excluded from a conversation about Israel. When I first started to write, there were absolutely zero Arab voices in the mainstream press. There were no Palestinian voices. I remember once offering to write about the Arab minority of Israel—nearly 20 percent of the population is Arab—and was told no, our readers would not be interested in this subject. So even an Indian writer who's not Arab, who's not Muslim, who has really no great stakes, or at least no known prejudices in this matter—even that was deemed not acceptable. So the obligation to speak, I can't say whether this is something that struck many people who write for these publications, the sort of liberal periodicals, the journalists who come to these places. I think they're all looking for a little assignment here and there. They're not really thinking of all this in terms of, Oh, this is something really important that I need to speak about. Well, if you have that impulse, that will be suffocated and stifled very soon, and that is what happened to a lot of people, and indeed to myself.
The tone I read in The World After Gaza, and also to some extent the original lecture, it read to me as pessimistic. At one point in the epilogue, you do believe that eventually Israel will wipe out the West Bank and Gaza. As I was reading the book, I saw a lot of disillusionment with Jewish writers or academics who realized, Oh, this is what Israel has become. Because you mention that you were a Zionist whose views changed, what kind of disillusionment did you experience when coming to that realization?
I think my own infatuation with Israel was a very shallow thing. So there's no real question of any kind of disillusionment. I do think that I was really shocked to see the state of occupation, and to realize just how brutally Israel oppressed the Palestinian population. Nothing had prepared me for it—nothing I'd read, nothing I'd seen in documentaries or in cinema. I think I speak for a lot of people who have similar sort of experiences, who go to Israel whether with an open mind or with certain images drawn from stories or accounts of the occupation, and are completely appalled by what they actually witnessed there.
But I think the experiences of people who survived the Holocaust and then felt an attachment to Israel, those are much more meaningful in many ways, for someone who survived the Holocaust, who knew this intense insecurity of being a Jewish person in Europe, and not only during the Nazi period, but also afterwards, when nobody wanted to accept Jewish refugees. Jews in Europe were still facing intense persecution in places like Poland, as I describe in my book. There were pogroms against Jews who'd managed to survive and return to their homes. So for those people, the making of Israel was something of religious significance. It's very important to remember this: For how many survivors, it was almost a miracle of sorts.
Now you have this attachment with the state of Israel, the place you think Jews can finally be safe. Then over time, you see the state turning into a version of the very hateful thing that used to persecute Jews in Europe, which is a heavily militarized, radicalized nation state that believes that some people are superior to others, and that those people, the majority, should be basically lording it over these people that they have managed to subjugate. Those kinds of tendencies that they saw developing in Israel really came as a huge shock to people who just thought, Well, here is a new state with great idealism, great investment, in many cases, in the idea of socialism. Then you realize: Oh, no, this is an expansionist colonialist state that is stealing the land of its neighbors, and occupying and expanding its territory all the time, and using torture, extrajudicial execution against the people it has displaced. So I think that was the realization of the people who thought that Israel was a miracle, was a religious and a providential act. That disillusionment was obviously extremely profound and extremely deep, as opposed to people who get their Zionism from books and go there and find out that this is actually a really brutal expansionist state in the eyes of Palestinians, the experience of Palestinians at least.
What role did Edward Said's work play in the writing of this book? As I was reading it, there were [distinct] parts here and there where I felt like I could pick up on his influence.
I think anyone writing on this question cannot but be influenced by Edward Said. It would be absolutely impossible, unless you are hellbent upon denying his significance, and basically decide not to read him. If you want to engage honestly with the subjects, you have to read Edward Said, and in the course of that reading, you would be inevitably influenced by him, because it is simply the most powerful reckoning with the Palestinian experience, and also with the equally potent ironies and cruel ambivalences that emerge if you reflect upon the Palestinians as Edward Said himself put it: as "victims of victims."
So for someone who could see the grotesque ironies of history in the Palestinian situation, moving quickly away from a simple account of the Palestinians purely as victims, I think he recognized that there was another history that had led to the creation of Israel, or had led to the early efforts at creating a Jewish homeland and that he never really lost sight of. That makes him actually a very sympathetic observer of the whole situation, and not someone who is biased or not someone who was completely partisan. He was very alert. He was very responsive to the Jewish suffering that, in many ways, was redeemed by the creation of Israel. It's impossible to not be influenced by his profound and complex reflections on the subject.
Aside from Said, I know Rashid Khalidi was used as a source for the book. Were there any other Palestinians who influenced or were useful as sources in the writing of this book? I saw Tareq Baconi was also in the bibliography, but I was wondering if there were any others for you.
My sense of Palestinian history was developed very early on in my encounters with Palestinian students in India, when I was a student myself. So I did read many of these books of Palestinian scholarship later. But I think I was familiar with the kind of major landmarks by the age of 21, 22, because there were a lot of Palestinian students in India, a lot of Arab students, but many Palestinians who had been expelled and were forced to move to places like Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, and Iraq. Many of them actually came to Indian universities and Indian colleges. So we in India were educated on this issue long before some of the big books of Palestinian scholarship started to appear. The idea of Palestinian history was very much in the air, as it were. So if you were even halfway politically conscious, you were aware of it.
I've gone back to these books simply to make my knowledge more complete, actually find references, stories, narratives that I hadn't previously encountered. But one thing to remember is that the book is actually not really dealing with Palestinian history. It's dealing with a very different narrative altogether: of a construction of the Holocaust memory, mostly by Israel and its supporters in Germany and then the United States, and the uses to which that Holocaust memory has been put. So in this context, Palestinian scholarship is important in understanding the role of resistance movements like the Palestine Liberation Organization, to understanding a broader context of this. But they don't play a major role in this particular narrative.
I know the title of the book has "Gaza" in it, but outside of the prologue and epilogue, I feel like there's not much of a focus on Gaza throughout the rest of the chapters. And I realize the focus was to look more at the decisions through history that led to Israel treating Gaza the way it does now. Because you were working in a publication cycle, and since it's a rapidly developing news event, was there something of a hesitance to put too many actual facts as they were happening, because they could possibly change quickly?
I became very convinced as I was writing it—and as time went on, and Western politicians refused to reconsider their support for Israel and in fact double down—that [the focus was] the world, after Gaza is eradicated. And we know it's been mostly eradicated. Donald Trump spoke in his usual blunt way the other day about [how] civilization has been wiped out there. He actually said it's uninhabitable. So I became very concerned that Gaza was actually a harbinger of a very, very dark world.
And that world is arriving rapidly as we speak. It's been arriving particularly fast, in the last three and a half weeks of the Trump administration. So that became my concern in the book: to start thinking about the world, the way it's dramatically, drastically changing. Not so much the facts or events in Gaza, the number of people—every day, we were being told about the number of people killed. Every day, that figure was rising, every day we were witnesses to Israeli atrocities. But they were simply reaffirming my sense that we are witnessing a major historical atrocity that will have consequences not only for Palestinians or Israelis, or the Middle East, or the larger region, but for the entire Western world. And that's really the ramifications of this, the possible meanings of that. That became my main focus.
That was not so if you look at my lecture. The lecture is invoking a certain kind of anti-Zionist Jewish tradition, and invoking that to offer a new vocabulary for criticizing and questioning Israel's conduct, and questioning the conduct of its supporters, also warning that Israel is destroying the international structure of norms that was built up after 1945, partly as a response to the horrific violence of the Holocaust. But in the book, I was forced to amplify that particular message and to say that what we are looking at is the world where might is going to be right. Or at least that's how the main bullies—whether it's Vladimir Putin or Donald Trump—that's how they will present the world to us. International norms and liberal institutions and so on, they will simply be very quickly dismantled, and we're seeing that process in real time.
What I'm trying to say is that Gaza is not something that can be seen most purely in terms of Middle Eastern politics, or through the politics of Palestinian resistance, or through the politics of the state of Israel. It is now a world-historical atrocity with the consequences as severe and as far-reaching as those of, for instance, the destruction of Spain during the Civil War by fascist forces. You have to remember: Hitler was very much involved in the Spanish Civil War, on the wrong side of course. Mussolini was very much involved. People who were there at the time, who reported on this, could see very clearly that the Spanish Civil War was a harbinger of something much bigger, and that turned out to be the Second World War and the Holocaust. So I'm afraid that Gaza, I see in somewhat similar ways: that this is actually the harbinger of something even more terrible and destructive.
You mentioned Trump's administration, and his haphazard idea to rebuild Gaza as a property. Because you wrote this during the Biden administration, did the reelection of Trump change things in kind or merely in degree? Did it alter any of your thoughts?
It didn't alter my thoughts at all, actually. I had written in the book before Trump was—I think I wrote it before anyone gave him a chance, that Israel would accomplish this task it has set for itself. If you have a U.S. president presiding over a genocide, why are people so shocked by Trump suggesting ethnic cleansing? Is ethnic cleansing much worse than genocide? I don't think so. It was very easy to see where all this was heading. If a Democratic president can preside over the extermination of an entire people in a small territory, then ethnic cleansing doesn't seem so bad compared to that.
It felt like, not just in terms of Gaza and Palestine but in basically every other issue, Trump just removes the subtext that the Democrats and other Republicans try to work around. So after a year-plus of hearing Antony Blinken and Joe Biden evasively make excuses, it didn't seem shocking when Trump was ready to raze it all.
I think it's shocking for people who have deceived themselves into thinking that Biden, as various other people put it, is "working tirelessly" for a ceasefire. If you believe that shit, you will of course be shocked by Trump. But those who have eyes can see. Those who have ears can hear. Those who can read, can read what happened over those long months of the Biden administration. The way these people around him lied and suppressed facts internally within the State Department, the way these hideous spokespeople appeared every day and lied, and smirked through those lies—in what way is Trump worse than that? For me, that was much worse.
Trump is by now a very familiar figure. He was president for four years, after all. He doesn't seem shocking at all to me. It's these so-called liberals, and the people who are very eager to defend them and to say, What a sacrifice Joe Biden has made after renouncing the presidency, no matter that he was actually pushed into doing that. People who told us that Kamala Harris was bringing joy to America—I'm more shocked by these people than Trump.
I was curious about how you decided on the title. I know the lecture was titled "The Shoah After Gaza." Were there other titles you considered?
I think the title suggested itself. I mean, "The Shoah After Gaza," what is it saying? It's saying that the whole enormous moral meaning of the Shoah, the Shoah as a warning, "Never again," the Shoah essentially helping us institutionalize a whole international system of norms and values and principles—all of that is under threat as a result of Gaza. So "The Shoah After Gaza" has a different meaning altogether. Likewise, [with] The World After Gaza, "The World" has a different meaning, and a different dimension altogether, after an atrocity like Gaza. That is simply the meaning. It came very organically to me, flowing out from the lecture and the first title.
Did you ever consider The World After Israel as a title?
No. I think the world after Israel is something we have been living in for a very long time. It's certainly not new.
This is a bit more ripped from the headlines, but I don't know if you saw the news about the shooting in Miami where a man shot at two Israeli tourists because he thought they were Palestinian. Then, when they were going to the hospital, one of the tourists wrote on Facebook that they thought the attack was antisemitic, and ended the post with "Death to the Arabs," because they didn't know who shot them.
I think this kind of insanity, I'm afraid we're going to be seeing more and more of it, because it's very hard to admit for many people, who will try to blame [Benjamin] Netanyahu or [Bezalel] Smotrich or [Itamar] Ben-Gvir—these are extremists, and these are people who have hijacked Israeli democracy and degraded it to serve their own ends and so on and so forth. I think we have to also acknowledge that we are looking at a substantial part of the population that's been profoundly radicalized, that has been basically indoctrinated with hatred against not just Palestinians but also their supporters, who have been injected with profound fear and loathing of the outside world, who have been made to feel that the world consists of either Nazis or potential Nazis waiting to kill them all.
With this kind of relentless exposure to narratives of imminent extermination, or monsters lurking everywhere waiting to kill you—with this kind of narrative, just about anyone would be going slightly mad and out of control. I think we're going to see more and more such incidents. I don't think this is an isolated incident here. We're going to see more and more radicalized, slightly crazy people erupt into violence in public life, and you'll probably see them in many different places, not just in the United States.
I read the interview you did with the Carnegie Endowment, and at the end, you said that this book is your way of saying your part, and it might be time to let younger people speak. Were there any particular younger people you had in mind?
I would rather not name any, because when you name any, there are people who feel like, Oh, why was I not mentioned? I would just say this: For me personally, there is a very oppressive sense of having been part of a generational failure, of belonging to a generation that did not do enough work, did not do enough probing, intellectual work, and was content to find its place within existing institutions and hoping that they would create careers. That they would have a nice life for themselves while sheltering within these institutions. We never really built alternative institutions. We never really built alternative platforms of any kind, and we never really encouraged fresh thinking on a range of issues, including this one that my book deals with. We were just content to absorb mainstream wisdom, or choose not to speak out, because we didn't really want to disrupt our comfortable lives.
I think young people have shown that this is something that essentially kills you from within, that the urgings of the conscience must be responded to, that you must actually speak out against injustice. And the young protesters in particular, over the last few months, have shown their timid, cowardly elders just what it means to have a moral voice, to have moral authority. Speaking very broadly, I feel like it's younger people today who have been exposed to some incredible scenes over the last 15 months, who have not only seen these incredible scenes of atrocity, but also seen their respectable elders justify them. It's now up to them to describe the world that we are living in and to chart a better future. I think people like myself should just step back a little bit and let these people take the lead.
