Lounge
Pankaj Mishra on Gaza, and the ‘emotional bonding’ between India and Israel
Summary
The novelist speaks about his new book on the Middle East, ‘The World After Gaza’, and connecting the dots between our colonial past and present
Pankaj Mishra wrote his new book, The World After Gaza, in the aftermath of the attack on Israel by the Palestinian nationalist organisation Hamas on 7 October 2023. Since then, the Palestinians have faced brutal retaliation from the Israelis. But the scope of his study goes beyond the politics of the Middle East, connecting the rise of authoritarian regimes in India, the US, and the world over.
At its heart, Mishra’s book calls out the deeply racist ideology that has defined the creation of the monster that is the Middle East today. The catastrophic war of 1948, also referred to as the Nakba by Palestinians, saw a concerted move to uproot the original inhabitants of the land. It was followed by a project to redraw geographical borders, identifying and persecuting the “enemy" inside and outside Israel. As one of Palestine’s leading writers, Raja Shehadeh, points out, the Ashkenazi Jews of European stock have historically looked down on the Mizrahi Jews, or “Arab Jews", creating a simmering tension within the community.
Mishra’s most radical argument is to reframe the Holocaust, known as the Shoah in Jewish culture, as a “distinctive" event in world history, rather than being “unique" in and of itself. Going by the scale of inhumanity, how different were the genocides in Rwanda abetted by Belgium or the planned destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the US? And yet, the narrative of Jewish persecution has gained primacy over many other tragic histories and has been turned into the raison d’être of the Israeli State.
The silver lining is that, to this day, dissident voices like Gideon Levy, Jacqueline Rose and Peter Beinart from the Jewish community have spoken out against extremist Zionism, but voices from inside the Middle East, and increasingly from outside of it, too, are censored by pro-Israeli interest groups. The parallels with India, especially its treatment of activists like Umar Khalid and the Bhima Koregaon Sixteen, are uncanny.
In an email interview, Mishra shared his thoughts on the past, present and future of Gaza—and what the world is increasingly coming to look like. Edited excerpts.
As a writer living and working in the West, how are you negotiating the fallout of ‘The World after Gaza’?
It’s still early days. I expect a great deal of hostility and resistance to my argument. I also expect some liberal periodicals to maintain silence. But there would be nothing surprising about this. As I write in the book, any opinion less than favourable to Israel’s regime in Western elite circles is prone to be rejected or attacked. And some agitated folks will level the charge of anti-semitism, which has less and less potency since it is now largely used to stifle criticism of Israel. I think the book will find an audience only among a wider public who can see with their eyes open what is going on, and now benefit from the clarity provided by Donald Trump’s bluntness about ethnic-cleansing Gaza.
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What do you think Gaza’s influence will be on the future of activism, especially digital mobilisation and grassroots movements?
At present, there is still much paralysing melancholy among political activists and thinkers over the failure of Black Lives Matter and MeToo movements in checking the excesses of masculine power. In fact, it is oppressively clear that the backlash against social movements has been wildly successful, with a man accused of rape now elevated to the White House. The protests against the destruction of Gaza came from a younger generation, but then these were crushed by a supposedly left-leaning party in the US. And an Obama-voting plutocrat took over Twitter and turned it into a cesspool of far-right hatreds. This is partly why there is hardly any street resistance to Donald Trump today. I think we may see a period of despair-infected passivity before any kind of mass mobilisation happens.
The war in Gaza is reshaping the balance of power globally. Are intellectual hegemonies also shifting?
Yes, I think the reputation of Anglo-American periodicals and platforms that enjoyed intellectual hegemonies in the past—The New York Times, The Washington Post, the BBC, the Economist, and CNN—has been very badly damaged by their coverage of Gaza, which, to put it mildly, has rarely deviated much from the propaganda efforts of the state of Israel. There was no reason to have a high opinion of them. The BBC after all aired a documentary by a supposed historian claiming that the British Empire brought democracy and free trade to Asia and Africa.
The coverage of places like India in the Economist is mostly risible. But it has become much too apparent lately that many reporters and commentators at these places are neither very bright nor very honest. The damage to these so-called legacy institutions would seem greater if there were already existing alternatives to them. But post-colonial countries failed in their original mission to overturn the Western hegemony over culture and thought and create alternative spaces. The initiative now has to come from different places, from populations of Asian and African ancestry in the West, or from within a progressive intelligentsia in the non-Western countries.
Writers like Raja Shehadeh have written about the schism between Ashkenazi Jews and Arab Jews in Israel. How do you think such internal tensions will play out in the future?
Israel is internally a much more fragile place than its military might and spying software make it seem. A large part of its population, including the 20% of Arabs and religious Jews, is very poorly educated. Social tensions are always rising, and not always defused by channelling pent-up furies against Palestinians. It is not hard to image some of Israel’s most talented people leaving a country perpetually at war.
What are the resonances and divergences between contemporary Israeli and Indian majoritarian politics?
I grew up among people very envious of the Israeli way of constructing a national community, and of treating Muslims in the only way they deserve to be treated. So, the emotional bonding between far-right majoritarians in India and Israel comes as no surprise to me. We are likely to see more institutions in India shaped in the image of Israeli nationalism. The commemoration proposed by the current regime of the Partition is a direct emulation of highly effective Israeli national narrative of the Holocaust. And of course there is the ongoing dehumanisation of Muslims. That said, nothing any Indian government has done in Kashmir, or the North East, comes close to the barbarity of the Israel treatment of Palestinians.
Your book makes us aware of the anti-humanitarian biases of much-lauded figures like Saul Bellow and Isaiah Berlin. How do we reckon with the legacy of such once-iconic heroes?
The accounts that exalt them as icons and heroes of humanism all come from the West. Too many of us have swallowed them unthinkingly in India and in other parts of the non-Western world. We have rarely arrived at an independent assessment of these figures, or examined how deep their humanism or liberalism was, whether it extended only to the perceived boundaries of their own ethnic-religious or cultural communities. Nor have we sought to interrogate how much they knew of the histories and cultures of the non-West. Did Isaiah Berlin understand the meaning of decolonisation, for instance, a world-historical process that he actually lived through? If not, then why should we take him seriously on a range of related historical and philosophical issues? It is never too late to start that process of examining these Western reputations—crucial to the formation of an indigenous intellectual modernity.
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