Book Review: The World After Gaza: A History by Pankaj Mishra

✒️:. Shahid Manzoor Bhat

Pankaj Mishra’s The World After Gaza is not a conventional history book; it is a forceful political and moral intervention. Written in the immediate aftermath of Israel’s war on Gaza, Mishra examines how the memory of the Holocaust has been shaped, institutionalized and, ultimately, instrumentalized within Western political culture. His central claim is stark: the suffering of European Jews has been used to justify the long-term dispossession and subjugation of Palestinians, and the West’s support for Israel reveals the persistence of racial hierarchies at the core of modern global power.

The book moves across historical periods with urgency. Mishra traces how the Shoah came to be enshrined as the West’s defining moral reference point, while the atrocities of colonialism, slavery, and imperial conquest were minimized or forgotten. He argues that this selective memory has allowed Israel to cast its military projects, including the occupation of Palestinian territory, as acts of self-defense rather than settler expansion. In doing so, he shows how the language of historical victimhood can be converted into a shield for state violence.

A major strength of the book lies in its recovery of dissenting Jewish voices. Figures such as Jean Améry, Primo Levi, and Marek Edelman appear not only as witnesses to the Holocaust but also as critics of Israel’s turn toward militarism and ethnic hierarchy. Their presence disrupts the simplistic narrative that Jewish identity uniformly aligns with Zionism. Mishra’s use of these testimonies demonstrates that moral clarity often emerges from within communities themselves, rather than from the states that claim to represent them.

Stylistically, the book is impassioned, at times searing. Mishra writes with a controlled anger directed not at Jewish suffering, but at its manipulation by political elites in Israel, the United States, and Europe. His critique of Western journalism, academia, and liberal institutions is particularly sharp, arguing that their silence or equivocation during the Gaza crisis exposed a catastrophic failure of moral courage.

However, this intensity is also the book’s limitation. The narrative frequently places the entire Israeli state project within a framework of inevitable oppression and expansion, leaving little room for the complexities of Jewish historical trauma or for internal debates within Israeli society. Palestinians, too, sometimes appear more as moral symbols than as diverse political actors with their own strategies, disagreements, and agency. The world Mishra describes is one where power speaks overwhelmingly, and resistance is largely crushed; the possibility of future reconciliation remains faint, almost absent.

Nevertheless, The World After Gaza is a necessary and unsettling work. It demands that the reader confront uncomfortable truths about memory, power, and complicity. In a global moment where violence is livestreamed yet often normalized, Mishra forces us to ask what solidarity means—and what it means to look away.

This is not a book that provides solutions.
But it is a book that insists on accountability, moral clarity, and historical honesty.

For that reason alone, it is deeply important.

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