Last October the bestselling author Ta-Nehisi Coates, promoting a new book with a chapter on the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, dropped by CBS for an interview in which host Tony Dokoupil blasted him with a series of questions that all but accused Coates of antisemitism.
Looking for answers in the Israeli-Palestinian crisis
Nonfiction: New book sifts through the wreckage there.
For the Minnesota Star Tribune
February 17, 2025 at 3:00PM
Coates hit back with respectful rebuttals, yet the controversy quickly went viral, with a flurry of op-eds and confirmation of other titles in the pipeline. Now, Indian critic Pankaj Mishra has entered the chat with “The World After Gaza,” a coolly argued polemic that sifts insights from the gore and chaos.
The idea for the book emerged during Mishra’s 2008 trip to Israel and Palestine, when he posed a pair of conjoined questions: Why would a historically oppressed minority in turn oppress another minority under their jurisdiction; and why would so many mainstream governments and journalists “ignore, even justify, its clearly systemic cruelties?”
“The World After Gaza” is his answer, its voice clear as a bell but with striking nuances. Mishra devotes most of his text to rationales for the Jewish state, weighing the pros and cons, considering familiar names, from Hannah Arendt and Albert Einstein (both expressed ambivalence) to bad-faith actors such as Menachem Begin and Konrad Adenauer, the first chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany.
Mishra highlights two principled, if lesser-known, characters as well: Austrian-Belgian writer Jean Améry, a Jew raised Catholic but nevertheless deported to Auschwitz; and Brooklyn-born literary scholar Alfred Kazin. Améry’s tale of survival and lingering trauma (he died by suicide in 1978) and Kazin’s reversal of earlier Zionist stances make for somber reading, yet also stir feeling into Mishra’s narrative.
Step by step, year by year, war by war: Mishra traces the unraveling of a noble ideal. The international order has gone the way of the dodo, he suggests, and Gaza is proof. The Pax Americana was mere window dressing for the military-industrial complex. Indeed, those very paradigms surrounding the Shoah have beget slaughter on a colossal scale.
“A global civil society once seemed possible around the transvaluation of the Shoah as the ultimate atrocity and antisemitism as the nastiest form of bigotry,” he notes. “Other groups now advance rival claims, attesting to historical mass crimes of genocide, slavery and racist imperialism, and demanding recognition and reparation.”
Mishra’s no fan of the West. In previous works, he’s lacerated European and American meddling in the affairs of developing countries, decadent empires strangling a people’s right to self-determination. He sees courage in college protesters who reject the uneasy roles of bystanders, confronting the moral complacency — complicity, in some cases — of their elders. Their efforts will likely fail, and the West will allow Israel to inflict violence on Palestine, bankrolled by the subjects of a transnational oligarchy.
This is depressing stuff, yet avoidable. Is sunlight the best disinfectant? “The World After Gaza” casts its audacious gaze on ashen ruins and corpses of children, a debacle Mishra views as decades in the making.
The “stakes have rarely been higher,” he opines. “The atrocities of Gaza, sanctioned, even sanctified, by the free world’s political and media class, and brashly advertised by its perpetrators, have not only devastated an already feeble belief in social progress. They challenge, too, a fundamental assumption that human nature is intrinsically good, capable of empathy.”
Hamilton Cain, who also reviews for the New York Times and Washington Post, lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.
The World After Gaza: A History
By: Pankaj Mishra.
Publisher: Penguin Press, 292 pages, $28.
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