In The World After Gaza, left-wing essayist Pankaj Mishra attempts to argue that Israel’s actions in Gaza represent a ‘case study of Western-style impunity’. The fundamental problem with the West, argues Mishra, is that it has sanctified the Holocaust and wilfully ignores crimes of a supposedly equal magnitude.
His goal in The World After Gaza is to knock the Holocaust off its supposedly ill-deserved pedestal. He wants us to see it as just one of many horrors in a modern world shaped by colonialism and slavery. Or, as Mishra puts it, his goal is to ‘reconcile the clashing narratives of the Shoah, slavery and colonialism’. It follows from his premise that the ‘bumper-sticker lesson’ to be drawn from the Holocaust is not ‘Never Again’ – it’s ‘Never Again for Anyone’.
It’s an approach that might appear humane, acknowledging Jewish suffering while suggesting that other human lives are equally valid. Yet it soon becomes clear that this approach serves deeply anti-humanistic ends.
Delegitimising Israel is critical to Mishra’s approach. In his telling, Israel is a colonial power. He takes this argument further to argue that Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians is, in important respects, akin to the Nazis’ treatment of the Jews.
The main flaw in Mishra’s argument is its gross one-sidedness. He demonstrates his familiarity with Jewish writers on the Holocaust, such as Jean Amery, Hannah Arendt and Primo Levi. Yet he suffers from monumental blindspots. In particular he fails to consider the relationship of anti-Semitism to the Holocaust. He acknowledges the scale of the mass killing, but he fails to probe the anti-Semitic motivations driving it. As a result he fails to understand what is unique about the Holocaust.
His misreading of Hannah Arendt is particularly breathtaking. He uses the great German Jewish political thinker to help make his case for downplaying the significance of anti-Semitism. He points to her ‘denial that anti-Semitism alone was to blame for the Shoah and her emphasis on the innate genocidal potential of the modern bureaucratic state’. In reality, Arendt thought the opposite. She argued that anti-Semitism was key to the emergence of the totalitarian horrors of the 20th century.
In The Origins of Totalitarianism, she described anti-Semitism as ‘an outrage to common sense’. She sought to explain ‘the outrageous fact that so small (and, in world politics, so unimportant) a phenomenon as the Jewish question and anti-Semitism could become the catalytic agent for first, the Nazi movement, then a world war, and finally the establishment of death factories’.
For Arendt, anti-Semitism went beyond the mere hatred of Jews. It was a complex phenomenon, in which Jews came to embody the supposed evil of speculative capitalism and Bolshevism. For the Nazis, the only way to purge this evil was to annihilate its supposed bearers.
This attempt to exterminate an entire people is a key element to what makes the Holocaust unique. For the Nazis, all Jews had to be systematically exterminated. That is why, at the Protocol of the Wannsee Conference in 1942, which was called to discuss the ‘Final Solution’, the Nazis referred to 11million Jews. This number included the Jewish populations of all the countries the Nazis planned to occupy, including Britain, Ireland and Switzerland.
No reasonable person would argue that the Holocaust was the only instance of mass killing in modern times. Like the Holocaust, some of these other instances were even motivated by racial thinking. Nevertheless, the Holocaust had unique features that mark it out from other historical tragedies. The failure to recognise its distinctiveness diminishes the unique moral horror of the Shoah.
Mishra’s failure to take anti-Semitism seriously goes hand in hand with his failure to recognise the threats faced by Israel. There is no recognition in The World After Gaza that the Jewish State has faced relatively powerful forces committed to its destruction throughout its entire history. It is easy to criticise aspects of the Israeli state’s behaviour over the years – as with any country. But Mishra’s failure to recognise the existential threats Israel faces makes for a grossly one-sided narrative. For example, the Palestinian Nakba, which refers to the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, happened in the context of the surrounding Arab regimes trying to destroy Israel at birth. To ignore the context renders the Israeli state’s actions unintelligible, except as expressions of some deep, irrational loathing of Palestinians.
When Mishra does acknowledge the Islamist forces threatening Israel, he tends to give them an easy ride. He even seems to assume they are progressive. This despite the fact that Hamas has openly pledged to destroy Israel and slaughter its citizens. Iran, too, has frequently threatened to destroy Israel, alongside its allied terrorist groups across the region. It is only by putting considerable resources into its defence, involving great sacrifices by its citizens, that Israel has managed to survive.
The terrible consequences of Mishra’s superficially humanistic worldview are apparent in his brief take on the 7 October 2023 pogrom on southern Israel. In what must be one of the most shameful treatments of the subject (a title for which there is stiff competition), he argues that those horrified by the attack must be racists. ‘The surprise assault by people presumed to have been crushed’, he argues, ‘represents, after 9/11, the 21st century’s second Pearl Harbor to many shocked and horrified white majoritarians’. What really angered the West about the pogrom, he argues, was the perception that ‘white power’ had been ‘publicly violated’.
The World After Gaza claims to be about recognising our common humanity. Yet in reality it downplays or excuses the mass slaughter of Jews. Mishra shows off his erudition at every opportunity. Yet he is somehow blind to the evils of Hamas, a political movement that openly propagates genocidal anti-Semitism, and is determined to downplay the unique horrors of the Holocaust.
What a shameful, morally repellant book this is.
Daniel Ben-Ami is an author and journalist. He runs Radicalism of Fools, a website dedicated to rethinking anti-Semitism. Follow him on X: @danielbenami
The World After Gaza, by Pankaj Mishra, is published by Fern Press.
