‘The World After Gaza’ Review: Violence and Ideology

A progressive polemicist relies on predictable tropes to castigate Israel’s conduct in its war in Gaza following the attacks of Oct. 7, 2023

By Tunku Varadarajan. He reviews the book The World After Gaza: A History by Pankaj Mishra. Excerpts:

"Mr. Mishra describes Israel’s actions in Gaza as “industrial-scale slaughter,” fully conscious as he is that our civilization’s paradigm for slaughter on an industrial scale is the Nazi death camps."

"nowhere in “The World After Gaza” does Mr. Mishra describe the Hamas killers of Oct. 7 as terrorists. They are “gunmen” in one reference, “militants” in another."

"Not until page 34 does Mr. Mishra acknowledge that “Palestinian militants” murdered more than a thousand Israelis on Oct. 7. But he concedes that foundational information only to tell us that, after the massacres in the kibbutzim and elsewhere in Israel, “Israel’s politicians repeatedly brought up the killing of six million Jews in Europe.”"

"Readers who don’t share Mr. Mishra’s scorn for Israel and its “survivalist psychosis” will find repulsive his attempt to depict Stars of David as the trappings of a Jewish pageant of victimhood."

"Mr. Mishra . . . is a darling of the postcolonial left. This work, and others like it, peddle—no, wallow—in the same trite, poisonous, ahistorical idea shared by the ideological descendants of Edward Said: that Jewish Israelis are “settler-colonialists.”"

"Ideologues like Mr. Mishra incite Ivy League undergraduates to wave banners on campus in solidarity with Hamas." 

"His description of anti-Israeli campus protests is breathtaking. “In their indifference to career advancement, and their challenge to the establishment either to reform itself or to crush them, the protesters have demonstrated an uncommon kind of courage.” These are the protesters, remember, who came out in support of Hamas mere hours after the Oct. 7 massacres, well before Israel’s war of hostage-rescue had begun. Anti-Israeli mobs would, for months, make life on campus perilous for Jewish students. The book says nothing of this."

"he uses the same playbook as the rest of his fellow progressives. The hokiest trope—which has also become the most deeply rooted on the antisemitic left—is the grafting of the Palestinian question onto the Manichean race narratives of black versus white that are espoused by groups like Black Lives Matter."

"He is an adamant anticapitalist radical of Indian origin, and it’s clear that one reason he loathes Israel is that Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister and a Hindu nationalist, is so partial to the Jewish state."

"the plurality of Israelis who are Mizrahi Jews (of Middle Eastern origin) look like him—and like the Arab grandmother kneeling in the dust. He also writes of Israel’s “systemic degradation” of its own Arab minority, which shows a dishonest disregard for the fact that Arabs in Israel enjoy more political rights than Arabs anywhere else in the region.

The racism argument is a Jew-phobic hoax. But it has avid consumers on racialized Western campuses and among non-Western antisemites, which makes Mr. Mishra and his ilk as dangerous for the Jews in our midst as the butchers of Hamas."