Can the world ever be the same after Israel’s brutal, non-stop bombing of Gaza? That is the question author Pankaj Mishra writes in his latest book The World After Gaza. Mishra’s well researched book explodes several myths, not least being that Israel was formed in 1948 to provide a safe place for survivors of the Holocaust. On the contrary, he writes, the survivors who did move there were treated badly by the European Jews. Most Jews who moved there were from the Arab countries who knew little about the Holocaust. In his interview with Sidharth Bhatia, Mishra also talks about how western countries have backed Israel fully, allowing it to get away with a lot, and the long-term consequences that this will have.
Sidharth: Hello and welcome to The Wire Talks. I am Sidharth Bhatia. The brutal non-stop bombing of Gaza by Israel following the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023 has shocked the world. Condemnation has followed from many quarters and some countries like Spain and Ireland have broken off diplomatic relations. There have been protest marches on many campuses around the world.
Israel has not been moved by any of this criticism. It calls any attack on Israel or its policies as anti-Semitism. It has continued with the bombings and the death toll as reported by the health ministry run by Hamas is 37,000 plus, though the Lancet journal has recently calculated it to be more than 64,000. Either way, it is horrific.
When will it end and what will the world be after Gaza? Why is Israel, a country of Jews who suffered during the second world war, now doing the same to Palestinians as (Adolf) Hitler had done to the Jews then? Author Pankaj Mishra’s just released book The World After Gaza published by Juggernaut ruminates about these and other questions. It is well-researched, strongly argued and very, very provocative. Pankaj Mishra, welcome to The Wire Talks.
Pankaj: Thank you very much Sidharth.
Sidharth: In fact, while reading the book I kept thinking it is going to get many people angry. Were you attacked when you wrote that essay last year in the London Review of Books which preceded this book?
Pankaj: Oh yes, of course I was declared an anti-Semite in the pages of the Jewish Chronicle and in the UK and various other places. This is obviously something you just have to expect and be prepared for when you write on this subject. Nothing surprising there at all. I mean, I think as you said in your introduction, the charge of anti-Semitism is one way in which Israel and its supporters have tried to diffuse, pre-empt criticism of their violence against Palestinians.
Sidharth: So I presume the same is going to happen after this book is now widely read?
Pankaj: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, I think even more of course. The first attempt to write about this subject was only really an essay. This is a book with a much wider circulation, hopefully. And so it will definitely provoke a lot of vicious attacks on this book and on my work, on the whole, on my personality, no doubt. But as I said, this is an ordeal you have to brace yourself for.
Sidharth: At what point exactly when Israel was relentlessly bombing Gaza, killing men, women and mostly, most crucially, children, did you feel the need to write this book? When did you think this is outrageous? I want to say something.
Pankaj: Well, those of us who have tried to engage with the subject even if they have not written about it at great lengths – and I fall into that category – we’ve always known the horrific injustice that essentially governs coverage of the subject: incredible imbalance, incredible inequality of attention. So the plight of the Palestinians is not really taken into account in most Western reports of Israel and Palestine. And Israeli security, Israeli interests, Israeli sort of concerns are always given top priority.
So if you’re aware of that kind of inequality, and then you see that inequality, that sort of systemic inequality come into play when Israelis, as you say, are the state of Israel, is bombing a helpless population, killing thousands of children. And yet you see the slanted coverage in some of the more prestigious organs of the Western media. You see Western politicians claiming to represent democracies line up in support of this extraordinary onslaught.
I think in a way, soon after October 7th, soon after Hamas’s attack on Israel, it was very clear that the state of Israel was going to go completely mad. So I think those of us who knew this, those of us who fully expected the state of Israel to do what it did, were really shocked by the extent to which the country and its destructive policies were being fully endorsed by the leaders of Western democracy, not just the leaders, but also professional classes, media classes. So I think, right from the beginning, to answer your question more concisely, I was extremely agitated by the sort of Israeli response.
Of course, the Israelis had to respond to what happened on October 7th, an onslaught that consumed a lot of civilian lives that really, in a way, struck at the very basis of Israel’s sort of legitimacy narrative, which is really one of national security, which is one of giving security to people who’ve been persecuted around the world. So there was no way Israel was not going to respond. The Israeli leaders were not going to be like Manmohan Singh after 26/11.
They couldn’t really invest in a policy of sitting back and organising some kind of a diplomatic boycott or isolation of Pakistan or of the Palestinians. They were going to strike back viciously. But the extent of their sort of retaliation, the violence of it, the destructiveness of it, all that really has come as a continuous surprise.
And it was evident right in the first week, right in the first two weeks, that it was going to be horrific. So I think I wanted to write about it from October onwards. And I tried to do so in the places I was writing for at that time, encountered a degree of resistance.
And again, that sort of, I think that that kind of resistance just ended up enveloping me in the sense that I thought these are things that are things that I want to say, and I’m going to say them regardless. If I don’t ever publish another piece in a Western periodical again, I’m perfectly ready to pay that price. So when the London Review of Books asked me to deliver a winter lecture, and this is part of a kind of regular annual series, I knew that that’s the subject I was going to speak about.
And so I started to prepare for that lecture. Fortunately, I had already done a fair bit of research into this subject. And so I could count upon that accumulated intellectual capital.
Sidharth: And you didn’t meet resistance from London Review of Books?
Pankaj: No, I think you will find that this is one Western journal that has maintained an independent position on the subject that has actually hosted some of the most urgent and persuasive critiques of Israeli policy over the years. It was a paper that consistently published Edward Saeed, not just publish Edward Saeed on music. Of course, he published on music for the nation.
But they hosted Edward Saeed on this very crucial subject of Palestinian rights. And they carried a piece about the Israel lobby, which was a kind of heart-breaking piece for many people of revelation. Now, of course, it’s a widely accepted fact.
But back then, simply to allude to the presence of a lobby in Washington DC that works over time to protect and advance the interests of the state of Israel was blasphemous. And they took that risk back then only to see that decision perfectly vindicated. So this is a journal, in other words, that has a record of publishing bold and courageous articles on the subject. And for this reason, it stands out in this very desolate landscape of the Western media today.
Sidharth: The Holocaust has become the universal standard, the universal Western standard to gauge the political and moral standard of societies you’ve written. This perhaps also implies that it was a lesson to say that humanity has been through this horrible act and it stands as a warning and should never be repeated. And yet the lesson has been forgotten repeatedly over the last few decades, have you find?
Pankaj: Yes, I think the Shoah in particular came to have an extraordinary sort of symbolic part. Once its revelations, once the crimes of Nazis became in a way central to a certain sort of Western narrative from the 1960s onwards, I think that that’s when the Holocaust comes to occupy this hugely important place in the Western moral imagination. So those of us who were trying to, in a way, direct attention to some of the lesser-known atrocities or speaking about the rise of extreme nationalist movements in different parts of the world are often used to Shoah as an example of how horribly things could turn out. If certain kinds of rhetoric, certain modes of political mobilisation, certain kinds of demagoguery were to go unchecked, this is what you end up with, mass extermination of an entire population. So it was an example for many of us to invoke, even though, as I say in the book, those warnings were usually disregarded.
And obviously we saw instances of mass extermination in different parts of the world, whether in Rwanda and the Balkans, we saw that in Bangladesh. So those warnings really didn’t have too much power in them, but nevertheless they were an important rhetorical device. And I think even today they retain a certain kind of power.
But it’s very clear that actually, in a way, the Shoah has been used most devastatingly by people who have enshrined this particular memory into their national narrative. And I speak here primarily, of course, of the state of Israel, which has cultivated this memory in a way to make it central to the Israeli conception of the nation. So it’s become, it’s sort of come to serve as a perpetual legitimiser of Israeli actions.
So whatever violence that Israel inflicts on the Palestinians over it has inflicted this over more than seven decades now, can be justified. It is still being justified by reference to what happened during the Holocaust. So in other words, instead of actually preventing further acts of mass extermination, it has actually helped Israelis carry out an incredible sort of continuous sustained act of violence against Palestinians. And perhaps, in the last year or so, that act of violence has really achieved a kind of frenzy that we’ve not seen before.
Sidharth: As you say, and as we all know, there have been very many instances in other countries, which have been equally, if not for those countries, if not more significant. Just to mention the partition, the Rwanda killings, the Balkan bombing, all of those. And those somehow seem to have a lesser kind of symbolism around the world.
Pankaj: No, I think that’s a very important point because I think what makes particular narrative resonate, you need powerful narratives, you need big amplifiers. So none of these other incidents of genocide or mass extermination that you mentioned have that kind of power behind them.
So they will never achieve the same kind of resonance that the narrative of the Holocaust has. And I think this is why we are in this condition right now, where the narrative of the Holocaust has been hijacked by people who are themselves inflicting extreme violence, in fact, engaged in an act of extermination in Gaza and increasingly in the West Bank. It also calls attention to how memory has been instrumentalised by nationalist movements, including in our own country.
I think people have learned the lesson of the memory of the Holocaust in surprisingly sort of crooked ways where we see today in India an attempt to turn the memory of the partition into a narrative with the same kind of power to mobilise that the narrative of Zionism has. So this whole sort of commemoration of the partition that we’re now beginning to see in India the identification of a particular state, the whole set of rituals and sort of ceremonies around it. I think this is very much inspired by the great success of the Israeli narrative in making an act of extreme violence and dispossession central to the national narrative and therefore, a very kind of important glue for the nation at large.
Sidharth: You show in your book, and that’s the part that really got me thinking because, of course, one didn’t know it in such, such detail that the Holocaust was the basis of the early Israeli identity, but it was kind of manufactured because many of the survivors of Nazi Germany who moved it to Israel found they were not at all treated very well. No one wanted to know about it. So how did, how was this created? How was this memory and the sense of nationhood around that memory created?
Pankaj: I think, like you, I was actually really very struck when I first encountered this particular history of how the memory of the Holocaust didn’t really emerge naturally from the experience and become part of the kind of main narrative of Israeli nationalism. It was something actually deliberately invented to bring together a national community, which otherwise was incredibly diverse. I think most people probably still to this day do not know that a large part of the Israeli population came from the Middle East itself. It did not come from Europe and that population in particular, a Jewish population of countries like Iraq or Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco had very little experience of and certainly no memory of the Holocaust.
So what were they going to do in Israel? How were they going to be bound together in a national community with people from Europe? Many of whom actually looked down upon these Jews of Middle Eastern origin. In fact, Jewish, Israeli Jews from Arab countries were treated horribly, abominably by the European elite, the ruling elite of Israel. All these are incredibly well-documented facts. So there was a real problem when the state of Israel came into existence, the kind of problem that I suppose the founding fathers of India and Pakistan faced: how do you bind together this incredibly sort of heterogeneous national community? So you have to come up with some kind of a narrative and what the Israeli political establishment started to arrive at very late actually in the 1960s. So 15, 20 years after the events of the Holocaust, they came up with this narrative of the Holocaust as something that obviously happened in the past, but something that was also an imminent danger and that the Arab countries around them or the Arab populations around them who had been dispossessed or defeated in battle were essentially incarnations of German Nazis. And they were ready to destroy, eradicate the Jewish population of Israel if given the chance or given the opportunity.
And for that reason, the state of Israel had to remain completely vigilant, fully prepared to be a completely militarised society, be an extremely nationalistic society. So all of these, I suppose, nation-building or nation-finding narratives became hugely important. At the centre of these narratives really was the Holocaust that we are essentially a society of people victimised by murderous, genocidal anti-semitism.
And there is no way we can make this happen again. Of course, what gives away this narrative as something manufactured was essentially precisely the chronology. The fact that this narrative did not exist when the state of Israel first came into existence or the state of Israel as they describe in the book have a largely contentious attitude towards the survivors of the Holocaust.
They were literally described as human debris by the then Israeli prime minister. Now, these are extremely shocking facts, and they would shock those people who assume, and like many people, I assume too, that the state of Israel flows naturally out of this traumatic, horrific experience of extermination in Europe. And it was news to me that this particular narrative was really constructive to give Israeli expansionism, especially after 1967, greater legitimacy.
Sidharth: There are many important Israeli intellectuals and Jewish intellectuals, you quote in the book, who were very vocal in warning Israel to move on from the Holocaust. And but their voices went unheard. I mean, they were ridiculed. They were ridiculed even as Nazis. Is there any room at all for dissenting intellectual voices today?
Pankaj: I think it’s interesting that we are now 14-15 months into this extraordinary campaign of the eradication of Gaza, very likely the annexation of the West Bank, and how little we have heard from the Israeli intelligence here. Can you think of a single piece of writing from an Israeli writer or intellectual, a mainstream writer recognised not only in Israel, but also elsewhere? And Israel has some distinguished writers, people who have been part of the peace camp in the past.
We haven’t had really a single major intervention. Whereas previous wars in the past, and I allude to some of them in my book, Israeli intellectuals at different times in the last three or four decades addressed international audiences and said, ‘look, what’s going on here is completely wrong’. And I encourage you people living outside of Israel to speak out, to speak against these atrocities.
We haven’t had a single appeal from the Israeli intelligence here at this point. So I think it shows really the extent to which the Israeli peace camp or the number of Israelis who used to alert their country and their supporters against going down this destructive path, how that number has diminished over the years. And how we are really witnessing an incredibly radicalised society, where the possibilities of dissent, the possibilities of free speech have been systematically squashed.
So it’s to answer your question, I mean, I hope that there will be more voices, there are now voices beginning to speak up in favour of the ceasefire, which is something we might see in the next few days, but it really is too late. And it’s extraordinary, this sort of silence from the Israeli intelligence. Yeah, I mean, there have been exceptions, of course, I should mention academics here and there. But really on the whole, we haven’t, we haven’t had the same kind of interventions.
Sidharth: So, though, I mean, one keeps getting small videos of writers like Gideon Levy and all that. But I don’t know whether that amounts to anything within the country or, in fact, outside the country.
But that’s a very, very important point. Actually, the lack of dissenting voices, not because they are scared, but perhaps they are also supportive, is very disturbing, wouldn’t you say?
Pankaj: It’s extremely disturbing. I mean, I think Gideon Levy, of course, is an excellent example, even Amira Hass. There are others mostly associated with a newspaper that is, deeply besieged right now, Haaretz. So there’s a small number of people who’ve been doing that, who’ve been doing that for decades now.
But I’m thinking of people like David Grossman, who has been vocal on this issue in the past. Where is his voice today? I really want to know, what does he think about this issue? He had a couple of pieces, I think, early in this conflict. But we haven’t heard much from him or from other Israeli writers.
So, we’re kind of left to sort of wonder what exactly is their position on all this? Are they opposed to this? Do they support (Benjamin) Netanyahu? Have they come to support him, despite obviously disliking him? These are questions that really can only be answered by them. And we haven’t had sort of answers. So it’s really very puzzling and perplexing and certainly also demoralising.
Sidharth: So I’m going to quote something from your book: ‘A Jewish identity founded on memories of victimhood and of belonging to a community made up of fellow victims, present or past. I couldn’t help, and this connects with what’s happening around us, I couldn’t help that I’m seeing that in India at the moment. Of course, one has seen it among the Nazis. But now I’m seeing that in India, this building of hyper-masculine mythologies, the victimhood, the fake mythology, fake myths about the past’. It’s kind of a playbook, isn’t it?
Pankaj: It very much is. I mean, that’s why I think Israel is really important in sort of thinking through a whole range of nationalist narratives today. Because the strategies the state of Israel has adopted in creating a self-legitimising narrative, these are now strategies imitated, mimicked by different countries around the world. So in India, we know that I think there wasn’t this narrative of victimhood in the past. There was this idea that we need to look towards the future, we need to make the future better than the present.
And the future is definitely going to be better if we all work together and move on from the conflicts and animosities of the past. Now, I think with the future becoming more and more clouded, I think the makers of nationalist narratives have turned to the past. And from the past, they extract these very selective stories about how the Muslims invaded India, destroyed thousands of temples, enslaved a large part of the Hindu population.
And then the British came, and then they destroyed Hindu culture and so on. And again, this sort of whole narrative of perpetual victimhood like how we’ve been enslaved for more than a thousand years, and how we can only recover as a nation once we discover our Hinduness, Hinduness as victims.
What has sort of people who have been kind of diversely defined over the past several centuries, but precisely as Hindus, who have remained constant throughout time, throughout history, who were identified as Hindus by the people, who came to India more than a thousand years ago and persecuted because they were Hindus. So you see this sort of this identity that is stretched across the centuries remains constant and obviously the Hindus alive today have a very strong connection to people who were alive a thousand years ago. So you see this construction of a large, coherent, cohesive past.
What, for what exactly? All in the service of a Hindu nationalism that wants to essentially not just kind of mobilise people politically, but also colonise their inner lives, colonise their imaginations. And again in this project, the most successful nation state today is Israel. And that’s why I think so many aspiring, budding nationalists look to that country for inspiration.
Sidharth: And also the creation of a common enemy.
Pankaj: Absolutely. Absolutely.
Sidharth: So my final question, coming back to the title of your book and the book itself. So what will be the world after Gaza? Obviously not the same. And of course, every such question must first and foremost consider the plight of the victims of the bombings.
But also what will be Israel’s future position? Will it survive as a country? Or how will the world now react to other such situations of mass extermination? How is the world going to change?
Pankaj: Well, I think what we’ve seen over the last few months is a kind of bonfire of international norms. And I think it’s really extremely difficult. It will be extremely difficult for that very fragile architecture to be rebuilt. I do think the culture of impunity has been effectively universalised because of what Israel did in Gaza and the West (Bank), and the way it was then supported by the leading democracies of the world. And I don’t know, really, if we will recover from this in our lifetime. So that’s one consequence, one very direct consequence of this.
Speaking more specifically about the state of Israel, I think obviously, with its military power, let’s not forget it’s a nuclear power, a fact that most of its supporters are keen to disguise and to suppress. But it remains a nuclear power, very strong nuclear power. And so it’s not going to simply disappear.
It’s going to be around for a long time. And that’s a reality we all have to reckon with. But at the same time, Israel internally is much, much weaker as a result, as a direct consequence of what it has done in Gaza.
I think some of the country’s most talented people, I don’t think they can see the country or they can see a great future for themselves in Israel as it existed in Israel, surrounded by even more determined and ferocious adversaries, people who are not going to forget what it did in Gaza and the West Bank. And then, of course, we’ve seen some remarkable geopolitical shifts in the region as a result of what Israel did. The Saudis, who were on the verge of signing a deal with the Israelis, are now moving closer to Iran. They realise that it’s actually not only a question of their own legitimacy, but it’s also the fact that they are dealing now with a political establishment in Israel, that’s really out of control, that can strike any of these Arab countries without any restraint whatsoever. And we’ve seen this in this bombing of Lebanon, its bombing of Syria. So I think a lot of the Arab countries in the region who were previously disposed to think about normalisation with Israel are being forced to rethink.
And as a result, they’ve dropped their antagonism to Iran and moved closer to it. So I think in all these respects, Israel is increasingly a more isolated country. And as a result, I think the population of Israel, again, we have to remember, a large part of the population consists of Arabs with Israeli citizenship.
Then, of course, there are people with religious training who are not really very well-equipped for the modern world. So it’s only a small percentage of the Israeli population that is responsible for its economic power, for the sort of cutting edge brilliance in various fields, tech and security in particular. And if that population decides that its future is better served in Europe or in America, then, of course, Israel faces not only a long-term, but a short-term challenge.
So I think in all kinds of ways, this war has been deeply destructive for the state of Israel, not just for the Palestinians. It’s really not resolved the fundamental problem, which is how can you continue a state of occupation indefinitely? You’ve got to stop this at some point or other, but you’re not going to stop it by trying to eradicate Gaza or trying to annex the West Bank.
Sidharth: And what happens to the Palestinians?
Pankaj: Well, I think again, they’re now becoming pawns in this in these new struggles between the Israelis and the United States on one hand, between Arab countries and the United States on the other, between the United States and Iran. I think the tragedy really here is that the Palestinians have never had or never enjoyed the kind of support they needed and deserved from Arab countries in the region. They’ve certainly enjoyed a lot of international support. And I think that is growing.
You mentioned Spain and Ireland breaking off diplomatic relations, joining South Africa’s case at the ICJ against Israel, charging Israel with genocide. These are extraordinary, extraordinary developments. And again, the Western media has not really covered them.
But we see massive splits in the Western alliance here. So I think Palestinians at this stage have greater international support than at any other time in the sort of recent history. But at the same time, very little of that support is politically effective.
And so they remain, I think in many ways, extremely vulnerable. And with Trump in power, I don’t think the position is going to improve. I mean, we are looking at a ceasefire, but the condition might actually worsen too, in a different way.
Sidharth: Thank you, Pankaj. Even the interview now has a lot of material to think about. Thank you for joining us on a morning. I know you must be busy moving around and giving other interviews and talking to people, and you’ve got your own life to consider. But this was really, really instructive. And I thank you once more for joining us in this podcast.
Pankaj: Thank you. Thank you, Sidharth. And thank you. I really appreciate this.
Sidharth: Yeah. So that was Pankaj Mishra, the author of many books, but now the latest book that he has written is The World After Gaza. I urge you, if at all you’re interested in the Israeli relentless, again, I would say, bombing of Gaza, to read it. It’s not a difficult book to go through, but it makes you think on every page.
