It’s quite the achievement to be the idol of bigots whose hatred for your kith and kin in their midst is very keen and malevolent.
But then Israel, historically, was always comfortable allying itself with racist systems, like South Africa’s apartheid regime. It didn’t even have much of a problem dealing with Nazis barely a few years after the Holocaust. In the 1950s, the liaison between the Israeli foreign ministry and Germany’s Chancellor Konrad Adenauer was none other than Hans Globke, a Nazi and a close advisor to the German leader.
It’s not Israeli pragmatism in a devilish world that prompted such sordid dealings, it’s affinity, a shared visceral attitude towards the other, even similar ideas about what to do with them. There are many dimensions to this complicity, colonialism being one of them.
And so, naturally, Israel’s own victims would be the same as the West’s, rendering decolonization, as a counterforce, the shared aspiration of the dispossessed across maligned continents. Unavoidably, decolonization has haunted Israel, much like it has the West: a perpetual yearning for freedom, because of the perpetual craving for empire. A “fraternity of liberation” in response to a fraternity of exploitation.
It is true that, in a deceptively hopeful post World War II age of learned lessons, never agains, peace, and prosperity, Western atonement for its copious sins against the other as neighbor and as subject everywhere else in the world appeared earnest. But for those inhabiting the other side of the “color line” it was hard to buy into this hype before Gaza. That epoch was just too marred by pervasive Western hypocrisies, insidious racisms, and newfound paths to imperialism. After Gaza, it has become impossible.
Mishra meticulously weaves into a movingly compelling tale the details of this unbearably rich chronicle of the will to dominate and shun, and to resist and break free; to erase ugly truths and conjure myths, and to excavate the facts and lay bare the fictions. His achievement is to demonstrate the intersecting histories of colonialism, antisemitism, and racism as practiced and felt in every corner of this earth.
This preeminent intellectual’s other accomplishment is to compose a mosaic of who we were and are in these histories, in all our contradictions, flaws, pretensions, complicities, and heroisms. Much of what he shares is not new to the learned reader, but there is a distinct purpose to the book’s illuminations: the continuum between the past and present, notwithstanding the radical jolts that announce the end of an era and the dawn of a new one.
It was perhaps inexorable that The World After Gaza would be told through the villains and sages of this epic story. Those committing the misdeeds and those courageously bearing witness to them: a group violating every exalted claim, a group exposing it.
In setting the stage for the dramas sure to unfold on the page, Mishra meaningfully opens the book with the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, an event that best captures the force of Nazi atrocities and the counterforce of Jewish resistance. Israel’s successive generations of leaders always preferred to brag about the muscular in the Jewish response to the Nazi campaign of extermination.
