"The World After Gaza
By Pankaj Mishra
Penguin Press, 304 pages, $28
This is a review of a repugnant book.
Its author, Pankaj Mishra, accuses Israel of "atrocity hucksterism" in its pursuit of war in Gaza after Oct. 7, 2023.
Specifically, he charges the Jewish state with using the Holocaust as an alibi for the "blithe slaughter of innocents in Gaza." 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. So his assertion of equivalence -- that Jews kill like Nazis -- is unabashed.
It seems almost trivial to point out that 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. A naive reader would be forgiven for thinking -- on a reading of this book -- that Israel's war in Gaza was a matter of spontaneous combustion, of violence without cause.
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." The Holocaust, Mr. Mishra writes, was "rekindled" by "the most fanatical Israeli leadership in history." Israeli diplomats at the United Nations, he gasps, "wore yellow Star of David patches." 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.
So why review this book? Mr. Mishra, a vaunted progressive polemicist and the author of numerous books on race and empire, 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."
(Said's "Orientalism," published in 1978, is still the bible for postcolonial progressive hysterics.) As Mr. Mishra tells it, Israelis (or "settler-Zionists") have been empowered by "belligerent new forms of philosemitism" that can be found in their most toxic avatar, the United States. As Palestinians died in Gaza, those driven "to scan Joe Biden's face for some sign of mercy" encountered "an eerily smooth hardness, broken only by a nervous smirk when he blurted out Israeli lies."
Ideologues like Mr. Mishra incite Ivy League undergraduates to wave banners on campus in solidarity with Hamas. "A widening circle of young Western and non-Western citizens," Mr. Mishra writes, "level the charge that Israel is a cruel settler-colonialist and Jewish supremacist regime supported by far-right Western politicians."
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.
Particularly galling is the author's repeated invocation of anti-Zionist writings by Jews to legitimize his own anti-Zionism. He neglects to mention that this Jewish anti-Zionism was an organic part of an internal Jewish debate about the best way to ensure that Jews survive and flourish. It was not intended as ammunition for opponents of Israel.
Although Mr. Mishra can turn a phrase, elevating his tract above the swamp inhabited by the cruder antisemites, 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.
Mr. Mishra wants us to "look for ways to reconcile the clashing narratives of the Shoah, slavery and colonialism." 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. "Here was a resemblance I could not deny," Mr. Mishra writes, sanctimonious and solipsistic, after a trip to Israel in 2008.
"The Palestinians -- the hijab-clad grandmother kneeling in the dust before an Ashkenazi teenager with an Uzi . . . were people who looked like me, and who now endured a nightmare" -- their colonization -- "that I and my own ancestors had put behind us."
Mr. Mishra is no mug: His bogeyman with an Uzi is Ashkenazi -- an Israeli of European ancestry, which enables him to glide over the fact that 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.
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Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at NYU Law School's Classical Liberal Institute." [1]
1. Violence And Ideology. Varadarajan, Tunku. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 13 Feb 2025: A13.
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