The World After Gaza: A History

By Pankaj Mishra

Penguin Press 2025

Probably it’s inevitable that the greatest war crime of the 21st century, whose details are state-held secrets and whose atrocities are ongoing, would both draw the attention of historians and public intellectuals and defeat that attention, but it’s nevertheless depressing to see. Writers attempting to grapple with the Israeli government’s genocidal assault on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank need to surmount their own visceral reactions, assess the latest horrors, and somehow make either moral sense or at least moral order out of it all, on deadline, for the publishing marketplace. That’s a tall order in any generation. For the present ethically and intellectually denuded historical moment, it could very well be impossible.

Pankaj Mishra is a fine historian and public intellectual, for instance, and in The World After Gaza it’s beyond him. He approaches one of the most horrifying human rights abuses of the new century and glances off it like a raindrop. Confronted with razed schools, flattened neighborhoods, and burned hospitals with patients inside, Mishra almost immediately begins talking about Victor Klemperer, Stefan Zweig, Primo Levi, pretty much anything. He writes about the history of Israel; he writes about himself; he writes about the Holocaust. “When I finally began to learn systematically about the calamity visited upon Jews, Germany’s assault on its assimilated, patriotic, and minuscule (less than 1 percent) minority seemed abominable enough,” he writes, moving a bit closer to discussing the world after Gaza as opposed to the world before it. “It struck me as unutterably vile that most countries in the West should become directly or indirectly complicit in the massacre of a people that had done more than any other to define what equal and cosmopolitan citizenship mean in the modern world.”

All of the book’s attempts at parallel go astray in just this same way, until the whole thing starts to look like one protracted ghastly change of subject. A barbaric US President and a barbaric Israeli President held a press event where they quietly chortled over building condominiums on piles of dead Palestinian children, and Mishra devotes a leisurely anecdote to the fact that although Ben Kingsley plays a pivotal role in Steven Spielberg’s 1993 movie “Schindler’s List,” Mishra always just reflexively thinks of Kingsley in his role as Gandhi in Richard Attenborough’s 1982 movie. This kind of thing (the book went to press before that particular press event but well after plenty like it) can only charitably be called a disconnect. Given the sheer moral freight involved, it could almost be called blasphemy.

Are we closer, Mishra asks, to finding “a replacement for the Shoah as a universal symbol of human and moral evil?” And might that replacement be this scraping-bald of an entire geography packed with human beings, this slaughter of the Palestinians? Good questions, but Mishra seems hesitant even to pose them, much less answer them. Instead, horribly, unbelievably, he relaxes into bromides – on this of all subjects. “The dispute over how to signify Israel’s violence – legitimate self-defense, just war in tough urban conditions, or ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity,” he writes, “will never be settled.”

This kind of equivocation is monstrous, and its only defense is that it feels almost involuntary. The question of whether or not the Netanyahu government’s savagery in Gaza is “legitimate self-defense” will never be settled? Legitimate self-defense can be done against 13,000 children? This is nothing less than disgusting, even now, in the glare of the present, before any of this has become history. Inevitable, perhaps, but disgusting.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News