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The World After Gaza: A Short History
From one of our foremost public intellectuals, an essential reckoning with the war in Gaza that reframes our understanding of the ongoing conflict, its historical roots, and the fractured global response
The postwar global order was in many ways shaped in response to the Holocaust. That eventbecame the benchmark for atrocity, and, in the Western imagination, the paradigmatic genocide. Its memory orients so much of our thinking, and crucially, forms the basic justification for Israel’s right first to establish itself and then to defend itself. But in many parts of the world, ravaged by other conflicts and experiences of mass slaughter, the Holocaust’s singularity is not always taken for granted, even when its hideous atrocity is. Outside of the West, Pankaj Mishra argues, the dominant story of the twentieth century is that of decolonization.
The World After Gaza takes the current war, and the polarized reaction to it, as the starting point for a broad reevaluation of two competing narratives of the last the Global North’s triumphant account of victory over totalitarianism and the spread of liberal capitalism, and the Global South’s hopeful vision of racial equality and freedom from colonial rule. At a moment when the world’s balance of power is shifting, and the Global North no longer commands ultimate authority, it is critically important that we understand how and why the two halves of the world are failing to talk to each other.
As old touchstones and landmarks crumble, only a new history with a sharply different emphasis can reorient us to the world and worldviews now emerging into the light. In this concise, powerful, and pointed treatise, Mishra reckons with the fundamental questions posed by our present crisis � about whether some lives matter more than others, how identity is constructed, and what the role of the nation-state ought to be. The World After Gaza is an indispensable moral guide to our past, present, and future.
The postwar global order was in many ways shaped in response to the Holocaust. That eventbecame the benchmark for atrocity, and, in the Western imagination, the paradigmatic genocide. Its memory orients so much of our thinking, and crucially, forms the basic justification for Israel’s right first to establish itself and then to defend itself. But in many parts of the world, ravaged by other conflicts and experiences of mass slaughter, the Holocaust’s singularity is not always taken for granted, even when its hideous atrocity is. Outside of the West, Pankaj Mishra argues, the dominant story of the twentieth century is that of decolonization.
The World After Gaza takes the current war, and the polarized reaction to it, as the starting point for a broad reevaluation of two competing narratives of the last the Global North’s triumphant account of victory over totalitarianism and the spread of liberal capitalism, and the Global South’s hopeful vision of racial equality and freedom from colonial rule. At a moment when the world’s balance of power is shifting, and the Global North no longer commands ultimate authority, it is critically important that we understand how and why the two halves of the world are failing to talk to each other.
As old touchstones and landmarks crumble, only a new history with a sharply different emphasis can reorient us to the world and worldviews now emerging into the light. In this concise, powerful, and pointed treatise, Mishra reckons with the fundamental questions posed by our present crisis � about whether some lives matter more than others, how identity is constructed, and what the role of the nation-state ought to be. The World After Gaza is an indispensable moral guide to our past, present, and future.
300 pages, Hardcover
First published February 11, 2025
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6008 people want to read
About the author
Pankaj Mishra
75books689followersPankaj Mishra (पंकज मिश्रा) is a noted Indian essayist and novelist.
In 1992, Mishra moved to Mashobra, a Himalayan village, where he began to contribute literary essays and reviews to The Indian Review of Books, The India Magazine, and the newspaper The Pioneer. His first book, Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town India (1995), was a travelogue that described the social and cultural changes in India in the context of globalization. His novel The Romantics (2000), an ironic tale of people longing for fulfillment in cultures other than their own, was published in 11 European languages and won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum award for first fiction. His book An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World (2004) mixes memoir, history, and philosophy while attempting to explore the Buddha's relevance to contemporary times. Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan and Beyond (2006), describes Mishra's travels through Kashmir, Bollywood, Afghanistan, Tibet, Nepal, and other parts of South and Central Asia.
In 1992, Mishra moved to Mashobra, a Himalayan village, where he began to contribute literary essays and reviews to The Indian Review of Books, The India Magazine, and the newspaper The Pioneer. His first book, Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town India (1995), was a travelogue that described the social and cultural changes in India in the context of globalization. His novel The Romantics (2000), an ironic tale of people longing for fulfillment in cultures other than their own, was published in 11 European languages and won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum award for first fiction. His book An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World (2004) mixes memoir, history, and philosophy while attempting to explore the Buddha's relevance to contemporary times. Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan and Beyond (2006), describes Mishra's travels through Kashmir, Bollywood, Afghanistan, Tibet, Nepal, and other parts of South and Central Asia.
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December 1, 2024
Pankaj Mishra's brilliant moral-political treatise may as well have been called 'The World before Gaza', for he here casts his rigorous eye on the historical events that have paved way for the escalation � and indeed, the silent sanctioning � of cold-blooded genocide of Palestinians at the hands of Israeli forces over the last 14 months.
He begins with a re-evaluation of how the collective memory of the Holocaust � as the ultimate atrocity of humankind � has come to shape the post-war moral and political imagination in the West. In this, he contends with the two major competing narratives of the twentieth century: the West's triumphant quashing of the totalitarian threats Nazism and Communism, and the ongoing and often thwarted post- (and de-)colonial project of racial equality.
Scrupulously researched, The World After Gaza demonstrates how the motivation for the West's involvement in quashing Nazi Germany, far from a moral imperative of rescuing European Jewry from annihilation, rested in the Allied powers' interest in preventing an influx of Jewish refugees in their own lands: Britain and the United States were, contrary to the now-popular saviour narratives, less than willing to admit Jewish refugees into their borders during wartime; Britain was in fact reluctant even to allow Jewish refugees of the Holocaust into British-administered Palestine despite Balfour and the ostensible motive for the creation of Israel.
As the book goes on to show, the Nazi extermination of six million Jews was seen as a mere 'detail' of the war, with Europe and even Israel abjuring the memory of the Shoah until the 1960s, when the Arab-Israeli war prompted the latter to focus on memorialising the Holocaust and using the manufactured fear of a second Shoah (manufactured because they were too evidently stronger than their opposition) to acquire military, monetary support from diaspora Jews elsewhere. Meanwhile, the shame of the Suez Crisis and the American defeat in East Asia meant that the West began seeing Israel as an important proxy in the Middle East. In the 1980s, European philosemitism in former sites of anti-semitism (exemplified by Germany, which fast went from being seen as the immoral and totalitarian enemy to a legitimate liberal democracy allied against the next big threat: the Soviets) became a requirement for membership of the European Union.
But while the project of Israelisation took hold, and even as the Holocaust was taking a central position in Western collective memory, it came to be challenged by decolonisation and the rise of other forms of collective self-identification. Quoting Aimé Césaire, Mishra argues that
Mishra argues that apart from the colour line, the American discourse of progress after the Cold War rendered Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism as the sole measures of evil, and
Indeed, 'Never Again' became more distorted, propagandistic, and visibly racialised as the traditionally anti-semitic and once-again powerful far-right in Europe and elsewhere began identifying with and supporting Israel. Anti-refugee and violently xenophobic rhetoric was now levelled at people of colour (seen as a threat by the Whites who were once their masters, and who once levelled it just as forcefully against European Jews). In Part III of the book, Mishra explores this formation at length, examining the relationships between the Jewish consciousness and the emancipation of Asia, Africa and the Caribbean and also looking at the global media's complicity in the destruction of Gaza. It all comes together in his identification of why anti-semitic far-right alliances with Israel have come to be in a world where critical race theory and decolonisation are seen as a threat, and where Arabs have carefully been constructed as the most hated 'other':
The World After Gaza is not only essential reading for all who continue to show courage in the face of a crushing mainstream, or those who, like Mishra, are undertaking a personal journey of reckoning with our present, but also for those who seek to better understand the history of the West and close the gaps in the knowledge that the countless other books about the World Wars and the Holocaust fail to serve.
He begins with a re-evaluation of how the collective memory of the Holocaust � as the ultimate atrocity of humankind � has come to shape the post-war moral and political imagination in the West. In this, he contends with the two major competing narratives of the twentieth century: the West's triumphant quashing of the totalitarian threats Nazism and Communism, and the ongoing and often thwarted post- (and de-)colonial project of racial equality.
Scrupulously researched, The World After Gaza demonstrates how the motivation for the West's involvement in quashing Nazi Germany, far from a moral imperative of rescuing European Jewry from annihilation, rested in the Allied powers' interest in preventing an influx of Jewish refugees in their own lands: Britain and the United States were, contrary to the now-popular saviour narratives, less than willing to admit Jewish refugees into their borders during wartime; Britain was in fact reluctant even to allow Jewish refugees of the Holocaust into British-administered Palestine despite Balfour and the ostensible motive for the creation of Israel.
As the book goes on to show, the Nazi extermination of six million Jews was seen as a mere 'detail' of the war, with Europe and even Israel abjuring the memory of the Shoah until the 1960s, when the Arab-Israeli war prompted the latter to focus on memorialising the Holocaust and using the manufactured fear of a second Shoah (manufactured because they were too evidently stronger than their opposition) to acquire military, monetary support from diaspora Jews elsewhere. Meanwhile, the shame of the Suez Crisis and the American defeat in East Asia meant that the West began seeing Israel as an important proxy in the Middle East. In the 1980s, European philosemitism in former sites of anti-semitism (exemplified by Germany, which fast went from being seen as the immoral and totalitarian enemy to a legitimate liberal democracy allied against the next big threat: the Soviets) became a requirement for membership of the European Union.
But while the project of Israelisation took hold, and even as the Holocaust was taking a central position in Western collective memory, it came to be challenged by decolonisation and the rise of other forms of collective self-identification. Quoting Aimé Césaire, Mishra argues that
Hitler seemed exceptionally cruel only because he presided over 'the humiliation of the white man': the 'fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa'.The question then was, what gave the Holocaust weight over the crimes committed in Hiroshima and Vietnam, over the institutions of slavery, colonisation and plunder, and over the genocides of Armenians, Cambodians, and Native Americans?
Mishra argues that apart from the colour line, the American discourse of progress after the Cold War rendered Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism as the sole measures of evil, and
the racism of American and Western societies, which Hitler had learned and borrowed from, was taken out of its original location, the institutions of slavery, colonialism and imperialism, and presented as a case of ugly individual bigotry.During the Cold War, the overplaying of the dangers of communism was further used to distract from the underlying causes and consequences of widespread decolonisation. Philosemitism and Israelisation strengthened with the colonial powers losing their potency, as did the resurgence from the 1990s onwards of the kind of ethnonationalism that resulted in the Holocaust in the first place.
Indeed, 'Never Again' became more distorted, propagandistic, and visibly racialised as the traditionally anti-semitic and once-again powerful far-right in Europe and elsewhere began identifying with and supporting Israel. Anti-refugee and violently xenophobic rhetoric was now levelled at people of colour (seen as a threat by the Whites who were once their masters, and who once levelled it just as forcefully against European Jews). In Part III of the book, Mishra explores this formation at length, examining the relationships between the Jewish consciousness and the emancipation of Asia, Africa and the Caribbean and also looking at the global media's complicity in the destruction of Gaza. It all comes together in his identification of why anti-semitic far-right alliances with Israel have come to be in a world where critical race theory and decolonisation are seen as a threat, and where Arabs have carefully been constructed as the most hated 'other':
There is among majoritarian movements a strong sense of identification with an ethnonational state that unleashes lethal force without constraints; it explains, much better than any calculus of geopolitical and economic interests, the stunning complicity of many in the West in an absolute moral transgression: a genocide.The book ends with a lamentation of � and an expression of wary hope for � what will become of the loneliness of the Palestinians, and of the world after Gaza. Though Mishra begins and ends with a formulation of current events in occupied Palestine as a 'war' despite also recognising the genocide� a centrist, pacifist and even Gandhian position that is sometimes confusing and also colours, I think, his understanding of post- and de- colonial movements � what holds in the middle makes a strong case for the Palestinian cause in a world that continues to turn a blind eye, to repeat history as it has time and time again.
The World After Gaza is not only essential reading for all who continue to show courage in the face of a crushing mainstream, or those who, like Mishra, are undertaking a personal journey of reckoning with our present, but also for those who seek to better understand the history of the West and close the gaps in the knowledge that the countless other books about the World Wars and the Holocaust fail to serve.
March 26, 2025
Jerry Seinfeld posed with a machine gun at an IDF training facility in the West Bank (on stolen land) and has also “taunted pro-Palestinian protestors.� The Atlantic Magazine has a long history of hating all things Russia, but did you know in May 2024, the Atlantic “carried a piece casting doubt on the number of people killed in Gaza by Israel and claiming that ‘it is possible to kill children legally�.� How is killing children ever possible legally? Weighing in on such a bizarre subject, according to Menachem Begin’s account published in the Times of Israel, Joe Biden as senator in 2020 “commended the Israeli war effort and boasted that he would have gone further, even if it meant killing women and children.� Biden’s sociopathic line was so over-the-top than Begin (a former terrorist in the Irgun) responded to Biden, “No Sir, according to our values it is forbidden to hurt women and children …This is a yardstick of human civilization, not to hurt civilians.� Fast-Forward, no wonder why Biden had no problem with Israel’s recent genocide. The author tells us that Timothy Snyder and (frequent contributor to Atlantic Magazine) Anne Appelbaum both are NOT objective sources but are known as over-the-top anti-communist historians in the Richard Pipes and Robert Conquest mold. Pipes and Conquest both even supported Contras during their 1,300 terrorist attacks on the Nicaraguan people. The highly questionable Atlantic Magazine also ran an article that dared call decolonization a “toxic, inhumane ideology� that corrupts young minds. Imagine the danger of teaching young minds that making people do things at gunpoint is somehow wrong! Why, that goes against the teachings of Hitler, Pol Pot, Pinochet, and Charles Manson! According to the author, “Elon Musk wants to ban the word ‘decolonization� altogether.� Maybe Elon should write for the Atlantic. [Glenn Greenwald and Max Blumenthal both call Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg a known neo-con hired to push neo-con talking points. In the past week (March 2025) Jeffrey had the chance to report on the US planned illegal war in Yemen, but as a faithful neocon, he shut up to let that war crime unfold smoothly. Neo-con uber alles…]
Hannah Arendt felt the Eichmann trial was an Israeli effort to show the world that Jews who weren’t Israelis would “let themselves be slaughtered like sheep� - a way of insulting the entire diaspora. Ben Gurion hoped that the trial would help conflate Arabs with Nazis by focusing on Mufti al-Husseini of Jerusalem. Ben Gurion said, “We don’t want the Arab Nazis to come and slaughter us.� A delusional thought from a man who looked like he just stuck his finger in a light socket. “In 2015, Netanyahu claimed it was (Mufti) al-Husseini who persuaded a dithering Hitler to proceed and ‘burn� the Jews.� In the 1960’s it became vogue for Israelis to pretend a second Shoah was always coming around the next bend, turning the Shoah into “the sacred core of Israeli nationalism.� Thus, Israel’s future lay in manufactured paranoia, inflexibility and eternal victimhood. Sounds like my first wife.
Germany: Die Welt claimed that ‘Free Palestine is the new Heil Hitler� and Die Zeit alerted German readers to the evidently outrageous fact that ‘Greta Thunberg openly sympathizes with the Palestinians�.� British historian Mary Fulbrook “calculates that of the nearly one million people who ‘were at one point or another actively involved in killing Jewish civilians, only 6,656 were convicted of Nazi crimes.� That’s fewer than the number of people employed by just Auschwitz. In the end “only 164 individuals had been sentenced for the crime of murder � of six million Jews.� Why are Israel supporters INFINITELY more upset by peaceful Pro-Palestinian protestors than the fact that the crimes of the ENTIRE Holocaust were paid ONLY by 164 former Nazis [and the entire Palestinian people]? In only Germany, Britain, the US, Israel, and topsy-turvy world, does faux-anti-Semitism (students peacefully opposing active genocide) rank as more viscerally upsetting than REAL anti-Semitism (killing millions of Jews in a past genocide).
Britain: “In 1939, British soldiers fired on Jewish refugees, including women and children, on an overpeopled hulk as they attempted to land on Tel Aviv beach.� Poland: There happened a mass murder of Jews, and “in 1946 in the Polish town of Kielce, 180 kilometers south of Warsaw, a mob of antisemites killed forty of the two hundred Jews who had survived the mass murder of the town’s 25,000 Jewish inhabitants.�
Edward Said, who I thought was a perfect progressive, this book points out he once “called campus security when students protesting the war in Vietnam disrupted his class at Columbia.� I can’t find verification of that story anywhere else on the web � I sure hope it’s not true. Pankaj calls Edward “dandyish�.
Kylie Jenner “lost nearly a million followers after announcing her support for Israel.� How great that her supporters see that Israel is committing crimes beyond the world of just fashion. James Baldwin said in 1970, “I’m not anti-Semitic at all, but I am an anti-Zionist. I don’t believe they have the right after 3,000 years to reclaim the land with western bombs and guns on biblical injunction.�
“Israeli soldiers, interviewed by CNN, claimed they can ‘no longer eat meat� after crushing hundreds of Palestinians under bulldozers, and noticing how ‘everything squirts out�.� Next time life has got you down, remember that somewhere in Israel are former soldiers still haunted by having to shove Palestinian bodies around with their bulldozers after (and sometimes before) they were dead. Couldn’t they just kill innocent civilians and then just LEAVE the bodies on the ground like the Khmer Rouge? So sad!
This book was ok; I expected so much more after the Rashid Khalidi blurb on the back of the book. But as you see, only a page and a half of useable information. Most of the book was endless intellectual name-dropping w/o reasons why those names were even dropped. Norman Finkelstein has written a few better books than this one where he also discusses many famous authors on Israel/Palestine and discusses the points in their books in depth. This book ignores the history of Zionism, Nakba, 67� war, the Lebanon war, the two Intifadas, Hamas, international law, Israel’s war crimes, to the point I wonder why it was even written. I learned far more from Ahed Tamimi’s book “They Called Me a Lioness� and she is not even a writer and was only in her teens when she wrote it. I’ve now reviewed 80 books on just the subject of Israel/Palestine since the infamous October 7th Hamas invasion, so it’s sad when an “acclaimed� book offers little actual NEW information.
Hannah Arendt felt the Eichmann trial was an Israeli effort to show the world that Jews who weren’t Israelis would “let themselves be slaughtered like sheep� - a way of insulting the entire diaspora. Ben Gurion hoped that the trial would help conflate Arabs with Nazis by focusing on Mufti al-Husseini of Jerusalem. Ben Gurion said, “We don’t want the Arab Nazis to come and slaughter us.� A delusional thought from a man who looked like he just stuck his finger in a light socket. “In 2015, Netanyahu claimed it was (Mufti) al-Husseini who persuaded a dithering Hitler to proceed and ‘burn� the Jews.� In the 1960’s it became vogue for Israelis to pretend a second Shoah was always coming around the next bend, turning the Shoah into “the sacred core of Israeli nationalism.� Thus, Israel’s future lay in manufactured paranoia, inflexibility and eternal victimhood. Sounds like my first wife.
Germany: Die Welt claimed that ‘Free Palestine is the new Heil Hitler� and Die Zeit alerted German readers to the evidently outrageous fact that ‘Greta Thunberg openly sympathizes with the Palestinians�.� British historian Mary Fulbrook “calculates that of the nearly one million people who ‘were at one point or another actively involved in killing Jewish civilians, only 6,656 were convicted of Nazi crimes.� That’s fewer than the number of people employed by just Auschwitz. In the end “only 164 individuals had been sentenced for the crime of murder � of six million Jews.� Why are Israel supporters INFINITELY more upset by peaceful Pro-Palestinian protestors than the fact that the crimes of the ENTIRE Holocaust were paid ONLY by 164 former Nazis [and the entire Palestinian people]? In only Germany, Britain, the US, Israel, and topsy-turvy world, does faux-anti-Semitism (students peacefully opposing active genocide) rank as more viscerally upsetting than REAL anti-Semitism (killing millions of Jews in a past genocide).
Britain: “In 1939, British soldiers fired on Jewish refugees, including women and children, on an overpeopled hulk as they attempted to land on Tel Aviv beach.� Poland: There happened a mass murder of Jews, and “in 1946 in the Polish town of Kielce, 180 kilometers south of Warsaw, a mob of antisemites killed forty of the two hundred Jews who had survived the mass murder of the town’s 25,000 Jewish inhabitants.�
Edward Said, who I thought was a perfect progressive, this book points out he once “called campus security when students protesting the war in Vietnam disrupted his class at Columbia.� I can’t find verification of that story anywhere else on the web � I sure hope it’s not true. Pankaj calls Edward “dandyish�.
Kylie Jenner “lost nearly a million followers after announcing her support for Israel.� How great that her supporters see that Israel is committing crimes beyond the world of just fashion. James Baldwin said in 1970, “I’m not anti-Semitic at all, but I am an anti-Zionist. I don’t believe they have the right after 3,000 years to reclaim the land with western bombs and guns on biblical injunction.�
“Israeli soldiers, interviewed by CNN, claimed they can ‘no longer eat meat� after crushing hundreds of Palestinians under bulldozers, and noticing how ‘everything squirts out�.� Next time life has got you down, remember that somewhere in Israel are former soldiers still haunted by having to shove Palestinian bodies around with their bulldozers after (and sometimes before) they were dead. Couldn’t they just kill innocent civilians and then just LEAVE the bodies on the ground like the Khmer Rouge? So sad!
This book was ok; I expected so much more after the Rashid Khalidi blurb on the back of the book. But as you see, only a page and a half of useable information. Most of the book was endless intellectual name-dropping w/o reasons why those names were even dropped. Norman Finkelstein has written a few better books than this one where he also discusses many famous authors on Israel/Palestine and discusses the points in their books in depth. This book ignores the history of Zionism, Nakba, 67� war, the Lebanon war, the two Intifadas, Hamas, international law, Israel’s war crimes, to the point I wonder why it was even written. I learned far more from Ahed Tamimi’s book “They Called Me a Lioness� and she is not even a writer and was only in her teens when she wrote it. I’ve now reviewed 80 books on just the subject of Israel/Palestine since the infamous October 7th Hamas invasion, so it’s sad when an “acclaimed� book offers little actual NEW information.
February 6, 2025
mandatory reading; for a present that is horrifying, for the way in which history that is ongoing needs to be written and understood� the myriad threads that Mishra weaves together include the treatment of Jews in East and West Europe before, during, and after WWII, in the Middle East where they were not blond and blue eyed, the role of the Allies and USA in the Holocaust and the utter lack of guilt and responsibility on their part + parallels with Vietnam, Germany's totally perverse absolution of the guilt + parallels to their colonial history (hardly ever spoken about), India's own hindutva nationalism sharing deeply in the zionist psyche, leaving us reeling today in an abyss of moral & political decrepitude � the colour line stronger than ever, the decolonial project still far too distant in the horizon
February 27, 2025
I enjoy Mishra’s journalism, but this book fell flat. It did so because I expected it to be more than journalism, and a book that would live up to its grand title. It’s perplexing how inappropriate the title is. Most of the book is about the uses and abuses of Holocaust memory, with various asides and tangents along the way. What does the world look like after the atrocities in Gaza? The few words at the end of the book on this seem to suggest something bleak. It would have been interesting to dwell on this at greater length, rather than simply running through the greatest hits of Palestinian and Israeli histories before finally giving a few thoughts. One of the most prominent tangents is Mishra’s personal story of having once been enamoured by the image of Israel as a strongman nation that ‘gets it done� (the context being that he was raised in a Hindu nationalist household). This was interesting and, of course, unique to Mishra’s book. Everything else piggybacks on other books that I often wished I were reading instead. In journalism, this piggybacking is an effective practice. The journalist digests complex information and reconstitutes it, producing something pithy and relevant. But this can’t sustain a book—not one that promises so much. The essays don’t hang together well, and one feels that Mishra talks about whatever he wants to talk about, with little sense of the wider direction or purpose of the book. This being said, it’s still insightful at many points, and made me aware of some further reading.
March 16, 2025
A thoughtful and nuanced essay on the significance of Gaza as a point of intersection between two contrasting “cultures of memory�: the Western mythos of liberal democracy’s triumph over the malignant—and wholly external—forces of fascism, racism, and genocide, necessitating the stewardship of the West over the redemption of global society from the paradigmatic evil of the Nazi Holocaust; and, for the global south, the painful historical consciousness of colonial oppression and exploitation, and the promise of decolonization, conceived not only as the political independence of many Asian and African states from former colonial regimes, but more broadly as the achievement of parity in power, prosperity, and dignity in a world order which, well into the twentieth century, was avowedly constructed and legitimized in terms of racial hierarchy.
The bitterly antithetical reactions to the obliteration of Gaza, and the larger debate over the history of Palestine and the nature of the Israeli regime, are largely the product of these radically divergent ways of remembering and making use of the last century. The decentering of the Western narrative, in which Israel symbolizes the defeat of Nazism, the expiation of Western guilt, and the only bastion of defense against a second Holocaust, coupled with the furious attempts in Europe and America to suppress pro-Palestinian speech and activism, portend a paradigm shift as the relative power of the West over the “rest� diminishes, while the West resorts to increasingly dramatic and overtly coercive methods to maintain its centrality in the global system.
Relating the construction of a sanitized history of the Second World War, which allowed the West to offload its own legacy of militarism, eugenicism, antisemitism, and racial supremacism onto the now-defeated Third Reich, the transformation of Jewishness in the Western mind from a symbol of a mistrusted leftist cosmopolitanism into a more familiar exemplar of a nation struggling for survival in a zero-sum social Darwinian world, and the parallel development of Israeli and Indian ethnoreligious extremism, Mishra explores the dangers and possibilities that accompany the search for solidarity in a time of rapid change and dislocation.
The bitterly antithetical reactions to the obliteration of Gaza, and the larger debate over the history of Palestine and the nature of the Israeli regime, are largely the product of these radically divergent ways of remembering and making use of the last century. The decentering of the Western narrative, in which Israel symbolizes the defeat of Nazism, the expiation of Western guilt, and the only bastion of defense against a second Holocaust, coupled with the furious attempts in Europe and America to suppress pro-Palestinian speech and activism, portend a paradigm shift as the relative power of the West over the “rest� diminishes, while the West resorts to increasingly dramatic and overtly coercive methods to maintain its centrality in the global system.
Relating the construction of a sanitized history of the Second World War, which allowed the West to offload its own legacy of militarism, eugenicism, antisemitism, and racial supremacism onto the now-defeated Third Reich, the transformation of Jewishness in the Western mind from a symbol of a mistrusted leftist cosmopolitanism into a more familiar exemplar of a nation struggling for survival in a zero-sum social Darwinian world, and the parallel development of Israeli and Indian ethnoreligious extremism, Mishra explores the dangers and possibilities that accompany the search for solidarity in a time of rapid change and dislocation.
May 24, 2025
Shoah, shoah, shoah—that’s what this book is all about. The title is misleading because it is not really about Gaza. I picked up this book after seeing Mishra speak powerfully about Israel’s assault on the Palestinians in a YouTube interview, expecting a similarly bold analysis. What I got was something far more cautious—measured, even evasive.
Mishra’s reluctance to engage directly with Israel’s atrocities is understandable. In today’s climate, showing any empathy towards the Palestinian plight risks being smeared as an antisemite. Rather than addressing Gaza directly, Mishra devotes the bulk of the book to a broader intellectual project: dissecting how Holocaust memory has been politicized, and how its moral weight has been used—consciously or unconsciously—to shield Israel from criticism and accountability. It’s a thoughtful and meticulously researched argument, but one that feels disconnected from the urgency of the moment. It's not until the final pages that Mishra confronts Gaza's fate head-on, delivering his stark prediction: “Israel will most likely succeed in ethnic-cleansing Gaza, and the West Bank as well.�
As a primer on Shoah, AKA the Holocaust, historiography and its political ramifications, this book succeeds. Mishra’s thesis is concise yet illuminating, and his recommended reading list have been added to my TBR. But if you’re looking for insight into Gaza’s current agony—or a bold moral stance—you’ll leave disappointed. This book grapples with the past to avoid confronting the present. And in a moment when Palestinian lives are under siege, that evasion feels like its own kind of silence.
Mishra’s reluctance to engage directly with Israel’s atrocities is understandable. In today’s climate, showing any empathy towards the Palestinian plight risks being smeared as an antisemite. Rather than addressing Gaza directly, Mishra devotes the bulk of the book to a broader intellectual project: dissecting how Holocaust memory has been politicized, and how its moral weight has been used—consciously or unconsciously—to shield Israel from criticism and accountability. It’s a thoughtful and meticulously researched argument, but one that feels disconnected from the urgency of the moment. It's not until the final pages that Mishra confronts Gaza's fate head-on, delivering his stark prediction: “Israel will most likely succeed in ethnic-cleansing Gaza, and the West Bank as well.�
As a primer on Shoah, AKA the Holocaust, historiography and its political ramifications, this book succeeds. Mishra’s thesis is concise yet illuminating, and his recommended reading list have been added to my TBR. But if you’re looking for insight into Gaza’s current agony—or a bold moral stance—you’ll leave disappointed. This book grapples with the past to avoid confronting the present. And in a moment when Palestinian lives are under siege, that evasion feels like its own kind of silence.
March 12, 2025
The book is interesting, rich and well-written; however, it is more about the collective trauma from the Holocaust than about Gaza and the aftermath of the conflict on the world stage.
February 12, 2025
A book of this caliber comes out only rarely. It is brilliant and courageous , at the same time it is disturbing and thought provoking. Some, in denial mode, will downplay it's importance which in itself would be vindication of its brilliance.
February 28, 2025
This is definitely a history though it's not necessarily the one I went in expecting! I imagined there would be more of a focus on the history of Palestinian resistance/that which is allied to it, tracking it's positionality in the postcolonial movement, but that's pretty minimal. The main focus of this book is tracing the two separate & conflicting ideas of History: that which descends from the Holocaust into Western supremacist neo-imperialism that is disguised by the propagandized White defeat of the world's greatest evil & claims to higher values resulting (Israel therefore the West's great moral victory, as a European colony in the morally/intellectually inferior Global South) � versus � that which descends from the overthrow of colonialism and the ongoing effects/exploitations of the Global South by the West along with it's puppets (including Israel in the latter, not as a postcolonial state but rather a current-day colonial entity).
Which is not to say that Jewish history/diaspora cannot be read into postcolonial theory, something the author does do, positioning the Holocaust as a (uniquely industrialized) horror in line & accordance with the worldwide atrocities committed and developed by the imperial powers who participated in the massacre of Europe's Jewish population. Currently this is not agreed upon by mainstream ideology, though this idea has never been excluded from said postcolonial theory. Excerpt: Aimé Césaire insisted in Discourse on Colonialism (1955) that Hitler seemed exceptionally cruel only because he presided over 'the humiliation of the white man': the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa. Reading about the Congo under Belgian rule while living in Nazi-occupied Warsaw in the early 1940s, Czeslaw Milosz wrote bitterly of how Europeans were now experiencing for themselves 'the roundups, the slap in the face of an interrogator, suffocation in jam-packed barracks, death under the heel of a criminal of a higher race. The historian Geoff Eley has described how the Nazis' Polish policy 'fits into the larger repertoire of practice associated with the pre-1941 "colonial ordering of the world"'. Europe's history of imperialism, Wendy Lower writes in Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine (2005), 'shaped the policies and behavior of Nazi leaders and their functionaries who tried to colonize Ukraine during World War II.�
This book is a history of Jewish transformation, 1900s to today, and charts evolving Zionist/anti-Zionist ideas via the Jewish diaspora literary canon (in which the author is extensively read). The loci of Jewish identity shifts around Israel, around the Holocaust: 'With Israel's existence reconceived in the 1960s as a preparation for another Shoah, continuous aggression seemed the only feasible solution to the Palestinian question. Bellicosity came to be perceived as necessary, not only to quell Palestinian claims on Israeli territory, but also to avenge the powerlessness of European Jews during the Shoah and wash off the shame of their passive victimhood. The Shoah thus became the sacred core of Israeli nationalism; and it rendered political negotiation meaningless, while serving to justify the grossest forms of violence and dispossession as self-defence. / The sanctification of the Shoah and Israeli power has made the most well-intentioned forms of liberal' Zionism seem a cynical deception, one more way of buying time for a non-existent 'peace process' while claiming the intellectual prestige and moral superiority of liberalism.'
There were a handful of concessions to imperial language which I found unnecessary (ideas of terrorism, naming a pre-40s Jaffa 'Tel Aviv') and honestly the dedication being to JVP the American-Jewish organization seemed strange to me. Given how much this book owes to Jewish thought & philosophy however I am not so surprised, that's clearly where the author is coming from.
Speaking of: the author also discusses his personal experiences in how India's Hindutva fash relates to Israel, to postcolonial theory, and how it exploits the latter in it's nation-building propaganda within South Asia itself. Hindu nationalists and Turkish Islamists brazenly use narratives of hereditary victimhood to dress up authoritarian and exclusionary politics as emancipatory, and to forge a hyper-masculine new national identity out of their narratives of humiliation, helplessness and insecu-rity. Narendra Modi claims that Hindus were enslaved for a thousand years, by Muslim invaders for 750 years, and then for an additional 250 years by white British colonialists - and then uses this lachrymose version of Hindu history to justify the degradation of Muslim and Christian minorities, the destruction of mosques and British-built buildings. Modi has launched a commemorative politics closely mimicking that of Israel: he announced in 2021 that 14 August will be remembered annually as Partition Horrors Remembrance Day to remind Hindus of their suffering during the partition of British-ruled India in 1947. Modi's supporters have also appropriated Edward Said, depicting dissenters as colonised minds and imperialist tools.
Interesting to me as a Bengali Muslim. There are good tidbits detailing historical relationships between Muslims, Hindus, and the Jewish peoples of the subcontinent both prior to the advent of Israel and following. Overall a good read for what it is though it's unfairly blank on the development of Gaza itself.
Which is not to say that Jewish history/diaspora cannot be read into postcolonial theory, something the author does do, positioning the Holocaust as a (uniquely industrialized) horror in line & accordance with the worldwide atrocities committed and developed by the imperial powers who participated in the massacre of Europe's Jewish population. Currently this is not agreed upon by mainstream ideology, though this idea has never been excluded from said postcolonial theory. Excerpt: Aimé Césaire insisted in Discourse on Colonialism (1955) that Hitler seemed exceptionally cruel only because he presided over 'the humiliation of the white man': the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa. Reading about the Congo under Belgian rule while living in Nazi-occupied Warsaw in the early 1940s, Czeslaw Milosz wrote bitterly of how Europeans were now experiencing for themselves 'the roundups, the slap in the face of an interrogator, suffocation in jam-packed barracks, death under the heel of a criminal of a higher race. The historian Geoff Eley has described how the Nazis' Polish policy 'fits into the larger repertoire of practice associated with the pre-1941 "colonial ordering of the world"'. Europe's history of imperialism, Wendy Lower writes in Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine (2005), 'shaped the policies and behavior of Nazi leaders and their functionaries who tried to colonize Ukraine during World War II.�
This book is a history of Jewish transformation, 1900s to today, and charts evolving Zionist/anti-Zionist ideas via the Jewish diaspora literary canon (in which the author is extensively read). The loci of Jewish identity shifts around Israel, around the Holocaust: 'With Israel's existence reconceived in the 1960s as a preparation for another Shoah, continuous aggression seemed the only feasible solution to the Palestinian question. Bellicosity came to be perceived as necessary, not only to quell Palestinian claims on Israeli territory, but also to avenge the powerlessness of European Jews during the Shoah and wash off the shame of their passive victimhood. The Shoah thus became the sacred core of Israeli nationalism; and it rendered political negotiation meaningless, while serving to justify the grossest forms of violence and dispossession as self-defence. / The sanctification of the Shoah and Israeli power has made the most well-intentioned forms of liberal' Zionism seem a cynical deception, one more way of buying time for a non-existent 'peace process' while claiming the intellectual prestige and moral superiority of liberalism.'
There were a handful of concessions to imperial language which I found unnecessary (ideas of terrorism, naming a pre-40s Jaffa 'Tel Aviv') and honestly the dedication being to JVP the American-Jewish organization seemed strange to me. Given how much this book owes to Jewish thought & philosophy however I am not so surprised, that's clearly where the author is coming from.
Speaking of: the author also discusses his personal experiences in how India's Hindutva fash relates to Israel, to postcolonial theory, and how it exploits the latter in it's nation-building propaganda within South Asia itself. Hindu nationalists and Turkish Islamists brazenly use narratives of hereditary victimhood to dress up authoritarian and exclusionary politics as emancipatory, and to forge a hyper-masculine new national identity out of their narratives of humiliation, helplessness and insecu-rity. Narendra Modi claims that Hindus were enslaved for a thousand years, by Muslim invaders for 750 years, and then for an additional 250 years by white British colonialists - and then uses this lachrymose version of Hindu history to justify the degradation of Muslim and Christian minorities, the destruction of mosques and British-built buildings. Modi has launched a commemorative politics closely mimicking that of Israel: he announced in 2021 that 14 August will be remembered annually as Partition Horrors Remembrance Day to remind Hindus of their suffering during the partition of British-ruled India in 1947. Modi's supporters have also appropriated Edward Said, depicting dissenters as colonised minds and imperialist tools.
Interesting to me as a Bengali Muslim. There are good tidbits detailing historical relationships between Muslims, Hindus, and the Jewish peoples of the subcontinent both prior to the advent of Israel and following. Overall a good read for what it is though it's unfairly blank on the development of Gaza itself.
Read
April 24, 2025largely a history of zionism, the holocaust, the memory of the holocaust, colonialism, and the ghosts of everything. densely populated web of people and ideas but always feels tangible and easy to keep reading. connects a lot of dots! i recommend
April 13, 2025
I don’t think any book has ever made me this angry. I found his purported scholarship to be misleading and obfuscating reality. I am disgusted.
March 22, 2025
Läs den!
April 28, 2025
this book is a must-read and if you happen upon it, try listening to the audiobook.
The narrator's casually mispronouncing world-famous politician's names, yet getting everyone else's name (no matter how obscure) was one of my favourite things.
I will probably re-read some chapters especially chapter 2.
The downside of this book is its bleak ending which I am not sure I could disagree with, yet I am horrified by the thought of it every waking moment. I hope this book could be a wakeup call to all the world before we finish up going down the path of Fascism and losing our humanity to tribal wars and racism.
The narrator's casually mispronouncing world-famous politician's names, yet getting everyone else's name (no matter how obscure) was one of my favourite things.
I will probably re-read some chapters especially chapter 2.
The downside of this book is its bleak ending which I am not sure I could disagree with, yet I am horrified by the thought of it every waking moment. I hope this book could be a wakeup call to all the world before we finish up going down the path of Fascism and losing our humanity to tribal wars and racism.
April 15, 2025
The title is misleading because it is not really an account of the suffering of the people in Gaza but rather a history of Jewish consciousness in dealing with the Holocaust. Mishra portrays the conflict from a decolonisation lens as an attempt of Israel as part of the Global North/Western white countries to continue the colonisation/oppression/settler project so their control over resources, narrative, and future can be maintained. The main message is that the Israelis as a victim of Holocaust has instead commit a Holocaust on the Palestinians.
It's an original and though provoking work with many unusual angles that we rarely see from debates we see nowadays in public online spaces, such as the various nuances that Zionism is portrayed, accepted, and criticized (did you know that the British and American government used to be almost anti-Zionist around World War II? Rashid Khalidi should take note of that and revise his narrative). However, in many sections it lacks a unifying narrative structure that at the end it feels jumbled and disjointed, like a collection of notes that the writer has been making in preparation of the book but still lacks that final touch of narration that you add in the final draft. Mishra lies heavily on diversity of voices and quotations, but that stretches his narrative to the point of breakdown, the kind of problem I also encounter when reading his Age of Anger.
I also think that despite his original angle of approach, he is mistaken in his whole criticism of the rise of right wing politics as the resurgent attempt of Global North/Western Civilization in which Israel is now firmly a part of. I think he doesn't give enough credit to immigration, rise of radical islam terrorism, fiscal policy/debt, or rise of violence as genuine problems that the left failed to address. Mishra also failed to take into account the resurgent acts of terrorism worldwide, not only as Muslim response to a perceived aggression against Islam but as a genuine anti-West/Semitic Jihad. Any country wouldn't stop attacking Gaza if their country is attacked like that and hostages are held, like on the 7th of October.
On the whole, I think it could have been a more promising book. I expected more discussion on politics such as the consequences of Israel and US' defiance of the ICC court orders, what does it mean on the nationalist independence movements worldwide in Kashmir, Papua, or Catalonia. Nevertheless, point taken, and this book is excellent food for thought. The fact that this book has induced me to ramble on this long on a book review is a plus point.
It's an original and though provoking work with many unusual angles that we rarely see from debates we see nowadays in public online spaces, such as the various nuances that Zionism is portrayed, accepted, and criticized (did you know that the British and American government used to be almost anti-Zionist around World War II? Rashid Khalidi should take note of that and revise his narrative). However, in many sections it lacks a unifying narrative structure that at the end it feels jumbled and disjointed, like a collection of notes that the writer has been making in preparation of the book but still lacks that final touch of narration that you add in the final draft. Mishra lies heavily on diversity of voices and quotations, but that stretches his narrative to the point of breakdown, the kind of problem I also encounter when reading his Age of Anger.
I also think that despite his original angle of approach, he is mistaken in his whole criticism of the rise of right wing politics as the resurgent attempt of Global North/Western Civilization in which Israel is now firmly a part of. I think he doesn't give enough credit to immigration, rise of radical islam terrorism, fiscal policy/debt, or rise of violence as genuine problems that the left failed to address. Mishra also failed to take into account the resurgent acts of terrorism worldwide, not only as Muslim response to a perceived aggression against Islam but as a genuine anti-West/Semitic Jihad. Any country wouldn't stop attacking Gaza if their country is attacked like that and hostages are held, like on the 7th of October.
On the whole, I think it could have been a more promising book. I expected more discussion on politics such as the consequences of Israel and US' defiance of the ICC court orders, what does it mean on the nationalist independence movements worldwide in Kashmir, Papua, or Catalonia. Nevertheless, point taken, and this book is excellent food for thought. The fact that this book has induced me to ramble on this long on a book review is a plus point.
March 6, 2025
Very informative but I felt like I was reading a thesis. It is as if there is a point to be proved and many "proofs" complicate the whole book and make it hard to follow.
April 1, 2025
rating: 5/5 stars
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no nuanced thoughts for this one; free Palestine and forever continue decolonization.
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no nuanced thoughts for this one; free Palestine and forever continue decolonization.
Read
May 1, 2025Selbst wenn ich alles verstanden hätte und immer mit dem Autor einer Meinung wäre, könnte ich keine 5 Sterne vergeben, da es mMn zu kompliziert geschrieben ist und ich finde, Texte sollten besser zugänglich sein. Ständig musste ich Sätze mehrmals lesen, um zu verstehen. Manchmal habe ich auch nicht verstanden. Manchmal wusste ich nicht, ob etwas für den Autor ein Pro- oder Contra-Argument ist. So oft wird etwas angesprochen (Ereignisse, Personen �) und ich müsste erst ewig anderswo nachlesen, um dann dieses Buch wirklich verstehen zu können. Da hätte ich mir mehr Fußnoten mit Anmerkungen gewünscht. Außerdem direkte Quellenverweise im Text und nicht nur eine Liste der genutzten Literatur am Ende, ohne diese aber Textstellen zuordnen zu können.
Den Buchtitel finde ich irreführend, ich habe dadurch Gegenwärtiges und Zukünftiges erwartet, es geht aber doch vor allem um Historisches.
Weiterer Kritikpunkt: I-Wort, N-Wort im Zitat, „farbig� � ein Übersetzungsproblem? Gerade bei dem Thema wäre da größere Sensibilität für diskriminierende Sprache schöne gewesen.
Trotz allem: Ich habe einiges gelernt und mitgenommen, auch wenn ich mich beim Lesen durchgequält habe. Eine wichtige nicht-eurozentrische, nicht-westliche Perspektive, die das Thema global einordnet und analysiert.
Den Buchtitel finde ich irreführend, ich habe dadurch Gegenwärtiges und Zukünftiges erwartet, es geht aber doch vor allem um Historisches.
Weiterer Kritikpunkt: I-Wort, N-Wort im Zitat, „farbig� � ein Übersetzungsproblem? Gerade bei dem Thema wäre da größere Sensibilität für diskriminierende Sprache schöne gewesen.
Trotz allem: Ich habe einiges gelernt und mitgenommen, auch wenn ich mich beim Lesen durchgequält habe. Eine wichtige nicht-eurozentrische, nicht-westliche Perspektive, die das Thema global einordnet und analysiert.
March 2, 2025
I’m exploring the ongoing conflict of being Jewish in a world where it’s become a nation.
April 14, 2025
such a deterministic treatment of an undetermined situation. the ending was frustrating.
April 23, 2025
Not much to say just a really good global look at Gaza situation
May 9, 2025
Run. Don’t walk.
I would read Mishra writing about watching paint dry, to be honest. Arguably the best living writer in the English language. But this is so eviscerating and complex, so relentless in its rigors �- it is a gift to anyone still host to a conscience.
I would read Mishra writing about watching paint dry, to be honest. Arguably the best living writer in the English language. But this is so eviscerating and complex, so relentless in its rigors �- it is a gift to anyone still host to a conscience.
June 10, 2025
4.5
Essential reading.
Essential reading.
April 23, 2025
Een verhelderend boek.
March 2, 2025
"after witnessing savage mass murder over several months, with the knowledge that it was conceived, executed and endorsed by people much like themselves, who presented it as a collective necessity, legitimate and even humane, millions now feel less at home in the world. the shock of this renewed exposure to a peculiarly modern evil - the evil done in the pre-modern era only by psychopathic individuals and unleashed in the last century by rulers and citizens of rich and supposedly civilised societies - cannot be overstated. nor can the moral abyss we confront."
April 1, 2025
Interesting and thought-provoking perspective on the creation/support for Israel, how the Holocaust fits in with other 20th century atrocities, and how a people can be both victims and victimizers.
February 22, 2025
Having read this book, I now have a much better understanding of how the current situation in Gaza fits in with colonialism's long history.
May 27, 2025
I thought I was picking a book to read about the history of Palestine and the ongoing genocide, instead I had to plough through the writer's meandering tales of books he's read on the Jewish holocaust and how those stories affected him and his affection for Israel and the Jewish people until he visited the West Bank in Israel and in spite of witnessing all that he continues anew with still more books he's read about the Jewish people and why they might have changed for the worse now or at least that's the underlying impression I got from his writing. Waste of time and a bore of a book.
Giving three stars only because there was some sprinkling of good information to be found on some pages.
Giving three stars only because there was some sprinkling of good information to be found on some pages.
March 2, 2025
A Necessary Book
As a young adult, I opposed my country’s murderous intervention in Vietnam, and have been ashamed of its foreign policy ever since. Now, at the end of my life (I’m 81), I’m more horrified than ever before by its aiding and abetting the Israeli genocide in Gaza and the occupied territories. This book has not only helped me situate the genocide in history and human psychology, it’s given me an even bleaker expectation of the future than I already had. But I’ve always preferred a relatively clear map of where I am to hiding my head in the sand. Thanks, Pankaj Mishra! (His other books are good, too.)
As a young adult, I opposed my country’s murderous intervention in Vietnam, and have been ashamed of its foreign policy ever since. Now, at the end of my life (I’m 81), I’m more horrified than ever before by its aiding and abetting the Israeli genocide in Gaza and the occupied territories. This book has not only helped me situate the genocide in history and human psychology, it’s given me an even bleaker expectation of the future than I already had. But I’ve always preferred a relatively clear map of where I am to hiding my head in the sand. Thanks, Pankaj Mishra! (His other books are good, too.)
May 17, 2025
It is almost two years since Hamas invaded Israel from Gaza on the fateful day of October 7, 2023, and brutally murdered 1200 people. The author of this book has very little to say about that barbaric act. Instead, he writes about the devastation in Gaza as being entirely Israel's doing. He completely evades the crucial point: the devastation in Gaza is entirely due to Hamas, an Islamic terrorist group, hiding in places like hospitals, mosques, among civilians, and even UNRWA offices. Hamas is ruthless in using Palestinian civilians as human shields. To date fifty-two thousand Gazans have died because of Hamas using them as human shields. Hamas doesn't care. It took 250 hostages and returned several alive and several dead. It is now May 2025 and Hamas, despite such a devastation of Gaza, refuses to return the remaining 58 hostages back to Israel. The author of this book has nothing to say about this. In fact he likely inspires Pro-Palestinian demonstrators across the Universities in the USA by making Israel look like an evildoer. This book makes me sick. It is obsessed with the Shoah (Holocaust) but really has nothing useful to say about antisemitism and how the world can be supportive of the Jews and avoid another holocaust. Or how the terrible ongoing conflict in Israel-Palestine could be resolved. Instead, as mentioned above, he starts the book with a portrayal of the Israelis as ruthless destroyers of Gaza. The "World after Gaza?" He doesn't even have anything useful to say about Israel after Gaza. A history? A most useless 'history' of the conflict I've ever read. I'll say it again: this book is an exercise in futility and made me sick. Can't believe it got published.
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