Book Review: ‘The World After Gaza,’ by Pankaj Mishra

The point seems to be to surprise readers with criticisms of Israel from unexpected sources as a way of opening them up to alternate ways of understanding history. Mishra’s scope is always wide. He spends little time discussing the Oct. 7 attack and how it heightened Israel’s sense of vulnerability. He focuses more on the effects on a generation of young people who witnessed what he calls “acts of savagery aided by the world’s richest and most powerful democracies.” The result has been part of a broader trend, he argues, of a growing number of people across continents who consider decolonization the most important event of the 20th century. In addition to political independence, he writes, this process offered the “seductive and perpetually renewable promise of equality,” and many of these people now see Israel as among the colonizers.

For Mishra, decolonization has played itself out largely in racial terms. It is “the physical and intellectual emancipation of the vast majority of the human population from the white man’s world” — although, he writes, “the Jew is not a white man in any simple sense,” not least because, as Mishra notes, “much of Israel’s population consists of Jews of Middle Eastern ancestry.” And yet, in his telling, Israel, in its treatment of Palestinians, has crossed from one side of the color line to the other, becoming an oppressor.

Decolonization is a tremendously large frame in which to fit the last eight or so decades of human history, and while it broadens Mishra’s realm of inquiry, it results in few new insights into the violence in the Middle East. After billing decolonization as “an unstoppable revolution,” he concludes that it might not make much difference anyway and predicts that Israel will eventually expel the Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza.

That struck me on my first reading as a dramatic and risky prediction. But now, President Trump has called publicly not just for removing two million Palestinians from Gaza, but also for the United States to take control of the territory and develop it into “the Riviera of the Middle East.” The Palestinians, Trump expects, will be “thrilled” by the idea.

One might expect that after arguing so forcefully that decolonization had profoundly altered global perspectives, Mishra might also predict a new and effective resistance to mass displacement or at least hope that his appeal to a more complicated view of the past could inspire change. But his pessimism seems to outstrip his optimism. He speaks admirably of the campus protesters who supported the Palestinians; they might help the people of Gaza feel less lonely in their sorrow. Is this what he means by solidarity? If so, it may be little comfort to those who continue to live under the profound burdens of their shared histories.

THE WORLD AFTER GAZA: A History | By Pankaj Mishra | Penguin Press | 292 pp. | $28