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Title details for The World After Gaza by Pankaj Mishra - Wait list

The World After Gaza

A History

by Pankaj Mishra
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"Courageous and bracing, learned and ethical, rigorous and mind-expanding.” —Naomi Klein
“This profoundly important and urgent book finds Mishra, one of our most intellectually astute and courageous writers, at the peak of his powers.” —Hisham Matar
“A triumphant work of empathy in a polarizing conflict.” —Anand Giridharadas

Named a Best Book of the Month by TIME • Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2025 by The Guardian, Bustle, Foreign Policy, and Literary Hub
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 event became 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 century: 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.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    February 11, 2025

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9798217058907

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9798217058907
      • File size: 838 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Kirkus

      February 15, 2025
      Against selective readings of history--and the horrors they enable. Mishra, who has employed his crystalline prose in novels and nonfiction alike, methodically unpacks the "extensive moral breakdown" that preceded what he describes as "the blithe slaughter of innocents in Gaza." As for the slaughter of Oct. 7, 2023, he says Israel's leaders did not "shrink from exploiting" the cold-blooded attack. Formative travel and extensive research upended Mishra's formerly "languid view of Zionism as vindication and shield of the eternally persecuted." A frequent contributor to respected political magazines by the early 2000s, he tried to publish his reporting about "the brutality and squalor of Israel's occupation," which he witnessed in the West Bank in 2008. But, he says, he encountered "pre-censorship in even liberal periodicals." This, Mishra believes, was informed by the publications' fear of being labeled antisemitic--the result of a decades-long effort by various political actors to establish the Holocaust as "the sacred core of Israeli nationalism." Soon after World War II, he finds, scholars worried that the Holocaust was being forgotten. But with the 1961 prosecution of Adolf Eichmann, it was front-page news once more. This was followed, in 1967 and 1973, by wars that Israel won despite appearing "existentially threatened by its Arab enemies." Thereafter, American politicians, stung by defeat in Vietnam, saw "an apparently invincible Israel as a valuable proxy in the Middle East." Meanwhile, the sentimentalization of the Holocaust in popular novels and Hollywood films dovetailed with the Israeli nationalist position that "those who have been or expect to be victims should pre-emptively crush their perceived enemies." At heart, this is an exhaustively sourced plea for historical literacy that opens up what Mishra calls "a broader vista of human fraternity and solidarity" and recognizes that across the globe, people victimized by "historical mass crimes of genocide, slavery and racist imperialism" wonder why "their own holocausts...have not been much regarded in history." A clear-eyed look at the Holocaust as justification for Israel's wars.

      COPYRIGHT(2025) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Formats

  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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