There’s almost no conversation about Gaza without the Holocaust as a comparison, antithesis, or foil. To most institutions worldwide, the history between the days of Auschwitz and October 7, 2023 remains suspended. Talking about Palestine guarantees scarlet letters that spell antisemite. After all, victimhood was an Israeli right, no matter that the nation-state has gathered affirmation from all the institutions that help create the reality of the world in which we live: the media, the publishing houses, the universities, the democracies, the intellectuals.
In his latest title, The World After Gaza, the essayist, novelist, and public intellectual Pankaj Mishra examines how Israel and its supporters instrumentalised the memory of the Holocaust to justify its actions and silence criticism. Mishra draws heavily on the writings of intellectuals and survivors of the Holocaust, including Jean Améry, Primo Levi, and Hannah Arendt, to analyse the history of Zionism, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the evolving relationship between the West and the rest of the world. Perhaps most significantly, he dismantles the inadequate linear assumptions that often guide our understanding of history, particularly the naive belief that the Holocaust was universally condemned immediately after the truth emerged. In reality, many who knew remained silent, much like some witnessing Gaza today. The Holocaust began to be invoked only when it served a particular narrative.
Mishra spoke to Scroll about Gaza as a symbol of ongoing colonialism, the dynamic nature of historical narratives, the suppression of the evidence of atrocities in Gaza, the media's role in shaping public perception, and the responsibility of writers to speak out against such atrocities. Excerpts from the interview:
I’ve noticed how certain place names, like Vietnam or Gaza, become synonymous with specific historical events, taking on a symbolic weight beyond their geographical meaning. The title of your book, The World After Gaza, employs Gaza in this way. However, this doesn’t seem to happen with other places experiencing conflict, not even Israel in this case. What are your thoughts on this linguistic phenomenon, and what does this selective application say about how the English language shapes our understanding and memory of historical trauma?
What events are you thinking of that don’t have that import?
I was thinking about anything that’s happened in Israel, anything that’s happened in America, and how the gaze is on the other country, as opposed to a country we think of as one of the powerful forces in the world.
I think you don’t have to look to language or linguistic shifts to understand this. What’s important in both these cases, whether it’s Vietnam or Gaza, are the larger political, geopolitical, and social forces at work. So Vietnam was important because it was a case of postponed, delayed decolonisation. The Americans were fighting a war without knowing why they were fighting it.
They had no idea that decolonisation was an unstoppable force. So they kept committing more and more arms and money to the whole project of propping up a corrupt regime in South Vietnam. They spent years and years, bombing large parts of Vietnam mercilessly. In the end, they had to go home and realise that the Vietnamese would determine what happened in Vietnam, and that’s how it has been for more than 50 years. In the case of Gaza, you could again call it – I think the Palestinian issue on the whole is yet another case of delayed and postponed decolonisation. Israel has come to represent a European colonial power in a part of the Middle East precisely when much of the Middle East was being liberated from its European masters.
Now that process of decolonisation has been, in a way, reversed throughout the last 70–75 years. And what Gaza shows is the complete obscenity of upholding a colonial occupation during a time when people are moving away from the sort of old world of colonialism, and you’re bringing it back. But I think it also sort of portends Israel’s occupation of Gaza and Israel’s attempted destruction of Gaza. It also portends a world in which might is right, and that’s what you’re seeing across the world today.
So in that sense, Gaza is more important than Vietnam. Vietnam was a disaster that could be contained; the Americans could go home and resume their political existence without too much damage. I mean, there was obviously damage, but I think Gaza has really damaged American institutions, Western institutions, international institutions, to an extent no previous war, no previous conflict has, because so many of the world’s most prominent and most self-righteous democracies came out in support of the mass extermination of Palestinians. This was something truly unprecedented.
If you cast your mind back to Vietnam, a lot of countries refused to join the United States in its project in Vietnam. The British, for instance, absolutely refused. Many countries kept a very fastidious distance from the Americans as they went about bombing Vietnam. But in this case, what we’ve seen over the last year is essentially not only politicians but the media class, the senior editors, prestigious newspapers, coming out in support of Israel – something truly unprecedented.
You’ve spoken before about resisting the subject/object, “us vs them” narrative when discussing history. In fact, the native Palestinians don’t figure prominently in your book. I wonder why you chose to keep the focus primarily on Israel and Jewish people. How did you tackle that oversimplification of “us vs. them” when discussing Gaza, particularly in relation to the Holocaust and its Americanisation?
I think my focus in this book is really unravelling the narrative of the Holocaust that enables the state of Israel to commit unlimited atrocities. I think the Palestinians have been and remain the best spokespersons for their plight, and I think they will continue to describe their historical experience and their intellectual history. It’s not for me to do that. What I’m interested in, and what is, I think, for the purposes of this book hugely important, is really taking apart a narrative, a very powerful emotional and political narrative that Israel and its supporters have consistently used to legitimate their incredibly violent behaviour over the decades.
I think, again, using this narrative of eternal victimhood, of perpetual victimhood – no matter how strong you become, even if you acquire nuclear weapons, which the state of Israel has – you continue to peddle the story of victimhood, of us being constantly persecuted by them. And that particular narrative is something I wanted to unravel, showing, of course, that the Jewish minority in modern history, in particular, has been viciously persecuted.
I think also that the state of Israel initially was contemptuous of the survivors of the Holocaust, and that the construction of the Holocaust narrative was something very deliberate, very methodical, and did not spring organically out of the experience of the Holocaust. It was constructed much later, back in the 1960s, not immediately after 1945. So what I’m trying to show in this book is the construction of the Holocaust narrative by the State of Israel, and then a parallel, equally powerful narrative that’s created by Jewish Americans, largely Jewish Americans, and, of course, evangelical Christians in the United States. So there are these two very powerful narratives that one has to reckon with.
And these are things that have not been written about. I think we’ve seen any number of comprehensive reports about the treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza over the decades. Any number of Palestinian institutions and individuals and international organisations and individuals have consistently reported on the plight of the Palestinians under Israeli occupation. But I think there are very few books out there, very few narratives out there, taking a closer look at Israeli justifications for their colonial rule. So that is why my emphasis in this book is on the latter.
As you mentioned, in The World After Gaza, you’ve described how the Holocaust received relatively little public attention in the years immediately following World War II, only gaining prominence later. Do you think the events in Gaza, given the current political climate and competing narratives of suffering, risk facing a similar fate – a gradual fading from public consciousness unless a future need arises to re-invoke them? What might such a future need be, and what forces could contribute to either maintaining or erasing the memory of Gaza?
I think there is definitely throughout the few last few months… there has been an attempt on the part of extremely powerful people in politics in the West and indeed in the Western media to suppress evidence of some of the worst atrocities that we’ve seen in recent decades. And how have they tried to do this? By simply not carrying reports on some of these atrocities, by highlighting the violence suffered by Israelis, by focusing on the plight of hostages in Gaza more than the sufferings of Palestinians or the mass killings of Palestinians.
They have essentially become propagandists for the state of Israel, carrying water for Israeli propagandists. This has really been an incredibly disgraceful episode in the history of Western journalism, and it’s really shocked and embittered many of us who did not credit it with too much sort of moral and intellectual virtue, but nevertheless are still shocked by the extent to which it has degenerated. At the same time, because the extermination of Gaza was broadcast by both the victims and the perpetrators so widely. You only have to click on a couple of links to see videos of some of the most horrific things you are ever likely to see in your lifetime, of people being raped, literally being raped. You can see a video of that. You can see children’s heads being blown off.
You can see Israeli soldiers confessing to how people look when they’re crushed under a bulldozer. I don’t really think that this kind of graphic evidence, which has seared itself into the memory and consciousness of everyone who was exposed to it, is going to fade. It was very easy, it was extremely easy, in fact, to suppress evidence of the atrocities the Americans committed in Vietnam or the Soviets committed in Afghanistan, or indeed what happened during the two wars in Iraq. We only got a few glimpses of the regime of murder and torture people in these places underwent because the media had so little access and the age of the internet hadn’t arrived back then when these wars were fought.
Now, of course, because of social media, because of smartphones, because of easily transmittable videos, we’ve all been very thoroughly exposed to the endless atrocities in Gaza over the last few months. So I doubt very much that those memories, those traumatic memories, will fade easily.
I want to speak a little bit about how history is taught. I learned about the Holocaust before I ever learned about Palestinians, or to be more precise, I read about Israel before ever reading about Palestine. You also wrote about how your own fascination, which you described as childlike, with Israel stemmed from the reverential Zionism of your family of Brahmin Hindu nationalists, and how a perception of Israel as a model of strength for formerly colonised peoples was undermined only after meeting Palestinian peers and reading Palestinian literature. My worry is that many people’s learning stopped at Israel. One could argue, again, that this has a lot to do with how history is taught. I wanted to know if you think there is the slightest possibility that Gaza will change that in India, particularly.
Well, I think, in India, you have a very rare instance, I would say, of an Asian government that is fully supportive of the state of Israel and has broken with India’s own extremely long political, intellectual, and moral tradition of standing with the Palestinians. This is something that has happened in the last decade or so of closer relationship with Israel, even as Israel becomes a much more radicalised society, and its leaders become even more extremist.
And of course, we can understand why there is so much synergy between the regimes of Benjamin Netanyahu and Narendra Modi. I think at the same time, the population at large here, in the past at least, I remember growing up really surrounded by people who were pro-Palestinian at university and afterward.
And this is because there was always a large amount of goodwill for the Palestinians, not just at the government-to-government level, but in popular culture at large. I think the kind of sympathy for Israel that I describe in my book was really confined to a tiny minority, to which my family belonged – mostly upper-caste Hindus who thought Zionism is the way to deal with nation-building, the best way to deal with Muslims. Now, of course, these kinds of sentiments are out there on social media, being expressed openly by the fans of the BJP or the fans of the Modi government.
But this was, when I was growing up, still confined to a really small minority. So when I came to university, I encountered a great deal of pro-Palestinian sentiment. There were Palestinian students in all the cities that I went to – in Nagpur, I remember, and in Delhi, where I went for my post-graduation. So my views started to change, or they were certainly challenged by these other narratives that I came across.
The Israeli narrative, to answer your question, remains powerful because it’s backed by a great deal of institutional networks. The history we learn, the history we are exposed to, is really a product of various institutions, both national and international, interacting with each other to create a narrative which is dominant.
This is why the voices of weaker peoples and the voices of oppressed peoples are suppressed, and you have to make a deliberate effort to make them resonate, to examine the narratives of the powerful. So, if the vast majority of the professional classes in the West, both in the media and in politics, support the narrative of Israel, I think we are looking at a situation where the Palestinian narrative would be definitely obscured, if not deliberately obscured and suppressed. And I think those of us in India who grew up reading Western literature, who grew up accessing these narratives through books published in the West – we don’t have too many Indian writers or too many Indian academics writing about these subjects.
And those who do write about these subjects are really confined to academia, and we don’t really access them. So we are mostly reading books authored by people in Europe and America on this subject. So it’s not surprising at all that we also imbibe this narrative that is fundamentally geared to supporting and justifying Israeli behaviour.
The much-lauded Ta-Nehisi Coates, once considered a prophet of the contemporary intellectual scene, is now subjected to unprecedented criticism, even from those who previously tolerated what they called his messianic tone, as seen in Between the World and Me. Some say this is because he has now begun to talk about Palestine through his recent title The Message. I’m sure you’re aware you’ve been called polemical before. Are you worried about a similar reception for this book?
I won’t say I’m worried. I fully expect it. The fate of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book was certainly a reminder that anyone expressing sympathy and support for the Palestinians is going to be pilloried, is going to be stigmatised. That is as true for someone like Ta-Nehisi Coates, who very briefly was a darling of American liberals, who in many ways was almost a creation of a liberal American intelligentsia. And of course, they’ve turned against him because he dared come out in favour of Palestinians and emerged as a critic of the Israeli occupation. I think some of the criticism of Ta-Nehisi Coates has struck me as entirely ludicrous; the way they’ve gone about finding fault with him.
What he’s saying is grounded in research, grounded in experience – not only of the Palestinian territory, but also of the United States of America and a profound experience of racism. This is a man who can recognise racism when he sees it. But nevertheless, the media class in particular in the United States went after Ta-Nehisi Coates with a kind of viciousness, which I’m sure they will soon direct at Malala, who has been relatively quiet about this subject and has started to now speak up. I wouldn’t be surprised if a similar fate awaits Malala, and that she also comes under vicious attack from the people who have been supporting her all along just because she dared to criticise Israel, most recently for decimating the education system in Gaza.
So look, I mean, I think I know this from my own experience in the past when I’ve tried to write about these subjects. I’ve faced resistance. I’ve faced even a degree of animosity. This is a subject that is guaranteed to make you universally disliked and unpopular. So I think you better accept that fate even before you write a single word. And, you know, I think I have; I accepted that fate a long time ago. So I’m fully prepared for what comes my way in terms of vicious, unhinged criticism.
You discussed the role of shame and humiliation in the experience of both victims and perpetrators of violence. Is there a difference in how the suffering of Palestinian men is perceived compared to that of women and children? I’ve seen several arguments on how the dominant narrative surrounding the conflict minimises the experience of Palestinian men. What are the consequences of this perceived erasure?
I have to think harder about this. This is not a question I can answer right away, partly because I’m not convinced that this is indeed the case, or that we have seen the experience or the plight of Palestinian men being erased in the narratives coming out of Gaza and the West Bank. I don’t know whether this is really something that can be accepted. I’m not sure whether I can really answer this question.
You discuss the concept of “metaphysical guilt” and the compelling but burdening idea that we are all co-responsible for the injustices in the world. What are the responsibilities of writers and intellectuals when bearing witness to atrocities like those in Gaza?
I don’t think anyone should even need to spell it out. If you’re a writer with a platform, if you are an intellectual with a platform, and you see this going on, if you see the slaughter of children on a daily basis, and if you’re not speaking out, you have to ask yourself what the point of your life is, what the point of what you do is. Unfortunately, that question has not occurred, and that’s the shocking part. That question has not occurred to some of the most prestigious, or at least formerly prestigious, writers and journalists in Europe and the United States, who have kept silence – disgracefully, shamefully silent – throughout this horrendous episode of bloodletting in Gaza and the West Bank, not to mention Syria and Lebanon.
I mean, I think the fact that you even have to ask that question shows how much of a dark conspiracy of silence so many respectable people have been part of. Dozens and dozens of journalists have been specifically targeted and killed in Gaza. Where is the outrage from their Western colleagues? We see massive campaigns to get people released from prisons in Russia, in Iran. Where are the campaigns against Israeli violence specifically targeting journalists in Gaza and the West Bank? So I think the answer to your question is self-evident.
I think if you consider yourself a person with any kind of moral consciousness, and a minimal moral consciousness is a requisite for intellectual work, for creative work, then you have to speak up, you have to raise your voice. The fact that so few people have done so really points, uncomfortably for many of us, to the shallowness of so much literature and journalism that is out there. We suspected that it was extremely shallow and superficial, but I think the evidence now is overwhelming.
