The emotional bonding between India and Israel comes as no surprise

Pankaj Mishra on his new book on the Middle East, and connecting the dots between our colonial past and present

- Somak Ghoshal

Pankaj Mishra wrote his new book, The World After Gaza, in the aftermath of the attack on Israel by the Palestinian nationalist organisation Hamas on 7 October 2023. Since then, the Palestinians have faced brutal retaliation from the Israelis. But the scope of his study goes beyond the politics of the Middle East, connecting the rise of authoritarian regimes in India, the US, and the world over.

At its heart, Mishra's book calls out the deeply racist ideology that has defined the creation of the monster that is the Middle East today. The catastrophic war of 1948, also referred to as the Nakba by Palestinians, saw a concerted move to uproot the original inhabitants of the land. It was followed by a project to redraw geographical borders, identifying and persecuting the "enemy" inside and outside Israel. As one of Palestine's leading writers, Raja Shehadeh, points out, the Ashkenazi Jews of European stock have historically looked down on the Mizrahi Jews, or "Arab Jews," creating a simmering tension within the community.

Mishra's most radical argument is to reframe the Holocaust, known as the Shoah in Jewish culture, as a "distinctive" event in world history, rather than being "unique" in and of itself. Going by the scale of inhumanity, how different were the genocides in Rwanda abetted by Belgium or the planned destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the US? And yet, the narrative of Jewish persecution has gained primacy over many other tragic histories and has been turned into the raison d'être of the Israeli State.