The world after Gaza - III

The World After Gaza by Pankkaj Mishra (Fern Press, London) 2025

- JAYANTHA SOMASUNDARAM

The attack on the Twin Towers in New York on 11 September 2001, drew an enraged and catastrophic counterproductive response. It triggered a war of terror on a subhuman enemy. A war that devastated parts of Western and Central Asia and Africa, ending in the humiliating retreat from Afghanistan in 2021.

In The Jewish Century Yuri Slezkine says that Israel had “rejected most traits traditionally associated with Jewishness” and has produced a “warrior culture of remarkable power and intensity, the only place where European civilisation seemed to possess a moral certainty, the only place where violence was truly virtuous.”

“Within and outside the West, decolonisation or the physical or intellectual emancipation of the vast majority of the human population from the white man’s world is an unstoppable revolution.” Mishra invokes Du Bois who, a century ago, pointed to the problem of the colour line which lulled the West to the ‘religion’ of Whiteness endowing them with ‘the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen.’ This had resulted in America and European colonisers penetrating further into Asia and Africa inflicting mass slaughter in the Congo, Southern Africa, the Philippines and China. But all the while this was only feeding resistance, rebellion and unity in the Global South - a ‘transnational imagined community.’

This threat did not go unnoticed. The US author Lothrop Stoddard in his 1920 book The Rising Tide of Colour Against White World Supremacy wrote that “nothing is more striking than the instinctive and instantaneous solidarity which binds together Australians and Afrikanders (sic), Californians and Canadians into a ‘sacred union’ at the mere whisper of Asian immigration.”