Mixed-up mirror images

Pankaj Mishra's The World After Gaza explores the West's skewed relationship with Israel and with Jews

- Prasenjit Chowdhury

In the summer of 1942, at the height of the Holocaust, mass roundups and deportations of Jews were documented by diarists across Nazi-occupied Europe.

The detailed entries from this period capture the horror faced by Jewish people as the systematic process of extermination accelerated. Ghetto diaries describing life in Vilna, Lvov, Bialystok, Theresienstadt, Kovno, Lodz and Warsaw document human life in a state of spiritual decomposition under the pressure of survival and the German policy of reprisals. Elderly people died in the streets, children were orphaned, wealthy Jews turned in a matter of weeks into paupers, people sank into madness, and families broke apart.

In his latest book, The World After Gaza, Pankaj Mishra infers that "the collective memory of the Shoah (Holocaust) in Europe as well as Israel did not merely spring organically from what transpired between 1939 and 1945, it was belatedly constructed, often very deliberately, and with specific political ends". This gradually became the raison-d'être of Zionism and the Jewish State which, in the words of Israeli columnist Boaz Evron, removed "any moral restrictions [on Israel], since one who is in danger of annihilation sees himself as exempted from any moral considerations which might restrict his efforts to save himself".