The World After Gaza | 4Columns

The mistitling of Pankaj Mishra’s new book.

The World After Gaza: A History, by Pankaj Mishra,
Penguin Press, 292 pages, $28

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Israel is death. To say anything else is frosting. What writers like Pankaj Mishra produce—in works like The World After Gaza, a hollow and useless book—is genteel Zionist distortion, where Israel is defined not by its actions but by its idea of itself, as a scrappy “left-leaning” nation propelled by an emotional fog and diverted from a noble purpose by some bad apples back in 1967 or 1997 or maybe 2006. This strategy aids and abets Israeli governments by obscuring the telos of the occupation and turbocharging a standard Democratic Party move: endless delay and next year-ism. Palestinians must die because well you see it’s complicated we are trying to remove it sorry sorry old chap yes we are going to get the good Israel back we are working tirelessly hang on please keep those protests down you sound a bit antisemitic I said give us a minute a year a month a lifetime.

Mishra’s project announces itself in sentences like “anxieties about the place and perception of Jews in the world were incited among survivors and witnesses of the Shoah after it became clear in 1967 that Israel had become a colonial power in the Middle East.” 1967 being the start of anything will come as news to Theodor Herzl, who proposed Palestine as the site of European Jewish settlements in Der Judenstaat, the 1896 text from which Mishra extracts a quote that could be the template for what Benjamin Netanyahu has been repeating for sixteen months now: “We should form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.” Or we might listen to Chaim Weizmann, who told the World Zionist Congress in 1921 that Palestinians were “the rocks of Judea, obstacles that had to be cleared on a difficult path.” (If Weizmann and Herzl could have used F-16s, they would have.) In that key, Mishra describes Arabs as “enemies” and “adversaries,” and at one point he writes about Palestinian “claims on Israeli territory,” which nimbly confuses our timeline. For the rest of you, if there are Palestinians living in Palestine in 1896, start your clocks on the “colonial power” countdown and drop 1967 as the bookmark for anything.

Mishra’s book is not about the world after Gaza or the world before Gaza or Gaza—this book is not even about the world. The World After Gaza is the work of a magpie with poor eyesight caroming through a bookshop, nodding at the noteworthy titles and pitching in a few topics to let you know that he’s looked at Twitter. The prose is the worst thing in this shit salad, a timid and rhythmless plod that seems to be auditioning for the position of World Book staff writer.

The World After the Shoah: Well-Known Reactions to the Holocaust in Europe and India might be a more accurate title. “In [Jean] Améry, Levi and other survivors I was looking for a different, more exalted, or at least less bleak, meaning of the Shoah,” Mishra writes, as if this could speak to Israel’s actions in 2025. Yes, Germany is a haven for murderous bureaucrats, and Hindu nationalists admire Zionists. Mishra would know, as he grew up in the ’70s with a picture of Moshe Dayan on the wall, “transfixed by his black eye-patch and mischievous grin.” Mishra speaks of the “glow of heroic virtue” exhibited by “founding fathers” like Herzl and Nehru; “this infatuation with Israeli heroes was irresistible partly because it was glamorously illicit in India.”

Here is more from Mishra’s scrapbook: “Zionism really was to us a wistful historical romance, in which a prodigious quest, full of tragedies and set-backs, culminates in a near-miraculous event: the founding of Israel.” One has to ask what miracle this founding—entirely staged, by the same guys who fucked his country—represents, and for whom? When Mishra does use the word “genocide,” it is to discuss other countries (often Germany) or to report that Israel has been “accused” of genocide, only asserting once at the end of an exhaustively indirect sentence full of other characters that it is carrying one out. Apartheid comes up as a policy you can attribute to a specific country only in the context of South Africa—even though Amnesty International declared Israel an apartheid state in 2022, before Mishra started this project, and declared their current actions a genocide in December of 2024, after Mishra was finished. (Not that there was a lack of other sources saying the same.) Penguin Random House got exactly what they wanted from all the waffling: The World After Gaza is a title that monetizes Israel’s genocide, slapped onto a book that barely mentions it.

The World After Gaza was being edited well into November of 2024, when many journalists were drawing on the easily accessed documentation of Zionism’s death cult, one that tortures babies, shoots children in the head, slaughters hundreds at a time, and rapes doctors to death. But Mishra was interested in something else. For him, the fate of Palestine is not down to Palestinians or even Israelis themselves but to an undefined group of people who can or cannot sort out their “construal” of the Shoah. Unlike Mishra, a public intellectual of value would be reversing decades of hasbara and normalizing what writer Mary Turfah expressed so clearly in The Baffler: “What matters is that Israel is a settler colony, built on stolen Palestinian land and sustained by Palestinian blood.” Or try Max Ajl in Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy: “Israel is the world’s least consolidated settler state, forced into brutal, constant counter-insurgency to defend settler property rights and imperialist domination of the Arab working classes.”

It is hard to see how Mishra merits any attention at all when he builds from term-paper styrofoam like this: “Much has happened in the world in recent years: natural catastrophes, financial breakdowns, political earthquakes, a global pandemic, and wars of conquest and vengeance.” One of his “points” is this nightly-news monstrosity of nonsense: “As the memory of the Shoah contends with memories of slavery and imperialism, the Native American and Armenian genocides and other calamities, it is becoming increasingly unclear if these clashing cultures of memory can yield a useful lesson for the present, and throw fresh light on its problems, let alone offer practicable solutions.” The perfect mainstream-media landing—It’s all too hard to sort out and there is such a proliferation of possible causes! Should the book-hustle fail, the state department will have room.

Mishra’s bibliography lists 158 books, fewer than ten of them by Palestinians. This book mentions Israel 544 times, and Palestine seventy-five times; the Shoah 150 times, and the Nakba just four times in total. In the early, unedited draft of The World After Gaza distributed to journalists, Mishra wrote that he returned from his 2008 West Bank visit “with an awakened, outraged sensibility.” In the commercial version I am now holding, “outraged” has been changed to “affronted.”

Sasha Frere-Jones is a musician and writer from New York. His memoir, Earlier, was recently published by Semiotext(e).