Gaza has been the setting of a kind of savagery that the world has not witnessed in recent times. The October 2023 Palestinian terrorist attack on Israeli revellers where hundreds were butchered triggered one of the most brutal retaliatory wars in history, one that continues to shake the world and claim the lives of thousands of Palestinian civilians.
Author Pankaj Mishra in his much talked about book The World After Gaza, argues that the Israeli genocidal war in Gaza is an assault on all humanity and its moral fundamentals. He feels all those who keep silent while the Palestinian tragedy unfolds are guilty of complicity: “I write out of that guilt — a broad human condition after Israel’s livestreamed mass murder spree in the Middle East — and the obligation that the living have to the innocent dead.”
His book is also a protest against the Western world’s systematic denial of the moral outrage that the Gaza war constitutes. “Why did the West, while defending and sheltering Ukrainians from a venomous assault, so pointedly exclude Palestinians from the community of human obligation and responsibility?” he wonders.
He believes that the “livestreamed liquidation of Gaza was daily obfuscated, if not denied, by the instruments of the West’s military and cultural hegemony… to the New York Times editors instructing their staff, in an internal memo, to avoid the terms ‘refugee camps’, ‘occupied territory’ and ‘ethnic cleansing’.”
The West, he maintains, does all this “to protect its own interests under the guise of a universalist rhetoric of democracy and human rights”. The book chronicles the ideological history of Zionism as well as how the West helped Israel become what it is today. In that sense, he feels, the West is responsible for the monstrous events unfolding in Gaza.
Following the end of WWII in 1945, as the author points out, “it was possible, even imperative, to hope that organised human viciousness was broadly in retreat.” However, he writes, the “profound rupture we feel today is a final rupture in the moral history of the world since the ground zero of 1945…The world as we have known it, moulded since 1945 by the beneficiaries of slavery, colonialism and anti-colonial nationalism, has been crumbling.”
“It is Gaza that has quickened their understanding of a decrepit world which no longer has a belief in itself, and which, concerned merely with self-preservation tramples freely on the rights and principles it once held sacred, repudiates all sense of dignity and honour, and rewards violence, lies, cruelty and servility,” he argues.
The only hope, the author believes, is the young, who in many parts of the world have protested the ongoing barbarity in Gaza. “Those opposing Israeli acts of savagery, and the Western propaganda of omission and obfuscation… risk permanently embittering their lives with failure. But their expressions of outrage and feats of solidarity may have somewhat alleviated the great loneliness of the Palestinians. They also hold out some hope for the world after Gaza.”
The World After Gaza
By Pankaj Mishra
Juggernaut
pp. 304; Rs 799
