Pankaj Mishra is an Indian essayist and novelist who was born in northern India in 1969. He graduated with a Bachelor of Commerce degree from Allahabad University before completing his M.A. in English literature at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. Mishra is the author of numerous books, among them From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia (Picador, 2013), Age of Anger: A History of the Present (Picador, 2017), and a book of essays, titled Bland Fanatics: Liberals, Race, and Empire (Verso, 2020). His most recent book, The World After Gaza: A History, will be published on February 6 by Penguin Press. Diwan interviewed Mishra in late January to discuss his forthcoming book, and more broadly the themes that it addresses.
Michael Young: Your latest book, The World After Gaza, is an expanded version of an essay you wrote for the London Review of Books in March 2024. What motivated you to write both texts, and basically what are the main ideas you wanted to get across?
Pankaj Mishra: I was trying to respond to the two moral and intellectual calamities that confronted us in the days after October 7. The first consisted of very deliberate killings and destruction in Gaza by Israel in the name of self-defense. The second was the attempt by the country’s supporters in the West, journalists as well as politicians and businessmen, to conceal the very obvious facts of not only the Israeli onslaught but also the very long history of its occupation of Palestinian territories, its relentless expansion into the West Bank, its destruction of non-violent Palestinian movements, and its bankrolling of Hamas. As an individual writer, there is not much you can do against such shameful acts of suppression, omission, and evasion, many of them committed by your own journalistic colleagues except try to raise your own voice somewhere, and the essay I wrote for the London Review of Books was an attempt to say the kind of things that had been deemed taboo, and were being severely punished, in the Western public sphere. The book aims to go further, to examine the ways in which the public memory of the Shoah was created in Israel, Germany, and the United States, and deployed as justification for Israel’s violent expansionism, how memory cultures have become important in our societies, and why Gaza signifies the kind of extensive moral and political breakdown that we may not recover from in our lifetime.
MY: In one passage, you quote George Orwell, who wrote in 1945 that Palestine was “a color issue,” before saying this is also how Mohandas Gandhi saw the situation there at the time. Evidently, this is a view you share. Can you explain how and why this fits into your broader interpretation of the conflict in Gaza, and what its implications are?
PM: Palestine was a color issue right from the time European Zionists made a strong claim to it with the help of British imperialists. People like Gandhi were sympathetic to Zionism, but were very wary of the Zionist attempt to establish a state through British bayonets, as he put it. This is obviously because Gandhi and many other Asian and African leaders were fighting their own battles against European white supremacists. Decades later, Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu made the same argument when Israel became a close ally of the apartheid regime in South Africa. It is very clear today that South Africa leads, at great damage to its economic interests, the international opposition to Israel’s far-right regime and receives reflexive support from many countries around the world that have suffered from racism and imperialism. And now, with an explicitly white supremacist regime installed in the United States, and its allies surging in Europe, all of them united in their opposition to dark-skinned immigrants, and fear and loathing of China, Palestine could emerge as a color issue even more than before.
MY: One of the points that comes across in your book is that the state of Israel was established in Palestine at the very moment when European colonial powers were being challenged by their subject peoples. In other words, Palestinian self-determination was sacrificed at the altar of Jewish self-determination, at a time when throughout the world many colonized peoples were seeking freedom. But you also make the point that the Jews, because of the great suffering they endured, were perhaps entitled to seek security in a state of their own. How has the West played into such complex dynamics?
PM: The role of Western powers was deeply dishonorable from the start. Prejudice against Jews was entrenched across Western Europe by the late 1930s. This is why almost all of Europe helped the Nazis kill 6 million Jews. The Allied powers knew what was happening, but underplayed it all, and even refused to take in more Jewish refugees. The British, in particular, were deeply dishonest. Even after the Holocaust was revealed, the United States would not open its doors wider to Jewish refugees. The state of Israel almost did not come into existence, and when it did so it was primarily as a refuge for a viciously persecuted and unwanted people. This is as important to remember about Israel as the fact that many Zionists were quasi-European colonialists, especially as Palestinians are treated today, in a grim repeat of modern history, as dispensable pawns on geopolitical chessboards.
MY: How has America been instrumental in the process of transforming the Shoah into a mechanism of Israeli expansionism—of transforming the terrible fate of the Jewish people into an event that, 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”?
PM: Immigrant populations in the United States have been crucial for the shaping of many nation states, from India to Ireland. But the Jewish-American link to Israel is historically the most momentous and multilayered. It works at many different levels—political, economic, intellectual, and emotional. It brings disparate constituencies together, from Christian fundamentalists to militant atheists, secular leftists in academia to Silicon Valley tycoons and far-right antisemites. And it invites all kinds of emotions and desires: from near-illiterate fanatics longing for Armageddon to highly educated people seeking meaning in the spiritual void of America’s commercial society through affiliation to Israel. And though all nation states have self-legitimizing narratives, no country is so profoundly shaped spiritually and psychically by a past event as Israel is by the Shoah. This memory of ancestral suffering is deliberately inculcated among young and impressionable people, and deployed to justify the worst atrocities any human being can commit. Of course, Hindu nationalists in India are trying to learn from the Israeli example, speaking more and more of Hindu victimhood and trying to infuse young Indians with hate and fear of Muslims and other minorities. I am trying to argue in the book against such memory cultures, which are destructive of the individual moral sense and basic social solidarity, not to say democracy and human rights.
MY: Toward the end of your book you offer sustained praise for the students (and not only the students) who protested the war in Gaza, pointing out that “it is Gaza that has pushed many to a genuine reckoning with the deep malaise of their societies.” Tell us more about the students, whose actions show that they have perhaps best recognized what you describe as a “final rupture in the moral history of the world since the ground zero of 1945.”
PM: The protests against the destruction of Gaza, mostly led by students, was the largest such movement since the 1960s. It has been crushed effectively, and now Donald Trump is cracking down more harshly on even ordinary dissent. However, I think the protestors have already made the point that Trump doesn’t come out of nowhere; that this unhinged demagogue was preceded by a senile president surrounded and protected by lying careerists; that there is something sick and rotten about states and societies that not only support and enable mass killings but also make money off them. It is important that this first shock of an ethical awareness is widespread among students who have not been corrupted yet by professional life, who are still far from being offered and accepting a stake in a horribly corrupt system. This is why I think that they and their actions invite some hope in what is already a very dark time: the possibility that our consciences are not completely perverted and deadened.
MY: One of the understated heroes at the center of your book is the Italian writer Primo Levi, who survived Auschwitz, but perhaps not quite his survival of Auschwitz, since he committed suicide in 1987 in Turin. Why do you regard him as such a central figure?
PM: I can’t think of any other survivor of the Shoah who reflected as deeply as Primo Levi on his trauma, or who arrived at such unexpected conclusions about the wider culture of complicity in which we all live. Levi was among the first to move away from simplistic accounts of the Shoah as motivated largely by antisemitism, and to glimpse the darker individual and collective forces that made it possible. He warned against another genocide not because he thought murderous antisemitism was eternal (this is what many of Israel’s supporters claim), but because he could see the potential for it in our social and economic arrangements and in our considerably weakened ethical lives.
MY: Finally, what will you be working on next? What can we look forward to?
PM: I have no plans for another book. I wrote this one under a kind of inner compulsion, largely to cope with despair. I am not even sure whether I’ll write another book. The bleak times we are living through, and may not escape for years to come, probably call for another kind of engagement with the world. Also, I think I have said as much as I could, and it may be time to let younger people speak.
