THE WORLD AFTER GAZA

Against selective readings of history—and the horrors they enable.

Mishra, who has employed his crystalline prose in novels and nonfiction alike, methodically unpacks the “extensive moral breakdown” that preceded what he describes as “the blithe slaughter of innocents in Gaza.” As for the slaughter of Oct. 7, 2023, he says Israel’s leaders did not “shrink from exploiting” the cold-blooded attack. Formative travel and extensive research upended Mishra’s formerly “languid view of Zionism as vindication and shield of the eternally persecuted.” A frequent contributor to respected political magazines by the early 2000s, he tried to publish his reporting about “the brutality and squalor of Israel’s occupation,” which he witnessed in the West Bank in 2008. But, he says, he encountered “pre-censorship in even liberal periodicals.” This, Mishra believes, was informed by the publications’ fear of being labeled antisemitic—the result of a decades-long effort by various political actors to establish the Holocaust as “the sacred core of Israeli nationalism.” Soon after World War II, he finds, scholars worried that the Holocaust was being forgotten. But with the 1961 prosecution of Adolf Eichmann, it was front-page news once more. This was followed, in 1967 and 1973, by wars that Israel won despite appearing “existentially threatened by its Arab enemies.” Thereafter, American politicians, stung by defeat in Vietnam, saw “an apparently invincible Israel as a valuable proxy in the Middle East.” Meanwhile, the sentimentalization of the Holocaust in popular novels and Hollywood films dovetailed with the Israeli nationalist position that “those who have been or expect to be victims should pre-emptively crush their perceived enemies.” At heart, this is an exhaustively sourced plea for historical literacy that opens up what Mishra calls “a broader vista of human fraternity and solidarity” and recognizes that across the globe, people victimized by “historical mass crimes of genocide, slavery and racist imperialism” wonder why “their own holocausts…have not been much regarded in history.”

A clear-eyed look at the Holocaust as justification for Israel’s wars.