Hyderabad:The World After Gaza by Pankaj Mishra is a treatise on the ongoing war in the beleaguered Palestinian strip. Published by Juggernaut Books in India, the book is a timely read that helps understand the nuances of this war it condemns as having blown to smithereens the idea of human rights and opening a window to the abyss of moral decay in the world.
Mishra is an award-winning essayist and author of nine fiction and non-fiction books. The World After Gazais the latest addition to his exhaustive work on complex historical and political issues.
In an exclusive interview with ETV Bharat’s Nisar Dharma, the author spoke about his book, how he perceives the ongoing Israeli war in Gaza, the systematic cruelties and injustices, and whether there was any hope left.
Excerpts from the interview:
Nisar: Would you callThe World After Gazaa timely piece of literature or just a way to express the “humiliation of our physical and political incapacity”, if I may borrow the words from your book?
Pankaj Mishra:I cannot make too many claims for the book as a work of literature or as a work of analysis. It is just something I felt compelled to write. It is the only response a writer can make to an atrocity like this. It is up to other people to assess it as a piece of analysis, as a work of literature. It is entirely up to them. For me, it met a very profound and urgent need to put together sentences, and to simply describe and make sense of it in some way using history, using the enormous archive that has been created in the last 100 years of various other historical atrocities. It was very much a book written almost entirely in response to something that was happening as I was writing, unlike any other book I have written.
Nisar: Hisham Matar, the American-born Libyan British novelist, says your book "is a humane inquiry into what suffering can make us do... and the troubling question of what world we will find after Gaza”. Can you give a glimpse of what that world would be?
Pankaj:Unfortunately, at this point, it looks like a world where all the norms of basic morality are under threat like never before, certainly like never before in our lifetimes. So this is a world, as I speak to you, in which some of the most powerful people are egging on nakedly racist, nakedly pro-Nazi political movements and personalities. They are openly stoking resentment, anger and hostility towards weaker groups, towards minorities using every event whether it is the fires in Los Angeles or the random terrorist attacks.
I think it is clear that we have embarked upon a treacherous phase in human existence. Certainly, large parts of the world, and I include India in that category, are plunging headlong into a chaotic period. I also wrote this book partly to warn against this outcome and to prepare people psychologically and intellectually for these incredibly rocky times we are going to see very soon.
Nisar: You also talk about the 'instrumentalisation of the holocaust' and the Israeli establishment disseminating a particular version of the Shoah that could be used to 'legitimise expansionist Zionism'. What is this version that you refer to and is Israel using it in the ongoing war against Palestine?
Pankaj:I think that is their major propaganda campaign, the biggest propaganda platform that they have. To constantly invoke the memory of the Holocaust and say ‘Look this is what happened to the Jewish population of Europe and if we don't take preventive steps (those preventive steps include the eradication of Gaza at this point), we will again face another holocaust’.
This memory of the holocaust has become a way of justifying endless expansion on the part of the state of Israel. So it has become a very cheap and cynical ploy for expansionism. In the process, it has degraded and desacralised the memory of the holocaust. It has cheapened the enormous suffering and trauma millions of people underwent in Europe and afterwards. In every sense, it is a real, horrible violation of this enormous tragedy for it to be degraded into a propaganda campaign for an aggressively expansionist nation-state.
The cover of The World After Gaza (Juggernaut Books) Nisar: Two perplexing questions that you sought an answer to when you first visited Israel in 2008. First: “How did Israel come to exercise such a terrible power of life and death over a population of refugees?”; and second: “How can the Western political and journalistic mainstream ignore, even justify, its clearly systematic cruelties and injustices?” Do you thinkThe World After Gazais an answer to these questions?
Pankaj:That is one way of putting it. Those are the sort of basic questions we ask. Let’s take the first one. When we speak about the victims of history, we tend to credit them with a superior morality. We think that just because they have suffered, they will not inflict suffering on other people. It turns out in almost every case that people who have suffered often tend to act, sometimes extremely, cruelly towards weaker people. In that sense, Israel, a country populated partly by the survivors of the most extraordinary atrocity of modern history, the Holocaust, themselves creating millions of refugees and millions of victims is a fact of history that is very hard to wrap your head around. It just shows that nobody who is a victim can be expected reasonably to behave in a highly moral fashion. We must always be prepared for the victim to also act horribly.
The second question: Why are powerful Western nations turning a blind eye to Israeli violations of international law and basic morality? The answer to it is a complex one and there are several reasons. There is a very strong factor of guilt. The fact that most European nations were complicit in the destruction of European Jewry; even those who fought the Nazis were extremely reluctant, as I described in my book, to accept Jewish refugees both during and after the Holocaust. This is an extraordinary fact. That Jewish suffering was ignored for an extremely long time. Later generations which have grown up with a greater sense of this fact feel an obligation towards the state of Israel. And discharge it in ways that are deeply unfair to the Palestinians.
The other factor here is that organised opinion in favour of Israel is much stronger than it used to be. It is a result of very concerted lobbying efforts by the state of Israel. The fact is that Israel has created a network all across Western Europe, and most prominently in the United States of sympathisers. Jimmy Carter said this and some of the most experienced politicians have said it that if you go against Israel as a legislator in the United States, as a member of the Congress, as a member of the Senate, you are very likely to be thrown out. It is career suicide.
The power of Israeli propaganda efforts has reached a point where it is politically suicidal to criticise Israel. That means that Israel today enjoys complete impunity. We saw the news that the US Congress has passed a resolution penalising the authorities of the International Criminal Court and issued sanctions against them. Why? Because these people have issued criminal warrants against (Benjamin) Netanyahu. The highest legal authorities are being sanctioned today by American politicians because they have dared to bring criminal charges against Israeli politicians. That is the state we are in today. Every major institution is under attack if that institution is not sufficiently supportive of the state of Israel. These are the questions I want to answer. They perplex a lot of people.
Nisar: When you write that Israel's Western patrons have turned “out to be among its worst enemies, ushering their ward deeper into hallucination”, what do you mean? Do you think Israel is isolated and vulnerable now?
Pankaj:Israel is in a deeply vulnerable position. Just because you can set off pager explosions in Lebanon, you can flatten large parts of Gaza, destroy ports in Yemen, and destroy the Syrian Navy, it does not mean that you are safe and guaranteed a stable future as a nation-state. Quite the contrary. You are in a way exposing yourself to a weakness and continued warfare over an extremely long period, and no modern nation-state can survive a period of continuous warfare.
Have we looked at the state of the Israeli economy? Some of the most talented people in Israel have left or have plans to leave the country and move to places where it is much easier to set up a business or work. It is a basic fact of human history that no matter how well a country fights its battles, it cannot continuously antagonise its neighbours, cannot continuously violate the laws of war, and wage war essentially.
Questions are already being raised in the United States including by the people who are now about to assume power in the US. Just recently Donald Trump tweeted a video of someone saying Netanyahu has been leading the US into unnecessary war in the Middle East. Why is Trump doing that? It is because a lot of Americans are beginning to ask questions not just about the US money going to Ukraine but also to Israel.
I think in the long term, the support Israel enjoys is going to be severely compromised. Israel has deliberately turned its back on the prospect of the existence of a nation-state entitled to live in peace and stability. It has decided to live by the sword and we know that you really cannot live by the sword anymore. Not that it was ever possible. It is even less possible in an intricately interdependent world where trade and the flow of goods and capital are so important.
Nisar: You write about how ordinary people 'contribute to the acts of mass extermination with a clear conscience, and even with frissons of virtue'. Could we pick this thought of yours and say it applies to the way the world is behaving vis-a-vis the current war in Palestine?
Pankaj:I think the people who had set themselves up as arbitrators of international morality, and by this I mean the nations of Western Europe and North America, they are certainly exposing to the world how shallow their sense of morality was and how easily they can become complicit in these acts of mass extermination; How easily can crack down on people who are pointing to those acts of mass extermination, whether these are students, academics, or journalists.
Ironically, it is smaller, less powerful countries like South Africa, Ireland, Spain, and Bolivia that are now speaking up for international law and international morality. In extraordinary reversal, the countries that claimed to lecture the world about human rights and individual dignity have all collaborated in an act of extermination. Countries that were being lectured in the past have come forward to uphold certain norms of international justice and morality.
Nisar: A Pew survey says Israel views India more favourably than any country in the world. How would you want us to make sense of this?
Pankaj:At the level of political parties or governments, there is a new relationship between Israel and India but I think it will be a mistake to underestimate the depth of pro-Palestinian sentiment within the Indian population. I don’t think that can be measured by opinion polls that take into account mostly an urban if not large metropolitan population in India. I certainly don’t think it can be assessed by taking into account the views and opinions of major politicians whether in this country or Israel. India has traditionally been a supporter of the Palestinian cause, not just at the government level but also at the popular level. I don’t think that reality has changed a great deal, not even after 10 years of BJP rule in this country.
Nisar: You speak about Palestine being a 'colour issue' as pointed out by George Orwell in 1945. Could you share some of your thoughts on this aspect of the conflict?
Pankaj:It was identified as a 'colour issue' at a time when most of the world was dominated by white European and colonial powers. And so the liberation of Palestine was seen essentially in terms of anti-colonialism or anti-white supremacism. That issue became less important in the 1950s. Many post-colonial nations emerged and white supremacy seemed to receive a setback. Even Israel started to establish relations with many African countries. But I think it has become clearer since the 1960s when Israel became a colonial power that it in many ways is closer to the white supremacist regimes than it is to any Asian or African nations. And so the colour line that was apparent during the anti-colonial struggles has reemerged.
Today we can see clearly that the biggest supporters of Israel are white supremacists in the West or places like Australia. The biggest critics of Israel are on the other side of the colour line. Race itself has emerged as a very crucial marker of identity. The defence of Israel is seen as a defence of white Western civilisation. The question (of colour) really never goes away. It can go out of sight for some time but it reappears. What Du Bois called the central problem of the 20th century has reemerged as the central problem of the 21st century.
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