The World After Gaza

By (author) Mishra Pankaj
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*SHORTLISTED FOR A PALESTINE BOOK AWARD 2025*

From the award-winning writer and thinker, an essential reckoning with the war in Gaza, its historical conditions, and moral and geopolitical ramifications

''Courageous and bracing, learned and ethical, rigorous and mind-expanding'' NAOMI KLEIN

''Mishra has made a powerful contribution to the moral history of the world'' ANDREW O''HAGAN

''Urgent'' HISHAM MATAR

''Brilliant'' WILLIAM DALRYMPLE

Memory of the Holocaust, the ultimate atrocity of Europe’s civil wars and the paradigmatic genocide, has shaped the Western political and moral imagination in the postwar era. Fears of its recurrence have been routinely invoked to justify Israel’s policies against Palestinians. But for most people around the world – the ‘darker peoples’, in W. E. B. Du Bois’s words – the main historical memory is of the traumatic experiences of slavery and colonialism, and the central event of the twentieth century is decolonisation – freedom from the white man’s world.

The World After Gaza takes the war in the Middle East, and the bitterly polarised reaction to it within as well as outside the West, as the starting point for a broad reevaluation of two competing narratives of the last century: the West’s triumphant account of victory over Nazi and communist totalitarianism, and the spread of liberal capitalism, and the global majority''s frequently thwarted vision of racial equality. At a moment when the world’s balance of power is shifting and a long-dominant Western minority no longer commands the same authority and credibility, it is critically important to enter the experiences and perspectives of the majority of the world’s population.

As old touchstones and landmarks crumble, only a new history with a sharply different emphasis can reorient us to the world and worldviews now emerging into the light. In this concise, powerful and pointed treatise, Mishra reckons with the fundamental questions posed by our present crisis – about whether some lives matter more than others, why identity politics built around memories of suffering is being widely embraced and why racial antagonisms are intensifying amid a far-right surge in the West, threatening a global conflagration. The World After Gaza is an indispensable moral guide to our past, present and future.

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The World After Gaza . . . is as thoughtful, scholarly and subtle as it is brave and original. By a long way the most horrifying and thought-provoking book I have read this year
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A book of passion, fury and clarity. Mishra is one of the most important voices of our generation
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A seething and erudite indictment of the west’s role in the creation of Israel and everything that has flowed from it
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This is a rare text: courageous and bracing, learned and ethical, rigorous and mind-expanding
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As scholarly and subtle as it is brave and original, it’s by a long way the saddest and most thought-provoking book I have read this year
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Stimulating and brilliantly researched
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In this urgent book, Mishra grapples with the inexplicable spectacle of stone-faced Western elites ignoring, and indeed justifying, the slaughter and starvation of Palestinians in Gaza. Mishra reflects on the supposedly universal consensus that emerged from the Holocaust, as well as his own early sympathies for Israel, as he expounds on the terrible toll of this passivity in the face of atrocity
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This profoundly important and urgent book finds Mishra, one of our mos