Book: THE WORLD AFTER GAZA
Author: Pankaj Mishra
Published by: Juggernaut
Price: Rs 799
How many dead bodies does it take for grief to turn into indifference? One thousand? Ten thousand? Half a million? How many children must die before the world stops counting? How many bombed-out homes? Shattered families? Nameless bodies buried in the rubble?
On October 7, 2023, Israeli territory was invaded. The attack was brutal: over a thousand people died, families were torn apart, plunging a nation into grief. The world reacted without hesitation. Western leaders condemned Hamas. News outlets ran endless loops on mourning families. Holocaust analogies were summoned as if as reflex action. The grief was immediate, the condemnations swift, the solidarity unquestioned. And, yet…
The horrors that visited Gaza since October 7 — a tenuous ceasefire holds at the moment — were allowed to take place over and over and over again. There were daily airstrikes; families were wiped out in their sleep; journalists killed mid-broadcast; aid workers bombed on their way to feed starving children and so on. Gaza’s victims pleaded for mercy even as their bodies piled up faster than the world could count them. But global leaders— the supposed guardians of human rights — chose to look away. The politicians who had wept for Israel’s victims now signed off on the bombs that turned Gazan children into corpses. The Israel Defense Forces broadcast its war crimes with impunity, revelling in the grotesque theatre of genocide, while the Western media twisted language to make mass murder sound like self-defence.
Pankaj Mishra’s The World After Gaza is an autopsy of our collective conscience in the wake of an Armageddon. It is also an examination of how power shapes memory and a reckoning with the outlandish double standards that define who is allowed to suffer. It is a proverbial funeral procession, a call to mourn the death of conscience itself. Mishra scrutinises how power rewrites memory, how history is wielded like a weapon, and how those who were once oppressed can become the architects of oppression. After all, Gaza is a policy, the inevitable result of a world where human rights are sold to the highest bidder and where the bodies of Muslim children are deemed too politically inconvenient to save.
This is also a memoir of a child raised in Hindu nationalism once cheering for Israel as proof that might makes right. The book is also the story of Mishra’s journey through books and travels as he dismantled the propaganda he had swallowed whole and came to see Israel’s story not as a triumph but as a tragedy.
He traces Israel’s origins as a nation-state shaped by trauma but built on dispossession, its transformation from the survivor of a genocide to a coloniser, and how it learned to use Holocaust memory as both armour and weapon. A history of suffering now fuels a machine of destruction. People who were once dehumanised now erase the humanity of others. 'Never Again', it turns out, only applies selectively. The tragedy of Jewish suffering has been repurposed as a justification for apartheid, for occupation, for genocide. It is a shield against accountability; a sword against the Stateless.
The book is not just about Israel. It’s about the enablers, the bystanders, those who mask complicity as neutrality. It’s about the United States of America and Europe, about nations that claim to be champions of human rights fuelling a genocide with weapons and money. It’s about the media, where entire newsrooms contort themselves to soften war crimes, where dead Palestinian children become mere statistics while Israeli suffering is individualised, mourned, and avenged. It’s about race, where the apathy that allowed the Holocaust to take place has now been magnified, redirected, and unleashed on Palestinians — because, at the end of the day, their lives do not carry the weight of whiteness.
'Both sides' — the phrase that sanitises mass murder, the phrase that turns apartheid into 'complicated geopolitics', the phrase that lets a genocide unfold while the world stands by, paralysed by its own cowardice. The book doesn’t play this game, forcing you to see what should be obvious: this is not war — it is slaughter. This is not defence; it is occupation. This is not complicated; it is colonialism in its rawest, most violent, form.
The world will say it didn’t know. The world will say it was complicated. The world will say nothing at all.
Because silence is easier than guilt. And forgetting easier than justice.