When Donald Trump floated the idea of taking over the ruins of Gaza and turning it into the “Riviera of the Middle East,” the American media dismissed it as the usual “outlandish” rant, or dug into the real-estate implications of the supposed “deal.”
But that Trump has simply dismissed the agency of millions of displaced human beings and casts a genocidal war as a property acquisition opportunity should actually come as no surprise to us. It’s the latest chapter in a long and brutal history of cruelty in the area, and the media’s failure to tell the truth about it is rooted in the long failure to resolve the clashing narratives of decolonization and Holocaust memorializing that has made peace in the Middle East so elusive.
That’s at the heart of the story Pankaj Mishra, a brilliant public intellectual and one of the world’s foremost chroniclers of empire and modernity, tells in his new book, The World After Gaza: A History. In Mishra’s analysis, the 15-month war is one of the defining moments of the 21st century, an event that brings together, explosively, the historical currents of nationalism and decolonization and is likely to change the way people around the world will experience reality (and realty?) for the coming decades.
Mishra’s book is a triumphant work of empathy in a polarizing conflict. It gives voice and extends sympathy and probes the innermost fears and aspirations of both parties in the conflict — and shows how fine the line is between humanity and its opposite.
We talked to Mishra about what it has meant for the entire world to watch atrocities livestreamed, how oppressed peoples can learn the wrong lessons from history, how the abused can become the abusers, why Western media hasn’t been willing to tell the true story of Israel and Palestine, how grown-up indifference to genocide has shocked a rising generation into moral adulthood, and why decolonization — rather than the resurgence of Western nationalism — is the movement that will define the future.
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Pankaj Mishra’s new book is The World After Gaza: A History
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