“The war will eventually recede into the past, and time may flatten its towering pile of horrors. But those who watched helplessly from afar, as tens of thousands were killed and maimed, while the powerful applauded or looked away, will live with an inner wound, and a trauma that will not pass away for years.”
Having read Age of Anger and Bland Fanatics, I expected The World After Gaza to be unflinching, but Mishra’s dismantling of Western hypocrisy is even more devastating than I anticipated. He exposes, with precision and fury, the ideological machinery that has enabled Israel’s destruction of Gaza, the racial hierarchies, the political cowardice, the moral collapse of the so-called liberal democracies. This isn’t just about Israel; it’s about empire, about the West’s open embrace of militarism, surveillance, and apartheid, and about the utter indifference to Palestinian suffering.
At the heart of The World After Gaza is a reckoning with history, particularly the political afterlives of the Holocaust. Mishra traces how a historical atrocity that should have fostered a universal commitment to justice has instead been repurposed to justify Israeli expansionism and silence critics of the state. He contrasts Germany’s post-war reckoning with antisemitism with its refusal to acknowledge its colonial crimes in Africa or its current support for Israel’s war on Gaza. He explores how Holocaust memory has been deployed to obscure the West’s own history of genocide, slavery, and empire, ensuring that European guilt over the Shoah translates into unconditional support for Israel, at the direct expense of Palestinian lives.
But Mishra does not limit his critique to Western hypocrisy. He also highlights the Jewish voices of dissent that have been systematically ignored, from Holocaust survivors like Marek Edelman to contemporary historians like Omer Bartov, who have condemned Israel’s actions in Gaza. Even as Western elites claim to honour Jewish memory, they dismiss or suppress those who challenge the official narrative of Zionism as a moral necessity.
“Western leaders declined to admit large numbers of Jewish refugees for years after the revelation of Nazi crimes. Now, in a bitter historical irony, their nations extend limitless moral and military support to an extremist Israeli state that has made ethnic cleansing its official policy.”
Mishra is particularly scathing on the role of Western media, from The New York Times to the BBC, in obfuscating and justifying atrocity. He dissects the passive constructions—Palestinians simply ‘die’ rather than being killed, Israel ‘defends itself’ even as it carries out ethnic cleansing. He lays bare the NYT’s internal directives instructing staff to avoid words like ‘refugee camps’ and ‘occupied territory,’ and the BBC’s grotesque insistence on platforming Israeli propagandists while refusing to describe Israel’s actions as war crimes. Western media, Mishra shows, did not just fail in its duty to report the truth—it became an active participant in the erasure of Palestinian lives, laundering Israeli justifications for mass killing while ruthlessly policing the speech of journalists, academics, and activists who dared to dissent.
“The New York Times instructed its journalists not to use the words ‘refugee camp’ or ‘occupied territory’; the BBC refused to call Israeli atrocities war crimes; and across the West, journalists, academics, and artists faced blacklists, harassment, and dismissal for the crime of acknowledging Palestinian suffering. This was not just media failure. It was (and still is) an active erasure.”
What follows, Mishra argues, may be a new era of reckoning, not just for Israel, but for the entire world order built on imperial violence and racial hierarchies. The war on Gaza has irreversibly altered global politics, deepening the divide between the West and the Global South, exposing liberalism as a hollow facade, and radicalising a generation that has watched Western democracies openly endorse genocide.
There is no hedging here, no space for comfortable moral equivocation. Mishra is relentless in exposing the cynicism of politicians, the duplicity of the press, and the sheer brutality of Western complicity. He captures the raw fury and impotence of those who have watched this horror unfold, as Western leaders smile through press conferences and international law is revealed to be a hollow charade.
But this is more than an indictment; it is an act of resistance. The World After Gaza refuses to let history be rewritten, refuses to let Gaza’s suffering be erased. It is not just a necessary book but a defining one, one that makes it impossible to look away.
*This review was written a few months ago.
