The staggering contrast between President Trump’s Ukraine and Gaza policies may appear inexplicable. But then, the US policy towards Israel was never meant to be within the parameters of international diplomacy.
According to political scientist Paul D Miller, evangelical Christians, who form the biggest pro-Israel religious group in America, influence the US policy towards the Jewish state by exploiting the Biblical statement that nations friendly to Israel stand to be blessed by God, while those opposed to it court His wrath (Genesis 12:3).
But Israel still needed to justify its expansionism and brutal violence against the Palestinians. How it did this forms the main theme of Pankaj Mishra’s book, The World After Gaza.
Mishra’s heartrending narrative recounts the ruthlessness with which Israel has tried to suppress the legitimate resistance to its occupation of Palestine by demonising Palestinians as the new Nazis who are plotting another Shoah (holocaust) against the Jews.
To pass off this lie as a genuine possibility, and thus justify the grossest forms of violence and dispossession as warrantable self-defence, the memorialisation of the holocaust came in handy even though David Ben-Gurion himself had initially demeaned holocaust victims as “human debris” who survived only because of “harsh, evil, egoistic” nature, and therefore, not good enough to be part of a strong Jewish state.
Mishra’s case is that Israel hopes to fool Americans and Europeans into believing that the whole of Palestine has to be violently occupied and annexed to prevent the imminent genocide of Jews.
He illustrates this by citing Ben-Gurion’s statement that Israel is entitled to protect itself by any means including nuclear bombs because “we don’t want the Arab Nazis to come and slaughter us.” In a wily either-or argument that eliminated the possibility of a Palestinian state, Ben-Gurion had told President John F Kennedy that the liberation of Palestine is not possible “without the total destruction” of Israel.
Auschwitz survivor, Primo Levi, was so distressed by the exploitation of the holocaust that he said, “We must choke off the impulses towards emotional solidarity with Israel to reason coldly on the mistakes of Israel’s current ruling class.” Levi’s suicide in 1987 tells us that he knew Israel’s moral deviance had reached a point of no return.
However, Mishra is more concerned about the fact that Israel’s desensitised depravity – which soon progressed to genocidal criminality – was aided and abetted by the very nations that had shamefully collaborated with the Nazis, including the USA which, as a report commissioned by President Harry S Truman found, treated Jews as the Nazis treated them “except that we do not exterminate them”.
Mishra turns to historian Frank Stern to explain that the transmogrification of Western antisemitism into “obtrusive philosemitism” was primarily a political instrument (as in the case of Germany) to “justify options in foreign policy”, and “to evoke and project a moral stance in times when domestic tranquility is threatened by anti-Semitic, anti-democratic and right-wing extremist phenomena.”
Mishra describes the coming together of the White-supremacist West and Israel – the nation state where “racism and colonialism paradoxically reincarnated in muscular Zionism” – as “Western colonialism in the Middle East”.
But when calls to end it started becoming a globally reverberant rallying cry, it was suppressed for being the profanity that breaks the “pious silence” around Israel’s violent behaviour. Mishra’s own lecture on Gaza was cancelled by the Barbican Centre in London, not to mention the discontinuation of his regular column at Bloomberg.
This led Mishra to experience what philosopher Karl Jaspers called a “metaphysical guilt”, a sense of culpability that sensitises a person to feel “co-responsible for every wrong and injustice in the world” and confess: If I fail to do whatever I can to prevent these crimes, I am guilty too.
The World After Gaza is the upshot of this guilt. The book is also a grief-stricken appeal to his readers to speak out in recognition of the truth that “there is such a thing as solidarity between human beings as human beings, and it does not end at the colour line”, where non-whites are denied the dignity of being human.
Mishra believes Israel will nonetheless succeed in ethnically cleansing and taking over the whole of Palestine with the help of the West. This, he says, is the portent of the future of a bankrupt and exhausted post-Gaza world.
The only hope, he says, quoting Jean Améry, is to keep speaking “in order that the crime become a moral reality for the criminal, in order that he be swept into the truth of his atrocity.”