The World After Gaza Quotes

“Why should Christianity compensate for its torture of the Jews during the past two-thousand years from the pocket of Islam? Why should the West pay for its crimes from the empty pockets of the Middle East nations?”
― Pankaj Mishra, The World After Gaza: A History

“or Europe, have been in a state of collapse. The world as we have known it, moulded since 1945 by the beneficiaries of slavery, colonialism and anti-colonial nationalism, has been crumbling. Far-right mobilisations in the United States, France and United Kingdom, as well as in the former Axis powers of Germany and Italy, speak of an irreversible crisis; the scapegoating of minorities – immigrants, Muslims, trans people – threatens a recrudescence of the pathologies of modernity that blighted the first half of the twentieth century. Yet”
― Pankaj Mishra, The World After Gaza: A History

“for ways to reconcile the clashing narratives of the Shoah, slavery and colonialism.”
― Pankaj Mishra, The World After Gaza: A History

“Its fierce fortress mentalities were inflamed on 7 October 2023, when Hamas destroyed, permanently, Israel’s aura of invulnerability. The surprise assault by people presumed to have been crushed represents, after 9/11, the twenty-first century’s second Pearl Harbor to many shocked and horrified white majoritarians. And, as before, the perception among them that white power has been publicly violated has ‘triggered’, in John Dower’s words, ‘a rage bordering on the genocidal’.”
― Pankaj Mishra, The World After Gaza: A History

“India and Israel as much as anywhere else, uneven economic growth has helped create fierce new constituencies, among haves as well as have-nots, for xenophobia, and ultra-nationalist demagogues have duly emerged, ranting about internal and external enemies and capturing democratic institutions. *”
― Pankaj Mishra, The World After Gaza: A History

“with a continuing deficit of compassion in the West. There are also other ways to avoid the temptation of reducing history to an endless agon between evil perpetrator and innocent victim, or the binarism of colonialism and anti-colonialism.”
― Pankaj Mishra, The World After Gaza: A History

“horrendously compromised births of nation states in South Asia: the imperialist skulduggery, nationalist opportunism, clumsy partition, war and ethnic cleansing that produced the eternally warring states of India and Pakistan. Historical contingencies destroyed at one stroke the many options of self-determination for the Hindus and Muslims of South Asia as well as the Jews and Arabs of Palestine, bringing forth nation states and permanent refugees under the shadow of the Shoah, the Nakba and the Partition.”
― Pankaj Mishra, The World After Gaza: A History

“German romantic nationalism with the emphasis on blood, race and descent as the most determining factor in human life.’ A contemporary generation of scholars sees European ideologies and institutions of the nation state, racism and colonialism paradoxically reincarnated in muscular Zionism, partly through the efforts of Zionists who tried to fight off antisemitic accusations of degeneracy and abnormality by forging a nationalist programme of regeneration and normalisation.”
― Pankaj Mishra, The World After Gaza: A History

“The pre-eminence of the Shoah among historical memories is fading even where it happened. In large parts of Eastern Europe, where few Jews now live, memories of Hitler’s crimes have been giving way since the nineties to memories of victimisation by Stalin: the Holocaust is being eclipsed by the Holodomor, the sacrifice of millions of people in Stalin’s plan to collectivise agriculture in the early 1930s.”
― Pankaj Mishra, The World After Gaza: A History

“There is little doubt today about the outcome of a global contest between narratives of suffering. If collective memories are taken to express essential truths, deeply informing members of an imagined community who they are, and what their place in the world is, then the memory of the white supremacism of Western powers has many more subscribers today than the memory of Nazism. The”
― Pankaj Mishra, The World After Gaza: A History

“Israel remains the foremost military power in the Middle East, with rock-solid support among the ruling classes of the world’s richest and most powerful countries. Many older white citizens in the West continue to endorse Israel’s self-legitimising narrative as a country built to ensure that Jews never again suffer a Holocaust. But many more people – increasingly within as well as outside the West – have come to embrace a counter-narrative, in which the memory of the Shoah has been perverted to enable mass murder, while obscuring a larger history of modern Western violence outside the West.”
― Pankaj Mishra, The World After Gaza: A History

“of totalitarianism. Oblivious to the long centuries of genocidal violence and dispossession that made Europe and the United States uniquely powerful and wealthy, they could not see the future, either: that the world to come would be shaped by ideas and movements occurring among the vast majority of the world’s population, in countries geographically remote from, and historically hostile to, the West; that the Chinese Revolution of 1949 would hold greater consequences for the wider world than the Russian Revolution of 1917, and Mao Zedong’s declaration that ‘the Chinese people have stood up’ after a century of humiliation by Western countries was more than just boosterish rhetoric.”
― Pankaj Mishra, The World After Gaza: A History

“for a lumpen American intelligentsia, originally gathered around Commentary and National Review and now accessible in the Atlantic as well. But its irate incomprehension was shared by many liberal American intellectuals. These opinion makers were united in refusing to consider that the most consequential event of the twentieth century might not be the First or Second World War, the Shoah, the Cold War, or, for that matter, the collapse of communism, but decolonisation.”
― Pankaj Mishra, The World After Gaza: A History

“That same year, Baldwin argued in an incendiary piece titled ‘Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White’ that ‘the root of anti-Semitism among Negroes is, ironically, the relationship of colored peoples – all over the globe – to the Christian world’. He wrote that the ‘Negro is really condemning the Jew for having become an American white man – for having become, in effect, a Christian. The Jew profits from his status in America, and he must expect Negroes to distrust him for it.’[*2]”
― Pankaj Mishra, The World After Gaza: A History

“Bois. Attending in 1956 the first international Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris, he wrote that what distinguished black Americans like himself from Africans was ‘the banal and abruptly quite overwhelming fact that we had been born in a society, which, in a way quite inconceivable for Africans, and no longer real for Europeans, was open, and, in a sense which has nothing to do with justice or injustice, was free’.”
― Pankaj Mishra, The World After Gaza: A History

“Many middle-class Jews supported fascism in Italy late into the 1930s, choosing to see in it a bulwark against socialist revolution and a defence of their property rights.[*6] The present crisis would catalyse more such expedient alliances between those with minority survivalist mindsets. For white supremacy, historically exercised through colonialism, slavery, segregation, militarised border controls and mass incarceration, has entered its most desperate and dangerous phase. *”
― Pankaj Mishra, The World After Gaza: A History

“The far-rightists have inherited some economic and social visions of the first generation of fascists – from constraining the rights of women, minorities and immigrants to crony capitalism. Some of their ideological manoeuvres are relatively new, however. While both Hitler and Mussolini presented themselves as guardians of a superior Western civilisation, many white nationalists aim for the same moral advantage by offloading the scourge of antisemitism on Muslims, and by claiming to stand in solidarity with Israel. Christian”
― Pankaj Mishra, The World After Gaza: A History

“all. Writing to friends back in Turin he complained that Americans had ‘pinned a Star of David’ on him. ‘I don’t like labels – Germans do,’ he told his publicist. At a talk in Brooklyn, Levi, asked for his opinion on Middle Eastern politics, started to say that ‘Israel was a mistake in historical terms’. As he reported to an interviewer back in Italy, ‘there was uproar, and the moderator had to call the meeting to a halt’. Later that year, Commentary commissioned a 24-year-old wannabe neocon to launch venomous attacks on Levi. By Levi’s own admission, this intellectual thuggery helped extinguish his ‘will to live’.”
― Pankaj Mishra, The World After Gaza: A History

“the museum made, with its sheer size, location and potential appeal, all other memorials to the Shoah, including Israel’s Yad Vashem, look minor and insignificant. In Preserving Memory (1995), Edward T. Linenthal describes how the new museum on the National Mall in Washington DC turned the Shoah into ‘an event officially incorporated into American memory’. It completed, together with the television series Holocaust, the Oscar-winning Schindler’s List and Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation, what the historian Michael Berenbaum termed, approvingly, ‘the Americanization of the Holocaust’.[*5]”
― Pankaj Mishra, The World After Gaza: A History

“favourable to Israel and to insist on preserving the memory of the Shoah. The”
― Pankaj Mishra, The World After Gaza: A History

“until 1953, when the US finally lowered, if only slightly, its barriers to entry and accepted some 80,000 of them. The camps in Cyprus, where tens of thousands of Jewish immigrants captured by the British were interned, replicated some of the humiliations of German camps. Nor were attitudes and conditions in American-occupied Germany any better. A report commissioned by US president Harry S. Truman after he heard reports of ill-treatment of Jews in American-occupied Bavaria said: As matters now stand, we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them. They are in concentration camps in large numbers under our military guard instead of S.S. troops. One is led to wonder whether the German people, seeing this, are not supposing that we are following or at least condoning Nazi policy.”
― Pankaj Mishra, The World After Gaza: A History

“The flip side of West Germany’s accommodation of Nazis was what Améry called an ‘obtrusive philosemitism’. This philosemitism, parasitic on old antisemitic stereotypes, and combined with sentimental images of Jews, still shapes Germany’s relationship to Israel, and is now even more obtrusive.”
― Pankaj Mishra, The World After Gaza: A History

“When in March 1960 Adenauer met his Israeli counterpart, David Ben-Gurion, in New York, he had not only been presiding over a systematic reversal of the de-Nazification process decreed by the country’s Western occupiers in 1945, he had also been aiding the suppression of the unprecedented horror of the Judaeocide. The German people, according to Adenauer, were also victims of Hitler. What’s more, he went on, most Germans under Nazi rule had ‘joyfully helped fellow Jewish citizens whenever they could’.”
― Pankaj Mishra, The World After Gaza: A History

“In 1996, Switzerland, which had prided itself on its wartime neutrality, admitted its role in financing the Nazis in exchange for gold partly plundered from the bodies of Jews. In 2004 Poland acknowledged the victimisation of Polish Jews, and that same year the Romanian state acknowledged responsibility for the Holocaust. In 2012, Norway apologised for the role of Norwegian police in deporting Jews to Nazi concentration”
― Pankaj Mishra, The World After Gaza: A History

“Thus, history books and public commemorations in the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia and East Germany emphasised the anti-fascist credentials of these countries’ regimes, and played down, or even ignored, the Jewishness of the millions of victims. The extermination of the Jews receded even deeper into the background in places like Poland and Hungary when Soviet oppression followed the memory of German occupation.”
― Pankaj Mishra, The World After Gaza: A History

“But for many years such stupefying events were not woven into a pattern. The term Holocaust itself entered into ordinary English usage only in the early 1960s; the Hebrew word ‘Shoah’ came even later into international parlance. In the 1940s and 50s, the Shoah was not seen as an atrocity separate from other atrocities of the war: the attempted extermination of Slav populations, Gypsies, disabled people and gay people. During”
― Pankaj Mishra, The World After Gaza: A History

“This idea that Nazis are always present among us, especially among Arabs, was the beginning of an enduring trend in Israeli nationalist narratives. The Palestinian Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, an antisemitic megalomaniac who delusionally promised mass Muslim support to the Nazis,[*20] is depicted in the Israeli-produced Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (1990), in an entry that is almost as long as that on Hitler, as one of the major designers and perpetrators of the Final Solution. In a speech to the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem in 2015, Netanyahu claimed that it was al-Husseini who persuaded a dithering Hitler to proceed and ‘burn’ the Jews.”
― Pankaj Mishra, The World After Gaza: A History

“She quotes Primo Levi’s stern words on the subject of collaborators: ‘no one is authorized to judge them, not those who lived through the experience of the Lager and even less those who did not’. Levi, who had become reconciled to the inevitability of human failings in everyone, including himself, did not have much patience with the demand for moral perfection.[*18]”
― Pankaj Mishra, The World After Gaza: A History

“trains’. ‘The role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people’, in Arendt’s severe verdict, was ‘undoubtedly the darkest chapter of the whole dark story’. Arendt’s account of passive compliance by Jewish leaders in Europe – and more generally her denial that antisemitism alone was to blame for the Shoah and her emphasis on the innate genocidal potential of the modern bureaucratic state – incited rancorous attacks on her from Israeli authorities and intellectuals. For early historical accounts of the Jewish state had privileged heroic myths constructed around anti-Nazi resistance in Europe, especially the Warsaw uprising in 1943. ‘Basically,’ Raul Hilberg wrote, ‘there had been no meaningful resistance’ – a truth for which, Hilberg noted, he and a couple of other writers, including Arendt, were pilloried in Israel.[*17]”
― Pankaj Mishra, The World After Gaza: A History

“The memorial and documentation centre Yad Vashem is at the centre of Israel’s pedagogical efforts today. Back in the 1940s, the government actively worked to postpone ‘the establishment of an official, government-sponsored institution to cultivate the memory of the Holocaust and its victims’. More astoundingly, survivors were drenched with contempt by the leaders of the Zionist movement as well as unrepentant antisemites. George S. Patton, the American general in charge of the single largest population of Jewish displaced persons (DPs) after the war, described them as a ‘sub-human species’. The first prime minister of Israel, as we have seen, concurred. The Israeli-Irish writer Ronit Lentin remembers in her book Israel and the Daughters of the Shoah (2000) how she was trained to despise diaspora Jews for having ‘gone passively to their death’. Jewish diaspora life was seen, she writes, ‘as doomed to destruction and Zionism as the only answer to the plight of the Jewish people’. Israel, she recalls,”
― Pankaj Mishra, The World After Gaza: A History