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

“In their indifference to career advancement, and their challenge to the establishment either to reform itself or to crush them, the protesters have demonstrated an uncommon kind of courage.”
― Pankaj Mishra, The World After Gaza: A History

“He wonders, darkly, whether the collaborator with Nazis is more akin to us than we like to think, because ‘we, too, are so dazzled by power and money that we forget the fragility of our existence’.”
― Pankaj Mishra, The World After Gaza: A History

“In the East as well as the West, the Global North and the Global South, we have been called to fresh struggles for freedom, equality and dignity, and to create a world with less misery. But it is Gaza that has pushed many to a genuine reckoning with the deep malaise of their societies.”
― Pankaj Mishra, The World After Gaza: A History

“Yet again, in a grim reprise of the history of modern antisemitism, minorities bear the brunt of the fears and anxieties provoked by real or imagined marginality in a bewilderingly enlarged and incomprehensible world.”
― Pankaj Mishra, The World After Gaza: A History

“Most people around the world have never met a Jew, but many may now identify Jewishness as well as Israel with ferocious violence and injustice.”
― Pankaj Mishra, The World After Gaza: A History

“With much of the West barred to Jewish survivors, European animus against Jews showed few signs of diminishing.”
― Pankaj Mishra, The World After Gaza: A History

“Biden’s stubborn malice and cruelty to the Palestinians was just one of many gruesome riddles presented by Western politicians and journalists.”
― Pankaj Mishra, The World After Gaza: A History

“Much has happened in the world in recent years: natural catastrophes, financial breakdowns, political earthquakes, a global pandemic, and wars of conquest and vengeance. Yet no disaster compares to Gaza–nothing has left us with such an intolerable weight of grief, perplexity and bad conscience.”
― Pankaj Mishra, The World After Gaza: A History

“the project of keeping, as the first liberal internationalist US president, Woodrow Wilson, baldly stated in 1917, ‘the white race strong’ and preserving ‘white civilisation and its domination of the planet’.”
― Pankaj Mishra, The World After Gaza: A History

“Unable to present itself any longer as a pure victim, an object of other people’s actions, the country reveals itself today as a highly unstable actor, implicating more than just Palestinians in its calamitous failure. As such, the first Jewish state is now of great and ominous significance not only to Jews worldwide; it forces others to define themselves in opposition to or agreement with it. Simply by existing, Israel holds up a mirror, impelling other peoples and societies to identify themselves and their moral consciousness. And the reflections reveal, in one society after another, that the incurable offence, as Primo Levi called it, continues to spread like an infection, and is an inexhaustible source of evil, eight decades after the Shoah.”
― Pankaj Mishra, The World After Gaza: A History

“There is already too much evidence that the arc of the moral universe does not bend towards justice; powerful men have always made their massacres seem necessary and righteous. It’s not at all difficult to imagine a triumphant conclusion to the Israeli onslaught, or its retrospective sanitising by historians and journalists as well as politicians.”
― Pankaj Mishra, The World After Gaza

“Writing in 1982, the French Jewish historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet, whose parents were murdered during the war, had already seen what was only now becoming obvious to me (and still remains concealed from many): that for successive Israeli governments, ‘it is not a question and it never seriously has been a question of letting Israel and Palestine coexist. Instead, these governments have posed an alternative: Israel or Palestine.”
― Pankaj Mishra, The World After Gaza

“They see the garish discrepancy between the West’s generous hospitality to Ukrainian refugees and the barriers it builds to keep out darker-skinned victims of its own failed wars.”
― Pankaj Mishra, The World After Gaza

“Why did Keir Starmer, a former human rights lawyer, assert that Israel has the right to ‘withhold power and water’ from Palestinians, and punish those in the Labour Party calling for a ceasefire?”
― Pankaj Mishra, The World After Gaza

“that human beings have a fundamentally ‘moral’ nature. The corrosive suspicion that they don’t is now widespread. Many more people have closely witnessed death and mutilation, under regimes of callousness, timidity and censorship; they recognise with a shock that everything is possible, remembering past atrocities is no guarantee against repeating them in the present, and the foundations of international law and morality are not secure at all.”
― Pankaj Mishra, The World After Gaza