The Gaza Generation

Shaan Sachdev explores Pankaj Mishra’s “The World After Gaza: A History,” moral authority, and a generation of young dissenters.

By Shaan SachdevAugust 9, 2025

• Politics

• Cultural Studies

IN THE MID-2010S, as Islamic State militants bombed, rammed, and shot up Europe’s cafés, concerts, airports, and Christmas markets, an altogether different movement was underway in the United States. A generation of progressives, roused by recorded police and vigilante shootings, called for a national reckoning with systemic suffering and injustice: ills of the malodorous glue holding together the state’s beams and rafters, gears and troves, as if by acts of God. The reckoning, spanning some 400 years, was largely confined to iniquities and their reverberations within the country’s colonial and postcolonial borders. On the occasions it stretched across the Atlantic Ocean, it was to redress crimes and slurs whose victims were long dead, their remains long the soil and timber of redrawn nations and beautified histories. In 2015, when Ta-Nehisi Coates warned his son about “the power of the American state and the weight of an American legacy,” each with a wake of destroyed bodies—“some wild and disproportionate number of them” racialized bodies—he turned to face graveyards nearby: in New York, Michigan, Maryland, and Ohio.

As the decade came to a close, and the Islamic State’s lurid campaign to avenge and supplant Western imperialism was droned out of sight and mind, this modernized American civil rights movement grew stronger, eventually consolidating into soft power. Institutions were jolted or cowed into opening their doors and variegating their workforces. Universities, banks, news networks, and think tanks acquiesced to demands for representation and declarations of allegiance and atonement. Yet these demands, neither well organized nor principally subversive, often yielded to cosmetic alterations. For the likes of JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, and the Pentagon, it was perfectly acceptable to affix rainbow flags to lapels and appoint minorities to boardrooms, because the bulk of such reforms didn’t impel the redistribution of wealth, didn’t meaningfully change laws, and didn’t do much to get in the way of entrenched systems. The empire continued its business as usual, and what happened outside its nominal borders continued, as such, to remain out of sight and mind.

In a 2018 essay, the Indian author Pankaj Mishra noted that civil rights luminaries of the mid-20th century were less parochial in their compunctions. For W. E. B. Du Bois, Walter White, C. L. R. James, Stuart Hall, and Martin Luther King Jr., the hemispheres adjoined to form a continuum in which borders only obfuscated, rather than nullified, violated rights and answerable actors. “Compared to these internationalist thinkers,” wrote Mishra in his admirably lucid deliberation of Coates’s essay collection We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy (2017), the influential American writers and journalists championing then-president Barack Obama had “provincialised their aspiration for a just society.” While heedful of the long coattails of structural violence inside the United States, the liberal intelligentsia celebrated the symbol of Obama even as his government droned, convulsed, or enabled the repression of millions of people in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, the occupied Palestinian territories, and elsewhere. As self-styled political radicals in the United States mingled with Hollywood celebrities and morning news anchors, radicalism itself—or at least this insulated, undemanding version of it—became mainstream and commodified, the stuff of superhero movies and middling memoirs rather than reverberating confrontations with postmodern structures of power.

Coates seems to have reckoned with this criticism. In 2024, seven years after his paean to the Obama years, he published The Message, a series of essays addressed to his writing students at Howard University. The final chapter deals fiercely and directly with what daily life felt like for Palestinians under Israeli rule before October 7, 2023—slummed, rationed, surveilled, stopped, delayed, interrogated, harassed, humiliated, displaced, redisplaced, imprisoned, tortured, and killed by bullets, bombs, hunger, and disease: routinized cruelty, omnipresent as air. This all sounds partial, exaggerated, and dramatized until one actually goes to Palestine, which is what Coates did. His essay, based on a weeklong trip to Jerusalem and the West Bank in the summer of 2023, reflects what literary critic Parul Sehgal described as a “sudden epiphany”: Coates realizes that the preponderant, visceral evidence of medieval-grade persecution, authoritatively parried as “complex” for so many years by his former colleagues at The Atlantic, had “the specific imprimatur of the United States of America. Which means that it had my imprimatur. This was not just another evil done by another state, but an evil done in my name.” More awkward than Coates’s late arrival to this nearly century-old geopolitical axis was his attempt to cast Palestinian realities in the mold of the American racism familiar to Coates’s own parents, a contrivance whose speciousness was, by 2024, rather stinging. The lateness of his realization, however, was assuaged by what it mirrored (and consecrated) in the progressive American body politic: millions of zealous, empowered protesters of injustice had turned outward to face the world.

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Their first order of business, suffused with the efficacious heat they had brought to police brutality demonstrations, was Israel’s extermination of Palestinians in Gaza. Suddenly, those senior managers at JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, and the Pentagon, not to mention those at CNN, Alphabet, Columbia University, and the State Department, found themselves faced with the very constituents they had admitted or obliged in the aftermath of 2020—except that this time the exhortations, even hotter, were not about lapels, pronouncements, or proportions but an establishment-shattering plea: stop the hegemon, end the hegemony. This time, hundreds of billions of dollars were at stake. So, too, were critical donor bases, insuperable lobbyists, evangelical ringmasters, and NATO-coordinated geopolitical strategies in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Qatar, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates. Defense contractors across the United States were reaping tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars apiece to arm the Israel Defense Forces, a crucial industrial complement to Ukraine’s military needs in the post–War on Terror era. And finally, there was Israel itself, which had for decades been as inviolable in speech as it was ungovernable in practice, as buttressed by proselytism as it was unbounded in its appetite for foreign assistance.

Inflamed by the first vivid global atrocities in their lifetimes, the young protesters of Gaza’s cleansing were met not just with arrests and defenestrations but also, and more revealingly, with accusations of hysteria. The excesses of the 2020 protests and their aftermath, distilled by critics as “wokeness” and “DEI,” were, in the minds of such critics, comparable, if not equally frivolous, to a campaign against genocide. The on-campus rage and rigidity that met mass slaughter, mass maiming, mass starvation, and mass displacement—broadcast in real time and financed by American taxpayers—were dismissed as little more than pugnacious overreactions to a political inevitability.

Thinly enshrouded in the critics’ purportedly cultural distaste was a devastating political truth: Palestinians, even more so than the Iraqis before them, were ontological featherweights, scarcely important enough to matter, even in bulk, even in totality. Palestinian children, too, were somehow tainted, guilty by association from birth, and thus less intrinsically human than Israeli children. The murder of more than 50,000 people, two-thirds of them estimated to be women and children—in apartments, in schools, in hospitals, in cars, in tents—and the displacement of millions more were not, then, taken at face value by those who sneered at the hysterical generation. The murders were contextualized. They were qualified. Israeli officials and American Zionists could justify the violence by pointing to the Israelis killed on October 7, while Palestinians and their supporters were disgustedly forsworn as apologists of terrorism if they pointed to the 616 Palestinians killed between 2006 and 2007, the 165 Palestinians killed in 2012, the 2,203 Palestinians killed in 2014, the 256 Palestinians killed in 2021, or the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians killed, mutilated, disabled, or expelled between 1948 and 1981, all before October 7, 2023.

Of course, most Gazans were not sitting in front of televisions, weighing the finer points of Hamas’s culpability or vindication. Not that the IDF took this into account. On one typical occasion in late 2023, commanders “knowingly approved the killing of hundreds of Palestinian civilians in an attempt to assassinate a single top Hamas military commander,” according to an investigation by the Israeli-Palestinian magazine +972. This March, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shattered Israel’s ceasefire with Hamas through “extensive strikes” estimated to have killed over 500 people, a large percentage of them women and children. Unworthy of being killed by hand, Gazans were mostly killed remotely and in bulk. The IDF’s shrapnel-expelling automatons made it easier for news organizations to describe deaths in the passive voice and harder for them to individualize the murderers—harder, anyway, than it was to finger the bearded and bandannaed shooters and stabbers who moved from person to person: the haplessly manual work of “terrorism.” Gazans went from being “caged in a toxic slum,” as the United Nations described the situation in 2018, to trapped in the world’s most lethal, famine-stricken, rubble-filled strip of land, belying the argument about “both sides mattering” if only because mattering has little to do with sides. When borders are dissolved and the totality of deaths considered, one finds a necropolis of Palestinian corpses whose sheer demographic concentration ruptures armchair ideations of parity.

Dehumanization—semiconscious, dressed up as aesthetic preference, contradistinguished by lives that spill over with humanity—looks like this: numbers rather than names, rubble rather than faces, 40 Palestinian deaths for every Israeli killed, 75 Palestinian prisoners for every Israeli hostage, living memories of lifelong immiseration rather than single notorious dates. In his 2021 book Age of Anger: A History of the Present, Mishra wrote that the War on Terror ordained the idea of Muslims as “beyond the pale of humanity,” where “terrorist acts by Muslims were placed in some non-human never-never land, far outside of the history of the secular modern world.” Mishra brings to mind no one more so than Thomas Friedman, possibly the most enduringly surreal columnist in the United States, when he writes,

Many commentators continue to ignore or downplay a century of invasions, unequal treaties, assassinations, coups, corruption, and ruthless manipulation and interference while recycling such oppositions as backward Islam versus the progressive West, Rational Enlightenment versus medieval unreason, open society versus its enemies.

For generations, Palestinians have described their own lives in this way. “It is as if, on the one hand, a bin called ‘Oriental’ existed into which all the authoritative, anonymous, and traditional Western attitudes to the East were dumped unthinkingly,” wrote Edward Said in 1979. Palestinians were ethnically cleansed, wrote Mohammad Tarbush last year in his memoir My Palestine: An Impossible Exile, “not only because we were the weaker party in a power game but because we were perceived as nonentities whose aspirations for a dignified life were beneath consideration.”

This demotion from entity to nonentity doesn’t happen overnight or uncomplicatedly. It requires a certain torque to the imagination. It also needs a convincing narrative, one filled with enough heroes, caricatures, and antagonists to cocoon the myth from disruptive reports and enable it to withstand the agitations of dissenters. With time and craft, the myth crystallizes into something electrically sacrosanct, trapping its victims in the catacombs of political leprosy.

In Western Europe and the United States, it is the Holocaust, that most vile and shocking chapter of the modern age, that has been instrumentalized for this purpose. The machinations came to life gradually, filtered through the bureaucratizing prism of predatory nation-building. Hannah Arendt claimed that this prism turned men into dehumanized “cogs in the administrative machinery,” leading her famously to accuse Adolf Eichmann of “thoughtlessness.” Sleepwalking public servants, she wrote, were carriers of reflexive chauvinism, subsisting on “clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct.” Of course, some public servants are less unconsciously duplicitous than others. “There is no policy of starvation in Gaza, and there is no starvation in Gaza,” Netanyahu said to reporters in July, blaming Hamas for any and all impediments to aid distribution. That the notion of an omnipresent threat to Jews could be used so thoughtlessly, so effectively, to justify the extermination of another population is a despairing irony that sags under the weight of its perpetuity. Yet, as Mishra notes in an essay for the London Review of Books published last spring, the Holocaust and the danger of an imminent repeat wasn’t a significant part of the conversation about Zionism until about 20 years after the end of the Second World War. Well into the 1960s, Jewish writers, intellectuals, historians, and institutions hardly acknowledged what had taken place across Europe. “It was only after the Six-Day War in 1967 and the Yom Kippur War in 1973, when Israel seemed existentially threatened by its Arab enemies,” he writes, “that the Shoah came to be broadly conceived, in both Israel and the United States, as the emblem of Jewish vulnerability in an eternally hostile world.” Mishra based his essay on a lecture he was due to give at London’s Barbican Centre before it was abruptly canceled, bearing out his point about the long-standing institutional gag order when it came to criticizing Israel. This year, he widened the essay into The World After Gaza: A History, a full-length book published by Penguin Press in February.

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Born and educated in India, Mishra has aimed his nonfiction literary career at new incarnations of colonialism and scourges of the neoliberal world order (“Reaganomics”) that triumphed as he was coming of age. Though he most often picks apart the United States’ and the United Kingdom’s webs of global influence, he spares no country, movement, company, or person if he thinks one partakes in the postindustrial praxis of “Deregulate! Indebt! Impoverish! Make superfluous!” He doesn’t shrink from the horrors of Jewish persecution when criticizing Israel, nor does he whitewash political Islam when upbraiding NATO’s interventionism in the Middle East. He has not hesitated to snipe at darlings of the professional-managerial class, such as Niall Ferguson, nor at (less witting) darlings of the military-industrial complex, such as Michael Ignatieff and Anne Applebaum, some of whom he has painted as seductively neo-Orientalist. For readers, he feels trustworthy, unlikely to cede to shallow partialities. In these senses, he can be counted among the intellectual kindred of Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky, Arundhati Roy, and Barbara Ehrenreich; in a way, his writing fuses that of the four.

Since the late 2000s, Mishra has also established himself as one of our more reliable chroniclers of the War on Terror era, which still exists as a sort of world-historical blind spot, not quite near enough to merit cultural criticism and not quite far enough away to have settled into its own canon. While the War on Terror may be widely accepted as a military and geopolitical failure, Mishra noted during his 2024 Weston International Award acceptance speech in Toronto that “it is still not fully understood as a massive intellectual and moral fiasco: an attempt by the Western media as well as the political class to forge reality itself, which failed catastrophically, but not without embedding cruelty and mendacity deep and enduringly in public life.” The inability of Western journalists to fully face up to the war’s lies and violence was replicating itself, he said, in their coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza.

Like Coates, Mishra arrived at the Israel-Palestine conflict later in life than he would have liked. He had already reported on India’s mortally undemocratic occupation of Kashmir, the rise of extremism in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and the murderous pogrom against Muslims in Gujarat overseen by then–chief minister Narendra Modi. But nothing, he writes in his latest book, prepared him for what he saw in Israeli-occupied Palestine on a visit in the early aughts. He’d grown up in a family of Hindu nationalists who admired the pluck of Zionists—Jewish nationalists forging their own state despite colonial meddlers and resistant Muslims at every turn. His childhood reverence for Israel’s military successes extended as far as hanging on his bedroom wall a picture of Moshe Dayan, Israel’s eyepatch-donning defense minister who oversaw the Six-Day War. Mishra wrote The World After Gaza out of guilt, reminiscent again of Coates, who wrote the final chapter of The Message to right the “mistake” of citing Israel as an exemplary recipient of state-issued reparations in his famous breakthrough essay “The Case for Reparations.” In Mishra’s case, his book was not ablutionary so much as an effort to uphold Karl Jaspers’s idea of “metaphysical guilt”: that humans are bound by a solidarity “that makes each co-responsible for every wrong and injustice in the world, especially for crimes committed in his presence or with his knowledge.”

In The World After Gaza, Mishra exhumes from its roots the narrative that captivated his family and kept Israeli and diasporic Jews “weirdly oblivious to the reality of Israeli military supremacy in the Middle East.” Preempting charges of antisemitism by marshaling a phalanx of Jewish scholars, historians, writers, and activists, some of whom are Holocaust survivors themselves, Mishra uncovers a long tradition of Jewish and even early Zionist thinkers opposed to a violently exclusionary Jewish state—and opposed, too, to the slippery dictum that Jewishness and Zionism are indistinguishable. Jews as wide-ranging in time and character as Primo Levi, Hannah Arendt, Günther Anders, Philip Roth, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Alfred Kazin, Tom Segev, Woody Allen, Amos Oz, and dozens more make the case against the hazardous “vogue for Holocaust schlock” behind which the Likud party and US Congress today commit further war crimes.

Through these Jewish thinkers, Mishra evidences Jewishness outside an ethnonationalist Israel. He also evidences the decisive exploitation of the Holocaust—its privatization, industrialization, and sequestration from history—not by Palestinians but by ruthless and ambitious political actors, chiefly in Israel and the United States. With a succession of Israeli leaders having recast Arabs as latter-day Nazis, Jewish suffering has become a manipulative rhetorical tool, freed from accountability to facts or logic. In this way, the Israeli state, now ruled primarily by people born after 1945, has wrenched the Holocaust away from its actual victims, slandering or silencing even survivors of concentration camps who speak out against Zionism.

There emerges a grim irony in the possibility that those protesting for Gaza today may be the ones best poised to redeem the 20th century’s crimes against Jews and return them to their victims, who, after all, are not just Jews but also humans—something that they have in common with Palestinians. Crimes against humanity find their transcendent moral authority in the idea that they are crimes against all humans, regardless of borders or territories. Arendt’s pronouncement that Eichmann must hang because “no member of the human race can be expected to want to share the earth” with someone who did not want to share the earth with them bears eerily upon the architects of Gaza’s erasure, who scarcely view Palestinians as humans and certainly do not seem to want to share the world with them.

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Mishra depicts Jewish critics of Israel, writing half a century ago, as tolling a resigned sort of melancholia. Mark Edelman, a commander of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, told an interviewer that Israel had become “a chauvinist, religious state, where a Christian is a second-class citizen and a Muslim is third-class. It is a disaster,” he continued, that “after three million were murdered in Poland, they want to dominate everything and not to consider non-Jews!” Today, melancholia seems to have given way to dazed hopelessness punctured now and again by spasms of clarity. On one hand, there are those who continue to dwell in the well-crafted myth of a straightforwardly redemptive Israel, despite the reams of contradictory information. These people tend to doubt the veracity of widespread civilian devastation in Gaza. They are unlikely to acknowledge that Israeli leaders once looked contemptuously upon Holocaust survivors, that Israel’s founder David Ben-Gurion once referred to them as “human debris,” or that Mizrahi Jewish immigrants from Arab countries were once so undesirable to the Ashkenazi elite that some even had their babies confiscated in order to spare Israel an Ishmaelitish fate. It was Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, Mishra writes, “who turned the murder of six million Jews into a new basis for Israel’s identity, especially among the ill-treated and resentful Jewish voters of Middle Eastern origin.”

On the other hand, there is that younger, fresher contingent that refuses to buy into the weary correlation between anti-Zionism and antisemitism—and that can’t be threatened into shame or fear. It was hard to hold it against these young dissenters when they shouted, stumbled, or overstepped the mark, as they often put their freedom and their careers on the line for a cause across an ocean. Of course, for those in the United States who were most interested in dwelling on cancel culture and collegiate neuroses, these juvenile objectors were irresistible. They supplied good aesthetic critiques. For the first 18 months of the war, our centrist and traditionalist commentariat, ensconced in a near-erotic intensity of abstraction, depended on this kind of critical resting place. Fashionably countercultural fixations brought the incomprehensible back into familiar arenas of cultural commentary and domestic foibles. Hand-wringing about campus militarism was certainly easier than attempting to contend with industrialized mass murder. It was among this commentariat class, perhaps in an editorial meeting, that one was most likely to hear something along the lines of “Yes, civilian deaths are always tragic, but this is on-the-nose—we know it already. Let’s say something interesting.” For them, the fact that war and imperialism have killed millions of people was embarrassing in its sheer obviousness, plenty touted by Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and the rest of those shabby, idealistic, alarm-sounding professors on the picket line. It wasn’t until Gaza became “the hungriest place on earth,” as one UN official described it, that our cool-headed realists came around to the idea that this is no ordinary war.

Even so, this younger, fresher contingent found agreeable correlates in the wider world who had suffered too much imperialist brutality to be persuaded by narratives of exceptionalism. If Mishra’s lecture at the Barbican Centre were canceled for one particularly unutterable thought, it surely would have been this: the wretched global masses have noticed “a belligerent version of ‘Holocaust denial’ among the elites of former imperialist countries, who refuse to address their countries’ past of genocidal brutality and plunder.” For those people outside the West, Mishra writes in his 2024 essay for the London Review of Books,

the Shoah did not appear as an unprecedented atrocity. […] Most of the world doesn’t carry the burden of Christian European guilt over the Shoah, and does not regard the creation of Israel as a moral necessity to absolve the sins of 20th-century Europeans. For more than seven decades now, the argument among the “darker peoples” has remained the same: why should Palestinians be dispossessed and punished for crimes in which only Europeans were complicit? And they can only recoil with disgust from the implicit claim that Israel has the right to slaughter 13,000 children not only as a matter of self-defence but because it is a state born out of the Shoah.

The point in such clarifications is not that the West and its allies are the only source of political evil, but that national mythologies about good versus evil almost always cover up the “good” side’s own gluts of ugly violence. The attempt here is to try and cull jingoism from justice, connivance from circumstance, myth from truth.

Mishra is effective in forcing the Holocaust out of its historical vacuum in the pliable imaginary and back into the world of shared burdens and interconnected histories. He’s also effective in braiding together narratives and identities. He finds common ground between Israeli officials and Nazi officials, between the “industrial-scale slaughter” in Gaza and that of the Shoah, and between Zionists and white supremacists, antisemites, Islamophobes, and Hindu nationalists. He recounts a 1976 visit to the Knesset by South African prime minister John Vorster, a former Nazi supporter and a champion of apartheid, where he was toasted by Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. India, Mishra points out, is Israel’s biggest weapons purchaser, and far-right Hindus the constituents of Netanyahu’s biggest overseas fanbase; if Hindu nationalists admire both Nazism and Zionism, it’s not least because “both Nazi Germany and Israel seemed determined to cleanse their states of alien and potentially disloyal elements, and encourage a militaristic ethos among their citizens.”

Mishra’s deliberate entanglements recall a 2002 speech by Norman Finkelstein in which he characteristically dispenses with discretion and plunges the grimly paradoxical into the jugular:

To repress Palestinian resistance, a senior Israeli officer earlier this year urged the army to “analyze and internalize the lessons of how the German army fought in the Warsaw ghetto.” Judging by the recent Israeli carnage in the West Bank—the targeting of Palestinian ambulances and medical personnel, the targeting of journalists, the killing of Palestinian children “for sport,” the rounding up, handcuffing and blindfolding of all Palestinian males between the ages 15 and 50, and affixing of numbers on their wrists, the indiscriminate torture of Palestinian detainees, the denial of food, water, electricity, and medical assistance to the Palestinian civilian population, the indiscriminate air assaults on Palestinian neighbourhoods, the use of Palestinian civilians as human shields, the bulldozing of Palestinian homes with the occupants huddled inside—it appears that the Israeli army is following the officer’s advice.

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Mishra is known for making grand pronouncements about beginnings and ends, schisms and eras. In his last nonfiction book, the 2020 essay collection Bland Fanatics: Liberals, Race, and Empire, he announced that “a great correction” to postcolonial myths was underway with the late-2010s elections of Western populists and the passage of Brexit. In his preceding book, Age of Anger, his foremost verdict was in the title itself, though another came in his declaration that the “savage violence” sweeping the world was likely to culminate in a Third World War.

In The World After Gaza, alongside his confrontations of historical narratives, Mishra makes three bold claims. First, that the Israel-Palestine wars can be mapped upon W. E. B. Du Bois’s “color line”—that the conflict, in short, is as much a racial issue as it is anything else. Second, that decolonization, not the Holocaust, was the defining event of the 20th century. And third, that the mass killing that began on October 7 in Israel and continued into Gaza is the defining event of the 21st century.

On the first count, Mishra appears to have simplified things, reaching for the last centuries’ harsh unions of racism and imperialism to paint Gaza in terms that presently resonate. Descendants of Mizrahi Jews make up a sizable portion of Israel’s population—Mishra himself reminds us of early campaigns to civilize the “so-called Oriental Jews” who moved to Israel from Muslim countries in the late 1940s—obscuring neat racial divides between Israelis and Palestinians. More broadly, conceptions of postmodern imperialism must reckon with the fact that people of color serve at the highest ranks of government, military, and industry—not only in Western war machines but also in developing and multinational sectors that are not without their own internecine depravities.

Mishra’s second count may very well be correct, given the hundreds of millions of people around the world struck both by the indentures of colonialism and the postcolonial plummet into often dysfunctional and corruption-prone reconceptions.

When it comes to Gaza’s singularity—“a final rupture in the moral history of the world since the ground zero of 1945”—one pauses before the repellent task of weighing death tolls and quantifying the worst acts of which humans are capable. “[N]o disaster,” writes Mishra, “compares to Gaza—nothing has left us with such an intolerable weight of grief, perplexity and bad conscience.” A retrospective of 21st-century calamities resurfaces the genocides in Sudan’s Darfur region, Myanmar’s Rakhine State, and the Ethiopian state of Tigray; the humanitarian catastrophes in Yemen, Sudan, Haiti, and Burkina Faso; and the death tolls, even higher than that in Gaza, of the wars in Iraq and Syria. Perhaps his claim rings truer if we interpret it in light of what distinguishes Israel’s annihilation of Gaza from other wars—that the unhuman horror, committed very much by humans within a red-hot geopolitical nexus, was dispersed throughout the world in real time. In the forms of images, videos, and pleas, these horrors were transmitted directly by the sufferers to their witnesses, live streamed without the mediation of traditional arbiters of image and testimony, leaving the old guard of corporate media scrambling to justify, ignore, or acknowledge what global onlookers saw for themselves. In this sense, and certainly within the United States, Gaza did mark a definitive rupture in political discourse. Interrogations of US foreign policy—indeed, of the very purpose of overseas US military operations—have been mainstreamed by a new generation more resentful of the national security establishment than any since college-age kids were forced to leave home and rampage through Southeast Asia.

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A book review that’s well behind the pack has the privilege of surveying the anterior literature—of reviewing the reviews. Mishra’s book, like Coates’s The Message, brought out the Balkanized gamut of opinions about Gaza. He was criticized from the right by Tunku Varadarajan, a jaundiced dilettante from the managerial class (in his case, the American Enterprise Institute) who boorishly regurgitated the very same bellicose talking points that Mishra spends half his book dismantling; from the left by Sasha Frere-Jones, who found Mishra’s prose to be lousy and thought he didn’t go nearly far enough in skewering Israel; and by those from the netherworld who, despite knowing little about the conflict beyond a probable perusal of the Anti-Defamation League’s website, have minted foreign affairs laurels out of monomaniacal meditations on identity politics (Coleman Hughes’s self-indulgently blinkered review of The Message typifies this).

There were plenty of admiring responses too. More importantly, Mishra, along with much of the old guard of progressive intellectuals, got away with ringing critiques of Israel with no more than teeth marks—a far cry from the drawn blood and rubbished careers that were unavoidable during the days of Norman Finkelstein’s tenure trials. Mishra lost his current affairs column at Bloomberg. Sponsors pulled out of Masha Gessen’s Hannah Arendt Prize award ceremony after Gessen wrote a New Yorker essay comparing the suffering of Jews in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe to that of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Coates was lambasted on national television by a morning news anchor who alleged that sections of the book “would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist” (the mass killing of civilians by remote control, it seemed, didn’t count as “extreme”). Nevertheless, the old guard spoke the truth, and they spoke it publicly. If Mishra’s book feels rushed at points, more about the world before Gaza than about the world during or after the war, it’s because the subject, while he was writing, could be rushed—the fearsome litigiousness that had once boxed professional writers into extreme precaution simply could not contend with the one-third of Americans who were vocally critical of Israel’s actions.

Of course, conditions for dissent contorted once again after President Joe Biden yielded to a successor as hell-bent on weaponizing Zionism domestically as Biden had been in more literally weaponizing Zionism throughout the occupied Palestinian territories. After Donald Trump took office, the old intellectual guard had to contend with a fresh onslaught of threats and hearings, and even the most moneyed educational institutions in the nation were caught up in the truculence of Israeli supremacist groups such as Canary Mission and Betar US. The latter organization openly called for the killing of more Gazan children and petitioned the government to deport even naturalized American citizens who objected to Israel’s genocide, consummating the chimera that allegiance to Israel arbitrates who is truly American and who is perniciously (and swarthily) foreign.

Upon Trump’s return, students, emerging writers, and young or untenured professionals, who’d never had it as easy as their established counterparts, now faced a sensational new chapter of terrorizing Zionism within US institutions, namely Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s abductions of activists, some of whom held green cards. Even a book review such as this—one that does no more than take seriously the argument that historical state-perpetrated crimes are being weaponized to justify new state-perpetrated crimes—could quite conceivably obstruct future writing assignments and career advancements.

Curiously, the majority of journalists and intellectuals who decried the government’s guerrilla-style disappearances of students appeared to focus on questions of illegality, precedent, and what this means for “the rest of us” who might one day find ourselves protesting against something supposedly less contentious than maimed and murdered babies. Rarely did the mainstream press plainly state that these students were not protesting for something even slightly controversial. They weren’t, for instance, advocating for industrialized slaughter or mass starvation or a refugee crisis. Nor were they pledging their loyalty to Hamas or, for that matter, to a mercilessly rampaging, multibillionaire military. And yet, the pro-IDF students who did precisely this were left untouched—if not coddled—by lawmakers while students who pleaded for the end of a genocide languished in penitentiary black holes. All the while, oligarchs and lawmakers with stakes in Israel’s incessant militarization cannily exploited the shibboleths of antisemitism, safety, fear, and the Holocaust.

One plausible upside to the Trump administration’s tendentious war against political speech is that it has served to compound Israel’s delegitimization on the global stage. By illegally abducting activists under the strikingly shoddy guise that they were harming US foreign policy interests—which was the explanation offered by Secretary of State Marco Rubio—it seemed as though the Trump administration was scarcely even trying to appear civilized or rational. It might even be possible that by having crystallized in the American zeitgeist an obdurate resentment toward Israeli policies, the administration inadvertently has found itself on the side of the very protesters whose lives they continue to upend. By now, even centrists express disbelief at the parallel headlines of Israeli soldiers admitting that they shoot into crowds of Gazans desperate for humanitarian aid (“Our form of communication is gunfire”) alongside that of a student detained at a citizenship hearing for objecting to Israel’s campaign of death. The idea that “antisemitism,” “campus fear,” or an alleged “wave of hatred” faced by Jewish students can be named in the same sentence, even the same universe, as one of our century’s most odious campaigns of anti-humanism adeptly betrays a cunningly cultivated cultural nexus in which one person’s anxieties handily trounce another’s erasure.

Still, in spite of these dark and disheartening observations, and contrary to Mishra’s claim that the media class ignored Gaza, the last 20 months have seen even mainstream Western news organizations forced to shed some light, however flickering and inadequate, on the calamities as they’ve unfolded. In fact, the cankers of relativism aside, it is hard to deny that Gaza’s bombardment received more international press attention than the majority of the last two decades’ deadly international conflicts. A walk through many national newsrooms and broadcast centers in the United States might reveal one fundamental reason for this: more young, progressive, and minority employees work in mainstream media than perhaps ever before.

As Israel cleansed Gaza, these young and recent hires moved the meter, however marginally, for a second time. In 2020, when they got senior news editors to say “Yes, you’re right, there should be more racial representation, and we should be more sensitive in our coverage of police shootings,” they brought about a rudimentary shift in mainstream reportage on police—previously a bulletproof class of civil servants. Four years later, the infiltrators pushed media coverage past another third rail: by petitioning for newsroom-wide discussions about the passive voice when it came to Israel’s murders, for the responsibility to clarify history, and even against the vintage scaremongering that marked Coates’s televised flaying. Thus, CNN declared a genocide. A chorus of Washington Post editorials made the same charge. The New Yorker unleashed a fusillade of revulsed essays. The New York Times prominently featured previously unthinkable op-eds. One guest essay consisting of interviews with dozens of medical workers in Gaza quoted an anesthesiologist as saying, “Malnutrition was widespread. It was common to see patients reminiscent of Nazi concentration camps with skeletal features.” The piece’s author added: “It is difficult to conceive of more severe violations […] than young children regularly being shot in the head.”

The paper of record, as it happened, reviewed The World After Gaza. Its write-up, favorable though tepid, both proved and disproved Mishra’s media cynicism: it elevated his argument and intellectual standing while scarcely acknowledging the Times’ own pivotal role in abetting or forgiving state-sanctioned murders while they unfolded. The paper’s analysis in March of Trump’s seeming embrace of Putin, which began by calling the United States “a nation whose core idea is liberty and whose core calling has been the defense of democracy against tyranny,” admirably caricatured the schizoid credulity of journalists when faced with a fresh Pentagon agenda.

¤

At the close of his Weston International Award acceptance speech, Mishra said he was ready to step aside. He had lost faith in his contemporaries. “[W]e need fresh ideas about how to rethink our past, and to chart our way out of the present into a liveable future,” he said. “I strongly believe that they will come from a younger generation of writers, artists, and journalists.”

If Mishra is right, and the younger, disillusioned generation does take the torch, it will have to earn it. In order to chart an etiology of postindustrial imperialism in an age, no less, of near-metaphysical capitalism, this generation will have to winnow what’s true from billowing myths. Amid the wars between the complicated and the simplified, irony and sincerity, the internet and the book, the armchaired and the interred, those who speak about Palestine and Israel will have to balance looking inward and looking outward—eluded neither by one’s own ignorances nor by material realities. For citizens on the sidelines, including those Americans whose taxes are continually ransacked for more bombs and guns to be manufactured by more multinational contractors—Americans who, for better or for worse, will not lie in front of Lockheed Martin factory gates until they’re sent to jail—perhaps all that can be done, perhaps something that can be done, is to continue thinking, speaking, telling the truth, and saying what’s already been said, over and over again.