EVEN AS THE GENOCIDE in Gaza continues, and also the wider conflagration it has unleased in West Asia and beyond, the wheels of scholarly production grind inexorably on. One might legitimately wonder whether more information, analysis or knowledge in an already saturated mediascape can alter moral intuitions that have calcified in ways that enable the ongoing carnage. Yet while books do not stop genocides, and vice versa, we seem to write them in the hope that their insights might do something to shift moral compasses, perhaps by illuminating hidden affinities or recasting received understandings of victim and perpetrator.
Two books published in the shadow of this dark moment attempt to do this in different ways, with markedly divergent results – in part because they centre different historical experiences of oppression and struggle. The blurb of the Southasian edition of Pankaj Mishra’s The World After Gaza promises that the book will examine the competing claims of the Holocaust, Atlantic slavery and colonialism to the status of the atrocity most paradigmatic of the human capacity for evil. The book, however, focuses very largely on the Holocaust. In contrast, decolonisation in West Asia and Southasia forms the intellectual, political and historical milieu for Esmat Elhalaby’s Parting Gifts of Empire: Palestine and India at the Dawn of Decolonization. Amid their many differences in subject matter and style, both books are interested in how we might locate Zionism in relation to colonialism and anticolonialism.
The World After Gaza brings to mind the adage that books should not be judged by their covers. Besides the discrepancy between its blurb and contents, the title itself is also misleading. The book is not about the world, but rather about how the politics of Israel, Germany and the United States have been distorted by memory culture around the Holocaust, or Shoah. Its gesture towards an aftermath of Gaza seems to suggest either that the place no longer exists or that the genocide in Gaza has ended, neither of which is true. The book is much more about the discourses of Jewish persecution, suffering and vengeance that preceded the current moment in Gaza and paved the way for its destruction. One might say that it is not really about Gaza or Palestine at all. Insofar as it can bring itself to say anything about what has unfolded there in the days since 7 October 2023 – when Hamas militants broke out of Gaza to attack, kill and take hostage hundreds of Israelis – it chooses its words so carefully as to leave the reader mystified about where the author stands on what happened next.