Looking through a splintered mirror

By Shakir Mir

In September 1982, the rightwing Lebanese militia and Israeli forces massacred 3,000 Palestinian refugees sheltering in the squalid camps of Beirut. In some ways, the killings were an affront to the US which had promised protection for the refugees, should the Palestinian Liberation Organisation withdraw from Lebanon — which it did — in response to Israeli war bluster.  

However, accusing Arabs of being modern-day Nazis, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin gave a short shrift to US assurances and proceeded to authorise the bloodshed. When Ronald Reagan and others called out Israel for its conduct, Begin accused them of blood libel — one of those occasions where Israelis have leveraged the ghastly memories of the Holocaust to serve modern political ends. 

Primo Levi, a Jewish Italian writer, saw the carnage in Lebanon and the gas chambers of Auschwitz as “two experiences that superimposed in an agonising way.” Günther Anders, another Jewish writer, was aghast at the way Israeli people had “obeyed Begin in the same way as German people obeyed Hitler.”

If those views were shared in contemporary times, they are most likely to be denounced as antisemitic, given the loaded connotations the term has acquired. But “it’s worth remembering that many such reexaminations of Zionism’s fate began early in the existence of the State of Israel,” writes historian Pankaj Mishra, in his new book The World After Gaza. 

Given the book’s title, one might expect it to be an exploration of the genocidal violence that unfolded in Gaza after the devastating October 2023 attacks. It is not.

Instead, we are ushered into a world of a discursive genre popular among a section of top Jewish writers and intellectuals, offering superb insights into how they perceived the Israeli state’s creation in the aftermath of the Holocaust. 

The book demonstrates that Israel’s modes of self-preservation had spawned an unresolved narrative tension within the community. In sharp contrast to modern beliefs wherein Israel’s organised erasure of Palestinian lives is rationalised as a legitimate response to Palestinian resistance, a section of Jewry was apprehensive about the Israeli tactics. 

Mishra traces a trajectory of how the Shoah (Hebrew term for Holocaust) came to be sedimented into the Israeli and larger Western consciousness. For all its relentless invocation in the media today, the memories of the Holocaust by 1960 had, for all practical purposes, ‘gone permanently,’ wrote Raul Hilberg, the author of The Destruction of European Jews. 

Textbooks on Jewish history written in 1948 featured the Holocaust on just a single page. Ten pages, by comparison, discussed Napoleonic wars. Holocaust was yet to be distinguished as a great atrocity of standalone character and was, instead, treated at par with other big cruelties of time: “attempted extermination of Slav populations, Gypsies and gay people.”

But that would change soon with the trial of Adolf Eichmann through which the Israeli leaders projected an image of a country as a resolute defender of Jews. Also concomitant to this trial was the emergent discourse about “other Nazis” — a sinister allusion directed at Arabs, which helped Israel fashion tropes about the country being at a perpetual risk of extermination. 

Thus countries like Germany came to “atone” for its past sins by cementing defence deals with Israel and supplying it endlessly with arms. 

Facing a crushing defeat in Vietnam, the United States — where people couldn’t initially tell Menachem Begin from Shimon Peres — began to see Israel as a dependable ally in the new important geo-political arena, the Middle East. 

Jewish American intellectuals, however, problematised this new Western preoccupation. Robert Walter, a professor of Hebrew, despaired over the falsification of “our lives as Jews by setting them so dramatically in the shadow of the crematoria.”

Historian Shalom Goldman was perturbed at finding “conservative Christians who were more gung ho about Israel than my Jewish family and friends.”

By the 1980s, the Western world was so blithely sleep-walking into this Imaginarium that American publishers would go on to censor Jewish critics of Israel. Today, if Israel can get away with its horrendous actions in Gaza, it is because the conceptual categories with which the Israeli nation-state gets imbricated have been allowed to become solidified into the axioms of our time, and haven’t been reconsidered enough the way they ought to be. 

A provocative work, The World After Gaza does exactly that, rupturing the intellectual paradigm through which we have been reading about the Israel-Palestine conflict.