Posts tagged "gaza":
The World After Gaza
Finished reading Mishra's The World After Gaza. I think I was expecting the book to tell me how the Gaza genocide changes our world, and to hear some speculation about the future. But in fact, it tells us more about how we ended up in a world where genocide is still possible and is even the likely result.
It is superbly researched: it feels as if he has read every book related to modern Jewish history, the Shoah, as well as everything related to colonialism and its effect on shaping the modern world. His analysis is brilliant and sympathetic. He rejects the simplistic readings we usually hear, such as that Israel is a merely a modern case of classic settler-colonialism.
This is not a book that leans much on journalism. The voices he brings are mainly of authors and intellectuals. Sometimes I felt myself missing the cries of the actual victims of the Gaza genocide. Not hearing these, but only the opinions of Palestinians like (the late) Edward Said or of Raja Shehadeh feels a little weird; as if the victims themselves lack agency (as perhaps they do). It's as if the victims of any other modern genocide victims might be substituted for Gazans - were the book not so specifically concerned with the Jewish settlement of Palestine.
Today I was listening to an Empire series podcast on the writer Joseph Conrad, whose Heart of Darkness is usually seen as a fierce indictment of colonialism, yet they mentioned that Chinua Achebe calls him a racist: only white people are portrayed as real flesh and blood characters: Africans are only there as a group in the background. The World After Gaza is not a novel, and it isn't written by a white man, but one feels that the subject is less about Gaza than about what the genocide means.
Of course, this is still the burning question of our time, perhaps even more so since Trump has come along with his Board of Peace, which Jonathan Cook and many others see as an attempt to wreck the old world order and create a new one, in his frightful image. About Gaza's significance, Mishra says:
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 wiht the deep malaise of their societies.
It is Gaza that has quickened their understanding of a decrepit world which no longer has any belief in itself, and which, concerned merely with self-preservation, tramples freely on the rights and principles it once held sacred, repudiates all sense of dignity and honour, and rewards violence, lies, cruelty and servility.
At the same time that Gaza induces vertigo, a feeling of chaoe and emptiness, it becomes for countless powerless people the essential condition of political and ethical consciousness in the twenty-first century - just as the First World War was for a generation in the West.
Among these "powerless people" he includes both protesters in rich countries and myriads of citizens of the global south. The book scarcely bothers to appeal to people who believe that what has been happening in Gaza is perfectly justified. It speaks instead to those who are bewildered, appalled, or frightened about the direction our world seems to be taking.
The Canadian PM Mark Carney, the other day, said that, in today's world, if you don't get a seat at the table, you're on the menu. I personally wonder what will happen when the four fifths of the world's population - or whatever the current figure is - who collectively earn less than the top 50 or so billionaires, finally crash the dinner party. I have a feeling that the billionaires will have already departed for the shelter of their island paradises, and only the less important dinner guests, their cohorts and enablers of genocides, will be called to account.