The World After Gaza

A History

De: Pankaj Mishra

Narrado por: Mikhail Sen

"Courageous and bracing, learned and ethical, rigorous and mind-expanding.”—Naomi Klein

“This profoundly important and urgent book finds Mishra, one of our most intellectually astute and courageous writers, at the peak of his powers.”—Hisham Matar

“A triumphant work of empathy in a polarizing conflict.”—Anand Giridharadas

Named a Best Book of the Month by TIME • Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2025 by The Guardian, Bustle, Foreign Policy, and Literary Hub

From one of our foremost public intellectuals, an essential reckoning with the war in Gaza that reframes our understanding of the ongoing conflict, its historical roots, and the fractured global response

The postwar global order was in many ways shaped in response to the Holocaust. That event became the benchmark for atrocity, and, in the Western imagination, the paradigmatic genocide. Its memory orients so much of our thinking, and crucially, forms the basic justification for Israel’s right first to establish itself and then to defend itself. But in many parts of the world, ravaged by other conflicts and experiences of mass slaughter, the Holocaust’s singularity is not always taken for granted, even when its hideous atrocity is. Outside of the West, Pankaj Mishra argues, the dominant story of the twentieth century is that of decolonization.

The World After Gaza takes the current war, and the polarized reaction to it, as the starting point for a broad reevaluation of two competing narratives of the last century: the Global North’s triumphant account of victory over totalitarianism and the spread of liberal capitalism, and the Global South’s hopeful vision of racial equality and freedom from colonial rule. At a moment when the world’s balance of power is shifting, and the Global North no longer commands ultimate authority, it is critically important that we understand how and why the two halves of the world are failing to talk to each other.

As old touchstones and landmarks crumble, only a new history with a sharply different emphasis can reorient us to the world and worldviews now emerging into the light. In this concise, powerful, and pointed treatise, Mishra reckons with the fundamental questions posed by our present crisis—about whether some lives matter more than others, how identity is constructed, and what the role of the nation-state ought to be. The World After Gaza is an indispensable moral guide to our past, present, and future.

©2025 Pankaj Mishra (P)2025 Penguin Audio

Reseñas de la Crítica

“Stimulating and brilliantly researched . . . no incendiary polemic, but rather a sober and extensively documented treatise on the discursive history that has given rise to the current situation.”—The Irish Times

“Mishra’s book is a triumphant work of empathy in a polarizing conflict. It gives voice and extends sympathy and probes the innermost fears and aspirations of both parties in the conflict—and shows how fine the line is between humanity and its opposite.”—Anand Giridharadas, The.Ink

“Mishra, who has employed his crystalline prose in novels and nonfiction alike, methodically unpacks the 'extensive moral breakdown' that preceded what he describes as 'the blithe slaughter of innocents in Gaza.' . . . At heart, this is an exhaustively sourced plea for historical literacy that opens up what Mishra calls 'a broader vista of human fraternity and solidarity' and recognizes that across the globe, people victimized by 'historical mass crimes of genocide, slavery and racist imperialism' wonder why 'their own holocausts . . . have not been much regarded in history.' . . . A clear-eyed look at the Holocaust as justification for Israel’s wars.”—Kirkus

Disappointing

Lots of insights but falls apart in the last two chapters, willfully overlooking its own research and findings.

Was this text ghostwritten by Hamas?

If the answer to my above question were given in the affirmative, I would find myself far less disturbed than I am at present. At least, that would make sense, since Hamas has no credible claim to objectivity on the subject. But this writer is not Hamas and indeed insists that he did not approach this fraught topic with native or pre-existing antisemitic sentiments, or with the absurd but ubiquitous and reflexive hostility to and preoccupation with Israel that one finds in everywhere in the Middle East and through much of the Global South as a matter of course. I expected to disagree with the writer's position. I like to read the works of the opposing side and I have read much of the seminal texts of Islamist thinkers (there are some!), What i cannot abide in this text is the pretense of rigorous and judicious reasoning. The author proceeds from the assumption that Israel is committing a genocide, the gravest of all crime against humanity. He accuses Israel of committing exactly the atrocities that have been inflicted upon
on the Jewish nation.