Review By Harsimran Kaur | Rating: 5/5

We all have seen the obstreperous cries howling through the Israel-Palestine war. The caterwaul has still not found a sheath, where each drop cutting across a knife of conceited ‘ego’ lies barren; now in confluence with the murder weapon, the tear in effect lacks purpose and validation.  Haven’t wars become an Eldorado of depredating power for the perpetrator; an enfant terrible whose devilry is shepherd by moral conscious to benefit the rendition of masculinity?   

Or, is it just the war of today like the ‘war at Gaza’ or the ‘Ukraine conflict’ that question autonomy & self-protection? The right to deserve more than the ‘other’ has been the main-spring for ‘wars’ over centuries. It has never been about revenge but to secure one’s own place in the raison d’ etre of self-aggrandizement, quite evident of the ‘Gaza imbroglio’; look at the dissension between the Jews and palestines full of calumnies, and a reckoning to now remove the long-dried blood stains and the oppressive weight of self-pity.

Pankaj Mishra is elaborate about ‘Imperialistic roots’ and how the ‘White Supremacy’ today fails to rinse its mouth with dirt to squeamishly throw it on the less deserving. The vertiginous victims after eating the virulent poison of despotic rule have now risen to challenge a sense of belonging and identity. But, somewhere, as Mishra puts in, the ‘Imperialistic Panjandrum’ still prevails as it is just not an act of subterfuge but also about profound restoration of power aligned to one’s sense of morally equipped dilemmas. Think; think… it’s like cutting the fish in scales, to see bones present everywhere!  

Is it dilemma of self-preservation, a dilemma of self-sustainability or a dilemma of self-reliance; all of it arising from a daiquiri of betrayal and abandonment? ‘The World after Gaza’ by Pankaj Mishra kneads the dough, tough and twisted, of ambivalence of the West allied powers towards the dereliction of Palestines, and how anti-Semitism has turned into Philosemitism? 

Through the book, we are trying to understand the impulse of ‘survival.’ The ‘Jews’, in particular for Israeli nationhood, think of ‘survival’ as preserving life through a prescriptive will led by a traumatized sub-conscious that still carries the impertinence of the past prolificacies’ of the Nazis. They still feel betrayed by their priggish megalomania, and today, to clear the forbidden territory of conscious possessed by inclusive fear, aren’t the Jews presenting themselves as a grotesque simulacrum of the ‘Nazi regime’?    

What do we make of the ‘Israel-Palestine’ conflict? Isn’t it a rendition by a virtuous mind stiffened in the panjandrum of ‘ego’? Is it then reasonable to accept the once bête noir Jews rise to the same eccentric bellicose, now dissolving ‘Gaza’ in the same tide that once carried their epithet of dignity? 

Mishra seems overburdened with the capriciousness of the ‘West’ and the impact on the minority as has always been the case. Isn’t Racism born from the incapacity of the mind to be tolerant? It’s a purposeful cycle further creating another cycle of moral shifts and belief system that outstrip the former to galvanize and assimilate another set of paradoxes?  The ‘anti-apartheid movement’ in Africa and the ‘Nationalistic movement’ in India are perfect examples of finally creating their own rhetoric. ‘Israel’ now comes as a stirred-up rain!

Ironically inked as an insipid war of belonging, Mishra is contemplative.

Do we belong to Past, Present or Future?

Do we belong to our conscious or to power?

Do we really know what belonging is or ‘racial ignominy’ and ‘color cesspool’ have cut the corner stone of our piousness?

Where do Jews belong to; a question that Mishra has evoked through contrapuntal? Is it to the idea of Zionism or to the masochistic burden of the Shaoh or the anti-Semitic mea culpa? Are the actions of Israel to take over the territories of West Bank, Golan Heights and Gaza justified? What are we looking at? Aren’t just these repressed emotions furtively being off-loaded to a hard-bitten bulwark resting on bellicose jingoism?  

Where is this mind born from? It seems so petrified, still lambasting on the forbidden as if the right to perish would be forsaken if the ‘past’ is buried under the gravity of insolence. The fastidious mind of Israel does not seem convincing, though outwardly more apprehensive and bitten by callous toxity. Mishra goes on to describe such a behavior arising out of ‘decolonization’. The effort to put a cul-de-sac to ‘colonization’ in fact is a righteous act of nationalism that led nations to believe in the perspective impulse of ‘freedom’ and thereby grow in austerity of self-governance and equality.

There is charade too. The relationship between Germany and Israel has grown in terms of trade. Where are the burnt scales of skin that lie undissected on the crimson ground; never looked back by the Nazis, and today somewhere feel the blazing sun pouring a piteous look, or feet tromping on the buried carcasses? Life goes on, the war once it was, today is only a reflection of what was lost; the future thinks only of gain.     

The book is full of interestingly laid out facts and ethical extrapolations by renewed Holocaust survivor ‘Primo Levi’, and the famous writer ‘Jean Amery’ who did not leave any stone unturned to propagate for a Jewish homeland to cut the humiliation faced by Jews for decades. Mishra has put across an extensive research on the psychological ‘response’ and ‘resilience’ incandescently inflamed during the holocaust and now the blurring aftermath that sees mental deleteriousness anointed as self-protection’.

‘The World after Gaza’ is disinterring of sentiments that once fleeting on the periphery of clouds have risen as a cumulonimbus to evoke puritanical onslaught of moral depredations.

TAKE AWAY

Absolutely catastrophic in the parlance of how world is about to shape in the near future!