Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
In The Age of Anger: A History of the Present (2017), Indian novelist, historian, and public intellectual Pankaj Mishra described ressentiment as the defining feature of our age. Friedrich Nietzsche had spoken of the “men of ressentiment,” the alienated, abandoned, humiliated, and pushed aside losers in the modern world. Western imperialism, Mishra added, had condemned most of the world’s population to the status of “uninvited guests at the feast of life” prepared by global capitalism. A grossly unequal distribution of wealth and power had led to a worldwide state of emergency abounding in hatred and violence. The West had a resentful population of its own, exemplified by Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. Mishra focused on the Global South, though, where the world’s poorest are most heavily concentrated, “their numbers expanded…by an increasingly unequal and unstable economy.” A socialist in politics, he attacked the neoliberal globalized economy as the main cause of what was wrong with the world.
In Mishra’s new book on the events in Gaza since the October 7, 2023, attack by Hamas and other militant Palestinian groups against Israel, he makes many of the same historical points found in The Age of Anger, particularly regarding the importance of Western imperialism as the context for current events in the Middle East. The Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 between Great Britain and France for control of the Middle East would be incorporated into the peace settlement following the Great War. The Balfour Declaration of the next year, calling for a Jewish homeland, initiated a series of events leading to the creation of the state of Israel. After another war, a pro-Israel United States would replace Britain and France as the foremost Western military and economic power lording over the region. As a consequence of Western imperialism, the Palestinian problem became a splitting headache for the world.
In The World After Gaza: A History, Mishra adds a focus on “the color line” in the global racial hierarchy. The Age of Anger included a brilliant intellectual history of alienation in the modern world, but adhered to a largely economic interpretation for the current events under discussion. Racial privilege, of course, never had been in doubt in a world made by and for white men. Race, however, plays a decisive role in Mishra’s depiction of the tragedy in Gaza. Economics is never absent in this book, but the brownness of the Palestinians matters more in the fate that the West has intended for them. He makes effective use of Edward Said’s ideas in Orientalism (1978) about the racism and cultural stereotypes used to dehumanize the Palestinians and, in Zionist propaganda, to turn them into non-persons with no use for a homeland of their own.
The World After Gaza features a prominent autobiographical dimension. In the “Prologue,” Mishra describes his early life in India growing up during the 1970s in a family of Brahmin Hindu nationalists. He was taught to revere Zionism as a proudly nationalist movement with much to teach India. A picture of military leader and symbol of Israel’s fighting spirit, Moshe Dayan, adorned a wall in his boyhood bedroom. Only much later did Mishra become aware that a people called the Palestinians even existed other than as a terrorist threat to the state of Israel. He records the turning points in his reading and different life experiences that enabled him to understand “the long Palestinian ordeal.”
In Part I “Afterlives of the Shoah,” Mishra recounts a trip that he made to Israel in 2008. What he saw during this visit appalled him. Nothing that he had read or heard about Israel prior to his going there prepared him for the brutality and squalor of the military occupation in the Palestinian territories. Official Israeli mistreatment of and contempt toward the Palestinians were bad enough, but the sadistic violence of the nationalistic settler movement in the territories left him aghast. Yet in the Western media, the flagrant crimes against the Palestinians went unreported or were greatly understated as unavoidable consequences of Israel’s existential struggle to protect Jews from another Holocaust. Mishra notes in particular a “near total exclusion of Palestinian and Arab voices from American publications.” He devotes an entire chapter to the German record of post-World War II support for Israel and disregard for the Palestinians, an example largely followed by other member-states of the European Union. Indeed, the advanced Western democracies have taken the lead in backing Israel’s brutal regime in the Palestinian territories.
When Mishra takes up his main theme, the current war in Gaza, he calls it a world-historical event. October 7, 2023, “has ruptured time and removed the world before Gaza to another era.” He will be faulted for not taking into adequate account the Hamas murder of innocent Israeli citizens that day. No historical event exists in isolation from the historical events that precede it. He does not pass by in silence Hamas war crimes, but what we know about them should have received a greater weight in his account. What seems undebatable is the rightness of his claim that the ensuing gruesomely disproportionate slaughter of innocent Palestinian civilians and the demolition of their communities as a palpable measure of ethnic cleansing will go down in history as the greatest crime of our time. As a consequence, Israel has become a double South Africa of the apartheid era. Evil as that South African regime was it did not carry out a high-tech strategic bombing campaign killing women and children in the manner of the Israeli Air Force.
The bombs came to Israel courtesy of the Biden administration. For Biden, Mishra reserves some of his fiercest criticism. He speaks of Biden’s “stubborn malice and cruelty to the Palestinians,” a career-long attitude that during the Gaza war reached the depths of subservience to the most racist and fanatically right-wing government in Israel’s history. The president’s occasional peeps of protest to war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu excite Mishra’s capacious talents for debunking commentary. Biden’s abdication of moral leadership Mishra depicts as a reflection of the American zeitgeist. The growing savagery and moral decay of Israeli society have their counterparts in American society. A country cannot be a confederate in a genocidal war crime without endangering its soul. The perpetration of worse enormities is in the offing. Although the Kamala Harris campaign afforded no hope for a change in the egregious Middle East policy of Biden, the ultra-Zionist lobbyists and advisers surrounding Donald Trump promise a dramatic acceleration of America’s crusade against the Palestinians.
It is not as if complicity in the mass slaughter of the Palestinians is our first war crime.
Still, we might want to remember Ralph Waldo Emerson’s warning about an American crime in 1838, coincidentally also involving the torment and degradation of another non-white people: the brutal removal of the Cherokees in the “Trail of Tears.” He thought that by setting its seal of approval on the miserable morality of such a deed, “the name of this nation…will stink to the world.” We must wonder with Emerson about the carrying capacity of the American soul for the nation’s afflictions of the afflicted.
Mishra can see only one shaft of light penetrating the gloom now settling over the moral landscape of America: the student protest movement against the obfuscations and lies of the government, universities, and media about Gaza. These young people had the courage to face threats of expulsion from their universities, of the obliteration of career prospects by an outraged billionaire donor class, and of the anti-immigrant presidential candidate to deport the foreigners among them. Mishra celebrates their resistance to “thuggish authority.” The student movement slogan of the brave activists in the Jewish Voice for Peace inspires him: “Never Again for Anyone.” Given the power structure opposing them, he expects the student protesters to go down to defeat. Still, by taking their valiant moral stand, “they also hold out some hope for the world after Gaza.”
Source: Counter Punch
