Book Excerpt - How Gaza Shattered the West’s Mythology, excerpted from Pankaj Mishra's 'The World After Gaza', Foreign Policy

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Summary
This article is includes excerpts from "The World After Gaza: A History" by Pankaj Mishra. Mishra draws parallels between the Warsaw Ghetto uprising during World War II and the recent conflict in Gaza. He argues that the world's inaction in the face of the Gaza crisis mirrors the world's indifference to the plight of Jews during the Holocaust.

Mishra’s article is a forceful indictment of both Israel’s military campaign and the Western world’s role in enabling it. He argues that Gaza represents not just a humanitarian disaster but a fundamental failure of the postwar moral order.

He highlights the suffering of the Palestinian people in Gaza, emphasizing the scale of the devastation and the loss of life, particularly among women and children. Mishra criticizes the West's support of Israel and its failure to hold Israel accountable for its actions. He questions the moral compass of Western leaders and media, pointing to instances of biased reporting and the suppression of dissenting voices.

The article also explores the psychological impact of the Gaza conflict on both those directly affected and those witnessing it from afar. Mishra suggests that the world's collective conscience has been wounded by the events in Gaza, and that this trauma will have lasting consequences.

Finally, Mishra contends that the Gaza crisis has shattered the illusion of a shared humanity and respect for human rights that emerged after World War II. He argues that the West's response to the conflict reveals a deep moral failing and undermines the foundations of international law and morality.

Quotes
“Israel’s annihilation of Gaza, provisioned by Western democracies, inflicted this psychic ordeal for months on millions of people—involuntary witnesses to an act of political evil.”
“The world, or more specifically the West, didn’t do anything.”
“They sought from the very beginning ‘to make the entire Gaza Strip uninhabitable, and to debilitate its population to such a degree that it would either die out or seek all possible options to flee the territory.’” – Omer Bartov
“Why then did Biden repeatedly claim to have seen atrocity videos that do not exist?”
“Why did the West, while defending and sheltering Ukrainians from a venomous assault, so pointedly exclude Palestinians from the community of human obligation and responsibility?”
“Regardless of how we address these questions, they force us to look squarely at the phenomenon we confront: a catastrophe jointly inflicted by Western democracies.”