The World After Gaza
By Pankaj Mishra

Courageous and bracing, learned and ethical, rigorous and mind-expanding'and NAOMI KLEIN'Mishra has made a powerful contribution to the moral history of the world'and ANDREW O'HAGAN'Urgent'and HISHAM MATAR'Brilliant'and WILLIAM DALRYMPLEMemory of the Holocaust, the ultimate atrocity of Europe's civil wars and the paradigmatic genocide, has shaped the Western political and moral imagination in the postwar era. Fears of its recurrence have been routinely invoked to justify Israel's policies against Palestinians. But for most people around the world - the darker peoples', in W. E. B. Du Bois's words - the main historical memory is of the traumatic experiences of slavery and colonialism, and the central event of the twentieth century is decolonisation - freedom from the white man's world.The World After Gazaand takes the war in the Middle East, and the bitterly polarised reaction to it within as well as outside the West, as the starting point for a broad reevaluation of two competing narratives of the last century: the West's triumphant account of victory over Nazi and communist totalitarianism, and the spread of liberal capitalism, and the global majority's frequently thwarted vision of racial equality. At a moment when the world's balance of power is shifting and a long-dominant Western minority no longer commands the same authority and credibility, it is critically important to enter the experiences and perspectives of the majority of the world's population.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, why identity politics built around memories of suffering is being widely embraced and why racial antagonisms are intensifying amid a far-right surge in the West, threatening a global conflagration.and The World After Gazaand is an indispensable moral guide to our past, present and future