What does the global polarization over the Israel-Hamas war and its causes say about our political discourse? Pankaj Mishra joined FP Live to discuss. Watch this event here.
On April 19, 1943, a few hundred young Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto took up whatever arms they could find and struck back at their Nazi persecutors. Most Jews in the ghetto had already been deported to extermination camps. The fighters were, as one of their leaders Marek Edelman recalled, seeking to salvage some dignity: “All it was about, finally, was our not letting them slaughter us when our turn came. It was only a choice as to the manner of dying.”
This article is adapted from The World After Gaza: A History by Pankaj Mishra (Penguin Press, 304 pp., $28, February 2025).
After a few desperate weeks, the resisters were overwhelmed. Most of them were killed. Some of those still alive on the last day of the uprising committed suicide in the command bunker as the Nazis pumped gas into it; only a few managed to escape through sewer pipes. German soldiers then burned the ghetto, block by block, using flamethrowers to smoke out the survivors.
The Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz later recalled hearing screams from the ghetto “on a beautiful quiet night, a country night in the outskirts of Warsaw”:
This screaming gave us goose pimples. They were the screams of thousands of people being murdered. It traveled through the silent spaces of the city from among a red glow of fires, under indifferent stars, into the benevolent silence of gardens in which plants laboriously emitted oxygen, the air was fragrant, and a man felt that it was good to be alive. There was something particularly cruel in this peace of the night, whose beauty and human crime struck the heart simultaneously. We did not look each other in the eye.
In a poem Milosz wrote in occupied Warsaw, “Campo dei Fiori,” he evokes the merry-go-round next to the ghetto’s wall, on which riders move skyward through the smoke of corpses, and whose jaunty tune drowns out the cries of agony and despair. Living in Berkeley, California, while the U.S. military bombed and killed hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, an atrocity he compared to the crimes of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, Milosz again knew shameful complicity in extreme barbarity. “If we are capable of compassion and at the same time are powerless,” he wrote, “then we live in a state of desperate exasperation.”
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, who allowed themselves to occasionally think that it was good to be alive, and then heard the screams of a mother watching her daughter burn to death in yet another school bombed by Israel.
-
A low view shows two small signs on train tracks with a building at the end of the tracks on the horizon.
-
Two people hold signs at the foreground of a crowd on a street lined with buildings. The signs read: I thought we said never again, Silence = violence, and Free Palestine.
Left: Two signs that read “Never again” and “We remember” are seen on the train tracks to the former Nazi German Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp during the March of the Living to honor Holocaust victims in southern Poland on April 12, 2018. Omar Marques/Sopa Images/LightRocket via Getty Images Right: Activists take part in a National March for Palestine in London on Dec. 19, 2023. One holds a sign that reads, “I thought we said never again.” Mark Kerrison/In Pictures via Getty Images
The Shoah scarred several Jewish generations; Jewish Israelis in 1948 experienced the birth of their nation state as a matter of life and death, and then again in 1967 and 1973 amid annihilationist rhetoric from their Arab enemies. For many Jews who have grown up with the knowledge that the Jewish population of Europe was almost entirely wiped out for no reason other than it was Jewish, the world cannot but appear fragile. Among them, the massacres and hostage-taking in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, by Hamas and other Palestinian groups rekindled a fear of another Holocaust.
But it was clear from the start that the most fanatical Israeli leadership in history would not shrink from exploiting an omnipresent sense of violation, bereavement, and horror. Israel’s leaders claimed the right to self-defense against Hamas, but as Omer Bartov, a major historian of the Holocaust, recognized in August 2024, 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.” Thus, for months after Oct. 7, billions of people beheld an extraordinary onslaught on Gaza whose victims, as Blinne Ni Ghralaigh, an Irish lawyer who argued on behalf of South Africa at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, put it, were “broadcasting their own destruction in real time in the desperate, so far vain, hope that the world might do something.”
Every day came to be poisoned by the awareness that, while we went about our lives, hundreds of ordinary people were being murdered or being forced to witness the murder of their children. Pleas from people in Gaza, often well-known writers and journalists, warning that they and their loved ones were about to be killed, followed by news of their killing, compounded the humiliation of physical and political incapacity. Those driven by the guilt of helpless implication to scan U.S. President Joe Biden’s face for some sign of mercy, some sign of an end to bloodletting, found an eerily smooth hardness, broken only by a nervous smirk when he blurted out Israeli lies that Palestinians had beheaded Israeli babies. Righteous hopes aroused by this or that United Nations resolution, frantic appeals from humanitarian NGOs, strictures from jurors at The Hague, and the last-minute replacement of Biden as presidential candidate were brutally dashed.
By late 2024, many people living very far from Gaza’s killing fields were feeling—at a remove, but feeling—that they had been dragged through an epic landscape of misery and failure, anguish and exhaustion. This might seem an exaggerated emotional toll among mere onlookers. But then the shock and outrage provoked when Picasso unveiled Guernica, with its horses and humans screaming while being murdered from the sky, was the effect of a single image from Gaza of a father holding the headless corpse of his child.
Palestinian children flee Israeli bombardment in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on Nov. 6, 2023. Mohammed Abed/AFP via Getty Images
The war will eventually recede into the past, and time may flatten its towering pile of horrors. But signs of the calamity will remain in Gaza for decades: in the injured bodies, the orphaned children, the rubble of its cities, the homeless peoples, and in the pervasive presence and consciousness of mass bereavement. And those who watched helplessly from afar the killing and maiming of tens of thousands on a narrow coastal strip, and witnessed, too, the applause or indifference of the powerful, will live with an inner wound, and a trauma that will not pass away for years.
The dispute over how to signify Israel’s violence—legitimate self-defense, just war in tough urban conditions, or ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity—will never be settled. It is not difficult to recognize, however, in the constellation of Israel’s moral and legal infractions signs of the ultimate atrocity: the frank and routine resolves from Israeli leaders to eradicate Gaza; their implicit sanction by a public deploring inadequate retribution by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in Gaza; their identification of victims with irreconcilable evil; the fact that most victims were entirely innocent, many of them women and children; the scale of the devastation, proportionally greater than that achieved by the Allied bombing of Germany in World War II; the pace of the killings, filling up mass graves across Gaza, and their modes, sinisterly impersonal (reliant on artificial intelligence algorithms) and personal (reports of snipers shooting children in the head, often twice); the denial of access to food and medicine; the hot metal sticks inserted into the rectum of naked prisoners; the destruction of schools, universities, museums, churches, mosques, and even cemeteries; the puerility of evil embodied by IDF soldiers dancing around in the lingerie of dead or fleeing Palestinian women; the popularity of such TikTok infotainment in Israel; and the careful execution of the journalists in Gaza documenting the annihilation of their own people.
Of course, the heartlessness accompanying an industrial-scale slaughter is not unprecedented. For decades now, the Shoah has set the standard of human evil. The extent to which people identify it as such and promise to do everything in their power to combat antisemitism serves, in the West, as the measure of their civilization. But many consciences were perverted or deadened over the years European Jewry was obliterated. Much of gentile Europe joined, often zealously, in the Nazi assault on Jews, and the news even of their mass murder was met with skepticism and indifference in the West, especially the United States. Reports of atrocities against Jews, George Orwell recorded as late as February 1944, bounced off consciousnesses “like peas off a steel helmet.” Western leaders declined to admit large numbers of Jewish refugees for years after the revelation of Nazi crimes. Afterwards, Jewish suffering was ignored and suppressed. Meanwhile, West Germany, though far from being de-Nazified, received cheap absolution from Western powers while being enlisted into the Cold War against Soviet communism.
These events that took place in living memory undermined the basic assumption of both religious traditions and the secular Enlightenment: that human beings have a fundamentally “moral” nature. The corrosive suspicion that they don’t is now widespread. Many more people have closely witnessed death and mutilation under regimes of callousness, timidity, and censorship; they recognize with a shock that everything is possible, remembering past atrocities is no guarantee against repeating them in the present, and the foundations of international law and morality are not secure at all.
A view from the Israeli side of the border shows the devastated landscape of the Gaza Strip on Jan. 13.Menahem Kahana/AFP via Getty Images
Much has happened in the world in recent years: natural catastrophes, financial breakdowns, political earthquakes, a global pandemic, and wars of conquest and vengeance. Yet no disaster compares to Gaza—nothing has left us with such an intolerable weight of grief, perplexity, and bad conscience. Nothing has yielded so much shameful evidence of our lack of passion and indignation, narrowness of outlook, and feebleness of thought. A whole generation of young people in the West was pushed into moral adulthood by the words and actions (and inaction) of its elders in politics and journalism, and forced to reckon, almost on its own, with acts of savagery aided by the world’s richest and most powerful democracies.
Biden’s stubborn malice and cruelty to the Palestinians was just one of many gruesome riddles presented by Western politicians and journalists. It would have been easy for Western leaders to withhold unconditional support to an extremist regime in Israel while also acknowledging the necessity of pursuing and bringing to justice those guilty of war crimes on Oct. 7. Why then did Biden repeatedly claim to have seen atrocity videos that do not exist? Why did British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, a former human rights lawyer, assert that Israel “has the right” to withhold power and water from Palestinians, and punish those in the Labour Party calling for a cease-fire? Why did Jürgen Habermas, the eloquent champion of the Western Enlightenment, leap to the defense of avowed ethnic cleansers?
What made the Atlantic, one of the oldest periodicals in the United States, publish an article arguing, after the murder of nearly 8,000 children in Gaza, that “it is possible to kill children legally”? What explains the recourse to the passive voice in the mainstream Western media while reporting Israeli atrocities, which made it harder to see who is doing what to whom, and under what circumstances (“The lonely death of Gaza man with Down’s syndrome” read the headline of a BBC report on Israeli soldiers unleashing an attack dog on a disabled Palestinian)? Why did U.S. billionaires help spur pitiless crackdowns on protesters on college campuses? Why were academics and journalists sacked, artists and thinkers de-platformed, and young people barred from jobs for appearing to defy a pro-Israel consensus? 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, which has destroyed the necessary illusion that emerged after the defeat of fascism in 1945 of a common humanity underpinned by respect for human rights and a minimum of legal and political norms.
From The World After Gaza by Pankaj Mishra. Published by Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2025 by Pankaj Mishra.
Books are independently selected by FP editors. FP earns an affiliate commission on anything purchased through links to Amazon.com on this page.