In The World After Gaza, left-wing essayist Pankaj Mishra attempts to argue that Israel’s actions in Gaza represent a ‘case study of Western-style impunity’. The fundamental problem with the West, argues Mishra, is that it has sanctified the Holocaust and wilfully ignores crimes of a supposedly equal magnitude. 

His goal in The World After Gaza is to knock the Holocaust off its supposedly ill-deserved pedestal. He wants us to see it as just one of many horrors in a modern world shaped by colonialism and slavery. Or, as Mishra puts it, his goal is to ‘reconcile the clashing narratives of the Shoah, slavery and colonialism’. It follows from his premise that the ‘bumper-sticker lesson’ to be drawn from the Holocaust is not ‘Never Again’ – it’s ‘Never Again for Anyone’.

It’s an approach that might appear humane, acknowledging Jewish suffering while suggesting that other human lives are equally valid. Yet it soon becomes clear that this approach serves deeply anti-humanistic ends.

Delegitimising Israel is critical to Mishra’s approach. In his telling, Israel is a colonial power. He takes this argument further to argue that Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians is, in important respects, akin to the Nazis’ treatment of the Jews.

The main flaw in Mishra’s argument is its gross one-sidedness. He demonstrates his familiarity with Jewish writers on the Holocaust, such as Jean Amery, Hannah Arendt and Primo Levi. Yet he suffers from monumental blindspots. In particular he fails to consider the relationship of anti-Semitism to the Holocaust. He acknowledges the scale of the mass killing, but he fails to probe the anti-Semitic motivations driving it. As a result he fails to understand what is unique about the Holocaust.

The rest of the article is available to read HERE on spiked.