I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of Pankaj Mishra in conversation with Chris Hedges discussing the “psychic ordeal” of watching a live-streamed genocide and the steady normalization of mass violence inflicted with perverse righteousness by a nation-state armed with the latest technology and a narrative of exceptional victimization. Their voices wearily tuned to witness-bearing, collapsed into monotones, while their faces held foresight of what is to come for those in the US who speak out against atrocities unfolding. The thumbnail for the YouTube video captures their faces in a snapshot of this feeling, that of the dutiful making of time capsules for a desecrated future world that may or may not be ready to evolve beyond Western modernity’s violent orgy of hierarchical categorization and divinely-inspired theft of land, labor, and meaning. My room was still dark and I fell back to sleep.
I woke up a few hours later and purchased the audio version of The World After Gaza to keep me company throughout a weekend of anxious sleeping, during which I attempted to catalog all of the reasons why my life(style) as a US American is too precious to risk doing ANYTHING that might threaten its livelihood(lol) or status. You know, one day my individual scholarship – which will be the product of my individual unique brilliance and some good old American hard work! – will get published by an academic press and then anyone can access my powerful ideas for $45! When my political enemies read my careful arguments and citations in 2034 they will be so scared!!! I ate cold pizza with some old wine on ice and laid down, immersing myself in the narration of the first part of the book. My room was dark enough so I fell back to sleep.
I woke up a few hours later and listened to the rest of the book while doing laundry, petting my cats, staring at a wall. I found a lot of comfort in reading this book; I have no idea what it would/could do for you. The World After Gaza is therapeutic in the sense of going to therapy to heal the tangled mess of one’s childhood trauma by laying it all out and stitching it back together so that patterns can be discerned and insights recognized: the MANY genocides arising from colonial modernity, anti-semitism in Europe/the US before/during/after the Holocaust, the utter abandonment and failure of denazification, the European white supremacist colonial milieu from which Zionism emerged and was materially nurtured, decolonization as a disalienating deconstruction of “universal” colonial reality, the mirror that Israel holds up to the US and other settler colonial nations, the utility and danger of nationalisms, and the production of memory cultures in the US and Israel that produce innocence and nationalistic bloodlust. I fell back asleep, this time for much longer.
I woke up at 3am at the insistence of my cat. Since 10/7/23 I’ve read so many books and articles, watched so many lectures/round tables/video essays, and born witness to so many mass graves/disembowelings/dead children that there is a critical mass of highly-charged information in my heart and mind that I cannot sort through. I am grateful that Mishra did that work and placed it in the context of his own learning and unlearning about Zionism, which is a necessary journey for anyone within the Empire seeking to understand why October 7th happened and why the West responded in the way it did. Some people might be angry that this book doesn’t tell them exactly what to do with this new historically-grounded understanding of the centrality of genocide, colonialism, and imperialism to our current mode and structures of our material existence in the civilized West. I would counter that you already know what needs to be done, but you have not yet become the person who will do it…not yet.