The Conquerors of Tomorrow

The Conquerors of Tomorrow

The tragic inheritance of the Shoah is that the victims of violence are often its next perpetrators.

The World After Gaza: A History
by Pankaj Mishra
Penguin Press, 2025, 304 pp.

There’s a clue, hidden at the end of The World After Gaza, as to why Pankaj Mishra invokes the voices of Shoah survivors to critique the Israeli government’s murder of Palestinians today. It is a quote from the French philosopher Simone Weil, which appears as the epigraph to his final chapter. Writing during the Second World War, Weil knew that war collapses the distinctions that separate victims from perpetrators in ordinary times. Amid this ambiguity, Weil warned, the writer’s duty was to “seek a conception of equilibrium,” remaining “ready to change sides like justice, ‘that fugitive from the camp of conquerors.’” The writer must stand with the defeated today, ready to oppose them as the conquerors of tomorrow.

Mishra’s moral argument in this book works from Weil’s insight: that the victims of violence are often its next perpetrators. He believes this to be the true and tragic inheritance of the Shoah—not (as Benjamin Netanyahu would have us deceived) that “those who are strong and strike first deserve to live.” In embracing Weil, Mishra intrudes upon an internal conversation among Jewish thinkers about how to rightly remember the Shoah and so honor its victims. He locates the Jewish experience of rootlessness in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries within the broader emotional history of decolonization. In so doing, he risks conflating his own history, as an Indian, with that of Israel-Palestine. But there is historical weight behind his analysis. Colonialism, he argues, was the testing ground for the modern forms of state violence later mastered by totalitarians on the dark continent of Europe in the 1930s and ’40s—echoing an argument first made by Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism. (Remember that Hitler wanted to make Eastern Europe into a colony for Germany, the veritable equivalent of India for Great Britain.) Mishra thus recovers a forgotten form of solidarity between Jews, other peoples who suffered modernity’s evils in the twentieth century, and Palestinians currently being killed by Israel in Gaza. Throughout, Mishra remains steadfast: violent ethnonationalism is the common enemy that must be opposed.

Still, he never fully articulates what this haunted inheritance means for Israel, Hamas, or those of us complicit in Western democracies. He hints at a powerful question without addressing it head on: does violence—regardless of its source—always deform the moral agent, as Weil believed it did?

Since delivering “The Shoah after Gaza” as the Winter Lecture for the London Review of Books in February 2024, Mishra has found himself a fugitive from all who might claim victory in the vitriolic debates surrounding Gaza. Barred from speaking at the Barbican, he was forced to deliver his lecture in a Central London church. Perhaps it took hallowed ground to reckon with Israel’s mass slaughter of Gazans in retaliation for Hamas’s butchering and capture of nearly 1,200 Israelis on October 7, 2023. Since Israel broke the ceasefire on March 18, 2025, the official Palestinian death toll has reached over 50,000, with children, women, and the elderly making up more than half of those killed, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health. What we continue to witness is the darkest manifestation of the revenge instinct in global politics since the War on Terror, which up until now Mishra regarded as “the seminal war of our own century.”

In The World After Gaza, Mishra expands on his original lecture, deepening its arguments and tracing the afterlife of the Shoah. He insists that the Holocaust did not become the global moral benchmark for genocide until the 1960s. In the years immediately following Israel’s founding in 1948, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion dismissed Shoah survivors as “human debris.” It was only after the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann that the Shoah was elevated to the exceptional status it now occupies in historical memory, particularly in the United States and Germany—where a culture of national guilt atoning for the Nazis’ sins has been constructed around it.

Mishra is a deliberately provocative public intellectual whose customary mode involves identifying the West’s most precious self-deceptions and prodding them until someone cries foul (his eviscerations of Niall Ferguson’s revisionist defense of Western civilization are the key example). Here, Mishra’s approach is less polemical. His claim? Just as the European democracies of the 1930s and ’40s were complicit in the state violence that made the Shoah possible, today’s Western democracies are entangled in Gaza’s devastation at the hands of Netanyahu’s government.

This claim is hard to resist. Edward Said’s aphorism that the Palestinians are “victims of victims” has proven true in ways grimmer than we might have imagined. The Israeli military has executed Palestinians without shame. Nowhere is this more evident than in the annihilation of Palestinian children by unflinching drone attack. Western democracies have overwhelmingly armed, funded, and justified Israel’s slaughter, while many of their citizens dissent. Meanwhile, the decolonized world—seething with rage at its former imperial masters—presses complicity onto even the most casual Western observer, producing in them an unshakable sense of guilt. To make this point, Mishra turns to the German philosopher Karl Jaspers, who in 1945 argued that while Germans could not bear political responsibility for Nazi crimes, they did bear a “metaphysical guilt”—the “affliction,” in Mishra’s words, “of those who become impotently aware of inconceivable barbarism in their midst.” Mishra confesses to writing out of his own “metaphysical guilt,” confronting the inescapable fact that—no matter where we stand—we are all implicated in Gaza’s devastation. “Neither veneration of the victims,” he warns, “nor loathing of the perpetrators will help us see a way out of a global impasse.”

At Blackwell’s bookshop in Oxford, copies of The World After Gaza sat beside Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Message. Both books critique the Israeli government’s actions in Palestine from the vantage of authors who are neither Israeli nor Palestinian. Coates and Mishra, both writers of the left, attempt to advocate morally imaginative forms of solidarity with the Palestinian people. They arrive at this solidarity, however, in strikingly different ways.

Coates’s solidarity proceeds from analogy. Over a ten-day visit to Israel and the West Bank, he draws a likeness between the Palestinian misery he witnesses and the legacy of slavery that stalks his own family history, from Senegal to South Carolina. His book calls for the embrace of a “common humanity” across separate geographies of injustice. Yet he acknowledges the narrowness of his own perspective: “I see that land, its peoples, its struggles through a kind of translation—through analogy and the haze of my own experience—and that is not enough.”

Mishra’s approach is more effective. He maintains that the anger of Shoah survivors—including Primo Levi, Jean Améry, Hannah Arendt, and Zygmunt Bauman—mirrors the anger of Palestinians today. These Jewish writers knew “in their own frail bodies, the monstrous terror visited on millions by a supposedly civilised European nation state.” With a novelist’s skill, Mishra weaves these Jewish voices together with those of anticolonial thinkers who resisted modern violence, from Mahatma Gandhi to Lu Xun. By summoning their warnings to posterity, Mishra attempts to recover a solidarity between past and present victims of modern state violence.

After delivering “The Shoah After Gaza,” Mishra faced criticism from scions of the left for not centering Palestinian voices in his critique of Israel. This accusation resurfaced in early reviews of The World After Gaza, most sharply in Sasha Frere-Jones’s review in 4Columns, which accused Mishra of offering a “genteel Zionist distortion”—reducing Israel’s crimes to “bad apples” in administrations from 1948 to the present. But this critique deliberately displaces Mishra’s point: that the shortest path to violence is through victimhood. Levi, for example, feared the Shoah might become “an inexhaustible source of evil . . . perpetuated as hatred in the survivors.” Mishra finds the same terrible insight in Améry, who initially embraced Zionism only to reject it shortly before his death after learning of torture in Israeli jails. “Where barbarism begins,” Améry decried, “even existential commitments must end.” Améry’s and Levi’s refusal to see history in absolute moral terms came at the cost of self-
sacrifice. Both took their own lives—Levi after being denounced before a New York audience for branding Israel “a mistake in historical terms.”

Growing up, Mishra stuck a picture of Moshe Dayan—Israel’s eye-patched defense minister during the Six-Day War—on his wall. He excuses his youthful Zionist sympathies as a product of his Hindu nationalist upbringing in India. His first visit to Israel in 2008 left him with a “strange disturbance.” The stark divisions between “the young beach revellers in Tel Aviv, or the settler lounging by his hilltop swimming pool, and the inhabitants of Palestinian slum towns was too great.” Despite his debts to Jewish thinkers, Mishra admits that it was finally the “colour line” that led him to identify with Palestinians: they “were people who looked like me, and who now endured a nightmare that I and my own ancestors had put behind us.”

As an Indian writer navigating the fault lines between the West and the postcolonial world, Mishra has long been preoccupied with modernity’s dislocating effects. From The Romantics (1999) to From the Ruins of Empire (2012), he has examined how colonialism innovated ethnonationalist identities out of human diversity, inducing historical violence between the conquerors and the conquered. Like Indians under British rule, Jews were severed from their roots in the act of integrating into Western nations.

Perhaps Mishra’s most unsettling case for solidarity with Palestinians is that Israel’s nationalist trajectory should be understood not as a private struggle between Jews and their persecutors but as one of several competing victimhood narratives. What emerges, he calls, is “Atrocity Hucksterism.” Who suffered more from the sins of the twentieth century, Jews or Arabs? Which genocide, Gaza or the Shoah, is more depraved? Both the Israeli government and Hamas appeal to the same modern categories—genocide, existential threat, victim, perpetrator—to justify their violence against each other. This creates a mirroring effect in which victimhood is weaponized on both sides, locking the conflict in a state of permanent discursive war. Mishra appreciates this moral ambiguity with great subtlety. Yet what remains to guide our evaluation of moral action if we do away with strict narratives of guilt and innocence?

Mishra has been accused of scrutinizing Israel’s violence while failing to apply the same standards to Hamas’s brutality. I share in this critique, though only partly. He never explicitly interrogates, for example, how Hamas’s massacre of Israeli civilians on October 7 might at once be considered a response to Israeli oppression as well as an atrocity. Nor does he interrogate whether Hamas’s violence—and its willingness to put its own civilians in harm’s way—should be understood as anticolonialism at-all-costs or terrorism. He stops short of launching the broader critique of violence required within the terms of his own argument, which, at its most compelling, is a condemnation of violence and its perniciously modern role in inflaming and perpetuating ethnonationalism. Mishra’s language is passive when describing Hamas’s attacks: “[Israel’s] fierce fortress mentalities were inflamed on 7 October 2023, when Hamas destroyed, permanently, Israel’s aura of invulnerability.” Yet it would be utterly disingenuous, as some of Mishra’s reviewers have, to accuse him of dismissing Jewish suffering. The World After Gaza is an urgent—if incomplete—work that takes seriously the affliction of those Shoah survivors, who, as Mishra reminds us, outlived Hitler’s barbarity not with the drive to kill, but with the duty to ward against the Shoah’s repetition.

As I write in early April, Israel’s onslaught in Gaza has resumed. Medics have been murdered, and not a single hospital remains fully functional. For the past month, Israel has blocked humanitarian aid from entering the region. Israel is now planning to seize “large areas” of territory in Gaza. While all of this unfolds, I find myself walking through Berlin, visiting the impersonal concrete pillars that make up the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. The space is deliberately disorienting; the deeper you proceed down the narrow pathways framed by blocks of varying heights—the sunlight always shut out—the more you feel trapped within a brutalist prison. These concrete blocks remind me of the bombed-out cities and suburbs of Gaza, the earth there littered with shrapnel and the remnant metals of Israel’s American-made weapons.

Reading The World After Gaza, I cannot help but be moved by Mishra’s attempt to salvage a solidarity between the afflicted in Gaza and the afflicted of the Shoah. Like Simone Weil, with whom I began, Mishra has chosen to stand against injustice, against those making the lives of innocents hell, and so to become a fugitive from the camp of conquerors.

Jack Jacobs is a DPhil candidate in intellectual history at the University of Oxford. His research focuses on the global life of nonviolence in the mid-twentieth century. He writes and hosts a podcast on his Substack.