Pankaj Mishra on Israel, Gaza and the Holocaust

Many years ago, I stopped buying The London Review of Books because under Mary-Kay Wilmers it consistently published articles which criticised Israel and didn’t attempt to balance these with articles supporting Israel. So, I wasn’t surprised to see that the LRB has just published a 7498-word article by Pankaj Mishra attacking Israel, “The Shoah after Gaza.” Nor was I surprised that the article was full of omissions, bias and hostility towards Israel. As the scorpion says to the frog, “It’s in my character.”

But I was surprised that Selwyn College, Cambridge, having invited Mishra to give the 2024 VS Naipaul Lecture on 12 March, just a few days after the publication of his article attacking Israel, did not choose to reconsider its invitation. Of course, they have a legal right to invite any speaker they choose and he has the right to give the lecture. The issue is not about legality. It is about decency and respect for minorities. Had Mishra written in this way about any other ethnic minority in Britain I don’t think the LRB would have published it and Selwyn might have thought twice about inviting him. But as David Baddiel (a man of the Left) has written, “Jews Don’t Count” — at least, not in the same way as other minorities.

Why would a Cambridge college wish to invite the author of such an article to speak at a time when Jews are facing growing hostility in many of our universities and cities? They have a legal right to add to the toxic atmosphere facing many Jews in Britain today, by inviting someone who has written such a vile article attacking Israel, but why exercise that right? Why not think that now might not be the best time to offend British Jews, when so many of us feel afraid and isolated?

What is it about Mishra’s article that is so unpleasant? It is not that it is an all-out attack on Israel or that it accuses Israel of exploiting the memory of the Holocaust in the most disturbing ways. There is no shortage of criticisms of Israel or arguments that Israel exploits the memory of the Holocaust. Mishra begins by quoting well-known Holocaust survivors, like Jean Améry and Primo Levi, who criticised Israel. Améry, he writes, once said that Prime Minister Begin, “with the Torah under his arm and taking recourse to biblical promises”, speaking openly of stealing Palestinian land, “alone would be reason enough for the Jews in the diaspora to review their relationship to Israel”. He pleaded, writes Mishra, with Israel’s leaders to “acknowledge that your freedom can be achieved only with your Palestinian cousin [sic], not against him.”

Primo Levi, he writes, said that “Israel is rapidly falling into total isolation … We must choke off the impulses towards emotional solidarity with Israel to reason coldly on the mistakes of Israel’s current ruling class. Get rid of that ruling class.” Many people, Jews and non-Jews alike, might feel the same way about Netanyahu and his government today.

Mishra then quotes Yeshayahu Leibowitz, a theologian, who warned in 1959 against what he called the “Nazification” of Israel. He also cites the Israeli columnist Boaz Evron who, he says, criticised the tendency to conflate Palestinians with Nazis and shouting that another Shoah is imminent which, he feared, was liberating Israelis from “any moral restrictions, since one who is in danger of annihilation sees himself exempted from any moral considerations which might restrict his efforts to save himself.” Jews, Evron wrote, could end up treating “non-Jews as subhuman” and replicating “racist Nazi attitudes”.

There is much more he could have quoted from these and other Israeli authors. The problem is not that he quotes them, but that he doesn’t put these quotes in any kind of context by acknowledging that they were not representative of Israeli intellectuals. They were both longtime critics of the state of Israel and well known for their outspoken views. Mishra continues in the same vein, seeking out other provocative critics of Israel, whether other Israelis or foreigners, like Zygmunt Bauman and George Steiner, and making no attempt at all to balance these with any supporters of Israel. Another editor would have asked for some kind of balance in his piece and some attempt to provide background information about the people he’s quoting.

You may think this is just sloppy by Mishra. Where’s the offence? One of the striking features of the debate since 7 October has been that critics of Israel have routinely accused Israel of “genocide” and have often compared the deaths of Palestinian civilians with the Holocaust.

This is not a coincidence. They want to show that the relationship between Israel and the Holocaust is exaggerated and that Israel is more like Nazi Germany. The real victims, they say, are not Israelis but the Palestinians. Of course, this is said to deliberately offend Jews, by taking our most painful memories of loss, and saying: you’re not the real victims. Look how you exploit your history by becoming the new Nazis.

The timing is significant. They make this argument when there are still survivors of the Holocaust living in Israel, to trash their memories. And how better than by quoting Holocaust survivors like Levi and Améry, who criticised Israel?

That’s why it is no coincidence that in almost 8,000 words Mishra doesn’t mention October 7 or the hostages, doesn’t mention Iran at all, and mentions Hamas only twice. Of course, Israel can seem like the perpetrator, if you never mention those who want to slaughter its people. Israel is not perpetrating genocide. Given the chance, Hamas and Iran certainly would.

Similarly, Mishra makes no reference to any of the pogroms before 1948, any of the invasions of Israel in 1948 and since, or the expulsions of Jews from every single Muslim country in North Africa and the Middle East. All of this is airbrushed from history. For Mishra it simply never happened. None of it.

Instead, he writes about “the targeted killings of Palestinians, checkpoints, home demolitions, land thefts, arbitrary and indefinite detentions, and widespread torture in prisons seemed to proclaim a pitiless national ethos: that humankind is divided into those who are strong and those who are weak, and so those who have been or expect to be victims should pre-emptively crush their perceived enemies.”

And then, of course, we come to Gaza and “the victims of Israeli barbarity [sic] in Gaza today”. Mishra goes on to distort the history of the current conflict with Hamas (who are virtually invisible in his account). “Worse,” he writes, “the liquidation of Gaza” [sic] “is daily obfuscated, if not denied, by the instruments of the West’s military and cultural hegemony: from the US President claiming that Palestinians are liars and European politicians intoning that Israel has a right to defend itself, to the prestigious news outlets deploying the passive voice while relating the massacres carried out in Gaza.”

There is not a single reference to the support of the UN, UNWRA and a number of NGOs for Palestinians and their constant use of data taken from the Palestinian Health Ministry (better known as Hamas), the worldwide support for Palestinians in Gaza and the biased pro-Palestinian coverage on the major British and American news networks. All of this is simply ignored.

Then we come to the familiar rhetoric of post-colonial self-pity, or what he calls “a long-simmering racial bitterness”.  “In 2024,” he writes,  “many more people can see that, when compared with the Jewish victims of Nazism, the countless millions consumed by slavery, the numerous late Victorian holocausts in Asia and Africa, and the nuclear assaults on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are barely remembered.”

Really? Have we really all forgotten about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or about slavery? It’s more likely that some of us have forgotten or never knew about the terrible crimes committed by non-whites: the rape of Nanking, the millions of victims of Indian Partition, the slaughter of countless Muslims by tyrants like Assad and Saddam Hussein, the role in slavery of Africans and Arabs, the homophobia and misogyny of countless Muslim regimes, the ongoing persecution of Christians in many parts of Africa and the Middle East and the desperate plight of girls and women in Iran and Afghanistan. Again, no reference to any of this history, past or present.

Mishra’s essay is also full of omissions and distortions. He writes, “When I look at my own writings about the anti-Muslim admirers of Hitler and their malign influence over India today, I am struck by how often I have cited the Jewish experience of prejudice to warn against the barbarism that becomes possible when certain taboos are broken.” Curiously, he forgets to mention the Muslim admirers of Hitler — in particular, the Palestinian admirers of Hitler such the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin Al-Husseini.

Then we come, inevitably, to the unique perfidy of Israel. “Israel today,” he writes, “is dynamiting the edifice of global norms built after 1945, which has been tottering since the catastrophic and still unpunished war on terror and Vladimir Putin’s revanchist war in Ukraine. The profound rupture we feel today between the past and the present is a rupture in the moral history of the world since the ground zero of 1945.”

This isn’t just hyperbole. It is bad history. Where were these “global norms built after 1945” when there was genocide in Bosnia and Rwanda, the terrible wars between Iran and Iraq, the mass slaughter in Cambodia, civil wars in Nigeria and Syria, all with fatalities which dwarf what has happened so far in Gaza?

On every page, there are errors, omissions, distortions and hyperbole. Of course, because this presumably fits the world view of the editors and many of the readers of the LRB. This hatred of Israel, the anti-colonialist rants and the silences about Hamas, Muslim support for the Nazis, and Muslim antisemitism in Africa and the Middle East, are all part of the new progressivist ideology in our universities, our mainstream TV news networks and newspapers like The Guardian. He is preaching to the converted. It is the orthodoxy of our age.

That’s why it’s important to condemn Mishra’s polemic in some detail and to ask why the authorities at a Cambridge college think he is an appropriate person to give a lecture in memory of VS Naipaul, of all people, who was one of the great truth-tellers about the tyrants and slaughterhouses of the post-colonial world. Naipaul would have relished the irony, but he would also have condemned Selwyn College for betraying his memory.

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