Outraged, post-colonial attitude animates The World After Gaza ... Mishra has armed himself with a vast bibliography. Some of his ruminations are carefully wrought ... Elsewhere, quotations from various luminaries cascade down the page and his prodigious reading overwhelms his argument.
A coolly argued polemic that sifts insights from the gore and chaos ... Its voice clear as a bell but with striking nuances. Mishra devotes most of his text to rationales for the Jewish state, weighing the pros and cons ... This is depressing stuff, yet avoidable. Is sunlight the best disinfectant? The World After Gaza casts its audacious gaze on ashen ruins and corpses of children, a debacle Mishra views as decades in the making.
A repugnant book ... His assertion of equivalence—that Jews kill like Nazis—is unabashed ... Mishra, a vaunted progressive polemicist and the author of numerous books on race and empire, is a darling of the postcolonial left. This work, and others like it, peddle—no, wallow—in the same trite, poisonous, ahistorical idea shared by the ideological descendants of Edward Said.
Mishra has a habit of couching incendiary accusations in rhetorical questions, but his answer to this one is unambiguous. From the first page, Mishra seems intent on demonstrating that Israelis are, in fact, the new Nazis ... He writes with loving care about the Holocaust, referring to it by its Hebrew name, the Shoah, and he exudes nothing but sympathy for interwar writers such as Isaac Babel and Joseph Roth. But as he describes the Jewry that emerged from the ashes, he mostly finds unredeeming qualities ... To howl into the wind without any plausible vision of a better world isn’t heroic or ethical; it’s a gesture of nihilism, and so, too, is this book.
Hollow and useless ... Genteel Zionist distortion ... Mishra’s book is not about the world after Gaza or the world before Gaza or Gaza—this book is not even about the world. The World After Gaza is the work of a magpie with poor eyesight caroming through a bookshop, nodding at the noteworthy titles and pitching in a few topics to let you know that he’s looked at Twitter. The prose is the worst thing in this shit salad, a timid and rhythmless plod that seems to be auditioning for the position of World Book staff writer.
Mapping an ideological critique on to real world events, as Mishra does, demands some intellectual cartwheels to keep the theory from collapse ... The first mention of Hamas in the main text comes on page 34, and then only in passing.
Writers attempting to grapple with the Israeli government’s genocidal assault on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank need to surmount their own visceral reactions, assess the latest horrors, and somehow make either moral sense or at least moral order out of it all, on deadline, for the publishing marketplace. That’s a tall order in any generation. For the present ethically and intellectually denuded historical moment, it could very well be impossible ... He approaches one of the most horrifying human rights abuses of the new century and glances off it like a raindrop ... All of the book’s attempts at parallel go astray in just this same way, until the whole thing starts to look like one protracted ghastly change of subject..
