Jews in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Europe may not seem to share much with colonized peoples in Egypt, India or China. They were a mostly despised minority within large European empires whereas upper-caste Hindus could credibly claim to represent a majority before their European overlords. What seems irrefutable, however, is that European Jews as much as Asians and Africans were trying to liberate themselves in the nineteenth century from a tradition perceived as burdensome and achieve identity and self-knowledge in a formidable modern world largely made by Christian Western Europeans.
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While in the closed world of traditional society or the ghetto, they were relatively invulnerable to the racism and antisemitism that accompanied Western economic and political expansion in the nineteenth century. The psychological blow of harsh judgements—that the Jews or the natives were ugly, lacking strength, courage, initiative, self-respect and all the other manly virtues—was negligible. For the world from which such mockery and derision emerged was not considered a model of emulation or a measure for self-assessment. In the broader and lonelier vistas of the European metropolis or the imperial port city, Jews and colonized peoples lost their relative immunity to malign prejudice.
The few formal rights bestowed on them did not mitigate their social humiliation. Alfred Dreyfus, the first Jewish officer ever on the French army’s General Staff, was unjustly convicted and brutally treated in prison for no other reason than he was Jewish. Max Nordau, the son of a rabbi and one of the socially mobile Jews traumatized by the Dreyfus Affair, told the First Zionist Congress in 1897 that though the emancipated Jew was “allowed to vote for members of Parliament,” he was “excluded, with varying degrees of politeness, from the clubs and gatherings of his Christian fellow countrymen.” “This is the Jewish special misery,” Nordau added, “which is more painful than the physical because it affects men of higher station, who are prouder and more sensitive.”
In the face of Gaza, we ought to do more than register anger, grief, disgust or guilt; neither veneration of the victims nor loathing of the perpetrators will help us see a way out of a global impasse.
An aspiring Jewish writer in Odessa, a Muslim doctor in Kolkata and a Chinese thinker in exile in Japan at the turn of the twentieth century came to confront a similar lack of individual and collective dignity. They belonged to a family- and kin-oriented people that had derived its values from the past but now faced an unprecedented challenge in the form of a Western modernity that rode roughshod over traditions with a powerful new racialist discourse of civilization and plunged those not adept in it into profound feelings of rejection, humiliation and self-doubt. Even when they succeeded in finding a place within it, the price of assimilation was a painful alienation—from the past, from family, community and culture.
Their economic, social and spiritual uprooting painfully compressed the fundamentally modern and ambiguous experience of becoming a free individual; but the much-thirsted-for liberation stayed elusive after all the rapid-fire mobility across old boundaries of traditions, customs, regions and classes. It is not surprising that paths to statehood of Jews and many colonized natives come to resemble each other in their tortuousness.
Unmoored from tradition, but unaccommodated by the modern world, and fully exposed to its racist ideologies, the aspiring modernist had been condemned to precarity, and profound inner conflict, if not self- hatred. A people accustomed to living within families had suddenly found themselves, while seeking individual freedom, in a world of exclusionary strangers: the nationalizing societies of Europe. As people who visibly did not belong, they were the sacrificial victims of the new secular faith of nationalism.
Eventually, they too succumbed to its seductive promise: that once a family-oriented, socially rejected and spiritually lost people had normalized themselves into their own nation, a new family, they would no longer be susceptible to external assaults on their dignity and internal turmoil. Thus, in country after country, those who started by waging a struggle for individual dignity, ended up striving, in increasingly inimical conditions, for a community in which that dignity could be best guaranteed.
Like Gandhi, long a loyal subject of the British Empire, Theodor Herzl became a nationalist late in his life, out of a kind of existential necessity almost. Like Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the lawyer-founder of the ‘pure’ Muslim state of Pakistan, this successful journalist was deeply embedded in the secular and modern world, with little knowledge of his religious tradition, history and culture. Yet he embraced a religion-inflected nationalism as a safeguard for his threatened self-respect—revealingly, in his diary Herzl described the ‘Promised Land’ as the place where “it is all right for us to have hooked noses, black or red beards, and bandy legs without being despised for these things alone. Where at last we can live as free men on our own soil and die in peace in our own homeland.”
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“The Zionist movement is an expression of despair,” the Jewish Romanian writer Mihail Sebastian intuited in his autobiographical novel For Two Thousand Years (1934). “A tragic effort to move towards simplicity, land, peace,” it was unmistakably the work of “intellectuals who want to escape their solitude.” As it happened, members of a literate intelligentsia, whether Jewish or Indian, were the first to suffer, in their own souls and minds, the culture shock caused by the collision of their pre-modern peoples with modern Europe. It was while seeking to overcome their own special misery that these prouder and more sensitive men of higher station formulated their various ideological antidotes.
One early and powerful common impulse among the men united by their destabilized identities and painful ambivalences under the European gaze was to renovate their religious tradition and claim superiority for it. Leora Batnitzky describes in How Judaism Became a Religion (2011) how one of the world’s oldest monotheisms acquired its modern shape as an invention of Jewish reformers working under the influence of, and often in thrall to, European political institutions and ideologies. It is worth remembering that Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam, too, were formulated and codified under almost identical pressures. And that Abraham Geiger, the pioneering scholar who asserted that Judaism was the source of authentic religion, shares his defensiveness with the Hindu reformer Dayananda Saraswati who indulged in similar apologetics about Hinduism.
Such modernizing reformers from ‘underdeveloped’ communities claimed moral and spiritual pre-eminence over ‘developed’ Europeans while trying to overcome something they were excruciatingly conscious of: their political and economic impotence, and their lack of physical power. Thus, Max Nordau, seeking “salvation and alleviation” for the “better Jews of Western Europe,” called for a muscular Judaism (Muskeljudentum ), and Vivekananda, the Hindu reformer (idolized by Narendra Modi), sought to remedy the ostensible physical feebleness of his compatriots by asking them to eat beef and build muscles.
The disgust with which early German Jewish reformers spoke of their supposedly backward and superstitious Eastern European counterparts, the Ostjuden, is reminiscent of the ‘self-hatred’ of many early Islamic and Hindu reformers—or the Chinese writer Lu Xun, who claimed that cannibalism was the main ethic of Confucian society. What links a later Jewish thinker like Gershom Scholem to Muhammad Iqbal is their critique of their newly invented, reformed and intellectualized religion and upholding of mystical traditions—Sufism, Kabbalah—deemed superstitious by a previous generation.
To read Ahad Ha’am’s scathing criticism of Herzl—his belief that what the Jewish people needed above all was not political freedom, let alone territory, but cultural and spiritual renewal, or that the Westernised, German-speaking Zionist leaders in Vienna had lost whatever was of value in the Jewish tradition in their obsession with political state-making—is to be reminded of strikingly similar sentiments by Liang Qichao about China’s radical May Fourth generation.
To read Martin Buber on the value of creating an inner renewal and of seeing national unity as prerequisite for deeper unity among all peoples is to be reminded of the Indian writer whom Buber met thrice and whom Buber’s protégé Hans Kohn wrote about admiringly: Rabindranath Tagore, who accepted nationalism only in so far as it opened out into cosmopolitanism. The debates about the correct form of nationalism between Weizmann and Jabotinsky, Buber and Ben-Gurion echo those between Gandhi and Savarkar, Gandhi and Nehru.
Of course, these many-sided arguments became largely moot as the twentieth century lurched down its blood-splattered path. Still, the circumstances in which Israel was born—the way the many different visions of Jewish renaissance were undermined by pogroms in Russia, rising antisemitism in Europe, and then finally foreclosed by the Second World War, the Holocaust, the stateless and universally unwelcome Jewish refugees, the exhaustion of the British Empire and the nascent Cold War, all the calamities that left Zionists as well as many other putative nationalities at the mercy of events—parallel the horrendously compromised births of nation states in South Asia: the imperialist skulduggery, nationalist opportunism, clumsy partition, war and ethnic cleansing that produced the eternally warring states of India and Pakistan. Historical contingencies destroyed at one stroke the many options of self-determination for the Hindus and Muslims of South Asia as well as the Jews and Arabs of Palestine, bringing forth nation states and permanent refugees under the shadow of the Shoah, the Nakba and the Partition.
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From the hectic invention of tradition in the nineteenth to a defensive and derivative discourse of nationalism and then compromised statehood in the mid-twentieth century: these are some historical frameworks of Asia and Africa in which Israel can be productively accommodated. Certainly, the role of settler-Zionist ideology in the creation of Israel should not be exaggerated. Not until after the war did it attract more than a trickle of Jews to Palestine. Even the broader sentiment in favor of a Jewish homeland grew stronger only after the murder of six million Jews in Europe was revealed, along with a continuing deficit of compassion in the West. There are also other ways to avoid the temptation of reducing history to an endless agon between evil perpetrator and innocent victim, or the binarism of colonialism and anti-colonialism.
Post-colonial studies emerged mostly in the West, primarily concerned with how Western power shaped the representation of non-Westerners during the colonial period. This critique of the West doesn’t always take into account how the language of anti-colonialism was co-opted—and compromised—by demagogic post-colonial rulers. Nor does it cover with much depth the political and economic experimentation in many societies in Asia and Africa after liberation from colonialism—what often exposed them to more insidious forms of external exploitation and internal corruption.
For Israel also came to resemble any number of Asian and African states with the program of state-building, territorial consolidation and nationalist myth-making it launched after 1948. India’s most prominent socialist leaders in the 1950s—J. P. Narayan, J. B. Kripalani and Asoka Mehta—visited Israel, breaking the diplomatic boycott of the country by their government, and spoke highly of what they saw as a program of socialist modernization.
Living undercover in Cairo in the 1950s, Ahmed Ben Bella, leader of the National Liberation Front who later became the first prime minister of the Algerian Republic, closely followed the work of trade unions, kibbutzim and other social institutions in Israel. He told his Jewish landlords that Israel was a “civilization of the avant-garde,” an inspiring example for an independent Algeria to follow while addressing its economic and social problems.
Another of Israel’s more unusual admirers was the Iranian thinker Jalal Al-e-Ahmad. Al-e-Ahmad recognized that “Israel is a coarsely realized indemnity for the Fascists’ sins in Dachau, Buchenwald, and the other death camps during the war.” “Pay close attention,” he wrote, “that is the West’s sin and I, an Easterner, am paying the price.” Yet he came away in 1963 from a visit to Yad Vashem in tears, and with the conviction that the Jewish state was the best response to a tortured history of the Jews.
Moreover, its expedient nation-building through public education, Hebrew-language instruction and collectivist industry was a useful model for those aspiring to build a strong Islamic state: “Israel is the best of all exemplars of how to deal with the West, how with the spiritual force of martyrdom we can milk its industry, demand and take reparations from it and invest its capital in national development, all for the price of a few short days of political dependence, so that we can solidify our new enterprise.”
In the autumn of 1964, shortly after Jalal Al-e-Ahmad published his impressions of Israel, he received a phone call from a 25-year-old seminary student. Two years previously, Al-e-Ahmad had published Gharbzadegi (“Westoxification”), a scathing attack on the pro-Western regime of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi; it had made him an intellectual hero to the shah’s religious opposition. The seminary student later recalled how, as he spoke to Al-e-Ahmad on the phone, “the intelligence, affection, purity, and suffering of a man who in those days was at the pinnacle of opposition literature crashed over me like a wave.” Nevertheless, the aspiring cleric was frank with Al-e-Ahmad. The article’s praise of Israel had caused great distress to both him, Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader today, and his mentor, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
The ideologues of Hindu nationalism were much less divided in their admiration for Israel. Indeed, India’s unexpected post-colonial evolution from a socialistic and secular political culture to Hindu supremacism during a global regime of neoliberalism should alert us to the many different matrices of power other than colonialism and anti-colonialism. Internal developments within India and Israel, from the reclaiming of religious sites (Ayodhya, Jerusalem, Hebron) to socio-economic and political realignments, again tell another significant story that is excluded by the competing narratives of hereditary victimhood.
The nationalisms of India and Israel acquire an overtly religious and millenarian dimension at around the same time, as unrest grows in the occupied territories and Kashmir in the 1980s, and the two post-colonial states resort to repressive methods that even Western colonialists mostly eschewed. Then, in the 1990s, both countries embark on a deeper economic and ideological makeover—the rejection of the ideals of inclusive growth and egalitarianism in favor of Reaganite-Thatcherite notions about private wealth creation. Small economic booms follow hectic privatization, liberalization and decimation of the welfare state, but economic inequality deepens unmanageably. In India and Israel as much as anywhere else, uneven economic growth has helped create fierce new constituencies, among haves as well as have-nots, for xenophobia, and ultra-nationalist demagogues have duly emerged, ranting about internal and external enemies and capturing democratic institutions.
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The recent history of the two countries falls into a globalized pattern of authoritarian populism and demagoguery. In a world where unruly economic flows compromise national sovereignty, the old fantasies of cultural purification and ethnic-racial unity have grown stronger. Yet again, in a grim reprise of the history of modern antisemitism, minorities bear the brunt of the fears and anxieties provoked by real or imagined marginality in a bewilderingly enlarged and incomprehensible world. Ethnic-racial prejudice, it has become clear, is an enduringly potent and mercurial political force of modernity. Inseparable from both nationalism and capitalism, it flourishes on all sides of the old color line, and devours fresh victims all the time: European Jews, Asians and Africans yesterday, Muslims and immigrants today.
Helpless before the future, we still feverishly hope to use our particular understanding of the past to shape it; it is one of the chief ways to keep alive the idea of individual agency.
It has become particularly treacherous in the West, where the steady erosion of the inherited privileges of whiteness, and assertiveness of previously marginal peoples, has panicked many individuals and institutions into crude and reckless exertions of arbitrary power. This panic, caused by the specter of impoverished and needy masses of non-Western ancestry, publicly expressed fears about immigration, Islamic fundamentalism and population explosions, or through a racialized vocabulary (‘welfare queens’, ‘super-predators’), has been building up for some decades.
The world of individual rights, open frontiers and international law is now receding fast. Today, the US fence along its Mexican border, the Australian practice of imprisoning asylum seekers on offshore islands, the German promise of mass deportations, the open incitement by a British home secretary of far-right English nationalists, and the growing obsession of many young men with ‘white genocide,’ ‘the Great Replacement’ and other end-time scenarios of the early twenty-first century, make cruelly visible the homecoming of white supremacism at the heart of the modern West.
Its fierce fortress mentalities were inflamed on 7 October 2023, when Hamas destroyed, permanently, Israel’s aura of invulnerability. The surprise assault by people presumed to have been crushed represents, after 9/11, the twenty-first century’s second Pearl Harbor to many shocked and horrified white majoritarians. And, as before, the perception among them that white power has been publicly violated has “triggered,” in John Dower’s words, “a rage bordering on the genocidal.”
Trying to regain their image of potency through an extensive bloodbath, Israel and its supporters today lurch towards the “terrible probability” James Baldwin once outlined: that the winners of history, “struggling to hold on to what they have stolen from their captives, and unable to look into their mirror, will precipitate a chaos throughout the world which, if it does not bring life on this planet to an end, will bring about a racial war such as the world has never seen.” We have already witnessed in Gaza—after the millions of avoidable deaths in the pandemic—another stage of what the social anthropologist Arjun Appadurai calls “a vast worldwide Malthusian correction” that is “geared to preparing the world for the winners of globalization, minus the inconvenient noise of its losers.”
It is no exaggeration to say that the ethical and political stakes have rarely been higher. The atrocities of Gaza, sanctioned, even sanctified, by the free world’s political and media class, and brashly advertised by its perpetrators, have not only devastated an already feeble belief in social progress. They challenge, too, a fundamental assumption that human nature is intrinsically good, capable of empathy. At the same time, as the memory of the Shoah contends with memories of slavery and imperialism, the Native American and Armenian genocides and other calamities, it is becoming increasingly unclear if these clashing cultures of memory can yield a useful lesson for the present, and throw fresh light on its problems, let alone offer practicable solutions. Nor do rigorously historicized versions of those memories seem an improvement; they are likely to remain antagonistic, supporting the spiral of tribal hatred.
Is it possible to rescue visions of justice and solidarity from zero-sum contests for recognition and identity, and the strange quests for guiltlessness? In the face of Gaza, we ought to do more than register anger, grief, disgust or guilt; neither veneration of the victims nor loathing of the perpetrators will help us see a way out of a global impasse. Is it possible to imagine moral and political action in the present that is liberated from Manichaean historical narratives?
The questions have more urgency today because billions of people have become politically conscious around the world only to confront a sinisterly uncovered Janus face of modernity: how while making possible progress and freedom, it simultaneously inflicts new forms of regression and enslavement; how barbarism and civilization, far from being opposed, are inseparably entangled.
It is also their fate to recognize that the utopian imaginings of the last century, which gave purpose and shape to innumerable lives, have been used up. Few of us believe any more in socialist revolution, the flat world of capitalist globalization, or, for that matter, the ‘China Model’ of state-led development. The new utopias on offer from Silicon Valley’s tycoons seem technologically overdetermined, with no scope for moral action.
Helpless before the future, we still feverishly hope to use our particular understanding of the past to shape it; it is one of the chief ways to keep alive the idea of individual agency. But is it possible both to remember the past and to look to a future in which we are not exclusively concerned with, as Nadine Gordimer worried in 1967, our own kind?
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Excerpted from The World After Gaza: A History by Pankaj Mishra. Published by Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2025 by Pankaj Mishra.
