Pankaj Mishra, 56, belongs to that category of intellectuals like Edward Said or Arundhati Roy who adeptly use the tools of Western culture to dismantle prejudices and historical conventions. To show that other parts of the world, much larger and more populated than Europe or the United States, have a completely different perspective and vision of events.
With a precise and deeply creative style, this essayist and novelist born in Jhansi, India has been able, over a career spanning three decades, to create award-winning novels such as The Romantics (2000) and Run and Hide (2022), and also to devote himself to the study of the great events of our era with essays that have marked the public debate, such as The Age of Anger: A History of the Present (2017), in which he delves into the origins of the great wave of hatred that populates the world, or Bland Fanatics: Liberals, Race, and Empire (2020), where he analyzes why Anglo-American liberalism and capitalism were imposed as the only possible alternative.
Mishra decides to chat with EL PAÍS on a grey and humid London morning. The meeting takes place near Oxford Circus. He is hungry and suggests going to eat something at a very popular Indian restaurant. He barely touches his masala dosa, a crepe with potato and curry filling very popular in southern India.
For an hour and a half, he passionately discusses his new book, The World After Gaza, his sentimental and critical relationship with Israeli Zionism, and his vision of the destruction of Gaza as the harbinger of a new culture of impunity. The conversation also touches on other issues, such as the Ukrainian crisis, the rise of Donald Trump and the right-wing attack on what is contemptuously called “woke” to mean feminism, the fight against climate change and the defense of a reasonable rhetoric around illegal immigration.
Question: Donald Trump is now calling for the Gaza Strip to be cleared of Gazans, so that the United States can build a new Riviera there.
Answer. Even I hadn’t really imagined that what the destruction of Gaza portended was going to be as dark as it seems today. Donald Trump’s victory, and then the first traumatic four weeks of his presidency, have turned the world upside down. It has basically instituted a kind of global rule of predatory imperialism, whether it is Donald Trump wanting Greenland and Gaza or Vladimir Putin wanting Ukraine. It’s two gangsters coming to a deal among themselves.
Q. Are you surprised by the West’s lack of reaction to the tragedy in Gaza?
A. Our political classes in large parts of the Western world, and, of course, in the United States, have been desensitized. There, moral sensibilities have been numbed to the point where they stopped registering just how much of a break with international norms, with basic morality, the destruction of Gaza was. The true shock of the horror that Trump has inaugurated is still not being properly registered.
Q. Gaza, like the beginning of a darker era…
A. I keep thinking that Gaza in retrospect, 20 or 30 years from now, will be the same harbinger of fascism across a very broad sweep of the Western world, the same kind of harbinger that the Spanish Civil War was in the 1930s to total war and destruction. And even back then, people like George Orwell, who were there, who witnessed the Spanish Civil War and participated in it, were very aware of the participation of countries like Germany. Let’s not forget, Guernica was destroyed by German bombs. It was not something confined to the Spanish Peninsula, it was the inauguration of a continent-wide destruction of norms, of values, of principles. And I believe we are definitely heading towards much darker times.
Q. But you do not want to make a complete criticism of Zionism. You defend its original causes…
A. There was a time when it inspired a different kind of hope that Europeans in a part of the Middle East would create a socialist state. That is why illustrious figures such as Primo Levi or Jean Améry felt such an attraction to the Israeli cause. They were left-wing people convinced that an egalitarian and humanist socialist state was being created. Today, Israel’s great defenders are people such as the maniacal president of Argentina, Javier Milei, the former president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, or Donald Trump. And some of the most notorious anti-Semites in the West, such as Viktor Orbán, Marine Le Pen, Matteo Salvini or Santiago Abascal.
Q. The latter are the heirs of those who saw Jewish-Masonic conspiracies everywhere, yet today they show unconditional support for the government of Israel.
A. Israel represents to them a contempt for norms, particularly liberal norms, that they are struggling against in their own national political context, norms they see they see as a big constraint on their ability to do the things that they promised to do. Israel for them represents an exhilarating possibility, that you can ethnically cleanse an entire population in 2025, that you can have mass deportations. I think the culture of cruelty and the culture of impunity that Israel embodies at present is a very dangerous thing because it is enabling similar cultures of cruelty and impunity elsewhere.
Q. You claim that many of these strange allies of Israel remain deeply antisemitic…
A. They’ve never departed from the conviction that Jews are a profoundly disruptive force, that they represent a kind of liberal modernity that they hate. That they represent a liberalism, a capitalism, and a cultural Marxism that they detest. Basically, that they are lefties. They’re also people who gave us socialism or who were responsible for Marxist revolutionary movements. All that suspicion has not been dispelled by a very different history in the last 50 or 60 years. They are not interested in the Jewish aspect of Israel. They’re interested in a country that violates all kinds of protocols and all kinds of norms. Back at home they will continue their anti-Semitic messages.
Q. The grotesque handover of the bodies of Israeli hostages staged by Hamas predisposes international public opinion against the Palestinian cause.
A. Of course, the handing over of the bodies of the kidnapped children [Kfir and Ariel Bibas] was an act of barbarism, but so is the bombing of Palestinian universities or the killing of children by Israeli snipers. Palestinians have always been handicapped by a leadership not able to present its case persuasively to not just the Israelis, but also to an international audience. This was something that people like Edward Said were concerned about, and that is why he ended up breaking with Yasser Arafat. But today we also see clearly that Israel has made many attempts to completely crush the possibility of a decent and viable Palestinian leadership. They had no problem promoting Hamas, bankrolling this organization for a long time. They’re very much invested in the idea of keeping Hamas a player, because then they can continuously offer evidence for this claim that they are existentially threatened, and that these people are about to bring about another Holocaust in Israel.
Q. You argue that Israel has fostered its nationalism on the basis of the memory of the Holocaust.
A. The personal memory of the Shoah obviously existed in the minds and souls of all the survivors and those who lost loved ones. But collective memory is something quite different. It is something literally created and constructed by institutions, by educational institutions, by the state, by the media, and even by popular culture. Israel did not begin as a homogeneous national community. A large part of the population came from parts of the Middle East, from Arab countries. They had no experience or memory of the Shoah whatsoever. Their own identity was very fluid. The language of many of them was Arabic. The narrative of the Shoah was a construction of European Jews, especially their politicians, who decided that this was the glue that could bind together the different components of the Jewish population, each of them with a different historical experience.
Q. You have always argued that the great process that defined the second half of the 20th century was decolonization, and that it is still present.
A. Everything we are experiencing today shows how much the structures and mentalities of a certain kind of racial imperialism from the 19th century onwards have never really been truly dispelled. They are still there. Let’s take over Greenland, force the Ukrainians to part with their rare minerals, turn Gaza into a new Riviera. These are projects of just grab-and-run imperialism and degrading dark-skinned people. Most people thought that this was now retreating. We were all investing in moral progress and social progress and social liberalism.
Q. In these culture wars of recent years, which include the critical study of this imperial past, the left seems to be in retreat. Today, identity politics, pejoratively known as woke, are being attacked without mercy.
A. If you talk about the remnants of imperialism in the U.K. today, you’re denounced as woke; if you stand up for trans people, you’re denounced as woke. That’s the excuse given by many people who have been complicit in the failures and disasters of recent years, who haven’t thought too much about a certain kind of global capitalism that has created deep inequalities and enormous resentment among the population of Western Europe. They don’t realize that a vote for Trump is a vote against the system, not necessarily against woke. It’s quite an interesting move to divert the conversation away from economic matters and inequality.
Q. From the very beginning you were one of the voices who warned the West that much of the world, the Global South, was not so committed to helping Ukraine.
A. The non-Western world has never felt involved in this battle against Russia for many reasons. A number of these countries, like India, depend on Russia for arms supplies or oil supplies. They are not going to break that relationship. Or look at China, for example, which has its own special relationship with Moscow and its own interests. But also, many of them do not understand the moral arguments for going against Putin. They see NATO as an aggressive and expansionist power, and they think that extending its reach right up to the Russian border is a terrible provocation. Even if they think Putin is a deranged imperialist, they do not believe that he just invented the NATO threat. This is something that Gorbachev spoke about. This is something Boris Yeltsin complained about.
Q. And in that sense, you believe that the Ukrainian crisis has revealed that the emperor was naked.
A. What the Ukrainian crisis has shown in the eyes of many people around the world, both with the ineffectual sanctions regime deployed against Russia and with the war itself, which has not inflicted serious defeats on Moscow, is that the West is today much weaker than it was. That it cannot support its claims to be a world leader in any credible way whatsoever, neither economically nor militarily. That without the help of China, without the help of India, sanctioning Russia will not work. Both the Ukraine and Gaza cases have shown the diplomatic, military and moral weakness of the West.
Q. You end your book with a certain glimmer of hope, contemplating the student mobilizations against the destruction of Gaza.
A. In today’s climate of greed, violence and expansion, seeing young protesters defending values such as compassion, solidarity, empathy and feelings for the weak and the poor is a radical statement of intent. We are moving away from a technocratic left-wing language that spoke of redistribution and equality to claim instead certain basic moral principles that have always been present in philosophy and religion, and which we had disastrously lost sight of.
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