Pankaj Mishra's "The World After Gaza: A History"

There was this house where she actually wrote Uncle Tom's cabin and it kind of changed everything. Is it a day? Well, it's raining for the 10th day in Maine so therefore I have to go do something so I'm going to go to this thing which makes me feel virtuous. I'm Brock Clark. I'm Tess Chakolico. Welcome to Dead Writers, a podcast about great American authors and where they lived. Hello and welcome to the LARB Radio Hour brought to you by Reader Supported LA Review of Books. I'm your host Kate Wolfe and I'm joined by my co-host, a large editor in chief, Medea Oshar. Hi Kate. Hi Medea. And this week we're listening to a conversation that you and I had with the writer, Pankaj Misra, about his new book The World After Gaza History. Yeah, it feels like a particularly important book at the moment for pretty obvious reasons. I also read the initial, if it's supposed to be a lecture, it was then turned into an essay that was published in the London Review of Books. The title there was The Show After Gaza. The book looks at the history of the Holocaust and how it relates to the foundation of Israel as well as the foundation of its current right-wing nationalist government. And it ties in a lot of other nationalist histories in with its discussion of how the Holocaust played into and plays into currently very much the conflict and the many conflicts there and around the world. Yeah, it was interesting for me in this book to read Pankaj's discussion of India and Hindu nationalists looking both to Israel and to the Nazis. And I think, yeah, as a Jewish person, race in America, the Holocaust has certainly been a sacred cow that I would never, you know, maybe until the last couple of years really thought to examine and examine how it was resolved, dealt with, not resolved at all after it happened in Germany and how it haunts today so much more than just violence against Jews. Clearly. So this book is really, really important, I think, for anyone to read, maybe especially for American Jews to read. It's also, you know, as much as any of these topics can be treated in a lively style. It's an enjoyable read, a strange is that is to say just on a sentence level and kind of on a sharpness of intellect. And I'm so glad that we got to speak with Pankaj, really grateful to him for taking the time. Yeah, me too. I mean, it's, you know, it's obviously, but it's big subject, as you, I think you said, it's about how one genocide brings out another. And the very minor way in which we might grapple with it, which is on a podcast and in a conversation, at least there's an opportunity here to do so and also to talk about this great book. Yes. So let's get to the conversation. Let's do it. We're so glad to have the writer Pankaj Mishra back on this show today. He last joined us to discuss his novel, Run and Hide. He is the author of many other books of fiction and nonfiction, including Age of Anger, a history of the present, from the ruins of Empire, the intellectuals who remade Asia, and an end to suffering, the Buddha in the world. His work has also appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, and The London Review of Books, among others. And he is a recipient of the Wyndham Campbell Prize for Nonfiction in 2014 and the Western International Award in 2024. He's with us to discuss his new book, The World After Gaza, A History. It probes how the legacy of the Holocaust has shaped the contemporary world order, including how it has shaped the government of Israel and the current war in Gaza. The book grapples with how within the relentless violence of the 20th century, trauma can lead to nationalism and also how one genocide can lead to another. Thank you so much, Pankaj, for being here. Thanks a lot, Kate and Medea. Pankaj, I thought we could begin with how your consciousness of Israel as a nation changed. You write in the book a bit about the way you grew up and an alliance, at least with Jewish intellectuals, and then how when you visited in 2008, or correct me if I'm wrong, if that was the beginning of the change for you. So soon after I first became aware of Israel, which was like, as a nine-year-old, ten-year-old, developed a kind of childish infatuation with the image of this very strong nation which produced these very admirable charismatic military heroes like Moshe Dean. I had moved on from that when I went to college and met these Palestinians and then also start to read a little bit more widely in the history of the Middle East, in the history of Europe. There were many Palestinians students in the 1970s and 80s because India officially was extremely pro-Palestinian and would offer scholarships to these students. So when I came into contact with them, I started to obviously learn about a very different history of Israel as country that had dispossessed Palestinians and many of these Palestinians were actually children of refugees. So by the time I went to the occupied territories, I had done a fair bit of reading and also in the history of the Holocaust, in the European Jewish experience. I remember reading the Jewish century when it first came out by Yeree Slayskin. And then actually I also wanted to write about this subject and then found myself kind of prevented. The shock that that first visit to the occupied territories still delivered was pretty great, you know, in the sense that nothing really prepares you for the sheer brutality and fiendishness of the occupation and the apartheid system in place there. Nothing you read, nothing, none of the films or documentaries you see, you have to be there in places like Hebron and I really challenge anyone to go there and not come away feeling profoundly repulsed by the whole thing. So again, I mean that kind of shock is actually a very commonplace experience. I think you know, lots of people who go there feel that. In my case, it was a different kind of shock because I was coming from a country that had built its identity on a narrative of liberation from racism and imperialism and colonialism. You know, from the time I was a child, I was told that India was a great country. India was a very noble country in fact because its leaders, some of the best people in the other country including figures like Gandhi and Nero had fought a very long, very protracted battle to win national independence and they were fighting against essentially a global regime of racism that had been put in place by European powers. So if you go with that kind of intellectual and sort of, you know, moral background, then you're going to be shocked, really doubly shocked by what you see in Israel because what you see there is then an instance of the same racist colonialism that you imagined had disappeared a long time ago when decolonization first started to happen. You thought this is all, you know, over now. And even if we are not living in a regime of perfect racial equality, racism is still something that is suffering from discredit. And yet you see in Israel racism and an extremely violent colonialism entrenched, institutionalized. And then furthermore, being supported by countries that call themselves democracies that claim to be leaders of the free world. So there is that shock of, you know, coming from a different historical kind of background and then encountering this and then there is the third shock which is a shock of realizing that victims can turn into horrible oppressors, which is probably the profoundest shock of all these three shocks because I think that actually in a way goes to the heart of many of the things. you think are sacred. I think one of the things I suppose that Christianity has helped encourage in the world at large and now it's a kind of universal feeling is that victims are innocent. And then you realize that no, victims can see to be innocent, that victims are capable of extremely monstrous acts. Because even though as I said, I have been educated differently by Palestinians, by the books that I had read, I still retained within myself a kind of vision of Israel as being something incredibly necessary in 1948 that was really created to house the survivors of the Holocaust. And therefore, it had a much stronger case to exist as a nation state and to flourish than almost any nation state in the world. I still have that feeling to a great extent. I think Israel should exist, Israel should flourish. But I think the sort of sensation of watching a nation built by victims and then in a way defined by a certain narrative of a victimhood, embracing monstrous acts of violence, that was really profoundly unsettling to me. I would like to get into that. That's a large part of your book. I think part of that is also, you draw interesting parallel between different kinds of nationalisms, but for you, the very personal kind, which is the Hindu kind of nationalism, which you grew up seeing, it was an interesting part of your book where you could see the ways in which a vision of strength, of violence, of power somehow becomes appealing to a particular population, that there's something about being the strong man, all of a sudden, or finally, against years of persecution. And I remember reading in Gandhi's autobiography, he starts to eat meat and he's like, finally, I will be strong, I will be strong, and I will be able to face the challenges that I've been unable to face. Obviously, you change his course. And I feel like that's an understandable impulse. And I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit, about seeing the similarities there, seeing some of the personal similarities as you were growing up and seeing the similarities between these kinds of different nationalisms, but that somehow then manifests into the same thing. Yeah, you know what I mean, I think when I was growing up in India, one of the reasons why people were attracted to Israel at the time, and now there are many more people who are attracted to Israel in India today. In fact, all the, you know, sort of Hindu nationalist fans of Modi are also fans of Netanyahu. Netanyahu has his biggest fan base in India today. And it's because Israel represents to them the perfect embodiment of a hyper-masculinist nation state. This is something they desperately want India to be, and they think India is too soft, it's too unmannedly in its dealings with, you know, not only Pakistan, but it's, you know, sort of so-called internal enemies, and that's the Muslim population, that's the sort of Christian minorities that India should be much, much tougher, much harder in the way Israel is. So when I was growing up, that was a kind of ideological, emotional affinity that many people had with Israel. And then, of course, later, you know, I've written about this because I was obviously fascinated by this subject, this sort of search for hyper-masculinity in the world at large, and how does that translate itself into a search for a nation state or the building of a nation state in the age of anger, which I published in, you know, about nine years ago, I wrote at great length about these kind of mimic nationalisms that started to emerge in the late 19th century. And there was a simultaneous phenomenon, it's really fascinating amongst not only Indians, Hindus, also in Muslim countries, also amongst Zionists in Europe, also surprisingly among Buddhists in Sri Lanka, there was this great desire to create, you know, a sort of hyper-masculine national community in Gandhi that you, you know, who you just quoted, was initially very much a part of that sort of quest for a strong sense of both individual and collective self. So it's really interesting to see why they all succumb to this particular fantasy of superior strength and manly strength. It's partly because they were subject to all these communities, whether European Jews or colonized peoples in Asia and Africa, they were subject to degrading discourse emanating from their masters, European masters or Christian masters, that you guys are weak, you're cowardly, you're unmanly, you lack courage, you lack physical courage above all. And these allegations, these accusations were in turn internalized by some of these men, and these are, these are almost entirely men. And then, you know, their effort then was to purge themselves of these supposed feminine instincts and impulses and to become hyper-hyper strong and uncompromising and severe back in the 19th century, Gandhi's big sort of opponents at the time used to accuse him of being too soft, ultimately the man who killed him said the same thing, that he's too soft. So he needs to go if he want to build a strong strong nation state. So in other words, the quest for independence nations, the quest for a national community was to a disturbing extent a search for hyper-masculinity. And today, you're seeing the most monstrous sort of embodiments of that in the form of Donald Trump, in the form of far-righteous in Europe, whether it's the sort of, you know, after in Germany or Abascal in Spain, and then of course, you know, the far-righteous regime in in Israel, which wants desperately to project an image of uncompromising brutality. And that's what they think will impress their enemies. Yeah, I think for some of us, of your kind of shocks and revelations in 2008, you know, for me at least the one that is the hardest to fathom is how a people could go through the Holocaust and then turn around and do the same exact thing to another group of people. You know, your book looks so much at the kind of different ways that the reckoning with the Holocaust in Germany didn't really happen. And I think we can then play that forward to, you know, certain examples of the way America has not reckoned with, you know, its wars in other countries. You kind of shift and see the Holocaust here from so many angles. But I was interested, you know, when Israel starts or when people start moving to Pahua Stain in the 30s, it's not a hyper-violent community. It's a, you know, agrarian, you know, socialist, a kid butts kind of thing going on. I mean, it seems like it's from your book. It's only really post, post-show that things begin and earnest in the way that we would understand them now. So maybe I just the connection of, you know, the Israel that we know now to the mythos of the Holocaust is something I'd love for you to talk about. Yeah, no, it's interesting, isn't it, that, you know, back in the 30s, as you say, there was a different image of the Yeshua or, you know, the Jewish community in Palestine. And I think, you know, it actually seduced, attracted many distinguished people in Europe at the time. But then once it started to manifest the kind of disturbing tendencies people had noticed in Europe in the first half of the 20th century, tendencies that were eventually going to turn genocidal. I think some of these very distinguished people started to warn against a repeat of that kind of history. And the most prominent of these figures was Hannah Arendt, who very clearly was saying in the 1940s, that this path is utterly disastrous, this sort of embrace of nationalism, precisely at the point where nationalism has turned toxic. where the idea of the ethno-national community and its particular claim to territory, to which it is connected through blood and soil, these are highly, highly dangerous ideas. So I think nationalism is really the sort of big pathology here, or the kind of ethno-nationalism really, which is, again, basically insisting that only people belong to a certain ethnicity or religion have rights, and everyone else is going to be treated pretty badly, going to be a second class or third class citizen. Once you institute that kind of a political setup, then, of course, the danger of turning into, as Hanover and Seda, racist horde is very extremely high. And I think that kind of degeneration is something you've seen. Again, I would insist not only in Israel, but in so many different parts of the world. We all have different narratives that we appeal to in order to present ourselves as virtuous people, as people who have been wronged by history, and are now acting virtuously in order to protect ourselves, in order to survive, the Holocaust plays that role for the state of Israel. Anticolonism, I would say, plays that kind of role for many, you know, scoundrels in places like India who want to disguise their own violence and corruption by invoking the narrative of anticolonism. So we have to look very closely at these particular narratives. There was, of course, horrible exploitation and violence during the course of imperialism. And Holocaust, nobody, no sane person, denies that this was the most monstrous act ever witnessed in human history. But again, does that actually license anyone to commit atrocities, inflict atrocities on another population? No, it doesn't. And it's interesting, you really chronicle how the state politically started using this narrative, and how it moved from the political margins to obviously being the ruling narrative of the state as it currently is. That the Holocaust has been just over the past, what I would say, is it 50 years? Has moved into this kind of the central position and has begun central to the right wing government? I wonder if you could explain that the way that the movement has gone and how the right has come into power partly by using the Holocaust as this weapon, essentially. I was one of those people who assumed that the memory of the Holocaust and its centrality to the state of Israel and its kind of national narrative was a very natural thing that it flowed organically out of the experience of this monstrosity and that there were people who survived and who then passed it on and soon it became widely known what had happened and then people had resolved at some stage, well, they will not allow this to happen again. Of course, to my great shock, I discovered that this is not at all how it happened, that the survivors when they first arrived in Israel were treated with great contempt by the then leaders of Israel because they sort of in their eyes at least worked reminders of a shameful weakness that the Zionist settlers of Palestine were getting away from or trying to get away from. As I said, the whole idea of Zionism was so connected to a quest for hypermasculinity, so when these reminders of weakness arrive in Palestine, people re-coiled from them, people didn't want to talk about their experience, the Holocaust did not become a subject of academic study for years and years. It's only in the 1960s where their new consciousness began to emerge within the state of Israel after the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Again, I think the sense that the national community of Israel was not actually a homogenous community. There were lots of people there from Arab countries. In fact, at that point, a majority population consisted of people from Arab countries. So, a new national narrative was needed and I think there are always politicians, this is also happened in India, who emerge to create a national narrative that people from different parts of the country with different backgrounds can subscribe to, can basically that narrative becomes a sort of binding glue and that's what the right-wing demagogues started to do when I came begin started this process. And of course, at some point also, the Labour Party and the opposition also started to advance this narrative. And it's really interesting how this narrative gains strength, the narrative of the Holocaust is central to Israel and how we can never allow another Holocaust to happen. The people surrounding us are neighbours, Arab neighbours, they are potential Nazis, hell bent upon exterminating us. All this kind of rhetoric starts to gain prominence and starts to become institutionalized precisely when Israel becomes the most powerful country in the Middle East, starts to acquire nuclear weapons, shows its enormous military capacity by simultaneously taking on several Arab armies and defeating them decisively. So, you see this sort of weaponization of the Holocaust again as a justification for a strong nation state that is now going to expand, that is going to start stealing territory that is going to occupy Palestinian lands and constantly invoke the Holocaust while indulging in these grossly illegal acts. There's a line of, you know, Moshe Deans saying, you know, the borders of Israel are the borders of Auschwitz and those borders, as we know, are constantly expanding. Today they are expanding into Syria, they're expanding into Lebanon, who knows where else they will start to expand. And again, you will hear this justification that we have to do this for our security so that another Holocaust doesn't happen. You're listening to the Lara Radio app. We've been speaking with Pankaj Mishra, author of The World After Gaza. I wanted to ask, you know, you mentioned in the book that Primo Levy, who had been, at one point, you know, perhaps enthusiastic about Israel, started to question things, following the invasion of Lebanon and that, you know, he was derided as anti-Semitic. But then at the same time, seen maybe by the left as a Zionist and that he really had nowhere to turn in a way. But I, but then you mentioned this grace, Paley's story, you know, where that perhaps is based on this incident with Primo Levy, where people are saying like, you're anti-Semitic, you know, and he pulls up his arm and is showing him, you know, his number from the camps. I think that there's so much masking and the question of dissent seems so impossible. And I was surprised to see that even in the 70s, it would have been so similar to today. Maybe talk about the beginning of the impossibility of dissent against Israel, you know, whether it's here in the United States or abroad. Why does it have this kind of shield against dissent and that the immediate reaction even in America is that you're anti-Semitic? Well, it's, you know, it's quite revealing that Primo Levy encounters this, you know, very, very strong feeling. In America, the first time he visits it in the mid 1980s, and I describe that visit in the book, where for the first time he comes face to face with this new culture that has developed around the Holocaust, you know, a kind of cult of survivors, the perfect embodiment, the most garish embodiment of that is Ali Wazel, and you know, there are various organizations. who are doing this, extremely rich people are participating in it. And Prima-Levy is profoundly repulsed by all this. He's on a very different intellectual journey altogether at that point. He's moved away from simple ideas of victimhood in his last book, 'Strong in the Save'. He's sort of examining the notion of complicity in a very profound way. And so he is starting to think, 'What is this going on here?' He's already met Ali Wazal in Italy. And mind you, in America in the mid-1980s, this sort of phenomena that you've just described where dissent is being essentially rendered illegitimate. And if you actually criticise Israel, then you might find your career prospects suddenly diminishing or you might find yourself being sacked. This kind of thing hasn't really started yet in America in the mid-1980s. And yet something happens there while he's there. He goes around, he's being wheeled around by his hosts. He's not a great admirer of Israel at this point. As I said, he was profoundly disturbed by the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the massacres that happened there under Israeli supervision in the refugee camps of Shabran Chatila. And he's protested against that. He's spoken out in interviews against a far-right regime of Israel, despite all his profound sympathies for the state of Israel. And as a survivor, he feels the profound connection with the state of Israel. And that's why he's even more disturbed by than anyone else. But then in America, people expect him to speak in favor of Israel and support of Israel. And when he starts criticising it, they really recoil from him. In fact, his publisher is actually commission a translation of his book. And then they stall the publication once it is covered that he's actually critical of Israel. So in America, he's encountering this new culture which is still nascent in the making. And then he's attacked viciously by this horrific magazine, commentary magazine, still around unfortunately, by some young writer who they're clearly hired to launch this vicious attack on on Primolevi and the substance of the article is that simply that Primolevi is clearly not Jewish enough, if he's not sympathetic to the state of Israel. And this is felt so profoundly this insult by Primolevi that actually, before he kills himself, he tells a friend that this is one of the things that's extinguished his will to live. So I'm giving, offering this example as something that can eliminate the kind of extremism of rhetoric, of denunciation that was creeping into American public life into political cultures, into intellectual cultures, where even a survivor of the Holocaust could be viciously attacked for not being sufficiently supportive of Israel. This is something, this particular embrace of the narrative of the Holocaust, that the Israelis in a way encourage not only within their own country but also elsewhere. And then of course, backed it with different kinds of relationships, military relationships, business relationships, emotional investments, inviting people from America. Well, this is where we are today, as a result of this weaponization of the Holocaust, we are looking at the destruction of democratic rights, we're looking at a constitutional crisis in the United States today. It's an extraordinary turn of events. And this is something that people like Primolevi had encountered in its sort of nation state. I'm sorry, I really, when you could just have a word about the context of this book and the fact that even this book started from a lecture that was cancelled at the Barbarcon. Yes, you know, I was commissioned to write this lecture. I was asked to do one of the winter lectures that they London review of books puts on every year. And I decided to write on this subject. And at that point, I had nothing but the title, the show after Gaza, because it's very clear to me that our kind of vision or our sort of idea of the show would shift after what was happening in Gaza. And various other things that we had sort of considered to be the norm, those things would also be under question. And so, you know, that was the sort of broad thought that went into choosing this particular title, the show after Gaza. This was inflammatory enough for the Barbarcon for them to decide that this is not something they could host. So, they backed out of hosting this not only this event, but the whole sort of lecture series. And then the LRB at the very last moment had to run around looking for alternative venues. Fortunately, they found one in a church in Central London, a much smaller venue, but anyway, I delivered that lecture. But, you know, I don't want to insist too much on this experience, because obviously this has now be the experience of countless people. Wherever I travel in recent months, I've been to Canada, I've been to Australia, I keep meeting people who have lost their jobs, who've been silenced, who've been suppressed, prominent people, you know, a curator, museum in Toronto, who was hailed by the New York Times, is a great sort of one of the sort of most influential curator of indigenous art, who simply disappeared one fine day because of a post she had made on Instagram. And so, I think the levels of repression, both by individuals, powerful institutions, organizations, and now, you know, the governments of the United States, we've also seen this in Germany, where the state has been actively suppressing, you know, any kind of criticism of Israel is deemed antisemitic. It's really, truly extraordinary, the extent to which people will destroy everything that is sacred, every democratic principle, in order to keep supporting Israel, in order to keep hiding their own complicity in this genocide. I want to ask about complicity. There is no lack of documentation about what's happening in Gaza. If there was some reason to believe that in the 40s, people did not quite know what was happening all around Europe or in other parts of the world, perhaps that is believable and that the information was not as readily available as information is to us. What's happening in Gaza is very well documented. People have found ways to deny it, but it's hard to deny what is actually going on. So, I think that's something that you talk about in this book is like, how do you move forward with this feeling of complicity when you see what is happening and yet you feel powerless or that you see what is happening and you, but you don't see other people reacting in the way that you think would be the way to react. How do we grapple with that? It's a big question for one person. It's what remembering that when people first started to think about this enormous monstrous political evil of the Holocaust, soon afterwards, when they started to try and grapple with it in the way you want us to grapple with the genocide in Gaza. Some of the earlier conclusions reached by people like Hannah Rent was that this is not explainable by talking about the history of anti-Semitism, that you need to understand the broader history, the longer history of modern society, of the forms of violence that modern society has embraced, whether through colonialism in Asia and Africa, through a certain kind of teemunizing rhetoric, about colored peoples, about Jews, whether through creating massive bureaucracies, where people themselves do not get their hands dirty or hand get their hands bloody, but they press levers that result in the destruction of millions of people. So I think she was trying to steer the conversation. conversation away from an obsessive focus with murderous prejudice like anti-semitism and making the argument like, what is this modern world where people can commit these kinds of crimes while leading perfectly normal lives? So I think the question of complicity really has to be phrased against the context of this discovery that she made and other people made, Ziegmann Baumann, another philosopher that I quote at length in my book, about these modern structures that enable complicity, that plays so much pressure on individuals to conform, to obey, to keep their heads down, to sort of not do anything that will endanger them personally, endanger their careers, endanger their prospects for promotion, for social advancement. I mean, it's actually really fascinating that Primo Levi towards the end of his life, along with scholars or people who have been documenting and thinking about the Holocaust for a long time, come to sort of identical conclusions about the role of complicity in all this, is that people are paralyzed by fears about their own survival. And once they are gripped by those fears, they all fall in line, they all do the thing that everyone else is doing. And so this is how in a way people fearing social demotion, people fearing the loss of their careers, end up participating in monstrous acts of violence. And again, as I said, the bureaucracy of violence is organized in a way where you personally can allow yourself to think that I'm not really actually involved directly in killing hundreds of thousands or millions of people. But nevertheless, you are of course in one sort of link in this long chain that is leading to these monstrous acts of violence. So I think the question of complicity is the one we should ponder more and more. The act of evil, that happens so frequently that I think we can now safely say that human beings, if indoctrinated in a certain way, if intoxicated by these modes of nationalist ideologies, can behave in the most sort of grotesque fashion, we know that I think what we haven't really studied is complicity. And how that actually happens in our very intricate modern interconnected societies. There's a discussion that we were having yesterday about a piece, publishing a piece about the way that people react. React to images from Gaza. One of the reservations I had, and I'm not sure if this is the right reservation. And so I'd be curious to hear both of you think, is that I wonder when the fundamental right to exist stops being up for discussion. When do we stop engaging in a conversation about what seems to be an essential human right, which is simply just the right to live? But I also recognize that that's perhaps not a stance we have the privilege to take, that as long as that right is being denied actively, and as long as people are just actively being killed, we have to talk about it. At the same time, where do we draw the line about what is up for discussion? And what is debatable and what is not debatable? Because I think there's ways in which people get out of these conversations and actively, well, it's too complicated to talk about. I think my feeling is that young people in particular have already in a way clarified this issue. You know, these are not people who are extremely well-educated about the history of the Middle East. They're not well-versed in the history of Europe or the history of the Holocaust. But these are people who have seen these images. And I've thought it's cowardly to turn away from them, so I've opened those images and looked at them, those videos. As astonishing, I mean, I think at no point in human history have so many people been so routinely exposed to images that I don't think human beings in history have previously seen before. I don't think people had seen before an image of a child with his head blown off. I don't think that was in the repertoire of images available to human beings. But we've seen that image, not once, but several times in the last few months. Now, when you see that image, I think if you're an Israel supporter, you will justify that by saying, yes, but it's all the fault of the Hamas. It's terrible, you know, that children are being killed. I think people who don't know enough about Hamas or Israel for that matter have simply asked, what justifies this? What can justify this? The answer is nothing, nothing at all. No national narrative, no history of the Holocaust, no history of any atrocity, justifies the killing of 180 children in a single day, which has just happened. Having a very basic criteria right and wrong, good and evil, that has served these young protesters much, much more than any amount of education in historical narratives. And I think they are the ones who've been asking the really important and relevant questions here. The rest of us, the rest of us have been led astray by dangerous ideology, by all kinds of obscene justifications for monstrous violence. So I think to answer your question, I mean, I think once you start get away from these kinds of antagonistic clashing narratives, you're left with actually a very simple question. Is it okay? Is it fine to destroy a whole building where hundreds of people are sleeping peacefully in order to kill one Hamas militant? The answer always provided by international law was no. We've forgotten that today because we want to defend Israel. I think young people who don't know anything about international law can immediately see that it's wrong and they are saying that right now. Thank you so much. We've been speaking with Pankaj Misra. His new book is called The World After Gaza. Thanks for listening to the Lara Radio Hour. Subscribe to our show on Apple Podcasts SoundClouds. Spotify or wherever else you get your podcasts. If you like the show, please rate us an Apple Podcast to help us get the word out. And we'd love to hear from you. The producers of the Lara Radio Hour, our Medea Oacher, Kate Wolfe, Eric Newman, and Mary Naugh from Jonathan Shiflett, who also mixed and edited our show. Our founding executive producer is Alan Minsky. Our intro music was written and performed by Imogen Teasley-Vladen.