*SHORTLISTED FOR A PALESTINE BOOK AWARD 2025* From the award-winning writer and thinker an
essential reckoning with the war in Gaza its historical conditions and moral and geopolitical
ramifications 'Courageous and bracing learned and ethical rigorous and mind-expanding'
NAOMI KLEIN 'Mishra has made a powerful contribution to the moral history of the world'
ANDREW O'HAGAN 'Urgent' HISHAM MATAR 'Brilliant' WILLIAM DALRYMPLE Memory of the
Holocaust the ultimate atrocity of Europe's civil wars and the paradigmatic genocide has
shaped the Western political and moral imagination in the postwar era. Fears of its recurrence
have been routinely invoked to justify Israel's policies against Palestinians. But for most
people around the world - the 'darker peoples' in W. E. B. Du Bois's words - the main
historical memory is of the traumatic experiences of slavery and colonialism and the central
event of the twentieth century is decolonisation - freedom from the white man's world. The
World After Gaza takes the war in the Middle East and the bitterly polarised reaction to it
within as well as outside the West as the starting point for a broad reevaluation of two
competing narratives of the last century: the West's triumphant account of victory over Nazi
and communist totalitarianism and the spread of liberal capitalism and the global majority's
frequently thwarted vision of racial equality. At a moment when the world's balance of power is
shifting and a long-dominant Western minority no longer commands the same authority and
credibility it is critically important to enter the experiences and perspectives of the
majority of the world's population. As old touchstones and landmarks crumble only a new
history with a sharply different emphasis can reorient us to the world and worldviews now
emerging into the light. In this concise powerful and pointed treatise Mishra reckons with
the fundamental questions posed by our present crisis - about whether some lives matter more
than others why identity politics built around memories of suffering is being widely embraced
and why racial antagonisms are intensifying amid a far-right surge in the West threatening a
global conflagration. The World After Gaza is an indispensable moral guide to our past present
and future.
