*SHORTLISTED FOR A PALESTINE BOOK AWARD* 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.
