Matti Friedman at the Free Press, on the new genre of books that refashion the ruins of Gaza into a metaphor of Jewish evil:
The origins of this essay lie in a recent visit to the Middle East shelf in a Washington, D.C., bookstore during a visit from my home in the actual Middle East. I was on a short break from the story I’ve been living and covering in Israel for three decades, and from the tragedies that have become routine for Israelis and for our neighbors since the war that began on October 7, 2023.
As a longtime denizen of bookstores in Western countries, I knew that almost any shop would carry a few titles about the evils of Zionism and Israel, a venerable genre on the Marxist left. But this time I saw a change: The Gaza war had inspired a proliferation of these titles so intense that they now filled much of a shelf. I noticed the same phenomenon in other bookstores in other cities, where there were suddenly more “Gaza” and “Palestine” books, it seemed, than books about the rest of the entire Arab world combined. Humanity now inhabited a new age, according to one title, The World After Gaza. According to another, The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth. There was Gaza: The Story of a Genocide, and Palestine and Feminist Liberation, and many more examples in the same vein, with more soon to be published. A new literary genre had been born.
The Gaza war has been fought a two-hour drive from my Jerusalem home by people I know, and has claimed the lives of several of them. For me, reading the back covers of these books left the impression of a genre related to the actual territory of Gaza as the Dune novels are related to the actual NASA space program. At the same time, it wasn’t fringe work. Among the practitioners were authors who have recently won a National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and additional accolades.
After reading more in subsequent months, I came to think of the genre as “Gazology.” By this term I don’t mean the study of the real territory of Gaza, or of the terrible human tragedy caused by the Hamas offensive of October 7 and by the Israeli response in the war that followed—vast tracts of Gaza destroyed, tens of thousands of civilians killed along with tens of thousands of combatants, and aftershocks across the Middle East. Gazology is not reportage, and most of its practitioners are not in or even near Gaza or Israel. This is a Western literary genre with its own rules, tropes, and goals.
It’s likely that much Western culture, journalism, and politics in the coming years will be downstream of these books and the ideology behind them. Students in disciplines from anthropology to medicine will be assigned these works and invited to see the world’s problems through the lens of “Gaza.” For this reason, the genre is important. What follows is a survey of five representative samples of the volumes in question, in an attempt to sketch the contours of this expanding body of writing and to understand what it is trying to say.
For UK readers Pankaj Mishra is perhaps of special interest, as a regular contributor to the London Review of Books.
The World After Gaza is the contribution from Pankaj Mishra, a writer who was born in India and lives in Britain. In keeping with the genre, the book’s subject is not Gaza. It’s about literature, and specifically Jewish literature, and more specifically Jewish literature related to the Holocaust. The words Holocaust or Shoah appear more than 250 times in The World After Gaza, four times as often as the word Gaza.
The book begins with a blizzard of quotes from Jewish writers like Hannah Arendt and Sigmund Freud before proceeding to Isaac Babel and, eventually, to five whole pages about a novel by Saul Bellow. A reader gets the impression that Jewish writers are being stacked here like sandbags against the suspicion that the author may be engaged in something other than honest analysis when he describes the Israeli war in Gaza as “an act of political evil,” a “livestreamed mass-murder spree,” and a genocide to rival the Holocaust. There are other tragedies on Earth, to be sure: “Yet no disaster compares to Gaza—nothing has left us with such an intolerable weight of grief, perplexity, and bad conscience.”
Once a Gazology reader realizes that the goal is not an analysis of an actual war in Gaza, the search begins for the real use to which “Gaza” is being put. Mishra’s project, as far as I can tell, is to replace the genocide of Jews in the Western mind with a genocide by Jews, and then to replace the Jewish writers whom the author admires with—well, with himself. He returns repeatedly to the celebrated Italian novelist and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi, who is mentioned dozens of times in a book that has “Gaza” in the title, in which the name Yahya Sinwar is not mentioned once. Mishra seems to want to be Primo Levi, and even if we understand this is impossible—because Levi is gifted and Mishra is not, because Levi is a witness and Mishra is a voyeur, because Levi’s Holocaust was real and Mishra’s is an ideological fantasy—one still finds something authentic and plaintive in this longing.
The slipperiness of Mishra’s book made me miss the Swede who identifies as a PFLP commando, and who at least says what he means. Mishra regrets that the Palestinians have been outmaneuvered by “internationally connected and resourceful Zionists.” He sees “the insidious racism that had helped prioritize the interests of the West’s chosen nation in the Middle East while demeaning Palestinian suffering in Western eyes.” Getting insidious racism and chosen nation in one sentence is, a reader senses, what he considers daring. He quotes Roald Dahl: “Never before has a race of people generated so much sympathy around the world and then, in the space of a lifetime, succeeded in turning that sympathy into hatred and revulsion.” Mishra calls Dahl an “antisemite”, and seems to agree with him.
Mick Hartley 