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How Will History Judge Us After Gaza / Pankaj Mishra

A palestinian man mourns his family members who were killed in the israeli bombing of the nuseirat refugee camp  gaza strip

If you think of democracy as simply something that’s constituted by regular elections and if you don’t think that an ethno-nationalist state that badly treats about 20% of its population, which is the Arab population, which enforces a brutal state of occupation in the West Bank and Gaza, which treats the people living there as 3rd class citizens, which periodically bombs them. Kills them in large numbers. I think we are stretching here, quite dramatically, the definition of democracy. I think it’s a nice rhetorical move on the part of Israel supporters to claim that Israel is a democracy and for that reason morally superior to the people it oppresses and morally superior to its neighbors. But I think we are looking at a democracy where majority opinion is in favor of genocide and ethnic cleansing. I think we do have to radically redefine our notion of democracy and try to fill it a little bit more with positive content. Otherwise, democracy equals murderous majoritarianism and that’s what we’re looking at in Israel right now.

Award-winning author Pankaj Mishra returns to “This Is Hell!” to talk about his new book, “The World After Gaza: A History”, published by the Penguin Random House.

Check out Pankaj’s book here: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/780437/the-world-after-gaza-by-pankaj-mishra/

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Guest

Pankaj Mishra

Pankaj Mishra is the author of Age of Anger: A History of the Present, From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia, and several other books of nonfiction and fiction. Mishra won the 2024 Weston International Award, as well as the 2014 Windham–Campbell Prize for nonfiction. He writes regularly for The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, and The London Review of Books, among others.

 

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