the nations rage, the peoples plot in vain

A great gift to me two summers ago was a recommendation from a friend, a fellow ChiCommoner, to check out something Pankaj Mishra had written. (An LRB essay, chances are, though it might have been Age of Anger. I don’t remember.)

Toward end of year, a handful of his books under my belt, I was saying here that I wanted to start devoting space in posts to the thought and writing Mishra’s considerable reputation today owes to. A year later, now, I haven’t done that. Indeed I’ve been failing for months even to get to the little book he must have been at work on about then, February’s The World After Gaza.

As to that, at least, just in the last week I’ve turned corner. This is thanks particularly to John Ganz’s newsletter / blog Unpopular Front and its new move in a podcasting direction, inaugurated with Mishra interview. That recorded conversation is very good — see link at bottom (or, for present anyway, download file, 36 MB).

Here, an excerpt from mid-way through:

PM:The impulse to resist oppression is obviously something that cannot be disapproved of. I mean it’s something we have to support. But at the same time, we have to be extremely wary when that impulse becomes a desire to create political institutions and arrangements which in turn will be oppressive to another set of people.

And so I mean, I’m, you know, I find myself somewhat at a distance from people in Europe and America who criticize Israel from an anti-colonialist point of view. For me it’s a very dated perspective, because, you know, if you’ve lived long enough in India, you know we have moved very far away from anti-colonialism. We have gone through a whole cycle of historical experience, which has made anti-colonialism seem like a very inadequate perspective. I think we have to learn now from the experience of postcolonial nations. It’s, it’s not enough to say that the answer to, uh, the Israeli violence and oppression is another Palestinian state. We have to already foresee the problems that Palestinian state will have.

JG:Yeah.

PM:So we have to be a lot more imaginative than just thinking of Palestinian national sovereignty in simplistic ways. At the same time, you know, I think, when you’re facing that kind of genocidal violence, I think a lot of those, a lot of these kinds of conversations have to be shelved. Like, we are, you know — people are literally fighting for their lives. And, and, you know, but at the same time, for those of us who are not actually you know directly involved in these battles — for intellectuals, for historians — they certainly have to keep talking about these things. That’s, that’s certainly what I’m trying to do.

JG:I think that, you know, some of the most interesting figures you talk about in your book made the decision, even — so, Hannah Arendt, and Hans Kohn a little bit before, Hannah Arendt directly after the Holocaust — they made the decision — which I think was a very difficult one, when the urgency was felt among Jews that said, ‘Well yes, you know, maybe there’ll be problems down the road but we just went through this, so we can’t think about this’ — and they actually did the hard work of thinking about what the future might entail. And now their work seems prophetic. But it perhaps wasn’t that hard to see how things would develop.

And yeah, your point is really taken about the, the anti-colonial side of this. I mean, I, the status of Israel as a post-colonial state is complex, because on the one hand it was fold-, it’s folded into a friendly relationship with the, with imperial powers; on the other hand, you know, the dominant ideology of Israel now, this revisionist Jabotinsky-ite wing, you know, they, they, they were terrorists against the British, and they thought they were throwing off the British yoke. And they have some, some claim to being an anti-colonial movement, although they were themselves settler-colonialist.

So I think the entire, this conflict in particular, with the histories of the peoples involved, perhaps confounds and should be a place to put aside some of those easier narratives of resistance to colonialism, or ‘This is an outpost of civilization,’ or ‘This people has a right to a certain degree of violence because of their past’ — in a way it’s this knot of all these historical problems. And I think this is why — I mean there are other reasons that are material reasons — but certainly why it kind of, a conflict in this part of the world kind of pains the heart of the entire world, because it points to all of these contradictions. And I would hope — and I’ve been struggling to articulate and to convince people of this — that perhaps some of the terms should be abandoned, because we can see what they lead to.