The Nazis conducted their genocide in secret, and took pains to ensure that this secrecy would survive the war. After the failed prisoner uprising of August 2nd, 1943 – when it was already clear to every sentient German that the war was as good as lost – the SS set about dismantling the death factory they had built at Treblinka, 80 kilometres north-east of Warsaw. The gas chamber was blown up and its bricks taken away by train. The mass burning of corpses had been under way since early 1943; now it went at double-speed. The mass graves were filled in and the fresh earth was planted with lupins. The barracks, the station and the train tracks were dismantled. When the Red Army entered the camp thirteen months later, in September 1944, this is what they found:
It is quiet. The tops of the pine trees on either side of the railway lines are barely stirring. It is these pines, this sand, this old tree stump that millions of human eyes saw as their freight wagons came slowly up to the platform. With true German neatness, whitewashed stones have been laid along the borders of the black road. The ashes and crushed cinders swish softly. We enter the camp. We tread the earth of Treblinka. The lupin pods split open at the least touch; they split with a faint ping and millions of tiny peas scatter over the earth.
Millions of tiny peas. This account (‘The Hell of Treblinka’, 1944) is by the Russian journalist and novelist Vasily Grossman, who was a war correspondent with the Red Army as it thundered west through Poland. Inside the barbed wire, Grossman walks on, and finds that the cover-up – the white rocks, the lupins – has utterly failed. The earth is ‘swaying’:
The earth is casting up fragments of bone, teeth, sheets of paper, clothes, things of all kinds. The earth does not want to keep secrets […] Here they are: the half-rotted shirts of those who were murdered, their trousers and shoes […] photographs of children from Warsaw and Vienna, letters pencilled in a childish scrawl […] We walk on over the swaying, bottomless earth of Treblinka and suddenly come to a stop. Thick wavy hair, gleaming like burnished copper, the delicate lovely hair of a young woman […] And it feels as if your heart must come to a stop now, gripped by more sorrow, more grief, more anguish than any human being can endure …
Grossman muses on the Nazi efforts at secrecy. ‘Did the Germans really think that they could hide the dead, heavy flames and the smoke that stood in the sky for eight months, visible day and night to the inhabitants of dozens of villages and hamlets?’ They may not really have thought so. But they did try. It was not a programmatic decision. Still less was it a belated pang of conscience. Rather, it was a hasty and expedient change of course. The point was that the Nazis were supposed to win the war. When this happened, secrecy would be unnecessary, because there would be no context in which any witness to the horrors could meaningfully speak. It was the prospect of defeat that made the Nazis scramble to conceal what they had done.
Does Israel worry about the prospect of defeat? Certainly it is making no serious effort to hide its crimes in Gaza. The IDF and the IAF are apparently content for evidence of their atrocities to be broadcast via social and legacy media: pictures and video footage of the eyeless and limbless and headless men, women, and children, the starved infants, the dead children, the prisoners bound naked in chairs, the long trenches full of body-bagged corpses, the desperate people shot at food distribution centres, the airstrikes on community kitchens, hospitals, and universities, the airstrikes on refugee camps, the airstrikes on schools being used as civilian shelters. Periodically the Israeli Defence Ministry or the IDF issue a mocking statement to the effect that Israeli forces in Gaza take ‘feasible precautions to mitigate civilian harm’. The severance of language from referent, the moral inversion that this severance makes visible, is total. Everybody knows that civilian harm is the point.
The Israelis do not appear to imagine a context in which any witnesses or critics might meaningfully – that is, effectually – speak. As the number of Palestinian dead climbs daily (as of this writing, the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry cites 54,607 as the minimum figure), as prominent Palestinian artists like the Oscar-winning filmmaker Hamdan Ballal are kidnapped and beaten by Israeli security forces, as the bodies of missing health workers, murdered by Israeli forces, are found, as UNRWA staff are detained and tortured in IDF facilities, as journalists are routinely murdered by Israeli soldiers, as toddlers are shot in the head by Israeli snipers, as diplomats from Western countries are shot at by IDF soldiers in the West Bank, as aid (food, medicine) is withheld, as electricity and water are denied to the people of Gaza, even the token hypocrisies begin to fall away. In May, the Israeli finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, declared that ‘Gaza will be entirely destroyed’ and its inhabitants will ‘leave in great numbers to third countries’. Concurrently, Benjamin Netanyahu posted a video on social media in which he announced that the population of Gaza ‘will be moved, for its own protection’. He did not explain that the danger threatening the people of Gaza is his own government.
Back in April, we watched Netanyahu stand beside Donald Trump in the White House and smirk as Trump outlined his plan to ‘clean out’ Gaza’s two million inhabitants and turn the tiny strip of land into the ‘Riviera of the Middle East’. Clean out: as with Trump’s June reference to ‘infected countries’, upon whose citizens he has now imposed a ban on travel to the United States, the rhetoric is the old Hitlerite two-step of contamination-and-cleansing, fused, as Hitler fused it, with the language of territorial arrogation, now given a Trumpian rebranding. Not Lebensraum but Freizeitraum: leisure-space. The teleology is clear. No more Palestinians. Not in Gaza, and perhaps not anywhere else either. Instead – in Gaza and beyond – a rampant and vulgar white supremacist capitalism, extracting money from the bones of crushed children.
Israel is not only content to let its crimes be broadcast. It invites public testimony about them in its own institutions. In June 2024, an IDF soldier named Guy Zaken testified before the Knesset about the traumas he had experienced as the driver of a military bulldozer in Gaza. Zaken had repeatedly driven his bulldozer ‘over terrorists, dead and alive, in the hundreds’. When you do this, Zaken said, ‘everything squirts out’. According to CNN, ‘Zaken says he can no longer eat meat, as it reminds him of the gruesome scenes he witnessed from his bulldozer in Gaza, and struggles to sleep at night, the sound of explosions ringing in his head.’ The merest fig leaf of political cover is provided, here, by the word ‘terrorists’. Are there really hundreds of ‘terrorists’ crowding the streets of Gaza? The Hamas attacks of October 7th, 2023, in which 1,195 people were killed, were terroristic. But what do you call driving a bulldozer over piles of human beings? How many of these human beings were alive, as Zaken drove over them? How many of them were women? How many of them were children?
The Nazis did not invite public testimony about the trauma their soldiers experienced as they committed genocide. As we know from Christopher Browning’s seminal study Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (1992), a culture of moral nullity and dutiful competition obtained among the petit bourgeois family men who made up the Nazi Einsatzgruppen, charged in the early 1940s with shooting whole Eastern European villages of Jews and piling the bodies up in mass graves. The idiom in which these men later spoke of their crimes was not one of trauma but one of boredom, irritability, of go-along-to-get-along. But times have changed. The postwar ascension of psychoanalysis and psychiatry in the United States supplied the basic set of concepts and metaphors through which secular individuals in the West and elsewhere now understand themselves. The language of trauma has long since formed a central part of our emotional self-understanding, wherever we happen to live. Just as the language of genocide has, thanks to the postwar liberal project of grappling with the Holocaust, become part of our political self-understanding. And yet, here we are. It would seem that nothing has changed after all, except the uniforms of the killers and the ethnic identity of the victims. But something has changed. And everybody knows it.
To call what Israel is doing in Gaza genocide is simply to speak the truth. Efforts to say otherwise deny the reality of what everyone can plainly see. To compare the current Israeli government to the Nazis is not antisemitism, as it might perhaps once have been, but bitter justice. To say otherwise is to collude in Israel’s other great crime, the use of the twentieth century’s central European horror as pretext and alibi for its own monstrousness. The old crimes continue; the old identities lose their meaning, in the game of genocidal musical chairs; the old horrors serve only as pretexts for new horrors. The Palestinians, it seems, must pay for Hitler’s crimes, and the West must sign the invoice. According to Ehud Olmert, the former Israeli prime minister, writing for Haaretz in late May, Netanyahu’s government is a ‘criminal gang’ waging ‘a war of extermination: indiscriminate, brutal, and criminal killing of civilians. We are doing this […] as a result of a policy dictated by the government, knowingly, intentionally, maliciously, with reckless abandon. Yes, we are committing war crimes.’ Olmert – who is, it is worth remarking, no lefty, and no peacenik – does not point out that these lines might just as easily describe the activities of the Nazis in Eastern Europe in the early 1940s. What is Israel? What was it meant to be? ‘The world will be liberated by our freedom, enriched by our wealth, magnified by our greatness,’ wrote Theodor Herzl in The Jewish State (1896). ‘And whatever we attempt there for our own benefit will redound mightily and beneficially to the good of all mankind.’
‘Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return,’ wrote Auden, in ‘September 1st, 1939’. Almost from its inception, Zionism involved the displacement – the ethnic cleansing – of the inhabitants of Palestine. For a brief moment, in the early years of the movement, it was perhaps possible to imagine a Zionism that did not replicate the worst features of nineteenth century nationalism. But of course a nineteenth century nationalism is what Zionism was and is. Our world, the world of the twenty-first century, is still the world shaped by those old nationalisms, and by the ideologies that rose from them like smoke from burning pyres.
‘September 1st, 1939’ was composed in the first weeks of the Second World War, as the poet watched ‘the clever hopes expire / Of a low, dishonest decade.’ Clever, here, both praises and condemns the left-wing intellectuals of the Thirties, the communists and fellow travellers: fatally ambivalent or wilfully deceived about the nature of Stalin’s Russia, defeated in Spain, scattered and imprisoned by Hitler’s thugs in Germany (the KPD, in refusing to work with the Social Democrats in 1932 and 1933, had catastrophically split the anti-Nazi vote and given Hitler the chancellorship), their utopian project had crashed to nothing. Now, almost a century later, our own clever hopes expire – not just the hopes of a weakened and fragmented left, this time, but also the hopes of liberalism: last of the great twentieth century ideologies. Gaza – we feel, we know – has broken something. Or perhaps Gaza has shown us that something was already broken; perhaps many things. ‘I sit in one of the dives / On Fifty-second Street / Uncertain and afraid …
It is the nakedness of evil that tells us we are in a new world. On February 25th, 2025, Donald Trump shared an AI-generated video on his social media platform Truth Social. The thirty-three-second video begins with brief shots of a devastated Gaza, and then unfolds like a particularly vulgar property developer’s pitch video, depicting scenes of beachfront leisure, children catching dollar bills out of the air, Orientalised dancers, hotels, swimming pools, a large golden statue of Donald Trump, a tourist stall selling smaller golden Trump statues, scenes in which the richest man in the world – and, as of this writing, Trump’s former pal and enabler – Elon Musk, enjoying more natural hair and handsomeness than he in actuality possesses, eats flatbread at restaurants, and scenes in which Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu sit in swimming trunks beside a pool, drinking cocktails. An AI-generated song accompanies the video; the lyrics include the words ‘no more tunnels, no more fear / Trump Gaza is finally here.’ The creator of the video, an Israeli-born US filmmaker named Solo Avital, told The Guardian that it was originally intended as satire; he had been reluctant to share the video because ‘it might be a little insensitive and we don’t want to take sides’. Avital said he hoped that Trump’s sharing of the video would ‘spark a public debate about rights and wrongs’ of generative AI.
Questions about generative AI are neither here nor there. Our contemporary computer technologies have long since been weaponised by amoral multinationals and by fascists and reactionaries in Russia and the West to demoralise and dominate; soon they will be weaponised by fascist-adjacent corporations in order to render expensive human employees redundant and thus consolidate power and money in even fewer hands. (This, incidentally, is the real subject of ‘debates’ about AI. Will AI be good or bad? Will it rule us or serve us? Irrelevant: we are already ruled by the men who will simply use AI to control us more effectively). In posting the Trump Gaza video, Trump took advantage of a long-established crisis of meaning in online spaces. While Trump himself is not responsible for this crisis of meaning, he has for many years manipulated it superbly to secure his political power. His meaning in posting the video was manifold. On one level, he was trolling the libs – stoking literalist outrage, to the delight of his fans. At this level of meaning – the 4chan/Alt-Right level – it remains possible for Trump to say or at any rate to imply that he didn’t ‘mean’ the Trump Gaza video in any serious way, that he understands it as satire, and that he can walk back its apparently monstrous meaning at any time, making those of us who are outraged by its horror look foolish. (Even this, of course, is a profoundly evil thing to do, but it at least assumes a context in which liberal outrage has some lingering moral suasion.) On another level – the level of amoral narcissism at which Trump is always also operating, no matter what else he’s doing – by posting the video he was generating news, that is, calling attention to himself. And on another level, of course, Trump means the video literally. He would be happy to eradicate the Palestinians from Gaza and transform it into a glitzy Babylon for rich white psychopaths. He would be happy to drink cocktails on the graves of murdered children.
And of course this is the only level that matters. The Trump Gaza video tells us that the crisis of meaning in online spaces has entered a new phase, one in which trollish ambiguity is no longer ambiguous in any real sense but is now overtly the merest fig leaf for undisguised barbarity. The power of MAGA has always been its ability to hide its actual viciousness behind the mask of trollish ambiguity, behind a strain of diseased irony that was born on anonymous message boards in the late 2000s and that has long since infected mainstream social media (the logo of this strain of irony used to be, and perhaps still is, Pepe the Frog, an image categorised as a hate symbol by the Anti-Defamation League). But the MAGA counterrevolution no longer needs to hide its viciousness. It is busily repealing the liberal context in which any such disguise is required. It is using the enforcement arms of the US federal government to snatch pro-Palestinian protesters from the street. It is sending the odious JD Vance to Greenland to threaten its citizens with an American invasion. It is polluting the media ecosystem with lies about ‘white genocide’ in South Africa. The only valid interpretation of the Trump Gaza video, as posted by Trump, is that it is a triumphant advertisement for naked evil. To watch it is to understand that a moral horizon has been crossed; that we have all been dragged across that moral horizon; that a liberal context which has for some years now grown more and more implicit and less and less actual has now, finally, vanished.
But of course that moral horizon had already been crossed, many times. Trump has been dancing us back and forth across this particular line ever since he descended that golden escalator in Trump Tower on June 16th, 2015 to call Mexican immigrants rapists and announce his bid for the presidency. His prey was a moribund liberal consensus; his tactics were those of his favourite corporate pseudosport, World Wrestling Entertainment; he was, and is, in every way the dream embodiment of American fascism, Sinclair Lewis’s Buzz Windrip wearing Michael Douglas’s suit from Wall Street. The most salient fact about Donald Trump is not his cretinous authoritarianism or his venality or his narcissism or his degenerate verbal prose or his phobia of germs or his small hands or his terrible posture or the fact that his psychopathic father never loved him. It is that he does not care or even think about anyone but himself. He is the ignorant and spectacular embodiment of America’s worst idea, individualism, wrought to its uttermost. This is the American variant of fascism, first patented by Ayn Rand and now perfected by Trump: not a fascism of the mass but a fascism of the diseased and disappointed monad. It is not an accident that Trump is so popular among online solitaries. He gives their solitude a badge, a hat, a logo. When Trump essays a foreign policy decision, he operates as if the United States were not a nation but an individual – specifically, a corrupt property developer. Not Gaza the 51st state, and certainly not Gaza the Palestinian state, but Trump Gaza. He cares about no one but himself.
Thwarting the monadic psychopath – preventing him from damaging the common weal – is liberalism’s most basic job, the primal duty of the rule of law. This, essentially, was the basis of Hobbes’s liberalism, now revived by those deluded techno-optimists who believe advanced AI will rule us as a just Leviathan. That later strains of liberalism – John Stuart Mill’s, Isaiah Berlin’s – want the individual to flourish as an individual introduced a contradiction that Western liberalism in its later years has never satisfactorily resolved, except by borrowing communitarian ideas from the left. But the United States has long since stopped borrowing communitarian ideas from the left, except rhetorically – and hardly even then.
‘Stronger Together’ went Hilary Clinton’s campaign slogan in 2016. What did it mean? Nobody in America in 2016 any longer believed that Americans were ‘stronger together’. Black victims of militarised police forces and for-profit prisons, inhabitants of rural towns eviscerated by outsourcing and opioids, redpilled online extremists: they all had other ideas. But the real and urgent question about ‘Stronger Together’ in 2016 was not whether voters believed it. It was did Hilary Clinton believe it? Did Hilary Clinton believe in anything at all? Why was she running for president? The only viable answer anyone could come up with, including Hilary herself, was ‘to stop Donald Trump’. ‘I’m the only thing standing between you and the apocalypse,’ Hilary told voters via The New York Times as the November 2016 election loomed. But that is not a platform. It is not even really a story. ‘The apocalypse’: Clinton might have been better served if she had called Trump’s campaign what it actually was, that is the spearhead of a counterrevolution against the bankrupt and antidemocratic neoliberalism that Clinton herself embodied. But she wasn’t going to say that, was she?
What was Hilary Clinton, really? Was she anything? Even her most ardent supporters suspected that, beneath the emollient slogans and the touted bureaucratic competence, she was actually nothing. No more Yes we can. No more Hope. We all remembered Bill Clinton’s ceding of political power to the markets in the early 1990s. We all remembered Obama’s failure to close the gulag at Guantánamo Bay; we all remembered his bailouts of corrupt banks in 2009; we all remembered that Hilary Clinton had been secretary of state during all of this. The emptiness of mainstream liberal politicians in the US had become unignorably visible to all. And yet American liberals did ignore it. They clung to the dream-world that had served them for so long – a dream-world in which politics could be explained and managed by simple binary narratives advanced via protests and tweets and longreads, a dream-world in which the intractable complexities of the real could be papered over by the right-on choices of progressive individuals (drive an EV, eschew fast fashion, ask about pronouns), a dream-world in which everybody was just like them, except for a weird fringe group of idiots who inexplicably kept voting against their own best interests.
By 2016 the emptiness of liberal politicians was not just visible in America of course. It was visible across the West. What did David Cameron stand for? Why did he want to be prime minister? Was it actually to do something in particular? He spoke of ‘the Big Society’, which, despite its nominal effort to remind people of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programmes of social reform, really only meant more neoliberalism, more leaving it to the markets. In the end, Cameron really only stood for Brexit, although of course he washed his hands of it as soon as the referendum results came through. It is entirely possible that Cameron – an astute player of the game of politics – recognised Brexit for what it was, that is the first serious counterrevolutionary gesture in the popular war against neoliberalism, and therefore that he knew the jig was up; he had nothing to offer in response. In leaving the stage so promptly, he was wiser than most of his peers.
In the week that followed the Leave vote, Fintan O’Toole, writing in The Irish Times, insisted that Brexit was ‘an English nationalist revolution’, and that may indeed have been the case, but to say so raises a more disturbing question about the actual content of English nationalism in the twenty-first century. For O’Toole, expanding on the idea in his book Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain (2018), that nationalism boiled down to a compulsively retold narrative of the hero’s last stand against imperial decline. Certainly the anti-neoliberal counterrevolution has for its actual content merely old toxic narratives: nineteenth century nationalism and imperialism, twentieth century fascism (for now, more Francoist than Hitlerite, but it’s early days). Such narratives give sustenance until they don’t. The hero’s-last-stand-against-decline story, for instance, is pretty much a one-and-done kind of deal. You can’t keep telling it forever, especially if no actual reversal of decline then follows. But given that this was the implicit narrative content of Brexit, it should surprise no one that the politician who eventually rose to embody Brexit was himself an empty signifier with no more stories to tell.
We know, from Johnson at 10: The Inside Story (2023) by Anthony Seldon and Raymon Newell, that Boris Johnson had no vision beyond the vision of himself becoming, and then being, prime minister. Once in power, he tried halfheartedly to channel a fairly traditional liberal vision of an inclusive society – he is not really, at heart, an English nationalist, nor even much of a small-c conservative – but, lacking any actual values of his own, he was at the mercy of events, and of the chicanery of other politicians and advisers, at home and abroad. Buffoonery aside, Johnson fit seamlessly into what was by then a long parade of Western politicians who had no discernible ideas beyond ‘I want the prestige of office’ and ‘the markets are in charge’; whose liberalism was identifiable only in rote obeisances to liberal shibboleths; and whose own lack of faith in the institutions of liberalism (as when Johnson prorogued parliament and then slandered the Supreme Court judges who told him that he had acted unconstitutionally) was shamefully evident to all.
Johnson at 10 is an unsparing portrait of a specific liberal institution – the Tory party – that no longer has any values beyond the maintenance of its own forward motion. It was the vacuum of meaning at the heart of the post-coalition Conservative Party that allowed Johnson’s semi-deranged anti-establishment (indeed, counter-revolutionary) adviser, Dominic Cummings, to hollow it out completely in the name of an apocalyptic illiberalism, using Brexit as his Trojan horse. The moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the Tories under Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak (the mad neoliberal and the sane neoliberal) and now under Kemi Badenoch (the empty culture-warrior) were the inevitable result. The bad news is that the UK Labour Party, now of course in power, has largely followed the same trajectory. A new book by Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund, Get In: The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer (2025), recounts the process by which the socialist ideals of Jeremy Corbyn were flushed out and the Labour Party reconstructed along comfortably neoliberal lines. Maguire and Pogrund have Keir Starmer, in an early meeting as party leader, saying, ‘I don’t have any ideology at all. There’s no such thing as Starmerism and there never will be. I will make decisions one after the other.’ To say that you have no ideology is to say that what you have is the dominant, and therefore invisible, ideology of your time – in Starmer’s case, neoliberal technocracy, for which ‘Starmerism’ may be as good a name as any.
What Starmer is disavowing in these remarks is, of course, ‘Corbynism’, the allegedly radical idea that Britain might renationalise its utilities and reject neoliberal policies of austerity. The view that Corbyn was ‘unelectable’, widely held by Labour voters and politicians then and now, says less about Corbyn’s own personal failings and more about a political system geared towards, precisely, ‘electability’, meaning, largely, the quality of being able to elide yawning inequalities and cultural rifts in the name of ‘growth’. Instead of anything like a left-wing alternative to neoliberalism, Starmer presides over a Labour Party that has returned to the media-savvy emptiness of the Blair years, and to what is no longer called ‘the Third Way’ – by which Anthony Giddens meant, you will recall, neither conservatism nor leftism, but a paternalistic market fundamentalism. It remains to be seen if Starmer will fall prey to the primary Blairite temptation: to become the messianic figurehead for some righteous global cause. The refortification of Europe, as America turns against us, might yet provide the opportunity for just such an ascension. A more immediate risk derives from Starmer’s recent effort to court Reform UK voters by channelling the spirit of Enoch Powell – an effort that will almost certainly succeed only in making mainstream political discourse in the UK more overtly racist. But the visible emptiness at the heart of Starmer’s project – which is, as multiple sources quoted by Maguire and Pogrund put it, merely ‘to win’ (that is, to win elections) – will persist, as it did during Blair’s deluded venture alongside the Americans into Iraq.
Labour and the Tories are just two of the old Western liberal institutions that increasingly do not mean what they’re supposed to mean. The rot runs wide and deep: you can see it in the growing emptiness of middlebrow culture, in the fraying bonds of social and familial trust, in the increasingly combative university seminar room. But perhaps we should stick with political institutions for now. What about the US Congress? In ruling via executive orders (one of which, signed on February 18th, 2025 and entitled ‘Ensuring Accountability for All Agencies’, appears to define ‘the law’ as meaning whatever Trump says it is), allowing Elon Musk to butcher federal agencies and programmes, and selectively ignoring judicial orders, Trump has neutered Congress – which, with its Republican majorities, was not in any case an obstacle to his assumption of dictatorial power. The Democratic Party havers and hovers, and does nothing except complain as the US Constitution is effectively abrogated. But trust in Congress had already been profoundly undermined, and not just by grotesque Republican tactics of obstruction and persecution during the Clinton and Obama years, nor by anti-Democrat propaganda spread by Fox News and other right-wing organs; and not just by the fact that it stands idly by as the American citizens are murdered by their own healthcare system and as America’s children are murdered in their schools and kindergartens. In July 2024, Benjamin Netanyahu addressed both houses of Congress. In a long speech filled with lies, he thanked President Joe Biden ‘for being, as he says, a proud Zionist’, and said that those taking part in pro-Palestine protests ‘should be ashamed of themselves […] They refuse to make the simple distinction between those who target terrorists and those who target civilians.’
The inversion, here, is familiar from Orwell; Trump is also a big fan of this particular feat of rhetoric. The psychological mechanism underwriting it is basic projection. It permits the speaker to describe himself, while appearing to describe another. As the IDF, on Netanyahu’s orders, continued to murder civilians and block aid transports, members of the United States Congress, including Joe Biden, gave Netanyahu an impassioned standing ovation. Set aside the basic unnaturalness of the American sponsorship of Israel – its geo-strategic cruelties, its toxic roots in evangelical Christianity (which needs Jews in Palestine to help bring about Armageddon). Set aside, if only for a moment, the horrors of the Hamas attack on October 7th, which Netanyahu replayed in detail for his Congressional audience. By July 2024, almost 40,000 people had died in Gaza; half a million people there were in imminent danger of starvation. Biden and his senators and representatives could, in a single gesture, have ended Netanyahu’s brutal campaign. Instead they applauded it. What exactly does the United States Congress mean, at such a moment? What does it stand for?
Of course I am being laughably naïve. What did the US Congress ever stand for? It stood for elite American power, which was nothing to worry about if you lived in Western Europe and quite a different proposition if you lived in Palestine, or Guatemala, or Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Vietnam, or … It is not that the standing ovation for Netanyahu changed any material facts. Rather, it told us that even the sham rhetoric of liberal decency was now in abeyance. American elites would no longer even pretend to stand for anything at all. Lies would be ignored – not even believed or disbelieved, but ignored, that is, left to stand as lies, as if it no longer mattered what was true. Poor people with brown skin would be slaughtered and that would be that. There would be neither shame nor apology.
It is not surprising that the American left now appears demoralised to the point of dissociation. (There are honourable exceptions – Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Bernie Sanders, and a few scattered intellectuals here and there – but overall the American liberal left seems to have ceded in despair the power to shape reality, and to exist in a lingering dreamworld of hope and fear.) Even the slender handhold offered by hypocrisy – the compliment, remember, that vice pays to virtue – can no longer be grasped. Long before Trump took office for the second time, there was no longer even this smallest scintilla of leverage with which to pull the liberal state fractionally leftwards, fractionally in the direction of actually meaning what it used to say it meant. It was Gaza that showed us, finally and irrefutably, that the American liberal world was finished. It isn’t that Trump, in his second term, is destroying the American liberal state. It’s that he arrived to find it empty, and simply moved in, like a fascist hermit crab.
What about the other American liberal institutions? In May 2024, before he became Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, that alt-right finger-puppet pretending to be a human being, praised Viktor Orbán for repressing anti-regime dissent in Hungarian universities. This, Vance said, was ‘the closest conservatives have ever gotten to successfully dealing with the left-wing domination of universities’. The left-wing domination of universities is a concept that always amuses those of us who actually work in universities. But it is true that American universities, particularly the elite ones, have over the last three decades been undergoing a hollowing-out process of their own. The weaponisation of Title IX sexual harassment statutes by increasingly powerful administrators and rogue accusers in the 2000s and 2010s, as recounted in Laura Kipnis’s Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus (2017), as well as the endless wars over language, culture, gender, race and history that have defined the public faces of twenty-first century American universities, have not only muddied and papered over actual cases of rape, sexual harassment and racism, but insidiously undermined the standing of American universities as authentically liberal institutions. This is the bitterly ironic outcome of the ‘long march through the institutions’ announced by Rudi Dutschke and Herbert Marcuse after the failure of the New Left and student radical movements in the early 1970s. Intended as a Gramscian war of position against repressive bourgeois Western states, the long march has long since become a comforting story that university academics tell themselves about what it is they’re doing – when in reality, they live in another dream-world, utterly disconnected from post-Reaganite realities of money and power. Unable to combat the depredations of neoliberalism effectively, university academics in America have turned on each other. Kipnis’s book describes a regime of repression – closed tribunals, anonymous denunciations, words that cannot be spoken – that would make Viktor Orbán proud. That this regime was driven by ‘the left’ makes little difference to the result, which is the decay of universities as effective vessels for the protection of liberal values.
But once again it was Gaza that showed us where we stood. In May 2024, Minouche Shafik, the president of Columbia University in New York, called in 300 members of the NYPD in riot gear to break up an encampment of pro-Palestine protesters on the university’s campus. Protesters were arrested. Similar protests were violently broken up at UCLA (where, before they stepped in themselves, LAPD officers stood back and watched as the pro-Palestine protesters were violently assaulted by people shouting support for Israel), at the University of Texas at Austin, Arizona State University, the University of Southern California, and elsewhere.
At issue in most of these protests was the question of whether a given university would divest from Israel – move its investments elsewhere and make a statement about the ongoing genocide while doing so. The protesters understood that it was not morals but money that would provoke a reaction from their chosen institutions. A reaction was what they got. (Gaza protests on campus were not limited to the US. At the University of Amsterdam, a Gaza protest was broken up by police, who made hundreds of arrests. Here in Dublin, in May of last year, I walked several times past Trinity’s entirely peaceful Gaza encampment in Fellows’ Square; the university was closed to the public at the time, ostensibly for the protection of the protesters, but also, surely, to limit embarrassing scenes in the legacy media. Trinity eventually issued a statement in which it agreed to divest from Israeli investment funds, a process that was in fact already in train, and the encampment was dismantled. But Ireland is different. Among the state’s foundational values is anti-imperialism; perhaps because of this – but not only because of this I hope – support for Palestine is more widely articulated here.)
The violent response of Columbia and other American universities to the Gaza protests disclosed an institutional culture that had abandoned, in practice, the virtue that it praised most often in theory. To put it at its simplest, it became clear that many American universities were now places in which there were many things you could not say, or in which the price of saying certain things was now violent state repression. The Gaza protesters were going after the money but their real motivation was human life – solidarity, that is, with the victims of the IDF in Gaza. They found themselves becoming victims for saying so. Plus ça change, you will perhaps suggest, recalling that in 1936 Columbia tried to deny tenure to Lionel Trilling on the grounds that as a Jew he could not be ‘happy’ there. New dress, same repression. But Trilling sued for tenure and won; and it was at American universities that Edward Said, beginning in the late 1970s, articulated his critique of Zionism as an expression of Western-style imperialism. Indeed it was at Columbia.
That Trilling sued for tenure and won speaks of a liberal institution that was still capable of being forced up to the level of its professed values. That Said found a home at Columbia speaks of a liberal institution that was still capable of expanding the range of its intellectual sympathies and tolerances. But Gaza tells us that we are no longer in a period when liberal institutions can be bullied or embarrassed into actually being liberal. Rather the opposite is now true. In MAGA America, universities are now being bullied into being more illiberal. The list of capitulations to Trumpian blackmail is long and depressing, and grows longer every week. Columbia, threatened with the withdrawal of $400 million in federal funding, agreed to give up control of its Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies departments to the Trump regime, and permitted the militarisation of its campus police. (Columbia’s ostensible crime was ‘antisemitism’, a word rendered increasingly meaningless by fascists in Israel and America even as actual antisemitism grows more overt across the world.)
Under pressure from Jewish-American alumni groups, Harvard in March dismissed the faculty leaders of its Centre for Middle Eastern Studies (again, the alleged crime was ‘antisemitism’; the CMES director Cemal Kafadar was accused by the Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance of ‘expressing pro-Palestine views to his students’). Since then, of course, Harvard has begun to mobilise its legal and financial resources against MAGA assaults; Trump has responded by revoking the university’s permission to enrol foreign students and by threatening to suspend its tax-free status. (An American friend of mine remarked recently, ‘What have we come to, when Harvard is leading the resistance?’) Harvard is framing its efforts to stand up for itself as a defence of liberal values; a statement issued by the university on June 4th, 2025, cites the protection of its rights to freedom of speech under the First Amendment. But MAGA’s crusade against universities is of the very essence of its counter-revolutionary project, and it will not be easily thwarted. And MAGA has time, and many of the courts, on its side.
Harvard might find itself increasingly isolated. Very few American universities possess its formidable resources (and its elitism, of course, is part of the problem: it is Harvard, after all, that trains the generals and footsoldiers of neoliberalism). American campuses find themselves increasingly militarised, increasingly menaced by the forces of MAGA; and not all of them are leaping to the defence of liberal principles. Johns Hopkins University in Maryland has instructed its faculty and staff not to intervene if agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) abduct people from campus, and not to ‘engage in any behaviour in an effort to enable [such people] to leave the premises or hide’. We must ask the question: if ICE came for a still-living Edward Said, would Columbia do anything to prevent his abduction, imprisonment, deportation? But we don’t need to ask. In The Guardian (March 25th, 2025), Rashid Khalidi wrote:
We should hold on to these thoughts as long as we can, because in the dystopian world we have entered, simple mention of race and racism are, or will soon be, violations of the perverse current reading of federal law. Once the quislings who run Columbia University have implemented the diktats of their masters in Washington and on the board of trustees, once these diktats have spread to other universities under threat, teaching and even quoting [Frantz] Fanon will be perilous indeed, as will be mere mention of race and racism, not to speak of gender, disability and much else. We are approaching the status of Chilean universities under Pinochet, where on the orders of an authoritarian government, ideas and books were banned, students were expelled and arrested, departments were taken over, and faculty and staff fired.
A biographical note at the end of Khalidi’s article reminds us that he is the Edward Said Professor of Emeritus Studies at Columbia University.
Watching so many of these institutions fall over at the first push tells us that they were ready to fall; they had fallen already. So too with the various federal departments that Musk’s ‘DOGE’ eviscerated; and so too with the venerable outposts of American liberal media. To read The New York Times in the first half of 2025 is very often to behold a liberal commentariat still clinging to the shattered dreams of liberal proceduralism: articles about the question of whether the judiciary will ‘stop’ Trump; whether the United States is in, or is about to enter, a constitutional crisis; speculation about who will run for president on the Democratic ticket in 2028. There is a hallucinatory quality to these articles. They refer to a world that no longer exists.
The New York Times has done its bit, of course, to solidify the general Western silence and inertia on Gaza. It tends to do its work by means of the passive voice. ‘GAZA’S RETURN TO WAR’ ran the headline of an article, dated March 25th, 2025, about the Israeli Air Force’s ceasefire-violating campaign of ‘intense’ bombing against an already desolate Gaza. Why not ‘ISRAEL BREAKS CEASEFIRE’ at the very, very least? But now it’s me who’s clinging to shattered dreams, and appealing, out of sheer habit, to an implicit liberal context, one that used to be dependably present in American public life, no matter how corrupt or deranged or trivial or dreamlike or bellicose that public life became. But that context simply no longer pertains. The New York Times is now in danger of becoming a ghost institution, biding its time in the haunted house of liberalism until the MAGA blackmailers start knocking on its door.
We are faced with a United States in which Columbia, Harvard, The New York Times mean nothing; as liberal Germans were faced, in 1933, with a Germany in which the newly-minted Rektor of Freiburg University spoke passionately, in his inaugural address, in favour of Hitler’s ‘revolution’. Trump and MAGA already have their own coterie of tame intellectuals, centred around publications like the Claremont Review of Books and The New Criterion. They cannot boast of anyone remotely of Martin Heidegger’s calibre or pre-1933 reputation, but give them time. Israel’s present government of fascists, of course, can invoke a much more persuasive intellectual roster in support of their regime, many of them now among the honoured dead, some of them winners of the Nobel Prize. And some of them on the faculty at Columbia: the poet and critic Adam Kirsch has recently published a short book entitled On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice (2024), which rejects the concept of settler colonialism as a ‘radical’ ideology that sees the US and Israel as ‘permanently illegitimate’. Perhaps merely another entry in the long and disgraceful history of American Zionism; perhaps the shape of intellectual things to come.
Other public intellectuals in the West have rushed to disgrace themselves. Gaza is, of course, the topic on which these intellectuals – perhaps pundits is the apposite word – are most exercised. Douglas Murray, for instance, has produced a book called On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel, Hamas, and the Future of the West (HarperCollins) which frames what Israel is doing in Gaza as a ‘war’ and defends ‘the right of Israel to fight and win such a war’ as ‘vital not just for the sake of that country, but so Britain, America, and every other Western country will be able to fight such a war if – or when – the time comes.’ Such a war – against whom? The international legions of Hamas? Incidentally, Murray begins his book with an epigraph from Vasily Grossman’s ‘The Hell of Treblinka’. The lines he quotes are these: ‘Someone might ask: “Why write about this, why remember all that?” It is the writer’s duty to tell this terrible truth, and it is the civilian duty of the reader to learn it.’ Murray means the truth about the atrocities of October 7th. He does not mean the truth about 54,607 people dead in Gaza. ‘On democracies and death cults’: Israel, you see, is a democracy, and Hamas is a death cult. We’ve been here before.
The question of whether liberal intellectuals mean what they say they mean – whether liberal intellectuals can in any real sense do what they say they can do – is now acute as at no previous moment in my lifetime. When I was a student, I watched closely as the celebrated public intellectuals of the early 2000s cheer-led the US invasion of Iraq in the name of liberal principles. As a grown-up, I watched these same intellectuals fail to apologise when Iraq descended into bloodshed and chaos, or even to admit that they were wrong. To hear these intellectuals tell it, both Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party in Iraq and Islamist terrorists generally were the Nazis reborn – our ancient enemy, a ‘death cult’ rising up to threaten our existence yet again. Ignorant about Islam, shaky on the histories of Western neocolonialism in the Middle East, these intellectuals stuck to what they knew – they replayed the ideological battles of the twentieth century in drag, shouting about totalitarianism and defending Western elites whose crimes had created the very enemies who hated them. Intellectuals, too, constitute a liberal institution. Heidegger is merely one of the more extreme examples of how they too can be hollowed out by power. We have others, more recent, to think about.
Fascism, once in power, works by violence and the fear of violence. MAGA’s abduction and imprisonment of pro-Palestine activists, and its apparently random detentions of travellers from other Western countries, are meant to frighten the rest of us, to make us weak and lacking in morale. The craven impulse to avoid pain or humiliation is a crack into which all sorts of poison can be poured. Fascists know this. This is how the hollowing-out process works. Intellectuals who side with the perpetrators or sponsors of a genocide are ipso facto guilty of what Julien Benda in 1927 called la trahison des clercs. It would be nice to think that history will stand in judgement on such people. But my point, throughout this essay, is that at this moment in time we cannot depend on ‘history’ in this sense to exist at all. A regnant fascism will seek systematically to alter the contexts in which all intellectual, moral, and political activity takes place; it will aim to make these changes permanent; and never before has fascism been regnant in the world’s most powerful country. Indeed, even to call Trump a fascist, as I have done here, is implicitly to tell a reassuring story. Fascism, historically, is that which we have defeated. But that was then. Call them neofascists, call them counterrevolutionaries – whatever you choose to call them, they are with us now. They have not been defeated. They may not be defeated. Gaza has shown us that many, if not most, Western liberal institutions can no longer be relied upon to resist a corrupt authority, or even to identify a moral imperative so urgent that it should be shouted from every lectern and pulpit. ‘History’ is now; is us. How will we fare?
We are entering into the time of the treason of the clerks; we are entering into the time of monsters. Where is the liberal West as people are crushed under Israeli bulldozers, as children are starved, as they are beheaded by Israeli bombs and guns? As Palestinian paramedics are murdered by the IDF in a ‘safe zone’ and their bodies buried alongside their ambulances? Where is the liberal West? ‘Ask for that great deliverer now, and find him / Eyeless in Gaza, at the mill with slaves …” Samson was the great Israelite hero who massacred, as the legend has it, a whole Philistine army using only a donkey’s jawbone. In Milton’s “Samson Agonistes,” the hero, betrayed by Delilah, is now blind and toils, a captive of his enemy, in Gaza. He has words for us:
I dark in light expos’d
To daily fraud, contempt, abuse and wrong,
Within doors, or without, still as a fool,
In power of others, never in my own;
Scarce half I seem to live, dead more than half.
O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon […]
Darkness at Noon was, of course, the title of one of the twentieth century’s most significant antitotalitarian texts, the 1940 novel by Arthur Koestler. In that novel, Rubashov, an Old Bolshevik and former hero of the revoltion, is purged: imprisoned, interrogated, and executed by the new generation of revolutionaries, supposedly for crimes of ideological error. Reflecting in his cell on the night before his death, Rubashov thinks about the revolution (‘the Bastion of Freedom!’), and about how its original promise has been hollowed out:
Gletkin [Rubashov’s interrogator] justified everything that happened with the principle that the bastion must be preserved. But what did it look like inside? No, one cannot build Paradise with concrete. The bastion would be preserved, but it no longer had a message, nor an example to give the world.
How did it happen? Rubashov thinks that the problem lay ‘in the precept, that the end justifies the means. It was this sentence which had killed the great fraternity of the Revolution and made them all run amuck.’ In the twenty-first century West, we too live inside a revolution that no longer has a message, nor an example to give the world. The secret radicalism at the heart of the postwar West – the attempt, systematically pursued by successive Western governments since 1980, to ‘bring all human action into the domain of the market’ (the phrase is David Harvey’s) – has evacuated our institutions and political systems of meaning. Our leaders are now merely managers of a failed system that even they do not really understand, even as they benefit from its structural inequalities. According to the neoliberal ideologues of the 1980s and 1990s, ‘the market’ was supposed to be the means. But ‘the market’ was, of course, not means but end.
Almost half a century later, this is unignorably clear. ‘The market’ has signally failed to provide sustenance for our emotional and social lives – instead it provides a rolling avalanche of the same old forms of entertainment, each new iteration algorithmically tweaked, alongside thriving therapeutic and pharmaceutical industries to alleviate our distress. ‘The market’ has facilitated the consolidation of elite power in every Western country, and enabled the dismantling-for-profit of much of the machinery of the postwar welfare states. All of this is known, all of this is obvious; and yet, until very recently, many of us still believed, or half-believed, in a story about what ‘the West’ meant, and about what it was supposed to be for. If we are now in shock, it is because the last vestiges of faith in this story are in danger of being swept away. We are awakening from the dream-world that we entered in order to disavow the complexity of the new neoliberal world.
We are far from the first people in history to live through such an experience. In his memoir The World of Yesterday (1942), the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig describes what he calls ‘the world of security’ that existed in Vienna under the Habsburgs before the First World War swept it away, and the story of liberal progress that sustained it:
This feeling of security was the most eagerly sought-after possession of millions, the common ideal of life. Only the possession of this security made life seem worthwhile, and constantly widening circles desired their share of this costly treasure. At first it was only the prosperous who enjoyed this advantage, but gradually the great masses forced their way toward it […] In its liberal idealism, the nineteenth century was honestly convinced that it was on the straight and unfailing path toward being the best of all worlds. Earlier eras, with their wars, famines, and revolts, were deprecated as times when mankind was still immature and unenlightened. But now it was merely a matter of decades until the last vestige of evil and violence would finally be conquered, and this faith in an uninterrupted and irresistible “progress” truly had the force of a religion for that generation […] year after year new rights were accorded to the individual, justice was administered more benignly and humanely, and even the problem of problems, the poverty of the great masses, no longer seemed insurmountable.
Writing in the early 1940s, Zweig sees clearly that this story was a ‘delusion’. ‘[N]ow that the great storm has long since smashed it, we finally know that the world of security was nought but a castle of dreams.’ There was ‘a grave and dangerous arrogance in this touching confidence that we had barricaded ourselves to the last loophole against any possible invasion of fate.’ Nonetheless, Zweig says, ‘it was a wonderful and noble delusion, more humane and more fruitful than our watchwords of today’.
There are few better accounts of the great value of liberalism; few better accounts of its perennial fragility. Zweig, writing to us from the middle of the twentieth century’s greatest calamity, shows us where we are – shows us the place to which we have, in shock, returned. Lucky twenty-first century Westerners – the beneficiaries of the postwar reconstruction – will part with the story that liberalism tells only with great difficulty and pain. Liberalism, like any ideology, is not just a political project but a faith. It is not illiberalism that has chipped steadily away at the foundations of that faith since 1980 but a variant of liberalism itself, neoliberalism, which in outsourcing liberalism’s moral values to ‘the market’ merely rendered them down to nothing but a price tag. Our task – one of our tasks – is to re-ground liberalism in something other than market value. It will not be easy. But it has been done, if imperfectly, before.
But of course it isn’t just neoliberalism that’s the problem. Western liberalism in the largest sense was built on the basic idea that white people are better than people of colour. Anti-liberal thinkers like John Gray have suggested that to say so is to indulge in a demoralising masochism, to undermine the West’s faith in itself. But what is demoralising about accepting the truth? Various thinkers from non-Western countries have been pointing out for decades that fascism is more or less what happens when the West starts using its own methods of brutal imperial conquest against itself; and that the Nazi genocide is perhaps different from colonial massacres only in its scale and its industrial nous, and in the fact that it happened in the heart of the colonist’s own continent. (Frantz Fanon: ‘Nazism transformed the whole of Europe into a veritable colony.’) The limited, greedy, agonistic, social-Darwinist world order that Trump, Putin, Netanyahu, Orban and others seem to want to create is simply racial capitalism writ large and brought home to the West. MAGA’s ascendancy is partly an expression of rage at the political gains made over the last few decades by minorities. Accordingly, it is minorities who will be punished first under the MAGA regime (trans and queer people and pro-Palestinian brown people, for now; other minorities soon). The other central message of the Trump Gaza AI video is, of course, racism: we do not think that brown lives matter.
It should not surprise us, therefore, that nonwhite writers and thinkers have been among the first to react with any clarity to the West’s moral collapse over Gaza. Omar El Akkad, born in Egypt and now living in the US, covered the ‘war on terror’ as a reporter. He was ‘embedded’ with NATO troops in Afghanistan in 2007; he covered the ‘trials’ of detainees at Guantánamo Bay. In a short book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (Canongate, 2025), El Akkad records his teenaged discovery of the promise of the West. In Egypt, popular culture was censored and restricted on ideological and puritanical grounds; in a Montreal public library, he is able to procure William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch with no difficulty whatsoever. After that, ‘I believed, firmly, not in any ceiling on what this society would allow to be done to people like me, but in what it would allow done to itself, its own rights and freedoms and principles.’ El Akkad understood that the West was racist. But he believed that it was also, in certain crucial ways, liberal, and that it would defend those liberal principles; that this defence was what ‘the West’ meant.
Then the Israeli slaughter in Gaza began, and El Akkad watched the West do nothing. He observed as ‘the horrors that have been meticulously documented by Palestinians as they happened’ be ‘meticulously brushed aside by the major media apparatus of the Western world’.
Whatever mainstream Western liberalism is – and I have no useful definition of it beyond something at its core transactional, centred on the magnanimous, enlightened image of the self and the dissonant belief that empathising with the plight of the faraway oppressed is compatible with benefiting from the systems that oppress them – it subscribes to this calculus. People go to see the president in the White House for what they know is only a meaningless photo op and yet, in the hopes of getting him to see, to do something, anything, they show him pictures of the mangled bodies of children. It doesn’t work. There is no transaction to be had; these dead kids offer nothing in return.
El Akkad’s book is, he says, is an account of
something that, for an entire generation of not just Arabs or Muslims or Brown people but rather all manner of human beings from all parts of the world, fundamentally changed during this season of completely preventable horror. This is an account of a fracture, a breaking away from the notion that the polite Western liberal ever stood for anything at all.
Gaza, El Akkad writes, will be remembered
as the moment millions of people looked at the West, the rules-based order, the shell of modern liberalism and the capitalistic thing it serves, and said: I want nothing to do with this.
For El Akkad, Gaza is ‘a fracture’. For the Indian intellectual and novelist Pankaj Mishra, Gaza is ‘a profound rupture’ – in fact, ‘a final rupture in the moral history of the world since the ground zero of 1945 – the history in which the Shoah was a universal reference for a calamitous breakdown in human morality’. It is Gaza, Mishra writes, ‘that has pushed many to a genuine reckoning with the deep malaise of their societies’. It is Gaza that shows us ‘the moral abyss we confront’ and that has ‘quickened [our] understanding of a decrepit world which no longer has any belief in itself, and which, concerned merely with self-preservation, tramples freely on the rights and principles it once held sacred[.]’
Mishra’s book, The World After Gaza (Fern Press, 2025), is, along with El Akkad’s, the book to read now. Any reckoning with the deep malaise of the West must begin with the insights of these two writers, who know the histories and the myths of West and ‘East’ and who speak with a moral clarity scarcely audible elsewhere in the mainstream Western media. (Honourable exceptions: Mark O’Connell in The Irish Times, Owen Jones in The Guardian, a handful of others.) The primary duty of the liberal intellectual is twofold. The liberal intellectual must see what is actually happening. And the liberal intellectual must take the side of the powerless against the powerful. El Akkad and Mishra are therefore exemplary liberal intellectuals (though they may not thank me for saying so). They are themselves reasons for hope in a darkening century. But they do not offer extensive grounds for hope in any other sense. El Akkad’s purpose, in One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, is, he says, ‘witness’. Mishra acknowledges that protesters against the Israeli genocide ‘have not changed, and probably won’t change, opinion in a hardened Western mainstream’; the most they can hope for, Mishra suggests, is what the Austrian Holocaust survivor Jean Amery hoped for: to speak ‘in order that the crime become a moral reality for the criminal, in order that he be swept into the truth of his atrocity’.
One of the things spoken by the Trump Gaza video – and by Trump’s own promise that he would ‘redevelop’ Gaza, delivered as Netanyahu grinned by his side – is that Israel and the US are ruled by men for whom no such arrival at moral reality is possible. Trump and Netanyahu are key pillars in the new fascist international. Fascism, the disease that lies dormant in Western liberalism, depends on – is – the freedom from liberal, or from any other, moral restraint. This is a freedom that the West has historically enjoyed in countries other than its own, even as it built a postwar world order on the promise that such a collapse would never happen again in its own territories, or to its own people. Mishra’s book is for much of its length a critique of the ways in which the Holocaust has been weaponised by militant Zionism – he quotes the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who on visiting Israel in the late 1980s described the country as ‘Yad Vashem with an air force’ – and part of his message is that we must henceforth resist the temptation to think of the Holocaust as exceptional; that we must no longer permit it to be used as a justification for genocide.
Israel long ago perfected the art of using accusations of antisemitism to defuse criticism of its colonial brutalities (a recent local instance: the departed Israeli ambassador to Ireland, Dana Erlich, suggested in January of this year that Ireland was becoming a ‘hostile’ place for Jews after President Michael D Higgins criticised Israel’s crimes in Gaza). The World After Gaza carefully exhumes many instances from the long history of Jewish intellectual opposition to Zionism and to Israeli oppression of the Palestinians. Especially significant is the anti-Zionism of two Holocaust survivors, Jean Amery and Primo Levi. As Mishra records, in 1985, Levi visited New York to promote a translation of his novel If Not Now, When? His American audience expected a moral icon, a defender of Israel, a Jew’s Jew (Levi complained to his friends that Americans had ‘pinned a Star of David’ on him). Asked, at a Brooklyn event, for his views on Israel, Levi began by saying that ‘Israel was a mistake in historical terms’. There was immediate ‘uproar’; ‘the moderator had to call the meeting to a halt.’ Thus, the power of Israeli mythology, in American public life; the moral weight of the Holocaust that Israel continues to use as ballast.
Mishra is no dismisser of the moral weight of the Shoah. He knows that we again confront the moral collapse that it disclosed. He writes:
These events which took place in living memory undermined the basic assumption of both religious traditions and the secular Enlightenment: that human beings have a fundamentally “moral” nature. The corrosive suspicion that they don’t is now widespread. Many more people have closely witnessed death and mutilation, under regimes of callousness, timidity and censorship; they recognise with a shock that everything is possible, remembering past atrocities is no guarantee against repeating them in the present, and the foundations of international law and morality are not secure at all.
We feel it, do we not, the suspicion that everything is possible? Those of us, that is, who are not in Gaza, watching our children die? That between our homes and the torture chambers there exists now only a fragile web of coincidence and luck, and that we can no longer really envision a future that is not shadowed by disaster and death? That we in Europe have only a fraying elite of uncertain technocrats to protect us from the cruelty and rapacity of the new fascist international? I’ve spent much of my adult life reading about the 1930s and the 1940s in Europe, trying to understand how and why liberal societies collapse into barbarism. I had hoped never to watch this happen in my own time, even as I watched neoliberalism eat away at the foundations of the postwar order and tried to teach my students how and why this was happening. But here we are. Gaza is the shadow-line, the Rubicon. We cannot go back.
Anticolonial writers and thinkers were not the first to observe that Nazism was essentially European imperialism brought home to Europe. At the end of ‘The Hell of Treblinka’, Vasily Grossman, writing, let’s remember, in 1944, said: ‘everyone is asking how all this can have happened’. His answer was not antisemitism specifically but rather racism as such:
Every man and woman today is duty-bound to his or her conscience, to his or her son and to his or her mother, to their motherland and to humanity as a whole to devote all the powers of their heart and mind to answering these questions: what is it that has given birth to racism? What can be done to prevent Nazism from ever rising again, either on this side or on the far side of the ocean? What can be done to make sure that Hitlerism is never, never in all eternity, resurrected?
What led Hitler and his followers to construct Majdanek, Sobibor, Belzec, Auschwitz and Treblinka is the imperialist idea of exceptionalism – of racial, national, and every other kind of exceptionalism.
Even Holocaust exceptionalism? Yes. It must be so. Pankaj Mishra: ‘if there is any bumper-sticker lesson to be drawn from the Shoah, it is “Never Again for Anyone”, the slogan of the brave young activists of Jewish Voice for Peace.’ If the liberal West is to survive, it must pursue the aborted project of grappling with its own racist history. This is what ‘Never Again’ must mean.
On April 1st, 2025 the BBC reported on the bodies of 15 Palestinian paramedics, found in Gaza. The report says: ‘Asked about the killings, [US] State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce said: “Every single thing that happens in Gaza is happening because of Hamas.’” Milquetoast condemnations periodically issue from Western politicians (Israel’s actions are ‘intolerable’, according to UK foreign secretary David Lammy, speaking in the House of Commons on May 20th; some of his fellow MPs shouted ‘Genocide!’, but Lammy would not use the word.) But no actual intervention occurs. More than fifty thousand dead; hundreds of thousands displaced, maimed, tortured. All of them abandoned by the West, as it collapses into its own moral abyss. The most visible genocide in history is happening now, as I write these words, as you read them, and no one in power is doing anything to stop it. What can we do but say it? What can we do but keep saying it, over and over and over again? There must be something. There must be something more. Surely there must. There must be. Isn’t there?
Books Cited
Omar El Akkad, One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (Canongate, 2025).
Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (Penguin, 2009).
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (Grove Press, 1968).
Vasily Grossman, ‘The Hell of Treblinka’, trans Robert Chandler. In Treblinka: A Survivor’s Memory by Chil Rajchman (MacLehose Press, 2011).
David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford University Press, 2005).
Adam Kirsch, On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence and Justice (W.W. Norton, 2024).
Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon, trans Daphne Hardy (Scribner, 2006).
Laura Kipnis, Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus (Verso, 2018). Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund, Get In: The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer (Vintage, 2025).
Pankaj Mishra, The World After Gaza (Fern Press, 2025).
Douglas Murray, On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel, Hamas, and the Future of Civilisation (HarperCollins, 2025).
Fintan O’Toole, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain (Apollo, 2018).
Anthony Selden and Raymond Newell, Johnson at 10: The Inside Story (Atlantic Books, 2023).
Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday: An Autobiography. Trans Harry Zohn (University of Nebraska Press, 1964).
1/7/2025
Kevin Power’s The Written World: Essays and Reviews (The Lilliput Press) includes several pieces that first appeared in the Dublin Review of Books.
