AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: We turn now to a new book by the acclaimed Indian author and essayist Pankaj Mishra. In a moment, we’ll get to India, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi is scheduled to meet with President Trump and members of his administration today. Modi’s first meeting upon arriving in Washington Wednesday was with the new Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who is a Hindu American.

But first, we go to Gaza, where a deal has been reached for the ceasefire to continue. After talks in Cairo, Hamas has announced it will free three more Israeli hostages on Saturday. Israel had threatened to resume the war on Gaza if the hostages were not freed as scheduled.

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined in London by Pankaj Mishra. His latest book, The World After Gaza: A History, which places the latest war, since October 7, 2023, in a larger context of Western colonialism. In his prologue to the book, he writes, quote, he “felt almost compelled to write this book, to alleviate my demoralizing perplexity before an extensive moral breakdown.” Pankaj Mishra is also 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. He writes regularly for The Guardian and The New York Review of Books, among other publications.

Pankaj Mishra, welcome to Democracy Now! It’s an honor to have you with us. Why don’t you respond to the latest news? The ceasefire apparently will continue, after President Trump said “all hell will break loose” if Hamas doesn’t release more hostages on Saturday. And Hamas said the reason they had been holding out was that they said that Israel had broken the ceasefire agreement hundreds of times. Your overall thoughts?

PANKAJ MISHRA: Well, you know, I think the ceasefire remains extremely fragile, because there’s a new element there injected by a volatile U.S. president who keeps issuing these threats randomly. You know, I don’t know whether he’ll be satisfied with the release of just three hostages on Saturday. He might change his mind tomorrow or today. We don’t know. So, the ceasefire remains, you know, extremely fragile, and I think it’s because Trump has now announced his plans for ethnic cleansing Gaza. And I think Hamas or other militant groups have less and less incentive to keep to their side of the deal. And we know that the far-right regime in Israel completely endorses Trump’s plan and can’t wait to get it started. So, I think we shouldn’t be really surprised if the ceasefire breaks down sooner than we can see right now.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Pankaj, if you could — let’s, you know, go to your book, The World After Gaza: A History. And talk about this assault on Gaza in the context of the history that you lay out. As we said in our introduction, you write in the prologue to the book, quote, that you “felt almost compelled to write this book, to alleviate my demoralizing perplexity before an extensive moral breakdown.” Explain why you wrote that book and how you see the present situation in the context of the history that you lay out.

PANKAJ MISHRA: Well, you know, I think the primary impulse behind the book was really to put an end to this horrible loneliness that I felt, along with many other people, a kind of desolation induced by the fact that, you know, powerful people, powerful politicians in democracies, journalists, intellectuals were either silent about the ongoing genocide in Gaza or, even worse, vehemently supporting it. So, I think, you know, it forced many of us to reexamining not just sort of narratives of Middle Eastern history or Israeli history or Palestinian history, but a kind of broader history of Western supremacism, of decolonization.

You know, we also saw a massive global divide open up in the responses to the atrocities in Gaza, with South Africa, country like South Africa, taking the lead in bringing a case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. And, of course, we can now see South Africa is being severely punished by Trump and Musk for daring to do this. We saw public opinion in most of the world really shocked and appalled by the disproportionate Israeli response, and at the same time, you know, that public opinion asking questions of Western democracies, like “What happened here? Why are you supporting this endless massacre of thousands and thousands of people?” So, you know, in a very sort of — I think I would say that I find myself in a situation of a lot of people who were completely bewildered by the Israeli response to October 7. And, you know, at least I have this option of turning my anguish or turning my bewilderment into some way of — some way of trying to understand this through writing, through prose. But, you know, it remains — it remains a baffling, a baffling episode, and, of course, we’re now entering the most intense part of it.

You know, you just described, whether it’s Ukraine — I’ve just been listening to this program now for 45 minutes, and this, you know, vast panorama of violence, disorder and suffering that we’re seeing today. And I think it’s really important not just to think about the past or the history, the larger history, of what is happening in Gaza today, but also about the present. And that is also something I describe in the book, whether Gaza signifies something more than just the latest episode in a long-standing conflict in the Middle East. Does it portend the arrival of far-right, racial supremacist regimes across the Western world? So, I would argue — and I have said this in the book — that we are looking at a far more extensive moral, political and, I would say, intellectual breakdown than we have known, certainly in our own lifetimes.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And that, perhaps, Pankaj, explains the title of your book, The World After Gaza, which suggests that there’s, in your view, some kind of rupture, that the world is somehow substantively different, it will be different, after this assault on Gaza ends, in the event that it does and what form it takes. So, if you could say something about that, and then also the point that you made earlier about decolonization? It’s a theme that runs throughout the book, in which you say, correctly, I think, that the seminal event of the 20th century for the vast majority of the peoples of the world was decolonization. Why is that significant when we look at what’s happened in Gaza and the response to it?

PANKAJ MISHRA: Well, I think, very simply, decolonization was not just a political event. It was not just, you know, a whole lot of nation-states in Asia and Africa becoming sovereign, becoming liberated from their European masters. It was also a profound emotional and psychological moment of liberation. I think, you know, from the 19th century onwards, the world was knit together by a very explicitly racial mode of imperialism and capitalism. And I think, you know, some of the best people in Asia and Africa fought against this global regime, and finally won, starting the mid-20th century, and created these nation-states that exist all across Asia and Africa and are becoming both politically, economically and geopolitically more assertive. And there’s also a mental revolution also going on, has been going on for several decades.

So, I think, for many people in the West, who have been absorbed with a very different narrative — first of all, the narrative of the Cold War, the narrative of the end of history, the narrative of American unipolar dominance — decolonization still comes as a kind of news, or they confuse it with people asking for decolonizing knowledge in the United States or decolonizing educational syllabuses. So, I think there’s a very broad confusion about this world.

But what it really signifies is greater political, intellectual assertiveness and a very fierce desire to not live in a world where racial privilege, most specifically white privilege, orders and forces a global hierarchy. You know, you can see this very clearly in sort of South African president a few days ago making a speech and saying, “We will not be bullied.” You know, Trump is imposing very severe sort of measures against the country, and there they are standing and saying, “We’re going to push back.” And likewise, I think you will find that kind of resistance in different parts of the world. And, of course, you know, what happened in Gaza shocked, appalled people from Indonesia to Brazil. That is also something, you know, that can really only be explained, this global divide, if you think about decolonization creating a new subjectivity, a new mentality, a new way of looking at the world.

AMY GOODMAN: And, Pankaj, maybe President Trump understands this very well, as he repeated his claim that the U.S. is preparing to take control of Gaza, own it, while permanently displacing the territory’s entire population of 2 million Palestinians. I want to just play that short clip of him sitting next to Jordan’s King Abdullah for talks on Gaza at the White House on Tuesday.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We’re going to have Gaza. We don’t have to buy. There’s nothing to buy. We will have Gaza.

REPORTER: What does that mean?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: There’s no reason to buy. There is nothing to buy. It’s Gaza. It’s a war-torn area. We’re going to take it.

AMY GOODMAN: So, there you have President Trump saying not just we’re going to buy it, we’re going to own it — we’re going to have it — again, trying to push back on this whole trend, this whole move in the 20th century, of decolonization.

PANKAJ MISHRA: Well, you know, this is the strangest thing, really, you know, that the United States is going back — and that is part of the great American unraveling — it’s going back to a 19th-century model of rapacious imperialism that’s interested in territory, that is grabbing resources wherever they can find it. And this Ukraine deal you were just talking about, that is now so much about resources that Trump has eyed in Ukraine.

So, I think, you know, this is something that people have been talking about for a very long time, that the structures and mentalities of racial imperialism in the 19th century are very much alive. People like that were dismissed as woke, as politically correct. But we are now seeing a kind of real-time, live verification of those insights into the nature of the modern world. And, you know, what Trump is saying today is bringing a very refreshing kind of clarity. We can see how this wealth, how this great power was slowly accumulated, and how people, fearing the loss of that power because China is rising, China is becoming dominant, are — you have the most powerful people in the world resorting to the most naked form of expansion, the most naked forms of appropriation.

AMY GOODMAN: Before we go, Pankaj, if you could just comment on the meeting of Modi with Trump today at the White House? And then we’ll do an extended conversation.

PANKAJ MISHRA: Well, you know, I think we’ve seen very recently, just in the last few days, a kind of endless parade of heads of state — Jordan, you just mentioned; the Japanese prime minister was just there — people really trying to appease a bully, the chief bully, and hoping that they will get something out of him that they can go back and share with their people. I think Modi is in a particularly difficult situation. I don’t know if your viewers know — 

AMY GOODMAN: We have 15 seconds.

PANKAJ MISHRA: There were images all across India — India, of Indian migrants being deported from the United States shackled and chained. It created a lot of shock. And Modi has to now go back and tell people that India’s dignity is intact, which is a great tall order right now.

AMY GOODMAN: Pankaj Mishra, award-winning Indian author, essayist. His new book, The World After Gaza: A History. We’ll do Part 2 and post it online at democracynow.org.

Happy birthday to Brendan Allen! I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.