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‘A subject that is guaranteed to make you universally disliked’: Pankaj Mishra on writing about Gaza

Pankaj Mishra tells Scroll that writing about Gaza can bring hostility, and argues that writers with a public platform should consider speaking about violence they witness.
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In a Jan. 18, 2025, interview with Scroll’s Diya Isha, writer Pankaj Mishra said that writing about Gaza had brought resistance and animosity. “This is a subject that is guaranteed to make you universally disliked and unpopular,” he said. The conversation, prompted by his book The World After Gaza, also asks what writers should do when they witness violence and how a place can take on meaning beyond its geography.

Why does Mishra say writing about Gaza invites hostility?

Mishra describes the hostility as part of his own experience writing about Gaza, not as a measured claim about how every writer or reader will respond. In the Scroll interview, he connects the subject’s divisiveness to the resistance he has encountered and characterizes the likely social cost in stark terms: writers may become unpopular for addressing it.

That warning is not an argument that writers should avoid the subject. Mishra’s answer points instead to a tension between the consequences of speaking and what he believes public-facing writers owe their audiences.

What does he say writers’ responsibility is?

Mishra argues that people with a public platform who witness violence should ask themselves why they are not speaking out. That is his moral position, rather than a neutral finding about professional duties or a rule that applies identically to every writer.

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The interview places this question alongside the possibility of backlash: a writer may face animosity, yet Mishra says the prospect of unpopularity is not by itself a sufficient reason to remain silent.

How does Gaza acquire symbolic meaning in the conversation?

Isha asks how place names gain significance beyond their literal geography, and Mishra discusses his choice to put Gaza in the title of his book, The World After Gaza. In that framing, Gaza is both a specific place and a name through which broader arguments about history, memory and political response are considered.

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Mishra criticizes Western media coverage and argues that images circulated on social media make the violence more difficult to erase from public memory. These are his interpretations of coverage and memory, not findings independently established by the interview.

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What is the book’s wider argument?

In a Jan. 30, 2025, interview with Carnegie Endowment’s Michael Young, Mishra described The World After Gaza: A History as an examination of how public memory of the Shoah has been formed and used in political narratives, while placing Gaza in a wider history. Carnegie identified Penguin Press as the publisher and Feb. 6, 2025, as the scheduled publication date.

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In a Feb. 13, 2025, Democracy Now! interview, Mishra said the book grew from his bewilderment and distress at political and intellectual responses to Gaza. He also discussed his interpretation of the conflict through colonialism and decolonization. Those are Mishra’s arguments, not independent conclusions established by the interview transcript.

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