Nevertheless, for most people , decolonisation, fusing history with promise, remains a captivating story about the past, present and future, in which they seek to recognise themselves. For decades, white Westerners claimed to have made the modern world – as seen in the titles of many popular non-fiction books in Anglo-America – with their political, intellectual and technological breakthroughs, and ideological and military predominance. Today, many more people have come to see themselves in an equally compelling narrative of decolonisation – one in which white men subjugated and disparaged much of the world’s population and must now surrender their cruel prerogatives.

Many in Western political, corporate and media classes hope to quell this deep and broad consensus by suppressing scholarly examinations of racism and imperialism, whining about wokeness and cancel culture, or, like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s mobilisation against black and brown legislators, desperately throwing money at explicitly racial causes. But the narrative of decolonisation gains more emotional appeal especially as resurgent white nationalists in the West robustly try to repaint the colour line, and Zionism becomes more militantly exclusionary than before.

As mobs mouthing the xenophobic slogans of mainstream politicians rampage through the streets of the US, UK and Germany, and Muslims protesting the Western-assisted slaughter in Gaza are denounced as traitors, the old affinities between the West’s war-making abroad and race-making at home become too garishly apparent. Arguably, condemnation of Western powers has not been so widespread since the mid-twentieth century when most leaders of ‘darker nations’ were either fighting for national self-determination or incorporating their anti-colonial triumphs into the pedagogical systems of new nation states. The globally resonant accusation of genocide against Israel by the heirs of Nelson Mandela attests to the spread of a mass, outrage-inflected awareness of the linked fates of the wretched of the earth. This awareness has detached itself from the boundaries of nation states and existing frameworks of sovereignty, territoriality and national patriotism.

— The World After Gaza by Pankaj Mishra, Mikhail Sen (Narrator)