Reading Pankaj Mishra’s The World After Gaza, I thought of no one so much as Ian Black, a former colleague who led this newspaper’s Middle East coverage for many years before taking up a fellowship at the LSE. Black was keenly aware, after decades of careful reporting from Israel-Palestine, of the tendency to adopt one cause or another and cherrypick facts to support it. In 2017, he poured his knowledge into Enemies and Neighbours, a definitive history of the “twice promised land”, which drew praise from both sides. The source of the conflict, he wrote, came down to the diametrically opposed narratives Israeli and Palestinians told themselves. Israelis described “a quest for freedom and self-expression after centuries of antisemitic persecution”, while Palestinians thought of themselves “the country’s indigenous inhabitants who [had] lived peacefully for centuries as a Muslim majority alongside Christian and Jewish minorities”. These stories were utterly irreconcilable, since “justice and triumph for the Zionist cause meant injustice, defeat, exile and humiliation for the Palestinians”.

It feels now like another era. In October 2023 Hamas launched its surprise attack, provoking an Israeli response that has killed more than 46,000 people, according to estimates, mostly women and children. As Mishra states in the introduction, he “felt almost compelled to write this book, to alleviate my demoralising perplexity before an extensive moral breakdown”. It is a seething and erudite indictment of the west’s role in the creation of Israel and everything that has flowed from it. Even prior to publication, the book has been controversial. Mishra views history through the lens of race and “decolonisation” – a word Elon Musk has tried to ban from X.

Mishra is a relative latecomer to the Palestinian cause. It was Israeli heroes, not Arabs, with whom he was infatuated as a boy growing up in India: he even had a picture on his wall of Moshe Dayan, Israel’s defence minister during the Six Day War. Conversion came during a 2008 visit to Israel-Palestine, where Mishra was shocked to witness the humiliations heaped on the inhabitants of the West Bank. “Nothing prepared me for the brutality and squalor of Israel’s occupation,” he writes, “the snaking wall and numerous roadblocks … meant to torment Palestinians in their own land … the racially exclusive network of shiny asphalt roads, electricity grids and water systems linking the illegal Jewish settlements to Israel.”

Crucially, he felt a strong racial bond with the Arabs. “Here,” he writes, “was a resemblance I could not deny.” They were “people who looked like me”. It is in this connection – their shared presence on the darker-skinned side of what WEB Du Bois identified as the “colour line” – that Mishra locates both his credentials and the origins of his critique. India had freed itself of western white supremacism, but the Palestianians “now endured a nightmare that I and my own ancestors had put behind us”.

The evils of western colonialism, then, form the foundations of this analysis. “All Western powers worked together to uphold a global racial order,” he states, “in which it was entirely normal for Asians and Africans to be exterminated, terrorised, imprisoned and ostracised.” Nazism, in this view, was simply an extension of colonialism, which Hitler imported to mainland Europe, and the Shoah flowed naturally from other genocides committed by white people around the globe.

Curiously, the Holocaust was little memorialised after the war. Citing Hannah Arendt and others, Mishra argues that it was only during the Eichmann trial in 1961 that the Shoah came to embody the political case for Zionism, with Israel as the only state that would guarantee Jewish safety. At the same time, Israeli leaders increasingly painted Arabs as Nazi collaborators who threatened a new genocide. The collective memory of the Shoah, he states, “did not merely spring organically from what transpired between 1939 and 1945, [but] was belatedly constructed, often very deliberately, and with specific political ends”. Now, as Mishra puts it, many see its memory as having been “perverted to enable mass murder” and give Israel impunity. A “widening circle” of people around the world, he writes, “level the charge that Israel is a cruel settler colonialist and Jewish-supremacist regime supported by far-right Western politicians and fellow-travelling liberals”.

Supporters of Israel will doubtless level the charge of antisemitism at the idea of the Shoah being “deliberately” manipulated, although this won’t mean it isn’t partially true, or that Israel’s extremist government isn’t more politically dependent than ever on the Holocaust’s memorialisation. Many people would accept the depiction of Israel as a rampaging, supremacist regime. But there are problems with Mishra’s analysis, too. The paradigm of Israel as a settler-colonialist state fails to encompass the Jewish religious-national connection to Eretz-Yisrael, the historic Israelite homeland that is central to Zionist philosophy, or the presence in Israel of Mizrahi Jews, who have deep historical roots in the Middle East.

More widely, mapping an ideological critique on to real world events, as Mishra does, demands some intellectual cartwheels to keep the theory from collapse. To maintain the paradigm, he must airbrush all the racist colonialisms committed by nations outside the west. Japan offers a stark example. Millions of Chinese, Koreans and indigenous Taiwanese were murdered, raped, tortured and forced into sex slavery by imperial Japanese troops, but Mishra skips over these atrocities, writing instead that the island nation “humiliated European imperialisms across Asia”.

The broad thesis is imbued with a reverse-colonialist rhetoric, in which millions of individuals are stereotyped and lumped together into likeminded white supremacist blocs. But the most glaring lacunae, given the subject matter, relate to Israel’s enemies, in the shape of Iran and its proxies. The first mention of Hamas in the main text comes on page 34, and then only in passing. A brief treatment of the 7 October assault appears near the book’s conclusion, where Mishra writes with some approval that “Hamas destroyed, permanently, Israel’s aura of invulnerability”. The attacks were seen as another Pearl Harbor by “shocked and horrified white majoritarians”, he concludes, in which “white power” had been “publicly violated”.

Were “white majoritarians” the only ones shocked and horrified? Do Hamas’s victims anyway slot into Mishra’s race categories as white? Israel’s response, we can agree, has been horrific, and may constitute ethnic cleansing or even a new genocide, but don’t the Jewish dead also count?

• Charlie English is a former head of international news at the Guardian. The World After Gaza by Pankaj Mishra is published by Fern Press (£20). To support the Guardian and the Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.