It is the misfortune of Jews that they so often find themselves the subject of obsessive fixation. By his own description, Pankaj Mishra is a lifelong obsessive. As a boy in India in the 1970s, the writer grew up in a Hindu-nationalist family that revered Jews, despite not knowing any. In that spirit, Mishra placed a portrait of the Israeli general Moshe Dayan, the hero of the Suez Crisis, on his bedroom wall.

If I had known Mishra then, I would have warned him that philo-Semitism is not a healthy condition; that, in his future, he would realize that Jews, like every cluster of humans, have their flaws; and that he shouldn’t take his disappointment personally. This moment arrived for him during a trip to the West Bank in 2008, where he witnessed the ugliness of Israeli occupation, which left him feeling a “bit foolish” and “resentful.”

Obsessions, especially when they overtake an agile mind, are destabilizing; swooning and repulsion are the alternating registers of a mind consumed. And repulsion is the animating sentiment of Mishra’s new polemic, The World After Gaza.

The title suggests the grandiosity of his ambitions. To merely denounce the war, or to call for the end of American military support for Israel, would have been small beer. Instead, he wants to make the case that Israel today is a symptom of what ails the planet, “a case study of Western-style impunity,” and a “portent of the future of a bankrupt and exhausted world.”

The underlying problem with the West, Mishra argues, is its sanctification of the Holocaust. He blames Jewish leaders, along with their philo-Semitic supporters in the Western elite, for defining the Holocaust as the epitome of evil and insisting that the world incessantly remember the Nazi genocide, a practice he calls “atrocity hucksterism.” (Full disclosure: I think that the Holocaust was the epitome of evil.) By fetishizing the Holocaust, they diverted attention from the suffering of others and “obscured closer examination of the West’s original sin of white supremacy.” And then he asks: “When does organised remembrance become a handmaiden to brute power, and a legitimiser of violence and injustice?”

Mishra has a habit of couching incendiary accusations in rhetorical questions, but his answer to this one is unambiguous. From the first page, Mishra seems intent on demonstrating that Israelis are, in fact, the new Nazis. His book opens with a long description of the Warsaw Ghetto, quoting at length from the poet Czesław Miłosz’s description of the screams of Jews he heard drifting over its walls. Mishra then abruptly juxtaposes a scene from Gaza, flush with heavy-handed language that bludgeons home his comparison. He calls Israel’s war an “industrial-scale slaughter” and a “livestreamed liquidation.”

[Yair Rosenberg: Hamas’s theater of the macabre]

Although any decent human should mourn the deaths of Palestinian civilians, Mishra races past the specious underpinnings of his analogy. To cite the obvious: Unlike Hamas, the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto never launched an armed invasion of Nazi Germany. They didn’t rape or murder or kidnap Germans, let alone German babies, or in any way engage in violent activity that might morally justify a military response. The Jews of Warsaw never used human shields. They never published a charter calling for German genocide. Mishra mentions Hamas’s attack in passing, but he never wastes his breath chastising the group.

Later in the book, Mishra concedes that anti-Israel protesters justifiably wield such comparisons in the service of trolling. He writes, “Since the Shoah was coded as the greatest evil, incomparable and unprecedented, those describing Zionism as a genocidal ideology aim to defuse the symbolism of the Shoah and represent the destruction of Gaza as the true evil of our times.” It shouldn’t require minimizing the senseless loss of life to acknowledge that the death of more than 46,000 Gazans, some number of whom were Hamas combatants, isn’t the same as the systematic extermination of 6,000,000 Jews. But by hyperbolically analogizing, Mishra seems to be intentionally salting Jewish wounds. This is hardly the stuff of the more ethical world that Mishra claims to desire.

Even on his own terms, this rhetorical turn is gratuitous, because imagining a more measured version of Mishra’s argument is so easy. It would go something like this: Benjamin Netanyahu has exploited memories of the Holocaust to justify brutal tactics in Gaza. Although Mishra agrees with that more restrained claim, it doesn’t suit his inflated goals.

His attempt to blame the plight of the wretched of the Earth on the Shoah’s central place in Western culture is unmoored from evidence. He writes about the “deepening links between Israeli governments, pro-Israel Jewish outfits and white supremacists in the United States and Europe.” But American white supremacists traffic in anti-Semitism and tend to blame Jews for the migration crisis. (In 2023, Elon Musk circulated a version of that claim.) And although American Jews have shifted slightly rightward in recent years, polling suggests that they remain a reliable constituency of the Democratic Party, far more liberal than other white voters. Mishra loves to mine the writings of postwar Jewish intellectuals for a damning quote—a racist protagonist in a Saul Bellow novel is one of his primary data points—but he can’t be bothered to cite the present-day leaders of Jewish organizations.

(Mishra does quote The Atlantic, as evidence of “a strenuously willed affiliation with the Shoah” that “diminishes” American journalism about Israel; and he also attacks The New Republic, which I once edited, for becoming a “purveyor of racism and Islamophobia” in the 1980s.)

[Read: The problem with moral purity]

As he depicts Jews parochially clinging to their victimhood, Mishra skirts some pretty important countervailing pieces of evidence. It was Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish lawyer, who in the 1940s coined the term genocide, which he helped to enshrine in international law, in a quest to prevent other ethnic minorties from suffering the fate of the Jews. Mishra flays Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor who won a Nobel Peace Prize—quoting Alfred Kazin, who called him a “Jesus of the Holocaust”—while neglecting to mention Wiesel’s opposition to South African apartheid and his record of advocating for interventions to prevent genocides in Bosnia, Rwanda, and Darfur. (He also popularized the slogan “No human being is illegal.”’) And I wonder if Mishra has ever set foot in a synagogue aligned with Reform or conservative Judaism, the two largest denominations in the United States. After the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, they festooned their buildings with banners in support of Black Lives Matter, in the name of Tikkun Olam, healing the world.

Mishra inadvertently proves the thesis of Dara Horn’s book People Love Dead Jews. He writes with loving care about the Holocaust, referring to it by its Hebrew name, the Shoah, and he exudes nothing but sympathy for interwar writers such as Isaac Babel and Joseph Roth. But as he describes the Jewry that emerged from the ashes, he mostly finds unredeeming qualities. Mishra keeps reaching for his shelf to pull the books in which he’s underlined passages from intellectuals, many of them Jewish, denouncing Jews. Among the accusations he recycles: Jewish intellectuals in the U.S. became “too comfortably conforming to the American ruling class”: They “clung to the Holocaust and Zionism for a sense of identity and purpose”; “the Jew profits from his status in America.” Citing the unpleasant Holocaust survivors portrayed in an Isaac Bashevis Singer novel, he notes, “Oppression doesn’t improve moral character.” There are many more such accusations. Each might be justifiable in context. But sewn together, they resemble nothing better than a grotesque effigy.

Like so many other intellectuals who have taken up the banner of Palestine, Mishra is unclear about what he really wants. He describes the two-state solution as a “pretence,” without offering a viable alternative. After reading his book, I had no clue how downgrading the historical import of the Holocaust would enhance the struggle against racism. In the final paragraphs of the book, he applauds the campus protesters for their defiance, even though he admits “they risk permanently embittering their lives with failure.” To howl into the wind without any plausible vision of a better world isn’t heroic or ethical; it’s a gesture of nihilism, and so, too, is this book.

A Palestinian father has described how his 6-week-old baby daughter died from the cold in their tent in northern Gaza.

Oded Lifshitz came home to Israel, 503 days after his abduction to Gaza, in a coffin.

His return does not bring closure. For many of us in Israel, rather, it is the occasion of anguish and fury. And it is a call for us to contemplate the demand on the living made by the dead.

Oded’s coffin entered Israel on Thursday with three others. Two contained the bodies of the Bibas children: Kfir, who was 9 months old when he was kidnapped by terrorists from Kibbutz Nir Oz on October 7, 2023, and his brother, Ariel, who was 4. A fourth coffin held the body of a woman who was supposed to be Shiri Bibas, their mother, but turned out not to be. A day later, the Palestinian Mujahideen Brigades, the small terrorist group that had apparently held her, delivered the correct corpse, and Hamas sent it to Israel.

The initial delivery of the wrong body may have been a mistake, or one more means of inflicting pain on the enemy—the latest in a long chain that began with the kidnappings.

The Bibas children were the youngest of the Israeli hostages. Oded, 83 years old when he was shot in the hand and taken to Gaza, was among the oldest. His wife, Yocheved, two years older than him, frail and in need of oxygen, was released alive two and a half weeks into the war, in a rare humanitarian concession.

If one must establish a scale of brutality, kidnapping small children would rank as even worse than taking the elderly Lifshitzes. But the distinction is not large. Both actions presume that in the name of the Palestinian cause, every Israeli, from newborn to ancient, is equally a combatant, deserving not just death but suffering before death. Put differently, the kidnappings presuppose a collective enemy without individual faces or humanity. I don’t share a language in which to argue with those who can justify this view.

I begin with Oded because he was the hostage I knew. During the marathon broadcast of the return of the bodies, I opened my laptop and pulled up a black-and-white photo that I’d once scanned in his living room. It showed Oded at age 31, in the winter of 1972, with lamb-chop sideburns and a dark mustache. The backdrop was sand, a patch of wild grass, and scattered trees—the harsh landscape of the northern Sinai, then still occupied by Israel. At the center of the frame, a Bedouin stood with a camel, near the broken concrete pieces of a house that Israeli troops had demolished under the command of General Ariel Sharon.

[Read: How to end the war in Gaza]

In 2004, I made the two-hour drive from Jerusalem to Nir Oz to hear the story behind that picture. The drive to the kibbutz—in the southwestern corner of Israel, just a mile and a half from the Gaza border—took me past orchards and wheat fields, nourished by Israel’s extensive irrigation works.

Oded came to Nir Oz in 1957, when he was 17, as one of its founders. He belonged to Hashomer Hatzair, a movement most easily defined by the credo on the masthead of the now-defunct daily newspaper of Mapam, the left-wing political party to which it was linked: “For Zionism. For socialism. For the brotherhood of peoples.”

During the telecast of the returning bodies, I turned off the anchor’s voice and listened instead to the recording I’d made of Oded during that visit. Uncannily alive, he spoke to me in a gravelly baritone, a matter-of-fact voice of restrained passion.

In the winter of 1972, he said, “rumors started reaching us that thousands of Bedouin had been expelled.” The stories came from members of left-wing kibbutzim, including Nir Oz, who had served their army reserve duty in the Sinai. “Families were being expelled … their houses destroyed, their wells and orchards—in short, really brutal actions,” he recalled. A huge area was being fenced off for Jewish settlement.

Kibbutz members, Oded among them, went to the Sinai and corroborated the reports. They sent a mimeographed call to action to other kibbutzim in the south. Two hundred fifty people packed the communal dining hall at Nir Oz—the start of a campaign against the expulsion of the Bedouin and the Israeli settlement in the Sinai and Gaza. Newspapers began covering the expulsions, and apparently for the first time since Israel’s 1967 conquests, Israeli settlement in occupied territory became the subject of continuing public opposition.

The Bedouin, with the help of Mapam, appealed to Israel’s supreme court to reverse their expulsion. The government responded with an affidavit, supposedly from a prominent general, saying that the land had to be cleared and fenced off for military reasons, to prevent terror attacks. The court ruled in favor of the government.

[Read: A Gaza deal closed, but no closure]

Many years later, I gained access to the army’s internal investigation of the expulsions, which made clear that the affidavit, signed but not written by the general, was false: The land had been cleared in order to facilitate Israeli settlement. In 2016, I published an article I’d co-written about the case in a legal journal.

I heard from Oded shortly after. He pointed out something I had omitted: that terror attacks had indeed taken place in the area cleared in the Sinai. They were carried out not by the Bedouin residents against Israelis, however, but by Palestinian organizations against the Bedouin, whom they saw as collaborators with Israel.

As that incident indicated, Oded was not naive about Palestinian terrorism. In his view, the Israeli right was half-asleep to the danger. In a 2019 article in Haaretz, he criticized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu both for allowing cash transfers from Qatar to Hamas, as part of his strategy for dividing the Palestinians, and for ignoring the “deepening humanitarian crisis” in Gaza. “When Gazans have nothing to lose, we lose big,” Oded wrote. At the same time, he refused to see Palestinians as a faceless, hostile mass. In his later years, he and Yocheved volunteered to drive Gazans to medical appointments in Israel or East Jerusalem.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas fighters and the mob that followed them overran Kibbutz Nir Oz. The Israeli government had failed the community at every level: in its misguided encouragement of Hamas rule in Gaza, in its intelligence agencies’ ignorance that the attack was coming, and in the army’s slow response. More than a fourth of Nir Oz’s nearly 400 members were killed or taken captive.

The last person to report seeing Oded alive was a hostage released on the 53rd day of the war. She’d seen him lying on the floor in a Gaza warehouse, wearing a white robe drenched in blood.

The report came just as the first prisoner exchange and cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas unraveled. Israel insisted that the deal required Hamas to release women hostages before moving to the next category, elderly men. Hamas claimed that it could not locate the remaining women hostages. Israel’s position made sense given the real risk of sexual violence. But if the government had shown more flexibility, perhaps Oded would have returned alive.

[Read: Hamas’s theater of the macabre]

In the months that followed, the Netanyahu government seemed committed above all to continuing the war. Far-right parties in the ruling coalition were firmly opposed to a cease-fire that might have freed the hostages. In particular, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich of the Religious Zionist Party called repeatedly for renewing Israeli settlement in Gaza—for resurrecting an enterprise that Oded had rightly denounced from its inception as a disaster for Israel.

Only this January did the government reluctantly agree to a new hostage deal. The expected return of four more bodies this week will mark its conclusion, but this will not bring closure. Fifty-nine hostages will still remain in Gaza—some dead, some whose hopes of returning alive will rapidly fade if the negotiations falter in their next stage.

Out of respect for the hostages’ families, the telecast I watched the day Oded’s body came home did not show Hamas’s grotesque ceremony upon releasing the corpses. It was a rare effort to soften Israeli trauma. Yet our media have also shown too little of the destruction in Gaza. As so often happens in war, the enemy remains faceless, its deaths a mere body count.

I can’t imagine what Oded was thinking in his last days, if he could think of anything beyond pain. If he felt abandoned by his country or by the Palestinians he’d helped, no one could blame him. But the Oded I met, if he had remained free and alive, would likely have told me to look unflinchingly at what we in Israel have suffered, at the mistaken policies of the years before October 7—and at the deaths of Palestinians. He would have looked as resolutely at the ruins of Gaza as he looked at the bulldozed Bedouin houses in Sinai. He would say that the enemy always has faces, and that the way out of the labyrinth depends on seeing them.

The delayed release of 600 Palestinian prisoners will reportedly go ahead when Hamas returns four Israeli hostages' bodies.

On Saturday, Israel delayed releasing 620 Palestinian prisoners, plunging Najat into despair. Yet her hope lives on.