You're listening to the LRB podcast, and I'm your host, Adam Shats.

My guest on this episode is the writer

and critic Pankash Mishra. We'll be talking about Pankaj's recent LRB winter lecture, the Shoa after Gaza,

which appears in our 21 March issue. That piece has already been read by more than 250,000 people

and provoked heated discussion.

Pankaj, it's a pleasure to have you as our guest.

Thank you for having me, Adam.

On October 7, Hamas carried out an attack in southern Israel in which 1,200 people were killed,

the majority of them civilians, Israeli Jews, Palestinian citizens of Israel, and immigrants.

In response, the government of Benjamin Netanyahu has presided over an industrial-scale slaughter,

raising much of Gaza, displacing almost the entire population and forcing them into the southern

city of Rafa, and killing more than 30,000 people, mostly civilians,

a majority of them women and children. There's now a threat of mass starvation, and yet Israel

continues to block the delivery of vital food and medicine, drawing criticism even from its patrons

in Washington, the Biden administration, which is now circling around the Netanyahu government.

It continues to

arm by dropping food supplies from the air. This is not, of course, the only case in which Israel has

committed war crimes against the Palestinian people. Israel's history is full of such episodes.

The Nakhba of 1948, the invasion of Lebanon, the crushing of two in defadas, the sequence of wars against

Gaza. Washington's more or less blank check is also part of a historical pattern, and yet this

war feels both qualitatively and quantitatively different. Pankaj, what in your view makes

this war so distinctive in such a watershed?

...