India and Israel: a friendship deepened by
prejudice
An alliance against
Islamic extremism must not become an excuse for far-right parties to fan
anti-Muslim sentiment
In 1974, the New York Times journalist Bernard Weinraub described
India as "the
loneliest post in the world" for Israeli
diplomats. Having voted against the creation of Israel at the UN in 1947, India
held back from establishing full diplomatic relations with Tel Aviv until 1992.
For decades, Israel's presence in India was limited to an immigration office in
Mumbai. In between, India voted with the majority to pass UN resolution 3379,
condemning Zionism as a form of racism, became one of the first non-Arab states
to recognise Palestine's declaration of independence in 1988, and was generally
among the more vocal non-Arab voices against Israel.
Today,
India is Israel's closest eastern ally and its largest arms market. Annual non-military
bilateral trade alone exceeds $4.5bn. Since 2001, the diasporas of the
two countries have emerged as energetic allies against a shared enemy: Islamic
extremism. A survey by the
Israeli foreign ministry in 2009 found India to be the most
pro-Israel country in the world, well above the US. Once a bastion of
pro-Palestinian sentiment, India recently appeared at the bottom in a worldwide poll of countries sympathetic to Palestinian
statehood. Throw a stone in Panaji and it is likely to land on an
Israeli backpacking through India after his post-mandatory service.
What
precipitated this dramatic shift? Israel had all along been a quiet ally of New
Delhi, volunteering clandestine support as India sought to repel attacks by
China (in 1962) and Pakistan (in 1965). Israeli officials knew also that India,
which had no history of anti-semitism, had arrived at its Israel policy through
a combination of post-colonial hauteur, realpolitik – particularly its desire
to placate Arab opinion in its contest against Islamic Pakistan – and an
ethical commitment to the Palestinian cause. Partly for these reasons, India's
anti-Israel actions rarely provoked any anxiety in Tel Aviv.
There are
three principal reasons behind the shift in India's attitude. The first is the
belated realisation that no amount of deference to Arab sentiment could alter
Muslim opinion in the Middle East in India's favour: when it came to
Kashmir, Shia and
Sunni united in supporting Pakistan's position. The second owes
itself to the collapse of the old world order: the death of the Soviet Union
meant that India had to seek out new allies. The third factor that contributed
to the deepening of Indo-Israeli ties is less well-known: the rise of Hindu
nationalism in India.
To
votaries of Hindu nationalism, Israel is something of a lodestar: a nation to
be revered for its ability to defeat, and survive among, hostile Muslims. As
the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz put it,
"Relations between Israel and India tend to grow stronger when … India
experiences a rightward shift in anti-Muslim public opinion or in
leadership".
This
explains why Hindu opinion is inflamed even by the most anodyne Indian
expression of solidarity with Palestine. At the UN general assembly last month
India's prime minister, Manmohan Singh, offered some somniferous words of support for
Palestine's membership effort: "India is steadfast in its support for the
Palestinian people's struggle for a sovereign, independent, viable and united
state of Palestine with East Jerusalem as its capital, living within secure and
recognisable borders side by side and at peace with Israel".
No one in
Israel seemed to have noticed. None of the major newspapers editorialised it.
There wasn't even a specific news item in the Israeli press singling out India.
Trade did not suffer. The markets registered no shifts. But this did not deter
some Indians from rising to take offence on Israel's behalf. To Sadanand Dhume,
a US based commentator who published a hysterical philippic in the Wall Street
Journal castigating India for not "throwing its weight behind
Israel", Singh's speech was nothing short of a "foreign
policy mishap". According to Dhume, who has since been ordained
"the go-to guy for all matters India" by an excited colleague of his:
"Both India and Israel represent ancient civilisations whose land carries
a special spiritual significance for most of its people."
This
desire to define citizenship and belonging in the procrustean terms of ancient
culture over all other considerations is where Hindutva and Zionism converge.
As Koenrad Elst, one of the most influential producers of pro-Hindutva pabulum,
has said
of the movement's founder, "Veer Savarkar was the Hindu
counterpart of a Zionist: he defined the Hindus as a nation attached to a
motherland, rather than as a religious community". "True, there is an
obvious difference between the situation of the Jews, who had to migrate to
their motherland … and the Hindus who merely had to remove the non-Hindu …
regime from their territory." This prescription for ethnic cleansing came
to life in 1992, when Hindu nationalists brought down the Babri mosque in the
northern Indian city of Ayodhya. Their ongoing struggle to seize the Babri
land, which belonged to Muslims for over five centuries, looks to Israel's
appropriation of Palestinian territory as a useful template.
In 2009,
Mumbai's anti-terror squad arrested, among others, an officer in the Indian
army, Prasad Purohit, for masterminding a terrorist attack on Pakistani
citizens and plotting to overthrow the secular Indian state. In his confession, Purohit admitted to making
plans to approach Israel for help. It says something about the state of Israel
when the most virulently anti-Muslim terrorists in India reflexively look to it
as a potential source of support.
This is
tragic – because, in the minds of the formidable men who willed them into
existence, India and Israel were alike. Theodor Herzl's conception of Israel
was remarkably similar to Mahatma Gandhi's idea of India. Both men refined
their ideas gradually. In Der Judenstaat, Herzl presented Israel as a
"rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilisation as opposed to
barbarism". Several years later, he offered a more coherent version, a
blueprint for a modern pluralistic state, operating under the aegis of Jews,
but self-consciously inclusive: visionary Jews and welcoming Arabs people his
extraordinary novel Altneuland, one of the founding texts of Zionism. Herzl
resolved the conflicts of conscience by transmitting some of the most powerful
arguments for Israel's establishment through an Arab character, Reshid Bey. "It
was a great blessing," Reshid explains to a sceptical visitor.
"Nothing could have been more wretched than an Arab village at the end of
the 19th century … [The Arabs] are better off than at any time in the
past." But Herzl was alert to the victim's capacity to victimise. In Dr
Geyer, we are shown a chilling vision of majoritarian zealotry: a fanatical
rabbi, he wants all Arabs expelled from the New Society. Redemption comes in
the form of David Littwak, the son of a peasant who believes in a land for all,
Arab and Jew, and whose opposition to and victory over Geyer is cast as the
highest affirmation of Zionism. Unlike Herzl, Gandhi scorned modern technology
for most of his life. In his early life, Gandhi's politics wereconspicuously exclusionary. But the India he
imagined even after alighting on his Satyagraha campaign relied on a network of
Indian David Littwaks to survive. It was a dream that crashed during his own
lifetime, with the partition of India.
Today,
some of the most powerful politicians in Israel are those who violate Herzl's
ideas. Avigdor Lieberman, a Russian immigrant foreign minister of Israel, has
openly echoed Geyer's thoughts, calling for the expulsion of Israeli Arabs. In
Gandhi's home state, Narendra Modi, a rabidly anti-Muslim politician implicated
in the anti-Muslim pogrom of 2002, continues to secure handsome mandates from
the largely Hindu electorate.
India's
support for Palestine is one of the last remaining precepts from time of Pandit
Nehru, India's first prime minister who is loathed by Hindu chauvinists for
refusing to turn India into a "Hindu Pakistan". As per the Hindu
nationalist narrative, the Congress party's support for Palestine – if such a
thing actually exists in any meaningful sense – is a bribe to Indian Muslims.
In reality, Indian Muslims have made noticeable efforts to build
bridges with Israel. But if anyone can be accused of holding foreign
policy hostage to religious bigotry, it is the Hindu nationalist BJP. During
its disastrous term in power, from 1997 to 2004, ministers in the government
dismissed pro-Palestinians as "more Palestinian than Palestinians
themselves". Its foreign minister, Jaswant Singh, suggested that a common
civilisational outlook bound India and Israel – implying that Indian Muslims
who shared the faith of the Arab majority were somehow alien to India's "civilisation".
India and
Israel have much to offer each other and Israel's security must figure as a
non-negotiable precondition in New Delhi's support for Palestine. But Hindu
nationalists are not concerned with the security of Israel: it is the
abandonment of Palestinians they seek.
The seeds
of Israel's redemption are embedded in Zionism, which is concerned with housing
people, not displacing them. Israel must merely embrace it. It will still be a
paternalistic form of "pluralism", but it will be inclusive. On the
other hand, Hindutva's very purpose is the disenfranchisement and abolition of
religious minorities. So Israelis must wonder what has become of them, their
nation, that their most fervid admirers in the most pro-Israeli country in the
world happen to be fascists. Until Israel and India undertake an honest
reappraisal of their friendship, those who care about the ideas of Herzl and
Gandhi must acknowledge this much: theirs is an alliance deepened by prejudice.
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