Excerpted with permission from Becoming Pro-Palestinian: Testimonies from the Global Solidarity Movement.

I suggest that the nature of engagement I have with the question of Palestine is a triadic relationship between activism, academics and attachment. For the sake of compactness and convenience, I start with the first one, activism. I grew up in an atmosphere where the question of Palestine was politically intimate not just to intellectual and activist circles but to ordinary people as well. This was towards the middle of 1980s in the State of Kerala in South India. Imagine student organizations using pictures of Yasser Arafat in posters, and quoting the words of Mahmoud Darwish and Ghassan Kanafani in pamphlets wooing voters in college union elections! Imagine school assemblies passing unanimous resolutions demanding -- sometimes even warning-- Israel to stop attacking Palestine! Communist and socialist party offices in villages decorated their walls with photographs of Arafat along with those of their founder-leaders. Without exaggeration, in the late seventies and eighties, support for the Palestinian cause was a well-acknowledged gesture and much-valued political act in Kerala. Most of the parties and civil society movements, with the exception of the right wing Hindu outfits, used Palestinian symbols to show their political correctness. The rest of India was never an exception, though the magnitude of response varied in different Indian states.

With the Intifada in the late 1980s there was a sudden surge in Palestine solidarity groups. The Intifada was an unarmed mass insurrection of ordinary Palestinians, and television visuals showing them being brutally handled by the Israeli army made a great deal of resonance in Indian politics. People who watched the visuals of the Intifada became emotionally charged by seeing footage of Palestinians civilians being killed. I read, saw on TV, and heard from friends and relatives living in the Gulf countries about the sufferings of Palestinians. And there were many like me. The support movements on college campuses, film societies in rural and urban areas that screened movies of Palestinian resistance as well as gestures of solidarity by the political parties on every occasion of Israeli aggression: all played a key role in popularising the issue. Not long ago, translations of resistance literature from Palestine constituted a considerable portion of translated works published in the Malayalam, the language of Kerala. We knew Mahmoud Darwish as well as poets in Malayalam through his translated works.

My interest in Palestine as an activist grew with Intifada, when the leftist organization I was affiliated with in my early twenties launched a series of on-street demonstrations supporting the Palestinian cause. This was the case with most of the leftist organizations since they viewed Western support for the suppression of Palestine as leading to further expansion of imperialist influence in West Asia. This period coincided with a series of anti-imperialist agitations in Kerala, and organizations across the left-liberal spectrum invoked the legacy of the anti-colonial national movement-era as usable history to help oppose settler colonialism in Palestine. This anti-colonial feeling, which functioned as the driving force for Palestinian solidarity movements in India in shaping their anti-Zionist ideology right from the beginning, traces its roots to the national movement in India. The feeling resonated first in the 1937 Calcutta session of the All India Congress Committee (AICC) which openly protested against the reign of terror as well as the proposal of partitioning Palestine. Mahatma Gandhi, though he appreciated the sufferings of the Jewish community in Europe in the context of the Holocaust, openly supported Palestinian Arab nationalism and kept a safe distance from Zionist nationalism because of its colonial nature. It is important to note that his statements in solidarity with the Palestinian Arabs came in the context of severe pressure on him from the Zionist quarters to issue a statement favouring the Jewish attempt to establish a national homeland in Palestine. Despite the pressure from Hermann Kallenbach, one of his close friends, assigned by the Zionist leaders to visit him to enlist his  support, Gandhi opposed the move to create a Jewish state in a land occupied another people.

Jawaharlal Nehru also endorsed Ghandi’s anti-colonial position concerning the question of Palestine. He blamed British imperialist policy for creating the crisis and openly supported Palestinian self-determination. Under Indira Gandhi, support for the Palestinian cause became more politically intense. India was the first non-Arab country to recognize the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) “as the sole legitimate representative of the people of Palestine”, and established full diplomatic ties with the PLO in 1980, though a PLO office had been set up in New Delhi as early as 1975. Support for the Palestinians has also been regarded as a gesture by the post-colonial Indian state to the political sensitivities of its largest minority, the Muslims.

The slogans of Palestinian solidarity that once echoed throughout the nation have now faded away, replaced by the right wing political- religious parties’ social media campaigns expressing support for Israel. The hope felt by pro-Palestine activists in the 1980s and ‘90s has dissipated, with an increasing number of takers for the ‘support for Israel’ campaign. What went wrong over a period of thirty years? The reasons are more than one, but each invariably converges on two developments that India went through in the 1990s; i) a neo-liberal reconfiguration of the Indian economy; and ii) a phenomenal rise of Hindu nationalism in mainstream Indian politics.

The neoliberal turn in Indian policy was most overt in foreign policy in the 1990s, reflected in a partial or complete abandonment of anti-imperialism and a tilt towards the United States-dominated world order. This shift resulted, first and foremost, in a change in attitude towards the Palestinian cause. Since that time, support for the Palestinian struggle has been progressively diluted.

India officially recognized the State of Israel in 1950, but the formal relationship remained lukewarm, showing little enthusiasm due to public pressure and diplomatic considerations. At various times the Indian administration feared that ties with Israel would damage relations with the Arab world, and would eventually jeopardise the prospect for Indian labour migration to the Gulf countries, as well as the import of oil from the region. So India’s move to open an embassy in Tel Aviv in 1992 marked not just a radical shift in the way the Indian administration viewed the Palestinian cause, but also created confusion among sections of the administration which had previously been ‘all-weather’ supporters of the Palestinian cause.

This development coincided with the right wing Hindu groups’ propaganda portraying Palestine issue as a Muslim issue. Perhaps more striking was a shift in the language of media reporting of resistance in Palestine, as this was influenced by the global media discourse equating resistance with ‘terrorism’. Yet throughout this period the situation allowed the emergence of initiatives and movements in support of the Palestinian struggle, mostly among the students of the Indian universities. The reverberations of the Palestine solidarity movements across the country have been felt beyond activism. They probably played a part in the increasing popularity of the Palestine issue as a theme of research and writing, especially among the students of political science, area studies and international relations, in the national institutions of higher learning such as Jawaharlal Nehru University, Jamia Millia Islamia, Hyderabad Central University and provincial universities in South India like Mahatma Gandhi University, Kerala University and Mysore University.

Given the unusual number of doctoral dissertations and other scholarly works on Palestine, it is feasible to see this newfound popularity of Palestine as research theme partly as an academic response to the neoliberal negligence of the issue. With major political parties failing to respond to Israeli aggression, many people began to explore the potential of academia for disseminating information, political messages, opinions and views about the suffering of Palestinians. Many, including myself, turned academically to the question of Palestine as form of political self-expression that we believed might overcome the post-liberalization stigma attached to support for the cause. My choice was to take the ‘process of de-Arabization of the Palestinian map’ as the topic for my doctoral work at the Jawaharlal Nehru University.

Israel’s longing to mobilize Indian public opinion in its favour had by then met some initial success with the right wing groups’ drive to weaken the political and moral foundations of civil society organizations engaged in popularizing the Palestinian cause in India by branding them ‘terrorists.’  Yet the Indian universities remained the major theatre of solidarity for Palestinians. I remember Jamia Millia Islamia, the university where I worked, named two of its conference halls after Yasser Arafat and Edward Said; and a garden after Mahmoud Darwish. Annual commemoration of the Naqba became a much valued political gesture among university students at a time when most of the world preferred to ignore the Palestinian struggle for justice. The presence of Palestinian students on the Jamia campus, and their weekly dabke classes, conveyed the feeling of their existence and struggle in the face of global attempts to negate both.

The present wave of Palestinian solidarity activities and research actually began in a small way in Indian academic circles almost two decades ago. The movement gained momentum in 2009 with the formation of the Palestinian Solidarity Committee in India, with representatives from political parties, civil society groups, and universities. The committee calls for boycott of Israeli products and services, organizes activities in solidarity with Palestine, and critiques the strategic relationship and growing military ties between India and Israel. The Indian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (InCABI), a group of academics, activists and artists, was set up the following year [2010] to extend support to the international campaign for the academic and cultural boycott of Israel.

The emotional aspect of my engagement with Palestine was developed during my sojourn in the Gulf countries in the early 2000s. The first Arab I befriended from the region was a Palestinian, a citizen of Jordan working in a state-owned gas company in Qatar. The image of a typical Palestinian has been presented in popular narratives as being ‘short-tempered’, ‘aggressive’ and ‘stubborn’. But, befriending a Palestinian in the diasporic setting would always be a favourite political gesture for a politically active Keralite in the Gulf Countries, in spite of the language hurdle.  We made our weekend meetings a point to share our common concerns over the dwindling support for the Palestine cause  by the rulers of the Gulf countries.

Such cross-cultural identification is common between Malayalee workers and Palestinians, creating a space not just for solidarity but for sharing criticism of the pro-Western policies and weak positions of the Gulf monarchies vis-à-vis US policies favouring Israel. These spaces operate through activities such as Palestine solidarity film festivals and not-so-open gatherings in support of the Palestinian cause, thereby creating an important form of popular politics in the Gulf. Since they exist outside formal institutions, and since most of their actions remain internal to the country, they attract no adverse reactions from the host state. I was a part of one such informal weekly gathering in Qatar, into which we used to introduce discussions with political undertones.

At a more personal level, belonging to such a group offered me an escape, since my personal political expressions as an expatriate were restricted by the government. I remember, towards the end of each meeting, we reiterated our hope that the world would one day realise  Palestinian aspirations for justice and freedom.

M.H. Ilias is an academic and Palestine solidarity activist. He is currently Dean of Social Sciences, Mahatma Gandhi University, Kerala, India.

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