The Indian Right’s Fascination with Israel Is Short Sighted and Rooted in Islamophobia

The Indian Government and the mainstream media – the terms are  often interchangeable – have adopted a pro-Israeli position on the current ferment in the Middle East. This is at a time when the rest of the world – particularly the Global South and the BRICs countries – and other than the US, the UK and Germany, have taken a diametrically opposite view.

In this, India appears to have ceded the leadership of the Global South to China, Brazil and South Africa.

This obtuse identification with what most in the Global community characterise and, rightly so, as an apartheid, pariah state, extends even to the United Nations, the ICJ (International Court of Justice) and the norms of international law including the Genocide Convention. The extent of India’s support for Israel was seen in its singular refusal to sign a condemnation of Israel’s deeming the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, a persona non grata.

This departure is odd given that India has traditionally invested much in the United Nations; many Indian soldiers are part of several Peace Keeping Forces, including the UNIFIL in Lebanon which is currently under attack from the Israel Defence Forces. This bonding with Israel appears to be an ideological project, unconnected with history, principle or even national self-interest.

Our Prime Minister gives homilies to Vladimir Putin on the futility of war and armed struggle, yet seems oddly constrained from doing the same to his friend Bibi Netanyahu. We have not heard one word of admonishment from the Prime Minister on Israeli actions even as our TV channels depict resistance forces such as Hamas and Hezbollah as they would portray the Lashkar-e-Taiba in Kashmir.

Yet, through the growth of social media, we have got to witness the  wholesale genocide of Palestinians, certainly in Gaza and to some extent in the West Bank. The disturbing aspect of this is that the Israeli population is largely in favour of it.  There have been protests in relation to the Government’s refusal to negotiate a ceasefire in Gaza, but much of that has to do with the return of the hostages, not out of concern or empathy with the suffering of the Palestinians.

On Tik-Tok, which of course is banned in India, there are disturbing scenes of IDF soldiers enjoying the destruction in Gaza as well as the sadistic pleasure ordinary Israelis derive from the endless suffering and butchery of Palestinian civilians to the point where mass starvation is touted as a policy to be pursued.

This happens when you denigrate a people. The Israeli Defense Minister termed the Palestinians as worse than animals echoing Amit Shah’s characterisation of Bangladeshi migrants as ‘termites’, a term which came to bite him post the toppling of Sheikh Hasina.

The constant, Islamophobic media coverage has consequences.  If you keep dehumanising a community in the way that both the Israeli and Indian mainstream media do at every given opportunity, their lives are seen as of little worth.  This encourages sociopathic behaviour, widely seen among Israelis and many on the Hindu Right who are not just apathetic to the grotesque denouement happening in Gaza and now Lebanon, but seem to revel in the bloodlust. This is not something to be proud of, yet certain Right wing commentators seem to exult in this indifference.

Much of this behaviour owes itself to arguments which have little or no justification. The argument which has the most striking resonance with Indians is that those who take recourse to terrorism deserve no quarter or sympathy.

Like for the Israeli propagandists everything starts from October 7, not from 1948. People forget that in 1946-47 terrorist gangs such as the Jewish Stern gang were active in killing Palestinians and British soldiers and anyone who stood in their way, leading to the flight of many Palestinians in what was called the Nakba.

If the Israelis use this terrorism to acquire territory, they have little or no moral justification in calling the victims terrorists. The Likud party is the ideological successor to these violent groups and have been arming settlers in the West Bank and encouraging them to clear the land of Palestinians, so these are contemporary reminders of the fact that the Israeli state has not changed since 1948.

The violence of these settlers was so horrifying that Mrs Thatcher had to be cajoled into shaking hands with Menachem Begin on his visit to the UK, as she stated that she never wanted to shake hands with a terrorist.

But now we have Itamar Ben-Gvir, Minister of National Security and Bezalel Smotrich, Finance Minister of Israel running the show openly, ministers who believe in collective punishment, massacres of civilians including women and children and expelling the Palestinians. Thomas Friedman quoted a former Mossad chief describing the Netanyahu coalition government as including the Israeli equivalent of the Ku Klux Klan.

It is these statements, together with Netanyahu’s reference to Biblical genocide on the people of Amalek that gave basis to the ICJ to rule at the interim stage that there was a plausible case for Israel committing genocide. This was an ICJ Court that consisted of fifteen judges and it is notable that it was a consensus judgement except for Uganda. Among the judges of these countries that found this to be the case, included the US, Israel and India. So this was not some kangaroo court as Israel seeks to depict it as.

The ICJ is the instrument of the United Nations, an institution Israel has a major problem with, despite the fact as President Macron pointed out that Israel was recognised as a nation state by the United Nations by General Assembly Resolution 273 in 1948, on the back of Pakistan which was the first state to be recognised as a religious state.

In fact, this recognition was granted on the basis that the Palestinians who were displaced from their land would be compensated or rehabilitated. Israel has never attempted to do so from 1948 to the present day, which is why the United Nations continues to have the burden of looking after the refugees. What is at stake here is that the very existence of a rules based international order and to give Israel a free pass to commit genocide may have serious repercussions.

Even the question of whether the October 7 attack was indeed a terrorist act is in debatable under international law particularly with the recent judgement passed on the  July 29, 2024 where the ICJ has ruled that Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories is unlawful under international law. This means that Israel can hardly use the argument of self-defence when it has essentially sealed off an enclave, Gaza, by military means, by land and sea, rendering Gaza the largest open air prison in the world.

When the inhabitants strike back, political scientist John Mearsheimer , has characterised it as a prison break, not dissimilar to what the Ukrainians may be doing to the Russian forces in such a situation.  No one accuses them of terrorism or indeed the French resistance against the Germans in World War II.

The parallel with Kashmir, as some have done, is unwarranted.. These remarks are ascribed to bodies such as the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation. This is a common grouse with the Indian right who fail to see that there is no parallel or more seriously that criticism of India’s policies in Kashmir including violation of human rights is a serious issue with the West, too.

The State of Jammu & Kashmir was never Pakistani territory, there may be a dispute as to the accession to India, but India is not in breach of international law by treating it as part of India. The Pakistanis have an interest in conflating the issues; but the Pakistanis have never been very sympathetic to the Palestinians.

One of the worst massacres of the Palestinians happened in 1971 in Lebanon, in what is called Black September and the officer in charge was one Zia-ul-Haq, seconded to the Jordanian army which was at war with the PLO..

Nor are Indian Muslims particularly sympathetic to the Palestinian cause as their apparent co-religionists, as they are concerned more about Saudi Arabia and their pilgrimages than the plight of the Palestinians.

It must also be remembered that the PLO in its heyday was broadly secular body with many Christians as its spokespersons such as Hanan Ashrawi, George Habash and others. It is only from the 1990s, bodies like Hamas with the encouragement of Israelis came into vogue.  In fact, Israel is fast becoming a theocracy and has an interest in fundamentalism spreading.

In fact, the trendy thing to do is to say that the Middle East has changed and the Palestinians are no longer relevant. That may have been true as of the October 6, 2023, but is no longer the case. Authoritarian rulers of Arab States find Israel useful in helping them repress and control their population, buy arms, and surveillance equipment and that constitutes acceptance of Israel.

However, post the brutal genocide inflicted on the Gazans, the popular mood has changed. Mohammed bin Salman in a conversation with Antony Blinken stated that he personally had no interest in the Palestinian cause, but his people did including many youngsters who had no idea about the Palestinian struggle until the October 7, 2023. He could not afford to ignore the popular will and the power of social media.

This is also true of Qatar, but less so of the UAE which hardly has a local population of any size. In fact, two states which have been funded copiously by the US government for Israel’s sake, Egypt and Jordan are most concerned about the developments as they see further influx of refugees.

Where are the Gazans and Palestinian residents of the West Bank going to go? After all Israel has rejected the consensus diplomatic solution, which is the two States solution, which means that for the Palestinians there is only the choice of genocide or expulsion.

So this argument that the Middle East has changed and the Palestinian are irrelevant is a very lazy one which ignores the horrors of the genocide and facts on the ground. The fact is that Netanyahu’s policy of permanent war is going to destabilise the Middle East and not in a good way.

The question then is, what was wrong with the traditional Indian support for the Palestinian cause? According to some it was a hangover from the Cold War where India took its guidance from Russia. This is incorrect, as the Indian position was founded on the notion of anti-colonialism.

Mahatma Gandhi was very clear that the Israelis could only settle the land with the consent of the Palestinians. Nehru similarly whilst recognising Israel, saw it as a colonial project. These principles are very sound and I think have withstood the passage of time.

We risk forfeiting these principles and not even for national interest. I am not persuaded that it is in India’s interest to see Iran attacked, perhaps by nuclear weapons. We have already seen the unmitigated disaster that the neocon policy of the regime change has brought to the Middle East.

If the present Iranian regime is awful, we have no idea what may replace it.  It is not in India’s interest to see oil at $200 a barrel. Neither is it in India’s interest to see our sea routes sabotaged because of the evisceration of Gaza.

It is also forgotten by these panjandrums of the right is that there are millions of poor Indians in the Gulf who sent back billions in remittances. In an inflamed situation in the Gulf it is not impossible to see the Indian Government policy backfiring badly on its expatriate population.  These are all legitimate interests and matter much more to the common man than what some nobody thinks of India’s Kashmir policy.

Most of all, it is not in India’s interest to antagonise the Arab Street as being one of the few if not only nation from the Global South, other than Polynesian islands, to stand up for Israel. In short, despite the much vaunted technological expertise the Israelis have, to give all this up for an illusory relationship is an act of supreme folly and based on a discredited Islamophobic ideology.