In India today, if an Indian citizen speaks about the 2002 massacre of Muslims in the state of Gujarat that happened under the watch of then chief minister Narendra Modi, they will be branded anti-Hindu and/or an anti-national. In the USA today, those US citizens who dare to talk about Benjamin Netanyahu’s genocidal regime of Israel and it’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza, they would most certainly invite the potentially destructive charge of anti-semitism – a charge that would ruin any US citizen’s life. If they are a student, they will be expelled from the university; if they are a professor, they would be shown the door; If they are a business woman, the financial spigots will be squeezed for them.

This is the tell-tale reality of two of the most talked-about democracies of the world – one is the most populous democracy and the other the most powerful democracy.

Its hardly surprising that Narendra Modi and Benjamin Netanyahu have embraced each other, with the US giving its blessings to this courtship. Look at the chilling fact: India has not uttered a word against Israel in the last 20 months, whether at the United Nations or otherwise, while that country has unleashed a pogrom against Palestinians in their own homeland. It’s indeed an irony that while Mahatma Gandhi’s India had denounced the creation of a Jewish state in the Arab land as a colonial project, Modi’s India has become an ardent backer of an imperialist Israel that has turned fascist over the years.

History stands testimony to the fact that the state of Israel was founded in 1948 as a part of an imperialist and racist design: the Western imperialist powers created Israel by partitioning the existing state of Palestine and militarily evicting 750,000 Palestinians from their own homeland. The ethnic cleansing of Palestinians was carried out to send out a message loud and clear: that of the supremacy of the Christian white race over the Muslim Arabs.

The charge that Israel was an imperialist enterprise was not just a typical Leftist harangue; it was more than reaffirmed when Israel, backed by the Western powers, waged a military offensive against the Arabs in 1967 and swiftly took control of the Golan Heights, the West Bank of the Jordan river, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula at the end of the Six Day War. This was justified by the Western democracies as an act of self-defence!

The Iranian scholar Ali Shariati had laid bare the racist connotation of a Jewish state in the Arab land through some sharp posers:

“Why should the West and Christianity give up Islamic Palestine as payoff (for the crimes committed against the Jews in Hitler’s Germany)? Why shouldn’t they give up a part of Poland where they put the Jews under the most terrible torture? Why don’t they give one state of the Federal Republic of Germany as compensation for the Holocaust? Why should Christianity compensate for its torture of the Jews from the pocket of Islam? Why should the West pay for its crimes from the pockets of Middle East nations?”

Israel – the imperialist-racist project – has, over the years, recreated the spectre of the Holocaust; Hitler had exterminated almost six million Jews; the fascist Netanyahu regime is hell bent on annihilating more than five million Palestinians. It has already killed  almost a hundred thousand civilians in Gaza, mostly women and children; several hundreds of thousand Palestinians have been wounded or maimed in the last 20 months.

Modi’s India has been mutely watching while Netanyahu’s Israel, aided and abetted by the US of A and other Western powers, has systematically destroyed the entire civilian infrastructure in Gaza: its neighbourhoods, homes, roads, towers, sewage and water systems, hospitals destroyed; all the schools, colleges, universities in Gaza razed to the ground; and Israel is now forcing Palestinians to die of mass starvation by blocking the entry of the UN food supply vehicles into Gaza.

This is deliberate genocide, not collateral damage of a war of self-defence against the horrific terrorist attack that killed 1,200 Israelis almost 20 months ago. The aim is to wipe out Palestine from the map of the Middle East, uproot the surviving indigenous Palestinian people from their homeland and establish the Zionist supremacy in the region.

Every human being, with a modicum of human values, would raise their voice against the mass murder being committed in Gaza. Every country which believes in international law would accept the decree of the International Court of Justice and declare Netanyahu a war criminal.

However, it is sad to see that Narendra Modi’s India is embracing this criminal with open arms. This negates everything that Mahatma Gandhi’s India had stood for. Gandhi had said categorically, back in 1947, that a Jewish state must not be created in the Palestinian territory by the power of the bayonet. It would be a crime against humanity to displace the native Arab population for the establishment of a Jewish homeland, he had warned.

Gandhiji must be turning in his grave now to see India’s complicity in Israel’s virtual annexation of the Palestinian land through its brazen military power!

Nalini Ranjan Mohanty is a senior journalist and the former Editor of Hindustan Times, Patna.

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