On the recent furor concerning Israel and Palestine
I recall attending a few weeks ago a panel discussion on contemporary West Asia. The distinguished panel consisted of a retired Indian ambassador, a JNU professor, two Indian journalists covering international affairs and, as guest of honour, the Syrian Ambassador to India.
One could regard with certain consideration the animus that the Syrian Ambassador felt for Israel, but what was not explicable was the decidedly anti-Israel stance of the Indian ambassador and the professor from JNU. One would have expected a Foreign Service officer and a professor to be more perspicacious, but that was apparently not to be. Such, however, appears to be kosher in the chambers of the intelligentsia.
It was then that I was reminded of the commendable episode from The Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr. from 1981 which sought to explore the topic “Why are our Intellectuals so Dumb?” Indeed, some habits die hard, and the illuminati are no exception.
It is suggested that religion no longer fulfils their desire for a perfect society — a paradise — and they seek their paradise thus not in the empyrean but here on Earth. In pursuit of that paradise, violence is permissible, and the perpetrators are to be regarded as victims and not criminals. They are more influenced by dreams and visions than by objective conviction.
Presumably, this explains their animus against Israel in the recent confrontation between Israel and Palestinians. I did come across on social media a rather impassioned equivalence by a few Indians between Israel and India insinuating that both were the oppressor party in the Middle East and Kashmir respectively, and that they were to be resisted. The proponents of this equivalence identified firmly with the Palestinian cause.
Had sensationalist activism been the perfect debate ammunition, I would have said that India has had an ignominious history of not reciprocating Israel’s unwavering cordiality towards us. The least we could therefore do was to hear Israel’s view as opposed to presenting a binary picture.
Even that would well have been a measured stance unlike the subtle, if unwitting, symbolic support some of the commentariat and their fervidly sententious disciples are prepared to lend to anti-Semitism.
But it turns out that we can base our stance on firmer grounds. From the cognoscenti engaged in the analysis of foreign policy, only Abhijit Iyer-Mitra has discussed meticulously the state of affairs prevalent in the conflicted region in question. Those interested may go through this video.
His analysis is stated as follows:
In the region called Sheikh Jarrah, there is a neighbourhood wherein Jews had bought homes way earlier in the 1870s. Those were the days of British colonialism, and as the Palestinians became progressively active in politics, the British ordered the Jews to get out of the neighbourhood. The Palestinians soon claimed the properties. This is a long-standing property dispute.
There have been several rounds of litigation in the Supreme Court of Israel, where the Jews were able to prove ownership with title deeds and necessary documentation, which the Palestinians never had because the properties were never theirs to begin with. The Supreme Court, while conceding the fact, noted that Palestinians had been living there for a while and could therefore not be summarily evicted. It said that if they would stay there provided they paid rent to the Jews. The Palestinians refused to pay rent and persisted in their desire to stay despite absence of documentation. The Court then resolved to evict them.
The media has overlooked this history and focused solely on the putatively racist eviction, whereas the truth here is that there is nothing racist. It is purely a case of property law.
The Palestinians have gone to the third holiest place in Islam, the Al Aqsa mosque, and commenced stone-pelting on Jews and Israeli police. The Israelis simply attempted to restore law and order.
There were attempts to pass off a video as evidence of violence from an Israeli truck driver, but the Israelis promptly released the complete CCTV footage which proved that the driver was in fact the victim of an attempt by Palestinians to lynch him.
“Liberals”, “activists” — call them what you will — have only been too glad to pass this off as Israeli oppression of Palestinians and have made support to the Palestinian cause their short-term priority, until of course the Modi government does something perfectly innocuous such as the CAA to lead them to be apoplectic about India’s purported loss of pluralism, secularism and democracy; to cast the Palestinian cause down the Orwellian memory hole.
Fortunately for Israel, its people and its government do not harbour an inferiority complex. They would never lose sleep over the puerile social media activism by a few Indians. To be forthright, they do not need an explanatory write-up by a person of my obscure station to defend them either. But it is nonetheless helpful, purely for the purpose of discourse, to proffer a more comprehensive view of this.
The comprehensive view, thus, is that Israel bears none of the blame on grounds of the foregoing analysis. But in terms of a larger picture, it is perhaps time to rid our illuminati of their skepticism if not outright animus against Israel. It is gratifying in youth to engage in activism against a putative enemy and pretend that doing as much is key to an immaculate conscience, but prudent policy is based on a more multivariate, multidimensional approach to reality.
