Mid-east -- Jaswant invokes past to look at future

Mid-east -- Jaswant invokes past to look at future
JYOTI MALHOTRA

JERUSALEM, JULY 2: The journey between the First and the Third World takes about an hour. Israel's dream highways propel you at high speeds towards your chosen destination, in this case the Erez checkpoint some 130 km south of Jerusalem. External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh is the first Indian leader to be visiting here (save for a fleeting trip by L K Advani last month) after Jawaharlal Nehru in the early 1960s. But this is nearly the 21st century.

Welcome to Gaza. Welcome to litter and heaps of scrapped cars and occasional horses and donkeys carrying stock, stunningly beautiful Palestinian women in hejaabs and scarves and overwhelming poverty.

It dawns upon you that the scene, give or take a few Mediterrenean characteristics -- like the Mediterrenean Sea, for example -- is straight out of a poor North Indian small town. The affluence of Israel may be an unfair contrast, but nevertheless, filth and litter appear like dominant motifs in this Third World.

The Gaza Strip, a narrow stretch of land that has been for many generations of Indians the defining symbol of the Palestinian struggle for a homeland -- and where India still posts a representative along with a handful of other nations -- was relinquished by Jerusalem to the Palestinian National Authority in 1994 as part of the land-for-peace division of spoils.

But the shared dream that jointly gave Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin the Nobel Peace prize is already turning sour, as Israelis and Palestinians argue over details and concepts that sound uncannily similar to sound-bites from the Indo-Pakistani problem.

Meanwhile, alongside their poverty, young Palestinians show a remarkable degree of resilience as they speak of their determination -- whatever the Israeli opposition -- to declare an independent Palestinian state this September.

Jaswant Singh's visit to the Gaza strip that lasted through most of the day took him to the Palestine Tehnical College which New Delhi has helped build as well as to an inauguration of the Jawaharlal Nehru library at the local Al-Azhar university. Singh has agreed to up the Indian contribution to $700, 000 from $400,000 towards the library.

At both places he spoke in heartfelt tones about the need to plant the ``seed of education from which sap of learning will run...(that) there is no greater cooperation than in the field of learning...(and) we're not here because Palestine needs to be taught, but because we are attempting to open doors of opportunity which have been denied to you.''

The Indian link with Palestine--despite the overwhelming sense in New Delhi that the BJP government is ready to build a far stronger relationship with the Israelis--clearly remains a strong, though predominantly emotional one. And despite the realistic clarity that the new world order demands of foreign officewallahs, the depressing scenes in the Gaza Strip evoke a strong sense of historical wrong done to these people.

Singh has, meanwhile, offered to Arafat that India send a few teams to help develop infrastructure, such as building roads, sewage systems, housing, power stations, etc, perhaps on credit terms.

With the Palestinian-Israeli track in the Middle East peace process seemingly going nowhere, both Arafat and Singh spent a large amount of their 45 minutes together on these prickly issues. ``I hope we're not all eyeless in Gaza,'' Singh told accompanying Indian journalists, referring to the Aldous Huxley novel by the same name.

He seemed to be indicating that even if New Delhi and Jerusalem were getting set to forge a preferred relationship--beginning tomorrow--it did not mean that India was about to abandon old friendships that were once struck at the iron of anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism.