SHEKHAR GUPTA - Indian Express

Different Strokes by Sucheta Dalal

February 10, 2001

Can India meet the Sharon test?
The goonda patriot

The first time I saw Ariel Sharon was in a setting so unusual it could have only been in Israel. The Gulf War was on, the first Iraqi Scuds had hit Tel Aviv only the previous night and I, covering that entire war from Baghdad to Beirut with a strength of two (with photographer Prashant Panjiar), was hanging on to my only friend in a strange country, and waiting hungrily for lunch. The previous night had been spent in fear and claustrophobia, in a sealed basement, gas masks tightly fixed round our faces and clutching survival kits with syringes and vials of some chemical that was promised to be the poison gas antidote.

We had arrived from Baghdad the previous day and latched on desperately to Zubin Mehta, the Indian mascot of all Israel, back, as always, to be with his adopted country in war time, and the man who supposedly could play that country like a piano, since he knew all the right keys to hit. Always one to wear his Indianness on his sleeve, he ceremonially opened his box of whole red chillies, and proceeded to crush — with bare hands — two over his pasta. Then he spotted someone at the buffet table. It was an ambling, Falstaffian figure, not your typical cavalryman but more like the overweight Lalaji who runs your neighbourhood grocery shop.

‘‘Shalom, mantriji,’’ Zubin shouted and dragged me by the arm. ‘‘Here, here, meet the greatest goonda of Israel, none other than Arik Sharon,’’ he said, preferring the more popular nick-name for the war hero who now handled a minor portfolio in Yitzhak Shamir’s Likud coalition.

The Israelis are particularly forgiving with Zubin. So he could go on, colourfully, describing Sharon’s many ‘‘exploits’’. His remarkable counter-thrust, with just about a division of armour in the Yom Kippur war that turned the tide of history, saved Israel. It figures in textbooks of modern warfare as a stroke of genius. His ‘‘role’’ in the Shatila massacre (despite Sharon’s protestations), his not-an-inch-more approach to the Palestinians but, above all, his fierce nationalism. ‘‘Here is a great goonda, who is also a great patriot. Not my kind of Israeli but you cannot understand this country without knowing him,’’ he said. Sharon did not seem to mind any of that.

Just where does a right wing maverick transcend goondaism into patriotism or vice versa is never an easy question to answer, and this is what the world should be thinking about as Sharon takes charge of the world’s most sensitive piece of real estate.

IF you want to see his roguish side, go for a walk in Old, East Jerusalem, in the Arab Quarter. I was escorted on my first tour of the fascinating streets that connect four very different, distinct worlds, the Jewish, Christian, Arab and Armenian quarters in an area not larger than old Delhi’s Khari Baoli, by another instant friend, Sarah Sallon, very British, very Jewish and as shockingly enigmatic and direct as Israelis tend to be. An MD in gastroenterology who spent a long day, six days a week, working with sick Arab babies in the Gaza Strip, then researching her ‘‘favourite’’ diarrhoea bug, cursing the Israelis for being so bloody-minded, she lived alone, with her cat, in an apartment overlooking Old Jerusalem. She also swore daily never to part with an inch of it to ‘‘those bloody Arabs’’. ‘‘Look at that, look at that,’’ she said, pointing at the minora, the universally recognised five-pronged symbol of Judaism, on an arch across the street in the heart of the Arab quarter. ‘‘That b... Sharon, he has built a house here. He wants to show the Arabs this belongs to Israel. So why doesn’t he come and live here full-time? Why has he left these poor little Jewish boys to guard it 24 hours if not to humiliate the Arabs?’’ She went on, loud, even for an Israeli, asking if there could ever be peace with people like Sharon in the cabinet. Now Sharon, backed by a landslide, is the prime minister.

Obviously, the man who disdainfully outflanked the entire conquering, marauding Egyptian army and dashed for Cairo with a mere division of tanks could also similarly have the audacity of planting the Zionist flag in the Arab heart of the Holy City. Except that the first was an act of great military courage and imagination, the second is sheer cussedness. He wanted to state conclusively that the future of Jerusalem was not negotiable and he wasn’t one to do it with words alone. This is the way Sharon does business. This is why the world has been watching him more closely than any other leader in the Middle East for a long time. Which Sharon will we be seeing as prime minister now, the obstinate goonda or the brilliant patriot?

It matters to India a great deal because we have already gone too far down in our relationship with Israel to be able to afford a rethink or a setback. The process may have begun in the times of Shamir and Netanyahu but it certainly acquired impetus during the liberal, peacenik Rabin-Peres-Barak phase. India was able to develop such a rich and productive political, trade and security relationship with Israel, without a whimper of protest from the Arabs, only because the Gulf War had divided and weakened the Arabs and because the overall movement in the Middle East was towards conciliation and acceptance of the Jewish state. Will that now continue? Or will Sharon’s bloody-mindedness, combined with Arafat’s equally dangerous incompetence, reverse the equation? If that happens, the India-Israel relationship will also come under some stress.

Jaswant Singh’s recent visit to Saudi Arabia marked an important phase in India’s Middle East policy. Israel is the first close friend India has to its west. India is the first close friend Israel has to its east. Democracy is unfortunately not very popular in the Islamic world. India and Israel are the only countries in the world where sizeable Muslim populations have equal voting rights in free elections.

India also has some of the same in-built contradictions as Israel, underlined so marvelously in the dilemma of the Mossad spy in Le Carre’s The Little Drummer Girl. If Israel is a democracy, whereby all Arabs, including those in captured territories have a vote, it ceases to be a Jewish state. If only Jews have the right to vote, it is no longer a democracy. Similarly, India is not a secular state unless it reaches out and amicably integrates its own Muslims, for which it does need the goodwill of the Islamic world. But, can it do so as long as it is at such odds with Islamic fundamentalism?

India needs Israel as a political and a military partner but without being pushed into any new confrontation with the Islamic world. Sharon will complicate this equation. Under him, a right-wing Israel may not mind being at odds with the Islamic world, but a secular, diverse India cannot afford that. We will, therefore, be watching Sharon with some nervousness. There is, at the popular level, a great deal of warmth for India in Israel and vice versa. It will now be put to the Sharon test.

JUST how deep the Israeli affection runs for India was also demonstrated to me on the day I met Sharon; not by him but by one of his bitter political detractors. I met Shimon Peres (again, courtesy Zubin) sunning himself on an easy chair outside his town-home when the entire city was indoors nervously awaiting the next missile strike. ‘‘We never understood why you Indians shunned us so much,’’ he said, recalling how our freedom movement influenced theirs. The British, he said, banned Nehru’s books, so they clandestinely printed a Hebrew translation of his Discovery of India. ‘‘Come, come for a walk with me,’’ he offered, ‘‘let me show you a few interesting things.’’ He then proceeded to point out Rehov (street) Gandhi and Rehov Tagore. Will we ever dare to name a street after Ben Gurion or Yitzhak Rabin?

In months to come, if Sharon acts true to form and the Middle East is on the boil again — and when self-doubts emerge in South Block and the cold warriors come out of the closet seeking to slow down, if not reverse the positive movement in our relations with Israel — we would do well to remember this mutually shared goodwill, respect and strategic and commercial interest. Or, who knows, we might instead see a mellowed, mature Sharon, a patriot but not a goonda.