In 1960, the late Israeli satirist Ephraim Kishon viewed Israel as a land rebuilding the Tower of Babel. India is that Tower of Babel. The post-1992 diplomatic bonhomie has set to rest decades of mutual discomfort, shyness and curiosity; decades when one compared Nehruvian socialism and Israeli Labor socialism or Indian and Zionist nation-building, but from a distance. Then it was the Hindu Right and Jewish Right.

Today, terror attacks have ensured a common bloody fate that makes greater demands, especially on the Indian Right, for collaboration in defence and security. The Indian Left, for its part, must express its reservations on growing Indo-Israeli ties, its voice getting shriller when Israel undertakes operations like Cast Lead.

Israel is just 12 days away from the February 10 Knesset elections. But apart from these ideological salvoes, the Indian non-academic public discourse on the subject lacks understanding of the institutions, polity and daily business of Israel — how we converge on fundamentals and differ in details, as India too heads for general elections.

Israel suffers from too much democracy, not too little. It is a pluralistic polity with a multi-party system, a heterogeneous society where one in every five Israelis is an Arab. Let alone the myriad Jewish denominations. Meandering and chaotic, Israel is also West Asia’s only democracy worth the name.

At the time of Israel’s declaration of independence, controversy arose over the reference to God in the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel. The secular Left wanted nothing to do with a text referring to the immaterial. Religious, and non-religious but identity-conscious, Jews couldn’t conceive of a Declaration without “God” that would determine Jewish destiny. The solution was the term “Tzur Israel (Rock of Israel)”. This tradition-loaded phrase denoted God, but was ambiguous enough for secular connotations to proliferate. Confusion, controversy, disagreement and compromise remain symptomatic of Israel’s functioning. Israel’s building block was the not easily defined “Jewishness”, which includes but is not synonymous with Judaism. The secular Zionist Left built Israel, where subsequently the religious Right and Zionist Right emerged as powerful players. Religion lay behind India’s bloody Partition: an identity ever present, ever denied in the declamatory secularism of a country where too the Right rose to political prominence after the heyday of centrism.

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