For Israel, a Gujarati view

Yasser Arafat’s envoy to New Delhi has returned to Gaza City a deeply disillusioned man. The India of Jaswant Singh, he has discovered, is no longer the India of Nehru and Indira and Rajiv Gandhi. Jaswant Singh has had nothing constructive to offer, not even a heart-felt word of solace, in this the worst conjuncture for Palestine since The Catastrophe of 1948, the conquest of Palestine by Israeli terrorists, al-Naqba as it is called in the Arab world.

Ariel Sharon is the Narendra Modi of Israel. Naroda Patiya is to Gujarat what Jenin is to Palestine. And just as Naroda Patiya is only the worst of a series of grisly atrocities deliberately inflicted as an act of revenge on a hapless people, so is Jenin only the worst of a vicious vengeance exacted from blameless innocents. If the Muslim pogrom in Gujarat is justified as ‘‘action-reaction’’ for Godhra, so is Jenin exculpated as ‘‘action-reaction’’ for a suicide bombing at a Passover party. That those who are killed had nothing to do with those who were killed is regarded with as much nonchalance by the Tel Aviv government as by the government in Gandhinagar. And just as Sharon, the Butcher of Qibaya in 1948, and of Sabra and Shatila in 1982, is the same as the Butcher of Jenin, Bethlehem and Ramallah in 2002, so are the mass murderers in Gujarat of the same stock as those who assassinated Gandhiji in 1948, razed the masjid at Ayodhya in 1992, and undertook the genocide of Gujarat in 2002. And even as the Sharon of 2002 is no ‘‘aberration’’, so also, notwithstanding the pathetic cover-up by Jaswant Singh’s ministry, is the Sangh Parivar of 2002 no ‘‘aberration’’. Jenin was written into the Likud victory in the Israel elections as clearly as Gujarat was written into the ascendance of the BJP in ours. The BJP is the Likud in saffron, as the Zionist Movement is the BJP in gaberdine (reference Shylock to Antonio in The Merchant of Venice: ‘‘You call me misbeliever, cut-throat dog/ And spit upon my Jewish gaberdine’’).

As in Gujarat against the minorities, so in Israel against the Palestinians the full weight of the state has been thrown behind the invasion of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank — the territory on which, at Oslo and Washington in 1993, the Palestinians had been promised an independent state of their own by just about now. I derided the Oslo and Washington agreements as ‘‘Panchayati Raj in the Gaza Strip’’. But if in India, elected panchayats are sometimes dismissed and disbanded, in Israel’s version of Panchayati Raj, the Palestine National Authority has been bombed from the air, its citizens killed and maimed by the thousand, shops and schools and homes set on fire, their leader placed under siege with neither electricity nor water nor phone-lines nor even the freedom to walk among his own people. And that by a Sharon who publicly rues that he did not have Arafat mowed to death in Lebanon 20 years ago. This is truly al-Naqba.

Faced with human tragedy of this magnitude, Jaswant Singh can go no further in asking Sharon to desist than Vajpayee can restrain Narendra Modi. For even as Vajpayee admires Modi for being a better Rashtriya Swayam Sewak than his NDA-compromised self, so does Jaswant Singh profoundly believe that the Israeli way is the right way. That mind-set was exposed when our external affairs minister — in Jerusalem, of all places — attributed our decades-long Palestine policy to the ‘‘Muslim votebank’’. Unable to believe that even a BJP external affairs minister could be so irresponsible, I asked for confirmation from the external publicity division and was informed that the minister had indeed said exactly that. I gave Jaswant Singh the opportunity to retract or apologise on the floor of the House; the offer was haughtily refused. The saffron beast behind the ex-major’s suave countenance was never more nakedly revealed. The BJP believes in its bones that there is nothing more than the ‘‘Muslim votebank’’ to Gandhi declaring in the twenties that ‘‘Palestine belongs to the Palestinians as England belongs to the English and France to the French’’; to the 1947 Nehru formula of a federal state of Israel/Palestine; and to the half-century of unflinching Indian solidarity with the mercilessly persecuted Palestinians which preceded the advent of the BJP to power in our benighted land.

Extraordinarily, the apologist who sprang so gratuitously to Jaswant Singh’s defence then was the same journalist who now writes so feelingly about the carnage in Gujarat — Saeed Naqvi. He argued that it was indeed votebank politics which drove our Palestinian policy because, it seems Rajiv Gandhi had once asked him what would be the impact on Indian Muslim opinion of our extending full diplomatic recognition to Israel. The query was entirely justified. For Jerusalem is home to some of the most revered shrines of Islam. But is such concern for Muslim sentiment any more communal than seeking special assistance from the Chinese for Indian Hindus to circumambulate Kailas Mansarovar?

Of course, there is a religious dimension to Palestine, but that is only one dimension. It is much more the question of an entire people being driven like cattle from their homeland and being denied the right of return which the Israelis have proclaimed in their constitution to all Jews everywhere and forever. It is an issue of an alien state being imposed upon a guiltless people for the sins of European Christendom against the Jews for which they are not culpable. When the Antonios were persecuting the Shylocks, the Arabs had set a shining example of open-minded pluralism and secularism in Andalusia, the vast empire they ruled from what is today Spain.

Naqvi mentions the Jewish external affairs minister of Morocco. Why go so far? The Palestinian delegation to the talks in Washington included Palestinian Jews. The spokesperson of the delegation, the brilliantly articulate Hannan Ashrawi, who opposed the Oslo accords, is a Christian. So is the First Lady of Palestine, Arafat’s wife. Palestine is not a matter of religion; it is a matter of thwarted secular nationalism. Above all, it is a question of justice. For without justice there can be no peace — not in Gujarat, not in Palestine.

In 1947, Nehru pointed out that the partition of Palestine was no solution; nor, he said, was it right that the Jews who had settled in Palestine be ‘‘driven into the sea’’. The answer, he insisted, lay in a federated democratic state with equal civic and political rights for all its citizens, Jewish or Arab, as proposed by India in the United Nations as far back as the beginnings of our own Independence and the tragedy of our own Partition. That — not Oslo or Washington or the Wye River accord — is the only way to end al-Naqba.

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