Of ties, old and new

A month ago, when Spain brought a resolution in the United Nations General Assembly that condemned Israel for using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare and the unlawful denial of humanitarian access, India abstained from voting in favour of the motion. It was the second time in a span of a few months when India deviated from its historical position on the Israel-Palestine tussle. A country that became the first non-Arab nation state to recognise the Palestinian Liberation Army (PLO) as the sole representative of the Palestinian people in 1974 and the state of Palestine in 1988, now feels hesitant to express its support towards the cause of Palestine. In his new book, Hostile Homelands (Westland Books), journalist and author Azad Essa puts the current dynamics in perspective.

“One should not confuse being pro-Palestine and projecting oneself as such. While the Indian state projected itself as being pro-Palestine, it was also protecting its interests by working secretly with the Israelis –  buying weapons, working with Mossad, sending commandos for training. India was therefore working with the Israeli military, learning and borrowing its tactics from occupied Palestine, and subsidising the Israeli military machine,” he says.

The book starts with how Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru drew a direct connection between the Indian freedom struggle and the Palestinian cause; independent India’s foreign policy in the formative years was also based on this connection. In the next four decades, this relationship started changing—a notable example, according to the author, was the Indo-China war, when Nehru wrote to the first Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion and sought help. The author claimed that Nehru took the decision of buying arms from Israel, but later stopped the purchase as it made Gamal Abdel Nasser, the President of Egypt, and Nehru’s close partner in the Non-Aligned Movement “unhappy”.

The Modi era

The author also traces an ideological connection between Hindutva and Zionism. In 2015, a year after the BJP government came to power, India abstained from voting against Israel at the UN Human Rights Council. Essa also writes about Savarkar’s conception of the Hindu Rashtra being similar to the idea of the Jewish state. Modi, in fact, carries forward Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s legacy in this regard. “It was under Vajpayee’s government that Delhi first hosted an Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon in 2003. So, Vajpayee was involved in taking the relationship with Israel forward. When Modi came to power in 2014, he wanted to build a Hindu state, in which Hindus would have more privileges than others. And Israel had already built that state, a so-called Jewish democratic state in which Jews had more rights than Palestinians, be they Muslims or Christians. Modi also sees Israel as a strong militaristic state, with an outsized influence over the world, and Modi wants to replicate that, too,” Essa tells TMS.