Has Israel forgotten pakistan?

In the face of troublingly muted international criticism
of Israel' s relentless recent assaults on the corralled
civilian populace of Gaza , the United Nations Human
Rights Commission ( UNHRC ) managed to pass a
resolution to launch a probe into possible Israeli
human rights violations.
The move flags up growing disquiet even in quarters
which otherwise loath to challenge Israel on its
increasingly flagrant violations of international law
and protocols of civilian protection in war zones.
Hundreds of Palestinian children have died in recent
days as schools and hospitals have been bombed.
To the relief of many , India, which has maintained a
so- called " neutral " stance in relation to the Gaza
crisis , voted along with other non -European
countries in favour of due enquiry . This minimal
gesture created instant outrage in India 's ruling
Hindu nationalist circles , generally in favour of
following the lead of the United States, the only
nation to vote, predictably , against an UNHRC probe.
There is no doubt that the Indian vote alongside other
BRICS countries appears anomalous in the light of
India 's markedly pro - Israel leanings of the last two
decades . Yet it is unlikely to signal any change in an
increasingly intimate bilateral relationship which
includes trade worth over $ 6bn , with India
constituting Israel' s single largest arms buyer.
On Twitter recently, the hashtag # IndiaWithIsrael
opened up the floodgates for vast quantities of anti -
Muslim invective urging patriotic Hindus to back the
Jewish state , as it wiped out " the green
menace'"(Islam ) from its territory as India ought to
as well. Influential right- wing pundits shouted that
India 's "pro - Palestine " vote was "disgraceful " since
the nation' s strategic interests lay in supporting
Israel unconditionally .
Meanwhile , the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya
Janata Party ( BJP) government was successful both
in blocking a Rajya Sabha (upper house) motion
censuring Israel's killing of civilians and in
preventing the Lok Sabha (lower house) from voting
on Gaza - after first attempting to suppress
discussion altogether.
Both the confused claims of neutrality (" deepening "
ties with Israel without " diluting " support for
Palestine , as one former diplomat had it ) and the rise
of prominent pro -Israeli voices urging that such
neutrality be abandoned in favour of openly backing
the Zionist cause are , of course , relatively recent
phenomena in India.
Solidarity with Palestine
From 1947 , the year of its own independence from
Britain, until 1992 when full diplomatic relations with
Israel were assumed , India formally adhered to a
policy of support for the "inalienable rights" of
Palestinians as a sovereign people engaged in a
struggle against colonial occupation much like the
one that led to its own hard- won independence .
A postage stamp I remember from my childhood
showed the Indian and Palestinian flags interlocked
with the caption, " Solidarity with the Palestinian
People ". Now mocked as outdated " Third Worldism "
by right- wing commentators ( for whom anti -
colonialism has dwindled into cultural supremacist
chest - thumping ), this policy was rooted in the
principle that nations which had emerged from under
the yoke of European colonialism ought to support
others fighting the same fight .
Some pro - Israel academics parlay the peculiar
notion that Israel and India " won" their independence
from Britain at the same time, coolly overlooking the
fact that Israel was itself an explicitly colonial
creation and that its founders were allies of the
British Empire.
Though fashionably derided now as a cynical
electoral manoeuvre , the postcolonial Indian state
also paid due attention to the political sensitivities of
India 's largest religious minority, Muslims. Before
traducing a principled foreign policy stance as
" minority-appeasement ", it is worth recalling that
India also refused full diplomatic relations with
apartheid South Africa, where no such
considerations prevailed .
To go along with the nonsensical pretence that the
violence in Gaza involves "equal and opposite"
parties is itself to side with Israel, an occupying
power. To be fair to them, India 's influential right -
wing pundits want shows of neutrality dispensed
with in favour of an unambiguous partisanship
towards Israel.
In their adulatory vision, Israel's admirable
ruthlessness in dealing with resistance to occupation
will both inspire India' s ostensibly weakened Hindu
majority and provide the material means (arms and
intelligence ) to put both Indian Muslims and
neighbouring Pakistan in their place .
The idea of a Jewish state asserting untrammelled
supremacy in the Middle East appeals to those who
want a Hindu India to do the same in South
Asia. Ordinary Indians ' awareness of the Palestine
issue , never mind unqualified support for Israel, is
often overstated but there is no doubt that the rise of
virulent Hindu chauvinism (Hindutva ) among both the
urban middle -classes and the Hindu diaspora has
resulted in fawning emulative enthusiasm for
Zionism.
A radical shift
The shift from India' s once insistently anti - colonial
refusal to endorse Israel's atrocities in the region -
abetted by former colonial powers such as Britain
and France - to enthusiastic military and commercial
collaboration with Zionism has to also be seen in the
context of the Indian state 's own aspirational
authoritarianism in crushing resistance movements
in the Indian North -East , Kashmir and the so -called
" Maoist Corridor " in central India.
The most significant ideological shift, however, has
to do with how the so- called " Global War on Terror "
has licensed the emergence of openly virulent anti -
Muslim discourse. Hindu chauvinists, despite their
somewhat awkward adulation of Hitler , have long
called for a formal "anti - terror" club comprising
India , Israel and the USA.
Hindu chauvinist groups recently held
demonstrations of support for the Jewish state
against Gaza in the name of " fighting terrorism
together" .
The legitimation of open anti -Arab racism in Israel is
underpinned by the material reality of justifying
ongoing land appropriation . In India, the absence of
any such imperative transmutes Zionism into
religious and racial hatred for its own sake , complete
with strained mythical parallels between "ancient "
and " original " Hindu and Jewish homelands , and the
need to reclaim both from the depredations of Islam .
The rhetoric of counter- insurgency , once used by
the British to malign India' s own anti - colonial
resistance (in which Hindu nationalists were a
remarkably small presence ) as terrorists entails
India 's right- wing ideologues recycling a range of
Zionist myths.
One prominent Hindu nationalist regurgitates the
patently nonsensical claim that Israel is only
targeting Hamas which "has consistently shunned all
peace initiatives and is committed to the destruction
of the state of Israel".
Others suggest that supporting Palestinians is
inherently pro- Islamist and will "implicitly "
strengthen the entirely unrelated Islamic State
group. Other bizarre , reality -averse claims include :
" Gaza was the area vacated by Ariel Sharon in 2005 ,
which was taken over by Hamas" and that support
for Palestine in the West is confined to "Muslim
groups " and the "anti - capitalist anti - Semitic left ".
Terms like " disgraceful" and "monumental blunder "
have sounded in the blogosphere ever since India' s
Hindu right -wing government atypically voted for
Israeli war crimes to be investigated by an
organisation which has historically been powerless
in the face of that nation's impunity with regard to
Palestine .
What is truly shameful and degrading, however , is
the abandonment of India' s longstanding
commitment to upholding the rights of colonised
people to fight for their freedom . As Latin American
countries such as Ecuador, Brazil and Chile honour
their own anti - colonial pasts by cutting diplomatic
relations with Tel Aviv , history will show that the
most monumental blunder of all will have been the
India 's shameful failure to uphold as universal the
rights that it once rightly claimed for itself .