Attending a conference in Johannesburg on solidarity with Palestine, I said, “Let me begin by clarifying that I am not here on behalf of my government….” Thunderous applause greeted that opening line. It reflected the extent to which the “Arab street” has been grievously alienated by Narendra Modi’s declaration of “total solidarity” with Israel, a 180-degree turn from our rock-solid stand with the Palestinians for most of the past century.
To understand the Arab shock, we need to go back to the view that Mahatma Gandhi expressed in 1938 even as the question of Jewish settlement in Palestinian lands began to assume proportions that threatened the very lives and livelihood of the indigenous Palestinian people and even their existence in their traditional homeland. Gandhiji wrote in his magazine Harijan (November 26, 1938) with reference to the racial and religious discrimination the Jews had faced for millennia and the vicious pogroms in Europe, east and west, climaxed by Hitler’s “final solution”—the liquidation of the entire community—that, “My sympathies are all with the Jews, but my sympathy does not blind me to the requirements of justice. The cry for the national home for the Jews does not make much appeal to me….They can settle in Palestine only by the goodwill of the Arabs. They should seek to convert the Arab heart. The same God rules the Arab heart who rules the Jewish heart.” He formulated his basic position in a famous aphorism: “Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense as England to the English and France to the French.”
Mani Shankar Aiyar with two Jewish delegates in Johannesburg.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, India, under Jawaharlal Nehru, still suffering the pain of the partition, should have been one of the few countries to vote in the UN in November 1947 against the partition of Palestine. Notwithstanding the onset of the Cold War, the proposal to partition Palestine had brought the Soviet bloc together with the US-led bloc of white Christian nations to atone for their centuries of sins against the Jews by pushing the Jewish issue out their domain and into the Arab heartland. Given that the Jews in Europe had been safe and privileged only during the 700 years (711-1492 CE) of Muslim rule in Andalusia—present-day Spain and Portugal—Gandhi’s advice was the only one that could have led to the Jews and Arabs living together in harmony in a joint homeland. Echoing this view were the two Jewish rabbis attending the Johannesburg conference on behalf of “Jews against Zionism”.
The “one-state” solution was championed by Gandhi’s favourite disciple, Nehru, as prime minister. When this was not accepted, the UN proposed an alternative “two-state” solution in 1967. It has been on the table for the last half-century, but Israel is adamant on ridding themselves of, or subordinating to second-class citizenship, the Arab residents of Palestine.
Modi has reversed the long-held Indian position principally because hindutva is premised on same parameters as Zionism: hostility to Islam. Zionism is not Judaism even as hindutva is not Hinduism. Modi, as an avid hindutvist, and Benjamin Netanyahu, as an avid Zionist, are as similar as two peas in a pod because, as Christophe Jaffrelot points out, “Hindu nationalism and Zionism are rooted in a long history of hindutva’s admiration of Zionist ethno-nationalism.” Jaffrelot adds that this is “possibly because both have found a common enemy in their country’s largest religious minority.” I would only change “possibly” to “certainly”. For, as V.D. Savarkar had written from a diametrically opposite angle to Gandhi’s, “If Palestine becomes a Jewish state, it will gladden us almost as much as our Jewish friends.” Little wonder then that Modi stands in solidarity with Netanyahu.
Aiyar is a former Union minister and social commentator.