Hypocrisy on Palestine
LEVEL PLAYING FIELD
The Hindu, 30 April
The elections for the Palestinian Authority held in the Occupied Territories earlier this year were universally certified as free and fair, an exemplary exercise in democracy, unique in the Arab world. But there was a single tragic flaw in the process, and that was the result: a victory for the radical Islamists of Hamas.
Hamas leaders have indicated a willingness to recognise Israel if it pulls back to its 1967 borders, and Hamas itself has now maintained a cease-fire (not reciprocated by the Israelis) for 18 months. Nonetheless, the US, Canada, Australia and most significantly the European Union have recently decided to suspend aid to the Hamas-led PA government.
The consequences for the desperate population of the West Bank and Gaza hardly bear contemplating. According to the charity Oxfam, more than 60 percent already live under the poverty line – less that $2.10 per day. If, as a result of the aid suspension, the PA is unable to pay its staff, an additional 150,000 workers (teachers, police, civil servants) will become unemployed – and these 150,00 currently support more than one million dependents, 25 percent on the total population in the occupied territories.
It’s important to remember that this aid was never an optional charitable extra on the part of the western donors. It was the only way the PA could be established and operate under the conditions of occupation; it was a necessary component of the misnamed, one-sided peace process dictated by the US. And its withdrawal is plainly an act of collective punishment. The Palestinian people are being penalised for voting the wrong way – bitter confirmation of the widespread belief that democracy is the last thing the US and its allies want to see in the middle east.
But this is only the beginning of the hypocrisy. While Hamas is declared untouchable, the PA bankrupted and the Palestinian people pauperised, Israel continues to commit serial violations of international law and human decency with impunity. The illegal settlements and the construction of the wall are flagrant attempts to make permanent Israeli possession of land and resources seized through military conquest in 1967. And the same drive to establish unchallengeable domination is seen in the on-going subjection of the Palestinians to siege conditions – through checkpoints, road closures, targeted assassinations, mass arrests and repeated military incursions. In the first three weeks of April alone, Israeli forces killed more than 35 Palestinians, including at least 7 children, and injured 150 others, while about 200 shells have been fired each day into the Gaza Strip – a sustained act of indiscriminate violence against a civilian population.
Over the last year, Palestinian tax revenues (which make up half the PA’s total resources) have been withheld by Israel – yet another violation of the Oslo Accord that the world has chosen to ignore. In effect, the US and EU are now colluding with the Israeli policy of starving Palestinians into submission, preparing the ground for the unilateral imposition of a ‘final settlement’, one that will deny a viable state to the Palestinians in perpetuity.
India is complicit in this on-going historic crime – indeed its complicity has deepened under the Congress-led government. Along with other things Nehruvian, support for the Palestinian cause has been jettisoned. Since full diplomatic relations were established in 1992, Indian-Israeli collaboration – in military, intelligence and economic spheres – has steadily grown. Under the BJP, this collaboration acquired a distinct ideological (and communal) coloration. Israel became India’s second largest supplier of military hardware and India is Israel’s second largest trading partner in Asia.
The notion of a Delhi-Tel Aviv–Washington axis should have been junked by the current government the day it took office. Instead, the India-Israel alliance has been cemented by a steady stream of ministerial visits and arms purchases.
The ‘war on terror’ is cited as justification for this alliance, though Israel routinely carries out acts that conform to any meaningful, ethically consistent definition of terrorism. There’s also a a great deal of talk about Indian-Jewish common values and ancient connections. Speaking as a Jew who’s spent a lot of time in the US, Britain and India, that sounds to me like a prime example of the higher jibberish with which opportunism is customarily sanctified.
India’s de facto support for the Israeli occupation and all that goes with it is a blot on India’s anti-colonial inheritance. Nehru himself cogently analysed the interaction between Arab nationalism, Zionism and British imperialism, and recognised both the scale of the crime committed against the Jews in Europe, and the injustice of extracting compensation for that crime from the Palestinians.
No doubt the intimacy with Israel is seen by the Indian government as another example of the “enlightened self-interest” Manmohan Singh invoked in justifying the deal with the US and India’s abandonment of Iran at the IAEA. This cynical codification of realpolitik manages to give a sinister twist to the inoffensive word “enlightened” – somehow merging it with indifference to justice and morality. What’s more, abandoning the Palestinians is not in the self-interest of the vast majority of Indians, however profitable it may be to a few. It discredits India on the global stage and weakens its real influence over events. If India is to enjoy genuine global respect, and play a positive role in deterring violence, it has to draw back from its embrace of both the US and Israel. It should certainly join Iran and other nations in filling the hole left by the western suspension of PA funding. Given the crisis facing Palestinians, that would be an elementary humanitarian act. It would also be a contribution to constructing a multi-polar and therefore safer world.
How would people feel today if India had colluded with the apartheid regime in South Africa? Supporters of Israel are outraged by the comparison, but with the Israeli construction of settler-only (Jewish-only) by pass roads on the West Bank, it’s getting harder all the time to think of a more apposite one.
