Echoes and analogies

LEVEL PLAYING FIELD
The Hindu, 25 March

THE more I travel, read and study the history of peoples and societies, the more analogies I discover, and at the same time the warier I become of all analogies. History does not repeat itself exactly, but it is full of echoes.

Some analogies are routinely abused, while some are bitterly resisted. Today, the prime example of the latter must be the angry clamour that arises whenever Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians is compared to white South Africa’s treatment of black people under apartheid. In the U.S., uttering the “A-word” in relation to Israel elicits a surfeit of outrage, inevitably accompanied by accusations of anti-Semitism. As Jimmy Carter has found out, even being a widely respected former President of the United States does not shield one from the backlash.

It is true that people throw the word apartheid around incautiously. I was guilty of this when I referred in an article to the segregation of business from economy class passengers at airports as a form of “social apartheid”. But when it comes to Israel, the analogy is apt and unavoidable. Crucially, it is a spontaneous response from those black South Africans who have visited the Occupied Territories. What they see there – the Jews-only roads, the “security fence”, the confinement in camps and villages, the checkpoints, the daily harassment – reminds them graphically of the system they once suffered under.

There is, however, at least one major difference, though it’s not one that favours Israel. Under apartheid, the dominant whites used the black population as a source of cheap labour; they denied that population basic human rights, but they needed it. In contrast, Zionism has aimed to remove the Palestinian population, to replace Palestinians with Jews. That was the meaning of what Zionists called “the conquest of labour” (when Jewish settlers campaigned for the non-employment of Palestinians) and it is the ultimate source of the current calls within Israel for “transfer”, the final expulsion of the bulk of the Palestinian population.

In an article I published on the fifth anniversary of the Gujarat pogrom, I referred to the role played by “the stormtroopers of the Hindu right” – and was rebuked by a correspondent who said that he never trusted writers who invoked the Nazi analogy, because it tended to close rather than open debate. I have some sympathy for his argument. The Nazi analogy is indeed indiscriminately used, as is the word “fascist”, applied too readily to anyone who is authoritarian and racist. It becomes a form of name-calling, a substitute for analysis.

By the way, the prime culprit here is not the left. In my lifetime, every U.S. military action, from Vietnam to Iraq (and now the threat against Iran), has been justified with analogies drawn from World War II. Every enemy is a new Hitler (Nasser, Qadaffi, Noriega, Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, Ahmadinejad) and every call for peace is Munich-style appeasement.

Nonetheless, I stand by my use of “stormtroopers” in the Gujarat context. The Sturmabteilung or SA (German for “Storm division”, always translated as “stormtroopers” ) was the paramilitary, street-fighting wing of the Nazi movement, also known as “brownshirts” because of the colour of their uniforms. Claiming to be the guardians of German national pride, they mounted aggressive public actions whose aim was to spread terror among minorities and political opponents. In November 1938, they played a key role in Kristallnacht, ransacking Jewish homes, beating Jews to death, burning down synagogues, destroying Jewish-owned shopfronts with sledgehammers, leaving the streets covered in broken glass from smashed windows (hence the name). Given the similarities with what happened in Gujarat in 2002, it takes an effort to avoid the analogy, and the effect of that effort is to downplay the horror of the Gujarat pogrom.

Of course, the Nazis and the holocaust represent an acme of inhumanity, an evil so enormous that any comparison seems dubious. Yet if we remove them from history and treat them as sui generis, we debar ourselves from learning and applying the broader lessons. When the world discovered the extent of Nazi barbarism in the wake of World War II, the cry was “Never again!” We cannot turn that cry into a reality; we cannot ensure that nothing even remotely like this happens again, unless we are permitted to draw appropriate analogies from the experience.

League tables of atrocities serve no purpose, or rather, the only purpose they serve is to allow scope for the apologists for atrocities. The holocaust, the enslavement of Africans, the genocide of Native Americans and Australians, the centuries of `untouchability’ in south Asia, the Belgian Congo (where, according to Adam Hochschild’s revelatory book King Leopold’s Ghost, some 10 million Africans may have perished in little more than a decade), Stalin’s Gulag. All these are distinct historical phenomena, but share in common an institutionalised inhumanity on a mass scale. All are unspeakably, irredeemably horrific; they exemplify that which every human being has an absolute obligation to resist and not to aid, in any way, even by omission.

Which brings me back to the Palestinians. Their suffering is not only analogous to black suffering under apartheid but also to Jewish suffering, and specifically the experience of exile and diaspora. “We travel like everyone else, but we return to nothing,” writes the marvellous Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish, “We travel in the chariots of the Psalms, sleep in the tents of the prophets, and are born again in the language of Gypsies… Ours is a country of words. Talk. Talk. Let me see an end to this journey.”