SYED SULTAN MOHIDDIN analyses the brutal airstrikes on Gaza and calls upon New Delhi not to keep silence when there is overwhelming solidarity to the Palestinian people across the nations.
The brutal Israeli airstrikes on Gaza for the past two weeks have led to the death of 341 Palestinians including over 40 children. It was expected that the Modi Government would condemn the Israeli aggression and demand a halt to the attacks. Instead, the BJP government has adopted a dubious stand which fails to see the unjustified Israeli aggression.
First, the Ministry of External Affairs issued a statement which equated both sides as responsible for the violence. Following this, when in the Lok Sabha, members of the Opposition parties demanded that the government condemn the Israeli violence in Gaza, it refused to do so. Subsequently, in the Rajya Sabha where the violence in Gaza was listed for a short duration discussion, the government refused to conduct the discussion. The External Affairs Minister Mrs. Sushma Swaraj has stated that India has diplomatic ties with both nations and any ‘discourteous reference’ to any friendly country would affect relations.
Clearly, the Modi Government is going back on the longstanding position India had been following over the Palestine cause and is adopting a pro-Israeli stance which is unacceptable. We need to recall as to what the Father of our Nation had expressed his strong sentiments on the issue. Mahatma Gandhi observed in Harijan: “Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense as England belongs to the English or France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs.”
India along with 12 other nations voted against the UN General Assembly resolution 181 for the partition of Palestine.
THE ORIGIN OF ‘CATASTROPHE’
In the late 1800s, a small fanatic movement called ‘Zionism’ began in Europe. Its goal was to create a Jewish state somewhere in the world. Its leaders preferred the land of Palestine over others, claiming it as God’s ‘promised land’ for the Jews. Palestine’s population at this time was approximately 96 per cent non-Jewish (primarily Muslim and Christian).
The colonial forces of that time, Britain and France had a strategic interest in the Mediterranean Sea and Suez Canal. They needed a strategic force which could wield control over West Asia. In November 1917, the British forces seized Palestine from the Ottoman Empire of Turkey and decided to declare it as the future nation for the Jews. Known as the Balfour Declaration (dated 2 November 1917), it was a letter from the United Kingdom’s Foreign Secretary James Balfour to Baron Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community.
The declaration begins with the words of a promise… “His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object.” It was an unjust case of… one nation promising another… the land of the third. The argument that the people who suffered holocaust must be rewarded with a land to build a nation might sound logical… but the question is – why the innocent Palestinians should pay the price for a crime they never committed?
The Zionists soon started encouraging Jewish immigration to Palestine, partly through the invention of such deceptive slogans as “a land without a people for a people without a land,” when, in fact, the land was already inhabited.
In the 1930s, Jewish land ownership in Palestine had increased from approximately 1% to just over 6% of the land, and violence had increased as well. With the emergence of several Zionist terrorist gangs (whose ranks included a number of future Prime Ministers of Israel), there was violent conflict. Numerous people of all ethnicities were killed; a large majority of them Christian and Muslim Palestinians.
During the years of 1947-49, Zionist forces committed 33 massacres and destroyed 531 Palestinian towns. Norman Finkelstein states: “According to the former director of the Israeli army archives, ‘in almost every village occupied by us during the War… acts were committed which are defined as war crimes, such as murders, massacres, and rapes’….
Uri Milstein, the authoritative Israeli military historian of the 1948 war, goes one step further, maintaining that ‘every skirmish ended in a massacre of Arabs’.
This growing violence culminated in Israel’s ruthless “War of Independence,” in which at least 750,000 Palestinian men, women, and children were expelled from their homes by numerically superior Israeli forces – half before any Arab armies joined the war. This massive humanitarian disaster is known as ‘The Catastrophe,’ al Nakba in Arabic.
In 1967, Israel launched its third war and seized still more Palestinian (and other Arab) land. Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip – the final 22% of mandatory Palestine – and began building settlements for Jewish Israelis on land confiscated from Palestinian Muslims and Christians. It has demolished more than 25,000 Palestinian homes since 1967 to build settlements for the new immigrants.
INJUSTICE CONTINUES…
Over the 66 years since Israel was created, this colossal injustice has continued. While the Jews were permitted to build a nation… the local Palestinians had to flee from their own lands… never to return. Palestinian refugees are the largest existing refugee population in the world. As Israel celebrated its 67th year of birth on 14 May this year, for the Palestinians every anniversary reminds them of dispossession and exile.
1.3 million Palestinians live in Israel as “Israeli citizens,” but despite their status as citizens, they are subject to systematic discrimination. Every day they have to pass through countless checkpoints… even while their children go to schools and colleges. In Orwellian terminology, Israeli law designates these internal refugees as “present absentees”.
In 2005 Israel returned Gazan land to its owners, but continues to control its borders, ports, and air space, turning Gaza into a large prison, where 1.5 million people are held. The economy of the Gaza Strip is severely hampered by Israel’s almost total blockade, the high population density, limited land access, strict internal and external security controls, the effects of Israeli military operations, and restrictions on labour and trade access across the border.
Over 7,000 Palestinian men, women, and children are imprisoned in Israeli jails under physically abusive conditions (many have not even been charged with a crime) and the basic human rights of all Palestinians under Israeli rule are routinely violated.
There are many parallels between South Africa and Palestine. And not just in the tyranny of a minority over the indigenous majority. In fact, the Apartheid that Palestinians have long suffered is perhaps even worse than what Nelson Mandela’s people experienced under the white racist regime for nearly three centuries.
PLUMMETING INDIAN STAND
The Indira Gandhi era witnessed an all-round development of Indo-Arab relations. She evinced keen interest in the affairs of the Arab world and especially showed a great concern for the people of Palestine. India supported the Palestine issue in the United Nations and Non-Aligned Conferences. India became the first non-Arab State to recognise the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) as ‘the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people’ and allowed it to open its office in New Delhi in January, 1975. She invited PLO leader Yasser Arafat to New Delhi and established formal diplomatic relations.
There was a tectonic shift in India’s foreign policy during P.V. Narasimha Rao’s tenure. India announced its decision to establish full diplomatic relations with Israel, on the eve of his official visit to the U.S. in January 1992. Now that the present BJP government has taken a stand not to issue even a sentence of condemnation against the Israeli aggression would vindicate, as how far our sovereign nation’s foreign policy on the Palestinian cause has plummeted over the years.
VOICES OF CONSCIENCE
The tide of global public opinion has already turned against Israel, which is repeatedly seen in spontaneous protests around the world in solidarity with the long suffering Palestinians. These voices of conscience must now turn into a global chorus to shatter the wall of indifference and apathy that has encircled the imperialist powers, which are blind to the endless suffering of a people who have been bearing the brunt of the sins committed by the colonial forces. India cannot afford to keep silence when there is overwhelming solidarity to the Palestinian people across the nations.