Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Before President Pranab Mukherjee left Jordan on Oct. 11 for his trip to the Palestinian territories and Israel – the first ever by an Indian president – he quoted Mahatma Gandhi saying, “Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English and France to the French.”
This quotation was very much in keeping with the affinity of India for the Palestinian Arab cause, dating back well before the establishment of the State of Israel and continuing through the Cold War years. It might have made Arabs feel good upon hearing it, and it may have annoyed Israelis. But I doubt that the feelings of either could have lasted very long. It was hard not to view this as little more than a sop toward Arab sensitivities.
India and Israel are now closely bound, working together on many fronts, and the bonds are particularly close not just on the state level but among core supporters of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party and the Hindutva movement, whose support for Israel goes back decades, when it opposed the Nehru government’s refusal to establish diplomatic relations with Israel.
To be sure, India is not yet ready to waver from at least rhetorical support for the Arab cause. This is going to continue to cause occasional discomfort and misunderstandings between India and Israel. But whenever it does, it is worthy to ask: what matters more, meaningless votes at a hostile body (the U.N.) or concrete trade, agricultural and military relations?
Even the diplomatic support India has provided the Palestinians in the U.N. isn’t quite as monolithic and kneejerk as it used to be. India abstained on a crucial vote of the U.N. Human Rights Council in July 2015 on accepting a report condemned by Israel as biased. It was a stunning show of support for Israel from an old adversary. Ynet Israel News noted that “while India abstained, 41 states voted against Israel, and adopted the inquiries’ report, including traditional allies of Israel like Germany, Britain, France, Holland, Korea, and Japan.”
Against the background of the weakening of the automatic Indian support for Palestinians, it is hard not to view the Mukherjee trip, which will be followed by a trip to Israel by Prime Minister Narenda Modi, as anything but an unalloyed diplomatic victory for Israel. For one thing, it is not isolated. Home Minister Rajnath Singh has traveled to Israel to discuss security cooperation, and Minister of Defense Moshe Ya’alon has visited India. Lower-level, unpublicized visits are frequent.
The Indian leftist opposition will continue to protest, but the Modi government will have none of it. When the opposition Congress Party sought to pass a Lok Sabha resolution condemning Israel during the 2014 Gaza War, it was blocked by the government. India’s foreign minister Sushma Swaraj was chairwoman of the Indo-Israel Parliamentary Friendship Group from 2006 to 2009, and she is said to admire Golda Meir, the famous prime minister of Israel in the 1970s.
When Meir was prime minister of Israel, Indira Gandhi was prime minister of India, but the two never met. The Gandhi government’s support of the Arab cause of enthusiastic and its opposition to Israel on all fronts was total. Until India and Israel established relations in 1992, the official Indian line was one of hostility toward Israel. India voted against the partition plan for Palestine in 1947, and Indian hostility was especially severe during the Gandhi premiership. Indian passports were stamped to indicate that they were not valid for travel in apartheid South Africa and in Israel, in an indication of how intensely India identified with the rejectionist Arab front.
Those days have long since receded into history, and India is a popular travel destination among young Israelis, and Modi’s warm relationship with Israel dates back to days as Chief Minister in Gujarat. It is arguable that, diplomatic posturing notwithstanding, the personal relationship between Modi and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who met at the sidelines of the General Assembly last year, are warmer than they are between Netanyahu and President Obama. When Netanyahu won reelection earlier this year, Modi sent public congratulations in Hebrew. Obama may have done the same, but in the case of Modi it was more believable.
Modi has his own troubled relationship with the United States. He was banned from the U.S. in 2005, by the State Department under former President George W. Bush, because it was alleged that Modi failed to stop riots in Gujarat in 2002 that resulted in the deaths of many Muslims. This travel ban lasted for nine years. In 2006, in the midst of that travel ban, Modi visited Israel in his capacity as Gujarat’s chief minister. Undoubtedly Modi must have contrasted his icy reception in the U.S., which treated him like an outcast, to his warm welcome in Israel, which greeted him like a friend and ally. Modi is not a man to forget such things.
There are many intriguing aspects to this burgeoning relationship. India’s traditional support for the Palestinians could give it an opportunity to mediate between the two sides. Another is the ongoing improvement in relations in the U.S. between Hindu and Jewish groups, with the small but active Indian Jewish community as a bridge between the two. Both Hindu and Jewish groups are alarmed by Islamic terrorism and have strong ties to the home country.
Ultimately this relationship comes down to the national interests of both countries. Israel is working closely with India in agriculture, and since 2008, the Indo-Israel Agricultural Cooperation Project has created agricultural centers of excellence around the country. Israel is the second largest supplier of defense hardware to India, which is a result of Israeli innovations in that sphere and not sentiment. One Indian diplomat has told me that India has derived more benefit from its relationship with Israel since 1992 than it did with the Arab world during all the years of India’s independence. It is often notice that despite the Indian stance toward Israel for so many years, the Arab world always supported Pakistan in Kashmir and in its many disputes and conflicts with India.
As long as that is the general assessment of the Indian government and opinion leaders, the friendship between India and Israel will continue to be warm. Even the opposition Congress Party continued this close relationship with Israel when it was in power, and the ties were initiated when Congress was in power. India’s left will not like it, and neither will the Muslim minority, but as long as the two country’s national interests remain aligned, they will continue to be a fact of life. They will have to “lump it,” to use American slang.
Indeed, the changing character of India’s feelings toward Israel is epitomized by Gandhi, who said in 1946, after the Holocaust in which millions of Jews were murdered: “Jews have a good case in Palestine. If the Arabs have a claim to Palestine, the Jews have a prior claim.” That comment is not as frequently quoted as the widely quoted 1938 remarks cited by Mukherjee, but may reflect an evolution of Gandhi’s views on Zionism – very much as India’s views of Israel have evolved as well.
————————
Anjali Sharma is a New York-based freelance journalist.
The post India Pays Lip Service To Arabs, Strengthens Ties With Israel appeared first on News India Times.