In the fury of the war raging in West Asia and mounting anxieties regarding its future consequences—disruptions in the supply of oil and gas, and inflation—the issue of Palestine has been forgotten. It isn’t, for instance, mentioned in the tentative proposals for brokering a ceasefire or establishing peace in the region. This provides an opportunity to India to belatedly redeem itself, after having tacitly endorsed Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its relentless bombing of Iran, along with the United States, for more than a month now.
India’s chance of redemption lies in declaring that peace in West Asia isn’t possible without establishing the independent nation-state of Palestine. Such a position will not only be in consonance with the hallowed tradition of India’s anti-colonial struggle, but will also protect its interests. Indeed, as long as the Palestinian statehood issue festers, there will always be an attempt by competing segments in the region, states and non-state actors alike, to oppose the settler colony of Israel, to which the United States provides unstinted support in order to retain its hegemony by controlling oil and the global financial system lubricated by petrodollars.
The decades-old challenge to Israel will likely escalate as the region’s existing security structure, with the US as its guarantor, has been found wanting. Its replacement by a new order will invariably trigger socio-political instability, more so if the existing Islamic regime in Iran survives. Should it not outlive the war and the battered Iranian state lose its coherence, its proxies could split and mutate into entities far more deadly than today, with no one to control them. Propelling them will be the desire for vengeance against the US-Israel dyad and their supporters among the Gulf countries.
This is a scenario India should dread, and not because of its implications for the supply of oil and gas—which will presumably be restored at the end of the war. Chronic instability across a wide swathe of West Asia could scare 9 million Indians into returning home. With most of the countries there spatially and demographically too small—the United Arab Emirates, for instance—to thrive economically under the shadow of guns and bombs, the job market would shrink, prompting an exodus of Indians employed in blue-collar and white-collar jobs, and also those presiding over flourishing businesses.
Their return would mean India having to create millions of jobs to absorb the Gulf returnees, an alarming prospect for a country witnessing growth without spawning adequate employment opportunities. The remittances of Indians in the Gulf support nearly 9 million families, or at least 36 million people, if not more. An unstable West Asia could fuel social discontent in unforeseeable ways in India.
Modi in Israel
India’s enormous stakes in the Gulf underscore the poor timing Prime Minister Narendra Modi displayed in addressing the Knesset on February 25, two days before Israel and the US struck Iran. West Asia was then perceived to be hurtling towards war. In case India didn’t anticipate the war, shouldn’t it have at least expressed outrage over Israel’s invitation to Modi on the eve of bombing a country with which New Delhi self-avowedly has warm relations?
Yet India preferred to keep mum, presumably believing the US-Israeli assumption that the decapitation of Iran’s top leadership would have the Islamic regime keel over. Iran hasn’t collapsed. India’s silence has been construed as New Delhi having chosen to side with Israel and the US.
This construction on India’s silence was inevitable, given Modi’s speech in the Knesset. Nobody expected him to lecture Knesset members on the immorality of their country killing over 75,000 people in Gaza, nor pointing to them that Israel was born by killing Palestinians or expelling them and appropriating their land. But did Modi have to say: “India stands with Israel, firmly, with full conviction, in this moment, and beyond”?
Modi’s remark glosses over Israel’s foundational vision that has it in a state of constant war. The Jews view themselves as God’s chosen people, who were promised by him in biblical times the sacred land of Israel. The creation of Israel in Palestine is, in turn, interpreted as evidence of God fulfilling his promise. This belief, as late Israeli scholar Uriel Tal pointed out, implies the sacred land can’t be shared with non-Jews, who are to be exterminated, expelled, or enslaved. This frightening vision underlies the increasing chatter to establish Greater Israel, which would extend Israel’s border to the Euphrates.
US’ imperial interests
The US has economically and militarily assisted Israel to grow into a foremost power in West Asia, not out of its empathy for the suffering of Jews in Hitler’s Germany, but to protect its own imperial interests. Its other strategy for doing so has been to protect the Gulf monarchies by snuffing out, over the decades, the challenges from Arab nationalists, Leftists, communists, liberals, and Islamists. This process began with the Americans and the British deposing Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh through a coup in 1953, stung as they were by his decision to nationalise his country’s oil industry. It might be of interest to Indians that Mosaddegh kept a statue of Gandhi at his home.
From the 1990s, as academic Adam Hanieh has shown, America’s quest has been to integrate its two strategic poles in the region—Israel and the monarchies—along with countries like Egypt into a “single zone that is tied to US economic and political power”. This process was to culminate in the Abraham Accords, or agreements signed between the Arab countries and Israel to normalise their relationships. The UAE and Bahrain entered into these accords. Other countries, particularly Saudi Arabia, were to follow suit.
The Hamas invasion of Israel on October 7, 2023, disrupted the process of normalisation between Israel and the Arab countries, signifying how the unresolved issue of Palestine continues to torment the region. The war against Iran is an expression of it.
Once a new security structure takes shape after the war against Iran, its efficacy will depend upon overcoming Israel’s resistance to living next to an independent state of Palestine. With the US protective shield proving unreliable, even the Gulf monarchies will likely become insistent on Palestine to court the sentiments in the streets on it—and also because an unstable future would inflict incalculable cost on their countries.
This is why India’s chance of redemption lies in bringing back Palestine on the world’s agenda. To pursue this policy will, obviously, require BJP leaders, including Modi, to overcome their own ideological prejudices, weaned as they have been on the narrative that Israel is a victim and the Palestinian militants are terrorists, not freedom fighters. That makes you pessimistic, doesn’t it?
Ajaz Ashraf is a senior journalist from Delhi and the author of Bhima Koregaon: Challenging Caste.
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