Pankaj Mishra
India and Israel: An Ideological Convergence 

Written for This Is Not a Border: Reportage and Reflection from the Palestine Festival of Literature (2017)

Literary festivals, for most writers, are a release from prolonged and solitary labour. The few obligations of authors – solo talks or panel discussions – are lightened by the thrill of being recognised, even lauded; and any enforced sociability with prickly compatriots is sweetened by free alcohol and adoring groupies. PalFest, which I accompanied in its very first incarnation, may be the world’s only literary festival that broadens the mind and deepens the heart. 

I certainly cannot overestimate its revelatory quality. I grew up among fervent Zionists, who were either ignorant or disdainful of Palestinians. One of the first books that I read in English was Ninety Minutes at Entebbe, the account of a daring Israeli raid in Uganda to free hostages captured by Palestinian militants; and one of my earliest heroes was the Israeli general Moshe Dayan. I was introduced to both in the 1970s by my grandfather, an upper-caste Hindu nationalist. He recounted keenly how Dayan had outmanoeuvred numerically superior Arab armies in 1967; how he had snatched the Golan Heights from Syria at the last minute. 

India did not have diplomatic relations with Israel until the 1990s. My grandfather was among many high-caste Hindus who idolised Israel because it possessed, like European nations, a proud and clear self-image; it had an ideology, Zionism, that inculcated love of the nation in each of its citizens. Most importantly, Israel was a superb example of how to deal with Muslims in the only language they understood: that of force and more force. India, in comparison, was a pitiably incoherent and timid nation-state; its leaders, such as Gandhi, had chosen to appease a traitorous Muslim population. 

This is what I also believed as a curious child. I remember that when news of Dayan’s secret visit to India in 1978 as Israel’s foreign minister leaked, and pictures of him appeared in the Indian newspapers, I was transfixed by his black eyepatch and mischievous grin. 

As I grew older, I became aware of the plight of Israel’s victims. There were Palestinians in small Indian cities, mostly students at engineering and medical colleges, and their dispossession was often discussed in the left-wing circles I fell into at university. But even then Palestine signified to me a tragically unresolved dispute, in the same way that Kashmir did, between parties that had somehow failed to see reason. 

In 2000 I went on a reporting trip to Kashmir, where tens of thousands of people had died in an anti-Indian insurgency and counter-insurgency raging since 1989. Hindu nationalists have long vended an image of Indian Muslims as fifth columnists breeding demographic and other vast anti-national conspiracies in their urban ghettos. In fact, Muslims are the most depressed and vulnerable community in India, worse off than even low-caste Hindus in the realms of education, health and employment, frequently exposed to bigoted and trigger- happy policemen. Their condition has deteriorated in recent decades. After dying disproportionately in many Hindu– Muslim riots, more than 2,000 Muslims were killed and many more displaced in a pogrom in 2002 in the western Indian state of Gujarat, then ruled by a hard-line Hindu nationalist called Narendra Modi. But, as I discovered in 2000, India, in the eyes of Kashmiri Muslims, had never been less than a Hindu majoritarian state despite its claims to secularism and democracy. 

Seven years later, the trip to the West Bank with PalFest brought me face to face with the brutality, squalor and absurdity of the occupation. Far from being embroiled in a mere ‘dispute’ with its neighbours, Israel, it became clear, is the world’s last active colonialist project of European origin, sustained by high-tech armoury and the fervour and guilt of many powerful white people in the West. I also realised, like many visitors to the region, how much Israel’s claim to represent the victims of the Holocaust serves to hide the cruelties it inflicted on its captives in the West Bank and Gaza. For me, however, PalFest also unveiled another way of looking at India: together with Israel, another ‘secular’ and ‘democratic’ country. 

It has made it easier for me to understand the extraordinary ideological convergence, so much hoped for by my grandfather and others and now accomplished, between countries that had started out as formally democratic and economically left wing. Their cosmopolitan founding fathers – Nehru, Gandhi, Ben-Gurion, Weizmann – and egalitarian ideals helped give the new nation-states, both created within months of each other, their glow of heroic virtue. It mattered little during their early years that both countries were born of imperialist skulduggery and nationalist opportunism, of clumsy partition, war and frenzied ethnic cleansing, or that, in the case of Israel, the inferior status of Arabs was formalised in citizenship rules. 

As it happened, a mere decade – between 1977 and 1989 – separated their political transformations, when hard-line right-wing groups long deemed marginal – Likud, the BJP – began to change the political culture of the two countries. Unrest in occupied territories (the Intifadas of 1987 and 2000, and Pakistan-aided insurgency in Kashmir from 1989) helped give the post-colonial nationalisms of India and Israel a hard millenarian edge. In the 1990s both countries embarked on a deeper economic and ideological makeover, rejecting ideals of inclusive growth and egalitarianism in favour of neo-liberal notions about private wealth creation. 

That process is now complete. Narendra Modi is now India’s most powerful prime minister in decades while tens of thou-sands of his Muslim victims in Gujarat still languish in refugee camps, too afraid to return to their homes. A portrait of the Hindu nationalist icon V.D. Savarkar, one of the conspirators in Gandhi’s assassination in 1948, now hangs in the Indian parliament. When Netanyahu won re-election in 2015, Modi tweeted his congratulations to his ‘friend’ in Hebrew (Israel is now one of India’s biggest arms suppliers). The two prime ministers, both lovers of free markets, flourish in the ideological and emotional climate of globalisation, in which, backed by popular consent, violence and cruelty enjoy a new legitimacy. 

Kashmir has for years been subject to a draconian Armed Forces Special Powers Act, which grants security forces broad-ranging powers to arrest, shoot to kill, and occupy or destroy property. The summer of 2016 witnessed, in addition to the routine killing of scores of protestors, a sinister escalation: mass blindings, including of children, by pellet cartridges that explode to scatter hundreds of metal pieces across a wide area. Right-wing demagogues in both India and Israel seek to forge a new national identity – a new people, no less – by stigmatising particular religious and secular groups. And, as though emboldened by them, security forces in Kashmir this summer attacked hospitals and doctors in a display of impunity that was worthy of the Israel Defence Force. 

Indeed, fanatical Hindu organisations that assault Muslim males marrying Hindu women seem to mimic Lehava (Flame), an association of religious extremists in Israel which tries to break up weddings between Muslims and Jews. A lynch-mob hysteria in significant parts of the public sphere – traditional as well as social media – fully backs the atrocities of security forces in Kashmir and Palestine. More importantly, bigotry is now amplified in both countries from people placed on the commanding heights of government. 

A senior minister in Narendra Modi’s cabinet last year described Indian Muslims and Christians in India as ‘bastards’. Staffing educational and cultural institutions with zealots, both  governments seem obsessed with moral and patriotic indoctrination, reverence for national symbols and icons (mostly far right), and the uniqueness of (a largely invented) national history. The supremacism of these ethnonationalists goes with a loathing of dissenters who seem to be undermining collective unity and purpose. Indeed, the most striking aspect of the upsurge of fanaticism in India and Israel is mob fury, sanctioned by their ruling classes and stoked by the media, against anyone who expresses the slightest sympathy with the plight of their victims. 

Lost in a moral wilderness, India and Israel make one ponder, even more than the unviable and fragmenting states of the Middle East, the paths not taken, the missed turning points, in the history of the post-colonial world. But it is hard not to suspect that figures like Modi or Avigdor Lieberman are the clearest consummation of the European-style nationalism that my grandfather so admired. Murdered by a Hindu fanatic who accused him of being soft on Muslims, Gandhi was an early victim to its deadly logic. It is now manifest in the brutal occupations of both India and Israel – nation-states that are, as PalFest first revealed to me, committed to not resolving their foundational disputes.