Indian
- Israeli Ties Could Neutralize Delhi’s Palestinian Policy
By Nicola Nasser
12 July, 2007
Countercurrents.org
A
seminar on “Palestine: 1967 and After” organized by the
Indian Council of World Affairs (ICWA) and the mission of the League
of Arab States (LAS) in New Delhi on June 22 highlighted India’s
still unwavering historical support for the Palestinian people, but
failed to address the potential political effects of the growing Indian
– Israeli ties on New Delhi’s more than ten – decade
old policy on the Arab – Israeli conflict in Palestine.
Only the criticism of those
ties by the participating Indian intellectuals, university professors
and journalists made up for ignoring the factor of the Indian –
Israeli ties by the major speakers like the Indian Prime Minister’s
Special Envoy for West Asia and the Middle East Peace Process, Chinmaya
R. Gharekhan, the Director General of the ICWA and the newly –
appointed ambassador to the United Arab Emirates, Talmiz Ahmad, and
M.P. Sitaram Yechury as well as the Secretary General of the LAS, Amr
Moussa, whose contribution was read by ambassador Ahmed Salem Saleh
Al-Wahishi.
Similarly all attending Arab
and non – Arab ambassadors and diplomats, except for the Palestinian
ambassador Osama Mousa Al-Ali, also diplomatically avoided raising up
the issue, which could not but affect positively or negatively India’s
role in any Arab – Israeli peace process, which was the main concern
of all speakers.
Diplomats of the Palestinian
embassy in the Indian capital proudly showed this writer a four –
dumum plot of land in the diplomatic corps neighborhood of New Delhi
donated by the Indian government as a “present from the Indian
people to the Palestinian people” to build a complex for the embassy
of the “state of Palestine.”
It was part of a package
of a $15 million grant donated to the Palestinian Authority during the
visit of President Mahmoud Abbas to New Delhi in May 2005. $ 2.25 million
of the grant was allocated for building the complex and the rest went
to infrastructural projects in the Israeli – occupied Palestinian
territories, Palestinian ambassador Al-Ali said.
In addition to political
and diplomatic support, $20 million volume of bilateral trade and several
shipments of medical supplies for Palestinian hospitals, India was careful
to cement her Palestinian ties culturally and had completed two –
Indian aided projects in the Gaza Strip, namely the Jawaharlal Nehru
library at Al-Azhar University and the Mahatma Gandhi library at the
Palestine Technical College in Deir Al-Albalah; a third project, a center
of Indian studies, is also being planned at Al-Quds University.
Historically India’s
Palestinian policy has been drawing on the ideological guidance set
by the world’s spiritual leader of non-violence and the father
of Indian independence, the Mahatma Gandhi, who consistently rejected
Zionism over a period of nearly twenty years despite unrelenting Zionist
lobbying, because according to Paul Power: “First, he was sensitive
about the ideas of Muslim Indians who were anti-Zionists because of
their sympathy for Middle Eastern Arabs opposed to the Jewish National
Home; second, he objected to any Zionist methods inconsistent with his
way of non-violence; third, he found Zionism contrary to his pluralistic
nationalism, which excludes the establishment of any State based solely
or mainly on one religion; and fourth, he apparently believed it imprudent
to complicate his relations with the British, who held the mandate in
Palestine.” (1)
Although his sympathies were
all with the Jews, who as a people were subjected to inhuman treatment
and persecution for a long time, Gandhi wrote, “My sympathy does
not blind me to the requirements of justice. The cry for the national
home for the Jews does not make much appeal to me… Why should
they not, like other peoples of the earth, make that country their home
where they are born and where they earn their livelihood?”
“Palestine belongs
to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or
France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on
the Arabs... Surely it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the
proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews partly or
wholly as their national home,” he wrote in a widely circulated
editorial in the Harijan of 11 November 1938, which was a major statement
that has decided the Indian foreign policy on Palestine and the Jewish
question to this day.
Accordingly, India was among
13 nations who voted against the UN General Assembly resolution 181
for the partition of Palestine in 1947. In the same year, as a member
of the UN Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP), India proposed a
minority plan which called for the establishment of a federal Palestine
with internal autonomy for the Jewish illegal immigrants. She was also
among the first non-Arab nations to recognize the Palestine Liberation
Organization (PLO) as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian
people in 1974 and the first non-Arab country to recognize Palestine
as an independent state in 1988; in 1996 India opened a diplomatic representative
office with the autonomous Palestinian Authority.
Talmiz Ahmad’s reference
in his opening remarks of the New Delhi seminar to the “resurgence
of imperialism” in West Asia would undoubtedly assure Arabs that
India would continue Mahatma Gandhi’s heritage of dealing with
the Palestinian – Israeli conflict within the context of the international
national liberation movements against colonialism, but the pragmatism
which marked the Indian foreign policy in dealing with Israel, particularly
since 1992, would potentially compromise this approach sooner or later.
Arab and Palestinian strategists should not underestimate this possible
strategist shift in the foreign policy of the world’s largest
democracy, which a CIA study in 2005 envisaged as the second rising
world power after China during the next two decades.
New Delhi is very well aware
of her rising international status and that’s why she has been
vying with Japan and Germany for a permanent seat at the Security Council
of the United Nations. “The most important development of the
21st century will be the rise of Asia. India’s independence from
colonial rule and the gradual evolution of a strong, stable, dynamic
and democratic India has also contributed to Asia’s resurgence…
Our Government has re-activated the Indian Council of World Affairs
and has offered support to other think tanks to invest in the study
of Asia, Africa and our neighbourhood… We have imparted new energy
to our “Look East Policy”, launched in the early 1990s.
This has contributed to a comprehensive re-engagement with Asia to our
East,” said the incumbent Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, when
his book, “The New Asian Power Dynamic,” was released recently.
An indicator of the new Indian
strategic shift is the Indian focus on the Palestinian – Israeli
peace process more than on the struggle of the Palestinian people for
liberation, a development that was highlighted by the appointment of
the veteran diplomat and former assistant to the UN Secretary General
Kofi Annan, C. R. Gharekhan, as India’s Special Envoy for the
Middle East Peace Process.
Accelerated Pace
of Ties with Israel
Since Prime Minister P.V.
Narasimha Rao decided in January 1992 to establish full and normal diplomatic
relations with Israel, Indian diplomats felt it necessary to “brief”
Arab ambassadors in the Indian capital at regular intervals of India's
ties with Israel, but India is now Israel's second largest trading partner
in Asia after Hong Kong and Israel is now India's second largest supplier
of military equipment after Russia.
Official Israeli figures
show that Israeli exports to India valued $1.270 billion in 2006 and
imports $1.433 billion, to double the bilateral trade to more than tenfold
since 1992. India's Ambassador to Israel, Arun Kumar Singh, said recently
that Israeli investments in India top $1b. Agricultural, water and IT
technologies in addition to fertilizers and diamonds are major mutual
trade concerns. The State Bank of India (SBI) became in June the first
foreign bank to open a branch in Israel's diamond exchange.
However both countries are
careful to remain discreet about the defense component of their relations
and trade. Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) Limited is looking for
Indian partners to build two types of aircraft and jets in India and
set up software and aeronautical engineering companies in Bangalore,
according to The Hindu on July 2. The Times of India on June 14 reported
that a top-level Israeli Army delegation, led by Israeli deputy chief
of general staff Major-General Moshe Kaplinsky, was to visit Jammu &
Kashmir after wide-ranging discussions with the top Indian military
brass.
In August 1994, Israeli Defense
Ministry's Director-General David Ivry visited New Delhi and Indian
Defense Secretary T. K. Banerji visited Tel Aviv. In March the following
year the Israeli Air Force chief visited India and his Indian counterpart
was in Israel in July 1996, one month after a strategic visit by the
leading defense scientist, Abdul Kalam. In April 1996 the first Indian
defense attaché, an air force officer, arrived in Israel. Prolonged
cooperation between India's Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) and its
Israeli counterpart, the Mossad, is also reported; the RAW reportedly
arranged in the late 1970s a visit by former Israeli defense minister
Moshe Dayan to India.
Defense also figured high
on the agenda of visits by President Ezer Weizman in December 1996 and
the then Foreign Minister (now President) Shimon Peres in May 1993.
Comatose Ariel Sharon became the first Israeli prime minister to visit
New Delhi in 2003. However, late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat used
for decades to visit New Delhi on a two-hour notice.
Several factors contributed
to the Indian pragmatic shift in foreign policy. Internally India in
the early 1990s started her “look Asia policy” towards West
and East Asia. Internationally the collapse of the former Soviet Union,
which led to the emergence of the United States as the unipolar world
power and globalization were the most prominent factors. Regionally
the nuclear and technological race with China and Pakistan made New
Delhi more responsive to more opening to the US, Israel and Japan. The
Indian – Pakistani conflict was another regional factor. Except
for the Baath-led Iraq and Syria, most conservative Arab governments
were leaning towards Pakistan; the historical visit to New Delhi of
the Saudi monarch King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz in 2005 had however balanced
their imbalanced policy.
Diplomats of the ruling Congress
party like to blame the Israeli shift policy on the former ruling conservative
Janata (“people’s” in Hindi) party and the war with
Pakistan in the Kargil district of Kashmir in 1999, when Israel reportedly
promptly supplied the Indian army with much needed military equipment,
including night vision devices, thus kicking off a growing defense cooperation
ever since.
But in September 1950 Prime
Minister Jawaharlal Nehru (1947-64), a founding father of the Congress,
granted Israel de jure recognition. A few months later, Israel opened
a trade office in Bombay which gradually became a consular mission,
and the first Israeli consul took over in June 1953; in early 1952,
Nehru expressed his willingness to establish diplomatic relations. Another
Congress leader, Rajiv Gandhi (1984-89), initiated a few direct and
indirect contacts with Israel. (2)
Arab ‘Green
Light’
Arab and Palestinian diplomacy’s
ambivalent refrain from publicly warning against the growing Indian
– Israeli ties could be interpreted as a refrain from demanding
from friendly countries what Palestinians and Arabs have “green-lighted”
for themselves when they collectively chose the Arab Peace Initiative
as their “strategic option” with Israel in an Arab summit
meeting held in Beirut, Lebanon in 2002; non-Arab countries could not
be more Arab and Palestinian than Arabs and Palestinians themselves.
It is noteworthy that the Indian – Israeli relations accelerated
pace in 1992, a year after the Arab – Israeli peace conference
in Madrid, Spain.
However the presence of more
than five million strong expatriate Indian labor force in Arab countries,
three million of whom are to be found in Saudi Arabia and the United
Arab Emirates, and the more than $25 billion value of Arab – Indian
trade, including 60 percent of Indian oil and gas imports worth $20
billion, are enough pragmatic reasons not to be politically compromised
by the newly-found pragmatic approach of Indian foreign policy.
“When we recognized
Israel and normalized relations with her we did that after taking the
approval of the Palestinian leadership; we said, after you agree we’ll
recognize (Israel) … the Palestinian leadership told us: There
are signed accords between us (and Israel) and we are now talking to
the Israelis; your establishing relations with Israel helps us,”
the Indian representative to the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah,
Zikrur Rahman told the London-based Al-Haqeq newspaper on May 12, 2007.
Zikrur Rahman is a grandson
of the Indian Muslim Mujahed Muhammed Ali Al-Hindi who died in battle
in defense of the Palestinian people against the British mandate-protected
Zionist paratroops early in the twentieth century, before Israel was
created. His burial place alongside the graves of other Arab and Palestinian
prominent freedom fighters is still standing as a symbol of Indian solidarity
and friendship in the backyard of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, Islam’s
third holiest site in Jerusalem.
Nicola Nasser
is a veteran Arab journalist in Kuwait, Jordan, UAE and Palestine. He
is based in Birzeit, West Bank of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories.
Notes
(1) Quoted by Professor A.K.
Ramakrishnan, “Mahatma Gandhi Rejected Zionism”, Released
August 15, 2001, The Wisdom Fund, Website: http://www.twf.org.
(2) P.R. Kumaraswamy, “India and Israel Evolving Strategic Partnership,”
Begin – Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, Bar-Ilan University,
Israel, September 1998.
Leave
A Comment
&
Share Your Insights
Comment
Policy
Digg
it! And spread the word!
Here is a unique chance to help this article to be read by thousands
of people more. You just Digg it, and it will appear in the home page
of Digg.com and thousands more will read it. Digg is nothing but an
vote, the article with most votes will go to the top of the page. So,
as you read just give a digg and help thousands more to read this article.