Israel, US, the same old

Note (28 April 2024): On March 28, I received an email from one of the opinion page editors at The Indian Express asking if I might write an essay on the US vote of abstention in the Security Council on a resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and whether such a vote could be interpreted as a shift in the American position towards Israel. The resolution passed 14-0, with the United States, which is of course a permanent member of the Security Council, casting the only vote of abstention. But the US had, uncharacteristically, not vetoed the resolution, as it had done repeatedly in the past. I submitted my essay a week later but it was published, both in print and online, on April 14 on p. 11 (or see the online edition where it appeared under the title of “The US support for Israel, contrary to opinion, is as strong as ever”). As the online title suggests, I argued that the various opinions that had been voiced suggesting that the US support for Israel was diminishing or might no longer be taken for granted were entirely mistaken and overblown. Events since March 25 and indeed down to the present day have established, as I argued, that the US support for Israel remains, to use the words of Biden and countless number of officials of his administration, “iron-clad”. To think that it might be otherwise, if the US is provoked to breaking-point by Israeli intransigence or arrogance, is to show little understanding of the American establishment’s rigid attachment for Israel. To be sure, some–and some only, let it be clear–of these officials are, in private, anti-Semitic; but their Islamophobic sentiments run still deeper. Similarly, one can be certain that we will continue to hear American officials voice “uneasiness” with Israel’s policies, “discontent” and “dismay” at Israeli arrogance and the impunity with which Israel will continue to ignore the entire world and do what it pleases, and so on. All of American expressions of displeasure are hot air, and just that. A few will object to my remarks with the observation that it is only US restraint that stopped Israel from clobbering Iran. That observation may not be without merit, but to concede that much is not to admit that the US does in fact exercise real restraining power over Israel. One cannot ignore the much larger geopolitical implications of an outright war between Israel and Iran. In any case, the essay below is the slightly longer version of the piece that was published in the Indian Express: as noted above, it is dated only in the sense that other events since in the last few weeks amply demonstrate that the US remains unflinchingly supportive of Israel and therefore complicit in the genocide unfolding in Gaza.

On March 25, during a discussion in the UN Security Council, the United States did something highly unusual:  it abstained from a resolution that had been introduced calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. The United States had vetoed similar resolutions in the past, arguing that it would not permit any step that might impede Israel’s right to self-defense.  When it last exercised its veto power on February 20, the US justified its action with the observation that any call for a ceasefire perforce had to be linked to the release of all Israeli hostages from Palestinian custody.

Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, immediately pronounced the US abstention a “retreat” from the unstinting support that Israel has received from the onset of the present iteration of a conflict that effectively goes back to the founding of Israel in 1948.  As a mark of his displeasure, indeed of his alleged surprise that the US should in any way be signifying a shift in its position of unfettered support towards Israel, Netanyahu cancelled a planned visit by an Israeli delegation to the US to discuss Israel’s imminent invasion of Rafah. Netanyahu and Israel’s military planners have argued that the assault on Rafah is required to eliminate Hamas’s remaining battalions; the United States, importantly, questions not Israel’s right to defend its integrity as a nation-state, but only whether Israel has put into place a comprehensive plan that would guarantee the safety of Palestinian civilians.

Many commentators point to the US vote of abstention, as well as other recent developments such as criticism of Netanyahu by US Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and his call for elections in Israel—angrily dismissed by Netanyahu in a sharply worded rejoinder, “We are not a banana republic—as significant milestones in what is alleged to be an evolving relationship between Israel and the United States.  The diplomatic editor of the highly regarded The Guardian, for instance, described the American decision to abstain as far more than a ruckus over “some words in the text of a UN resolution: it marks another moment in the painful, almost anguished US diplomatic distancing from its chief ally in the Middle East.”

The terrain appears to have shifted quickly and considerably in the last several weeks: having vetoed UN Security Council resolutions thrice, the US was doubtless finding that it, too, was repeatedly being pushed alongside Israel into being part of a miniscule minority.  Indeed, before it abstained from the resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire, the US had introduced its own resolution—only to see it being shot down by China and Russia, which pointed out that the American initiative was more of a condemnation of Hamas rather than a demand for a ceasefire. Tensions have been rising between Israel and the US over the pace and scope of humanitarian aid, especially in the face of the imminent starvation of Palestinians on a large scale. Most recently, the death of seven aid workers from World Central Kitchen in a targeted strike by the Israel Defense Force (IDF) has ratcheted up the American pressure against Israel. 

Might one conclude, then, that something significant has altered in the special relationship that Israel has enjoyed with the US since its founding?  Reportedly, even as these lines are being penned, and following on what has been described as a tense call between Biden and Netanyahu, Israel has finally succumbed to the US pressure to open up new aid routes to Gaza. There is ample reason to think that American frustration with Israeli intransigence has been growing and some suspect that Israel may no longer enjoy unconditional support in the United Nations and more broadly the court of world public opinion. Moreover, the brute fact is that, as an electoral democracy, political parties are subject to the vagaries of shifting political sentiments.  The more “progressive” sections within the Democratic party have been arguing that arms sales to Israel must be tied to the immediate cessation of hostilities and much higher standards of accountability on the part of Israel. University campuses have been rocked by unrest over the Biden administration’s policies; more importantly, both recent polls and Democratic primaries being held in the run-up to the presidential election in November suggest that Biden is in grave danger of losing the support of Arab-American constituencies.

I would argue, however, that analyses which portend a significant shift in the US support of Israel are not merely premature but have failed to capture the pulse that animates the US-Israel relationship. Israel has, previous to this war, been the recipient of over $150 billion in American largesse, or something like $3.8 billion annually; it also has access to advanced American war technologies and weapon systems. If the pro-Palestinian demonstrators have appeared to make a splash on university campuses, it is only because the forces that lobby for both Jewish and Israeli interests have so long dominated the American university system that one barely heard of support for Palestine.  The charge of anti-Semitism remains the most potent weapon that can be deployed on behalf of Israel. The indubitable fact is that Israel is held up, by Democrats and Republicans alike, not merely as the only real friend it has in the Middle East but as the only democracy in the region. It is immaterial to this argument whether Israel is, in fact, a “democracy”:  the fact that some of its citizens have enjoyed liberties ordinarily associated with democratic states cannot obscure the other reality, namely that Israel has been an occupying power for decades and that Palestinians exist in a state of manifest and dire subjugation.

There is another and yet still more vital consideration.  I have elsewhere argued that there is a certain synergy between Israel and the United States as settler-colonial states. A messianic spirit has long informed American self-perception and guided US foreign policy: as every post-World War II American president has declared at one time or the other, the belief that America is “the one indispensable nation” is intrinsic to American exceptionalism. Israel is far from having the gumption of saying the same explicitly about itself, but the state of Israel conducts itself with the supreme confidence that it exercises a moral purchase over the rest of humanity. It does so, of course, on the presumption that the murder of six million Jews gives the Jewish state of Israel a special place in history—and the unconstrained and unquestioned right to oppress others in the name of “self-defense”.  Given this synergy, it is doubtful in the extreme that anything substantive has at all changed in the US-Israel relationship or is even likely to change in the near future.

Hamas’s Insurgency and Israel’s Vengeance

Vinay Lal

It is now forty-eight hours since Hamas initiated a multi-pronged attack on the state of Israel, creating shock waves around the world and sending the Jewish state into mourning and rage. Israel’s politicians and generals are seething with the desire for revenge, and some are calling for the utter annihilation of Hamas and the abject and complete submission of Gaza to a renewed Israeli occupation.  Over 1,100 people, quite likely many more, are already dead—and the majority of these are  presently Israelis, though at least 400 Palestinians have been killed thus far as well.  Before one proceeds any further to analyze this extraordinary and tumultuous state of affairs, the repercussions of which will doubtless resonate for years in West Asia and beyond, one must first clear the ground on how Hamas might be characterized. 

Israel, the United States, Canada, and the countries of the European Union (EU) designated Hamas as a ‘terrorist organization’ years ago, but it must be stated emphatically that this is not the view of much of the world. China, India, Russia, Brazil, and Turkey are among the countries which have resisted the call to declare Hamas a ‘terrorist organization’.  Indeed, a resolution introduced in the 193-member UN General Assembly in December 2018 to condemn Hamas as a ‘terrorist organization’ did not pass, with only 87 countries voting in favor of the resolution.  Though Prime Minister Modi has now declared that India stands by Israel, his government was among those that in 2018 cast a vote of abstention.   

Hamas, which is an Arabic acronym for Islamic Resistance Movement, is at once a nationalist organization and a political party; it has a militant wing (al-Qassam Brigades) as well as a social service wing (Dawah), but what is almost invariably neglected in Western accounts of Hamas is its presence as a political party.  It contested the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections, an election that the United States, the United Kingdom, and Israel desperately attempted to swing in favor of the Palestinian Authority. International observers, including those from the EU, declared that the election had been ‘competitive and genuinely democratic’; stunningly, Hamas won by a substantial majority, handily defeating Fatah 76-43. The US, Canada, and later EU froze all financial assistance to the Hamas-led government, sabotaging not only Hamas but, clearly, the will of the Palestinian people.  To this day, Hamas exercises a majority in the Palestinian National Authority parliament.

It should not be surprising that this history is being altogether obscured by the commentary now emanating from the West in the face of Hamas’s daring if bloodthirsty assault on Israel.  Certainly, with its indiscriminate and horrific killing of civilians, Hamas has done nothing to commend itself to the world’s attention as an organization that might be taken seriously as a political player at the negotiating table. The 250 some Israelis killed at a music festival just a few hours into the attack had no inkling of the murderous assault that was coming their way.  One must condemn, in the most unequivocal terms, the killing of civilians, whether women, men, children, or the elderly, and similarly denounce the taking of hostage as outrageous and antithetical to all canons of civilized behavior.

Just what the long-term outcome of this ‘war’, as so declared by the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, will be no one quite knows. For the present, however, it suffices to consider two of the many considerations or questions that form part of the present debate. First, the overwhelming question for many commentators has simply been this:  just how did Hamas manage to launch such a full-scale and coordinated attack from air, land, and sea and take Israel completely by surprise? I would like to suggest that this question, while not unimportant, is less interesting than is commonly supposed.  Israel has been celebrated for some time as a tough, or no-nonsense, state with some of the world’s most sophisticated military technology, the most advanced surveillance technologies, and a small but exceedingly well-trained army with a large number of reservists that is the envy of much of the world. Writing for The Guardian, Peter Beaumont reflects a commonly held view in arguing that Hamas’s ‘surprise attack on Israel … will be remembered as the intelligence failure for the ages.’  He reminds us, as have others, that the Pegasus spyware originated in Israel, and the country’s cyberwar unit, 8200, ‘is now the largest unit’ in the Israel Defence Forces. 

For all of this extraordinary sophistication, Israel was, it seems, wholly unprepared for Hamas’s stupendous infiltration into Israel.  Even Hamas’s most virulent critics, one suspects, must be secretly marveling at their ingenuity in firing thousands of rockets and thus overpowering the Iron Dome air defence system, using bulldozers to bring down a section of the Israel-Gaza border fence, and, most spectacularly, paragliding Hamas fighters into Israeli territory. Just why Israeli—and American—intelligence could not foresee any of this has also been put down to Israeli arrogance, the distractions created by the internal political turmoil that has been roiling Israel for close to one year, and the tendency to see Hamas as largely a spent force comprised of ragtag bunch of fighters. 

What all of this overlooks is the ineluctable fact that there is not now, and never has been anywhere in the world, a foolproof system of security. This is but one of the delusions of those who abide by a purely realpolitik view of the world.  Moreover, no security system in the world can prevail against a people who are determined to gain their freedom and who are unwilling to tolerate the suffocation of the cage into which they have been locked.  The Gaza strip is just that—a cage in which some 2.5 million people have been locked since Israel imposed a draconian and lawless blockade on Gaza in 2007. Not every Palestinian supports Hamas, but there isn’t a Palestinian who does not aspire to freedom—though this is far from the mind of supposedly enlightened Western commentators such as the numbskulled Thomas Friedman, whose only explanation for why Hamas undertook to attack Israel at this juncture is the common geopolitical view that Hamas is keen on sabotaging the Saudi-US rapprochement and similarly the normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. It would be naïve to suppose that Hamas did not also have this in mind, but by far the greater consideration is the desire of the Palestinian people to secure justice, freedom, and dignity for their people.

This, then, brings us, if briefly, to the second and related consideration. Politicians and commentators in the United States and Europe, speaking as if they were part of a well-rehearsed choral group, are unanimous in describing Hamas’s attack as ‘unprovoked’.  It is seventy-five years since the ethnic cleansing of Palestine by the newly created state of Israel and its principal backers, the United States and the United Kingdom.  Dozens of resolutions have been passed in the UN General Assembly proclaiming the right of Palestinians to self-determination. Their only effect has been to embolden Israel, which has ever so gradually been encroaching upon Palestinian territory. Jewish settlers in the West Bank have, especially since the last election in Israel which brought far-right Jewish extremists into power and into Netanyahu’s cabinet, gone on a rampage through Palestinian villages and terrorized Palestinian civilians. There is scarcely a people in the world who have lived under such sustained provocation over decades as have the Palestinians. The US has done over these years what it does best, namely act as the world’s greatest mercenary and arms supplier, while mouthing platitudes about being the world’s torchbearer of liberty.

As I have noted, and as merits constant reiteration, one must unconditionally condemn violence and, in this case, Hamas’s attack upon Israel.  Hamas cannot prevail in a military conflict with Israel:  with or without further US military assistance, Israel will pulverize Hamas.  Still, while we recognize the cycle of violence to which Hamas has most unfortunately given yet another lease of life, we must remind ourselves that it is also possible to degrade and kill an entire people in slow motion.  The world must ensure that the Palestinians, who have endured much, are henceforth spared this cruel fate.

First published at abplive.in under the title of “Hamas’s Insurgency and Israel’s Humiliation” on 9 October 2023. Two small but important errors inadvertently appeared in the first edition of this essay as circulated to subscribers but have now been corrected.

*A “Natural Alliance”: India, Israel, the United States, and the Muslim in the National Imaginary

Benjamin Netanyahu and Narendra Modi shortly after Modi’s arrival at Ben Gurion Airport, Tel Aviv, 4 July 2017. Source: Times of Israel.

As Israel prepares to celebrate the anniversary of its founding on May 14, 1948, the transformation in its relationship with India over the course of the last seven decades offers a palpable demonstration of the fact that there are no permanent foes or friends in politics.  India voted with Arab states in opposition to the UN Partition Plan that divided Palestine into two states, and formal diplomatic relations between India and Israel date back only to 1992.  Yet today India, the world’s second largest importer of arms and accounting for 9.5% of the global total, is Israel’s largest arms market just as Israel is the second largest exporter, after Russia, of arms to India.  Over the past decade, Indian imports of Israeli arms have increased by 285 percent.  In July 2017, Narendra Modi not only became the first Indian prime minister to visit Israel, but he pointedly, unlike Indian cabinet ministers on previous official visits, did not go to Palestine—not on that trip. Benjamin Netanyahu returned the compliment with the following official pronouncement on 13 January 2018:  “This evening I am leaving on an historic visit to India.  I will meet with the Prime Minister, my friend Narendra Modi, with the Indian President and with many other leaders. . . . We are strengthening ties between Israel and this important global power.  This serves our security, economic, trade and tourism interests . . . This is a great blessing for the state of Israel.”

Benjamin Netanyahu with his wife Sara by his side tries his hand at a spinning wheel — where else but at Sabarmati Ashram, Ahmedabad, January 2018. With devoted followers such as these, Mohandas Gandhi scarcely needs any enemies. Source of the photograph: Times of India.

It must have made Indians proud to hear their country being described as an “important global power”, but it isn’t one.  Nor should it be a fact of life that being one such power is necessarily a virtue:  “the meek shall inherit the other”, says one revered text, though I am fully aware of the modern wisdom which thinks that virtue only belongs to those nations which are “important global powers”.  But let us leave aside these esoteric considerations for the present.  There are yet other, often little considered, registers of the friendly ties developing between India and Israel: along with an influx of Israeli arms, young Israeli men and women have poured into India for long stays. According to the Jerusalem Post, so many young Israeli citizens swarm to India to enjoy a post-military training repose that one can now chart a “Hummus Trail” through various Indian landscapes and a proliferation of restaurants serving local kosher cuisine.  Israel’s own Foreign Ministry has reported that there is more support for Israel in India than in any other country of the world, the United States not excepted.  In one study, 58% Indians expressed support and admiration for Israel, exceeding the 56% Americans who responded in like fashion.

The bonhomie between the two nations is all the more remarkable considering the frosty relations between the two nations at the time of Prime Ministers Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi.  One might think that India, with the world’s second largest Muslim population after Indonesia, did not want to antagonize its own Muslim population and was indeed keen to cultivate the idea that India would remain a home for Muslims even after Pakistan had been carved out of the country.  Nor, as a country heavily dependent on oil imports, could India afford to antagonize Muslim-majority Arab states or Iran—all of which, for decades after the creation of Israel, displayed unremitting hostility to the Jewish state.  As one of the principal architects of the idea of non-alignment, Nehru was also wary of close relations with a U.S.-friendly Israel.  Some might think that India, not unlike most other countries, surrendered to anti-Semitism in not having diplomatic ties with Israel for well over four decades.  But nothing could be further from the truth:  as every scholar of global Jewish history knows, India, with a history of Jewish presence dating back to perhaps as early as 79CE, is nearly singular in having absolutely no history of anti-Semitism and, to the contrary, in having a clear historical record of offering hospitality to Jews.  Nathan Katz, author of the scholarly study, Who are the Jews of India? (UC Press, 2000), unequivocally states that “Indian Jews never experienced anti-Semitism or discrimination”, and lived “as all Jews should have been allowed to live:  free, proud, observant, creative and prosperous, self-realized, full contributors to the host country.”

The emergence of an India-Israel nexus, and, as is becoming patently clear, a tripartite alliance of India, Israel, and the United States, owes everything to the changing place of the Muslim in the national imaginary of India and the United States.  It was in the mid-1990s that the notion of Israel and India as two democracies surrounded by predominantly Muslim nations that had an aversion to democracy, and having in common the problem of communal violence, first arose.  The Indian middle class, I suggested in a piece published in the Indian magazine Outlook in 2006 entitled “Emulating Israel”, has long admired Israel as a tough, no-nonsense state with zero tolerance for terrorism from which India—a comparatively soft state in this imagination—can learn to confront the threat of terrorism from Pakistan and, as Hindu nationalists increasingly argue, Muslim fifth columnists within the country.  Middle class Indians have long demanded an aggressive response against terrorists (and, as they argue, their patrons in Pakistan) and they hold up Israel as a country that India should emulate.

It is also no secret that India furnishes sinecures to retired Israeli army generals who serve as consultants to anti-terrorist operations in India.  In 2000, when L. K. Advani, then the Minister of Home Affairs in the BJP-led government, visited Israel, the two governments pledged to stand together against terrorism.  Prime Minister Netanyahu, on his aforementioned visit to India in January 2018, pointedly harkened back to both the devastating terrorist attacks on Mumbai’s suburban train network in 2006 that killed 209 people and the grisly attacks by Lashkar-e-Taiba militants on the Taj Hotel and other sites in Mumbai in 2008 that led to 166 fatalities.  It is no surprise, then, that one Indian academic has called attention to the “ideological convergence” between India’s BJP and Israel’s Likud Party since “both promote a narrative of their respective populations being victims at the hands of Muslims.”

Matters do not, however, end here:  we can now speak of an emerging tripartite alliance between India, the US, and Israel, the logic of which has been captured by one scholar of public policy, Vivek Dehejia:  “India, Israel, and the United States are natural allies. All three are democratic and pluralistic societies, and all have suffered grievously from the scourge of Islamic terrorism.”  One might question a good deal in this assessment, such as what it means for three very diverse countries to be deemed “natural allies”—and why only these three democracies?  The US, to raise another difficulty, appears to be suffering from the scourge of white supremacism, not “Islamic terrorism”.  For Dehejia to imply that Palestinians are but a synonym for “Islamic terrorism”, which appears to be the case from his formulation, is objectionable in the extreme, even if one were to agree that Hamas is, notwithstanding its façade as a social welfare organization, at the very least a quasi-terrorist outfit.  But questions of the merit of his observations apart, what is most striking is that countries such as Pakistan, and the Muslim world more broadly, may be taking notice of this tripartite alliance. The Chairman of Pakistan’s Senate, Raza Rabbani, in a speech in January 2018 warned his fellow legislators about the “changing world scenario” and described the developing “nexus between the US, Israel, and India” as “a major threat to the Muslim world.”

Is it then the foreign policy wisdom in India, Israel, and the United States that these three democracies are, or ought to be, united by the menace posed by Muslim extremists?  To what extent are these countries collaborating in anti-terrorist and surveillance activities, more particularly with the thought of containing “Muslim terrorists”, and might such collaboration have implications for the exercise of their democratic rights by Muslim residents of these nations?  If India’s friendly relations with Israel on the one hand, and its growing ties with the U.S. on the other, augur new trilateral links, can we speak of such an alliance as a new force in geopolitics?  And, if we can, what might be the implications of such an alliance for the global world order?          

(A slightly shorter version of this was published at abplive.in on 13 May 2019, under the title:  “India, Israel, and the Geopolitics of an Emerging Tripartite Alliance, accessible here.)                                 

*Günter Grass and the anti-Semitism Canard

Günter Grass, some say, invites controversy.  For many years, he excoriated his fellow Germans to come clean about their past and confront the brute facts that might help explain how Germany became the seat of most terrifying machinery of human extermination that the world had ever witnessed.  However, not until Grass was nearly 80 years old did he confess that, as a 17-year old at end of the war, he was conscripted into the Waffen-SS, a paramilitary force attached to the Nazi party.  Grass is in the eye of the storm again, this time with a poem, published in several European newspapers on April 4^th and rendered in English as ‘What Must Be Said’, that warns the world that ‘Israel’s atomic power endangers / an already fragile world peace’.    Declaring himself sick of ‘the West’s hypocrisy’, Grass hopes that with his poem

many may be freed

from their silence, may demand

that those responsible for the open danger

we face renounce the use of force,

may insist that the governments of

both Iran and Israel allow an international authority

free and open inspection of

the nuclear potential and capability of both.

Israel has, in consequence, declared Günter Grass persona non-grata.  A once eminently diasporic people, formerly scattered to the ends of the earth and living their lives in exile until they could claim Palestine as their homeland, have apparently surmised that the banishment of Grass from Israel represents the most fitting punishment for the aged but unrepentant poet.

Just what, we must surely ask, was Grass’s sin?   The fury whipped up in Israel, and among Israel’s supporters in the West, points to several considerations.  Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, expressed outrage that Grass should have had the audacity to compare Israel to Iran.  Netanyahu described the comparison as shameful, offensive, shall we say, to the dignity of every civilized person:  ‘In Iran there is a regime that denies the Holocaust and calls for the destruction of Israel.  This comparison says very little about Israel and a great deal about Mr. Grass. It is Iran, not Israel, which poses a threat to world peace. It is Iran, not Israel, which threatens to destroy other countries.  It is Iran, not Israel, which supports terror organizations that fire missiles on innocent civilians. It is Iran, not Israel, which supports the massacre that the Syrian regime is carrying out on its civilians. It is Iran, not Israel, which stones women, hangs gay people, and ruthlessly suppresses the tens of millions of citizens in its country.’  No doubt, the present regime in Iran cannot be viewed as other than highly authoritarian, though there is no reason to suppose that the suppression of some freedoms has stifled all dissent, or creativity in art, music, cinema, and literature.  It has not helped Iran that its most public face is provided by Mahmud Ahmedinejad, succinctly and not inaccurately described in Grass’s poem as a ‘loudmouth’ who earned undying notoriety in the West when he described the Holocaust as a fiction.

Nevertheless, it is impossible to resist the view that Netanyahu protests too much.   However enormous the misgivings one may have about Iran’s political regime, Iran has never posed a threat to any other country, nor has it launched an attack on another nation.  Netanyahu is no less boorish than Ahmedinejad, and it is idle for him, or indeed for any other Zionist, to pretend that Israel has not been the perpetrator of untold number of atrocities against the Palestinians –– choking, numbing, and starving them into submission in a war of gravely disproportionate resources.  It is no surprise that the list of accusations hurled against Iran did not include its real or alleged sponsorship of political assassinations, since Israel is likely without peer in its mastery in this department of covert politics.  But there is something else underlying the swashbuckling behavior of Netanyahu and his predecessors in high office:  Iran and Israel have long fought a shadow war, and they need each other desperately.  The ayatollahs in Iran say and do enough to keep states such as Saudi Arabia and Jordan frothing at the mouth; similarly, the Shia clergy can always count on the presence of Israel to summon the faithful, particularly when internal dissent appears to pose grave threats to the regime.  Whether or not the relationship of Iran and Israel can be characterized as one informed by what Freud called the “narcissism of minor differences”, there is no gainsaying the fact that these two countries understand each other very well.

The more Iran and Israel begin to look alike, the greater the swagger with Israel must contemptuously dismiss Iran as the irredeemable other. Israel has long thought of itself as the sole democracy in the Middle East, ringed by unruly Arabs within and hostile states beyond; and if on occasion its unmitigated repression of Palestinians has evoked a mild rebuke from its allies in the West, it has nearly always conducted itself in world politics with the assurance that it may act with impunity.  Iran, on the other hand, has for an equally long time labored under it reputation in the West as, in the vocabulary of our times, a ‘rogue’ state.  The nationalism of countries such as Iran has always seemed to many in the West, even those who style themselves liberals, as ‘problematic’.  The nationalization of Iran’s oil industry in 1951 was bound to lead to serious repercussions for then Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, who would be removed in a coup two years later.  His overthrow, orchestrated by the CIA and British military intelligence, brought Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, whose gratitude to his benefactors would amply be on display in the decades ahead, to the helm of power.  Since the revolution of 1979, which installed the mullahs in power, and the subsequent Iranian hostage crisis, a rather humbling experience for the Americans, Iran has effectively been shunned as a ‘pariah state’ by the West.

The countries in the West which for years have rallied behind the United States to declare Iran a ‘rogue’ state have, historically speaking, treated their Jewish population much worse than did Iran, which even today has the largest population of Jews outside Israel in the Middle East.  It is barely necessary to recall, for example, the barbarism of the French, whether with respect to the Jews or their colonial subjects in Algeria, Indochina, and elsewhere.  On the received narrative, however, the anti-Semitism that was so characteristic a feature of European society is a thing of the past; indeed, what generally gives Western civilization its distinct prominence over other civilizations is its capacity for atonement and repentance.  It is precisely in this respect that Grass has been found by Netanyahu and other like minded yahoos to be severely wanting:  as Grass had disguised his past for over six decades, he is said to have been absolutely stripped of credibility.  Writing for Haaretz, long established as the voice of Israeli liberals, Anshel Pfeffer ponders in a piece entitled ‘The Moral Blindness of Günter Grass’ why ‘a highly intelligent man, a Nobel laureate no less’, does not understand that ‘his membership in an organization that planned and carried out the wholesale genocide of millions of Jews disqualifies him from criticizing the descendants of those Jews for developing a weapon of last resort that is the insurance policy against someone finishing the job his organization began. What could be more self-evident?’ For the likes of Grass, there is, quite self-evidently, no atonement, no remorse, only the certitude of eternal condemnation.  Yet the poet had clearly anticipated it all:

But why have I kept silent till now?

Because I thought my own origins,

tarnished by a stain that can never be removed,

meant I could not expect Israel, a land

to which I am, and always will be, attached,

to accept this open declaration of the truth.

When critiques of Zionism, or of Israel’s conduct towards Palestinians, cannot be adequately answered, there is always the weapon of last resort, the ultimate weapon with which to tarnish the voice of informed democratic and humanistic criticism:  the charge of anti-Semitism.  ‘This general silence on the facts’ –– the fact, which Israel is in no position to repudiate, and which Grass’s poem has now uncomfortably brought into the limelight, namely that Israel’s own nuclear program remains without supervision, inspection, or verification, subject to no constraints except those which its leaders might impose upon themselves in the light of reason –– forced Grass’s hand; and it was not without awareness on his part of how the end of the narrative was foretold.  Writes Grass,

This general silence on the facts,

before which my own silence has bowed,

seems to me a troubling, enforced lie,

leading to a likely punishment

the moment it’s broken:

the verdict “Anti-Semitism” falls easily.

To consider just how easily the verdict of ‘anti-Semitism’ falls on the critics of Israel, let us recall the opprobrium that Arun Gandhi, the grandson of Mohandas Gandhi and the co-founder and then President of the M. K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence at the University of Rochester, had to face when he penned a short blog for the Washington Post (20 January 2008) entitled, ‘Jewish Identity Can’t Depend on Violence’.  Though Arun Gandhi recognized that Israel was far from being the only purveyor of violence in that part of the world, he nevertheless thought that ‘Israel and the Jews’ were the ‘biggest players’ in promoting the ‘culture of violence’.  On a visit to Tel Aviv in 2004, Gandhi wrote, he was surprised to hear even peace activists defending the separation wall and the military build-up as the unavoidable condition of their secure existence.  The future of Jewish identity struck Arun Gandhi as ‘bleak’:  too many Jews remained ‘locked into the holocaust experience’, not merely convinced of the absolute exceptionality of the Holocaust but firm in their view that their victimhood gives them unique entitlements.  The case of Israel, Gandhi argued, ‘is a very good example of [how] a community can overplay a historic experience to the point that it begins to repulse friends. . . . the Jews today not only want the Germans to feel guilty but the whole world must regret what happened to the Jews.’  What hope is there, asks Arun Gandhi, that Israel will ever come around to the view that its existence cannot be secured by ‘bombs and weapons’?

Fast and furious was the response to Arun Gandhi, and in much less than a week he had been forced to step down as President of the M. K. Institute for Nonviolence.  Though Arun Gandhi cannot be accused of disguising his Nazi past, nothing prevented him from being brandished with the scarlet letters of anti-Semitism.  One cannot downplay the persistence of anti-Semitism over the centuries, and it is similarly instructive to what extent a forgery such as the ‘Protocol of the Elders of Zion’ continues to resonate among those who are convinced that the Jews are uniquely capable of conspiring to ensure their domination over the world’s financial markets and the power elites in the United States and Europe.  But it is a form of totalitarianism to insist that all criticism of Israel is itself a form of anti-Semitism.   Even the Jew might not critique Israel; if he or she does so, the Zionists have a phrase for such a person: a self-hating Jew.  Moreover, it is imperative to recognize that in the United States and much of Europe, it is not anti-Semitism but rather a visceral hatred and fear of Islam which is by far the greater problem.  In large swathes of respectable European and American society, the open display of xenophobic behavior towards Muslims is not burdened by the fear of censure.

It is Israel, rather than Günter Grass, that has come across poorly in this recent exchange.  This has happened all too often in the past, and Israel will have to do more than hide behind those gigantic scarlet letters that spell ‘anti-Semitism’ if it is to confront the reality of its own demons.

— First published in the Economic and Political Weekly XLVII, no. 17 (28 April 2012), 23-24, under the same title; for much shorter version, see ‘Stake in the Grass’, Times of India – Crest Edition (21 April 2012), p. 14.