Indian Support For Israel: Case Of Enemy Of Enemy is Friend

Sameer Arshad Khatlani
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A large number of Indians appear to have found something to cheer about in the middle of the devastation Covid-19 has caused in India—the Israeli dispossession of Palestinians. Unqualified expression of support for Israel has trended on social media in India as Israelis continued bombing the Palestinian enclave of Gaza and killed at least 119 Palestinians, including 31 children. The axiom that enemy of my enemy is my friend is clearly at work here and highlights the extent to which society has been dumbed down through sustained demonisation of Muslims over the last decade. The vilification is an important source of sustenance to the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) regime, which looks up to Israel and has sought to emulate its policies particularly in Muslim majority Kashmir. It has been taken to such levels that many Indians mechanically side with Israel even with zero understanding of the issue, forgetting India’s deep and historical ties with Arabs. The India-Arab relations predate by centuries Israel’s creation in 1948 through expulsions of Arabs from Palestine.  

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The support Israel enjoys among a sizeable number of Indians has everything to do with the fact that Palestinians are predominantly Muslims. The level of antagonism is such that the support Muslim nations extended to India to help it deal with a shortage of even basic medical oxygen amid the second Covid-19 wave has not tempered the hostility. Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan, and the United Arab Emirates have been among the countries that have rushed key supplies as the Indian health care system has failed to cope with surging infections. Burial grounds and crematoriums have run out of space and dead bodies have been found floating in rivers as many have died for the want of medicines, hospital beds, and oxygen. 

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With the Indian economy in the doldrums, the Gulf region's importance to India is expected to grow further in the post-pandemic situation. The biggest chunk of Indians overseas reside in the region and the remittances they send have often surpassed India's other sources of capital inflows such as foreign direct investment. In 2015, $72.2 billion in remittances from the Gulf region were more than India's trade with the US and almost as much as– $74.9 billion–that with its leading trading partner, China. The remittances constituted 2.7 per cent of the country’s GDP in 2017. It was double the spending–1.15 per cent of GDP–on healthcare. The remittances from the region–over $30 billion–accounted for nearly half of the $69 billion India got in 2017. Remittances from Saudi Arabia–over $10.5 billion–in 2017 were the largest contribution to the flow of capital from a single country into India. Almost a quarter of 17 million Indians around the world in 2017 lived in Saudi Arabia. The number will only go up as India encourages migrations since its economic growth has been not been enough to generate sufficient jobs for over 12 million people, who enter its labour force annually. India made online registration of foreign employers mandatory in 2015 and launched a skill development scheme for the people seeking overseas jobs. In October 2018, 29.5 million Indians were jobless. The problem of joblessness has since worsened.

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The symbiotic relationship that the Indians in the Gulf represent is a continuation of the historical links India has had with the Arabs for centuries. The ties existed centuries before the British introduced the divide and rule policy and first had Hindus and Muslims at their throats to perpetuate their rule in India. Baghdad, for instance, was a central market for merchandise from India when the city was the world’s business and intellectual capital under the Abbasid Empire (750–1258). Its centrality to global trade, knowledge, and science drew many Indians to Baghdad and facilitated a collaboration that continues to positively impact our lives to this day. An Indian merchant brought a manuscript to Baghdad sometime in the late eighth century and changed the face of mathematics. The manuscript first introduced nine numerals and the zero that are used today. It led to the development of the decimal system and calculus, which is important to almost all branches of science and underpins key discoveries in physics. The numbers were earlier, explained Christian Yates in The Conversation in September 2017, written out as words or notated with letters of the alphabet and made multiplication and division extremely cumbersome. The zero allowed effective record-keeping and meant financial calculations ‘could be checked retroactively, ensuring the honest actions of all involved.' Mathematician Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī (780-850), one of the icons of the Muslim Golden Age of science and learning under the Abbasids, was among the Baghdad scholars who built on these ideas and created what has been described ‘the Arabic hegemony’ in mathematics. 

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The soured Jewish-Arab relations since the expulsion of Palestinians for Israel’s creation in 1948 is also an aberration in history. It is a blip if seen from the perspective of centuries of harmonious ties dating back to the rise of Islam. Jews thrived under the Abbasid Empire. Caliph Al-Mansur laid the ceremonial first brick for Baghdad’s foundation as the Empire’s capital on July 30, 762, only after his astrologers, including a Jew, chose it as the most auspicious for work on the city to begin at the site Nestorian Christian monks suggested to him. Jewish religious scholarship flourished in Abbasid Baghdad. Jews had their own schools where Hebrew was taught. Baghdad once boasted of 10 rabbinical schools and 22 synagogues. Benjamin of Tudela, a 12th-century Spanish rabbi who visited Baghdad as part of an odyssey to the most storied cities globally, called the Caliph 'kind unto Israel', and well-versed in its laws.

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Islam is after all an extension of the Abrahamic traditions represented by Judaism and Christianity. The three religions trace their origins to Abraham. Early Muslims prayed in the direction of Jerusalem, the city Muslims, Christians, and Jews consider holy. The Quran calls Jews and Christians the ‘People of the Book’ 31 times. It also refers to them as alladhīna ūtū al-kitāb (those who have received the Book) ahl al-dhikr (the people of the remembrance). The Quran also addresses the Christians as ahl al-Injīl (the People of the Gospel). The respect was mutual, to begin with. The Ethiopian Christian kingdom offered asylum to some early Muslims when they faced persecuted in Mecca and were forced to flee Mecca. Christians from Najran in modern-day Saudi Arabia worshipped in the Prophet's mosque when he ruled Medina. A treaty the Prophet signed with the Christians pledged ‘there shall be no interference with the practice of their faith. … No bishop will be removed from his bishopric, no monk from his monastery, no priest from his parish.’.  The treaty reflected the Quranic spirit. The Quran says God protects ‘monasteries, churches, synagogues, and mosques in which the name of God is much mentioned.' 

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The Crusades, which have been described as a ‘divinely argued attempt to eradicate a religion [Islam] and a civilisation', changed the equations in the region forever. Many see their parallels in the West’s wars in the Middle East, unconditional support to Israel, and its settler colonialism. Jerusalem is central to Christian eschatology, or theology related to the final events of humankind. Conservative Christians and Bible literalists believe that Christ will return to Jerusalem under Jewish control. Jerusalem was central to the Crusaders' campaigns. But they were unable to hold on to Jerusalem after the First Crusade ended in 1099 with the capture of the city and slaughter of an estimated 40,000 of its Jewish and Muslim inhabitants on Pope Urban II’s call. 

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Jews found refuge in Muslim lands when papal ascendancy in medieval Europe led to religious repression, or inquisitions, from the 13th to the 15th century. Jews were banished from England and France in the 14th century, and from Spain in 1492. The Ottoman Empire welcomed Spanish Jews fleeing the Catholic Inquisition. Jews participated in the government under Ottoman rule, thanks to the Tanzimat (re-ordering) administrative, military, educational, legal, and social reforms in the 19th century. The reforms required provincial administrative councils to reflect local religious diversity. Menahim Salih Efendi Daniyal, a Jew, was among the four sent from Baghdad to the first Ottoman parliament in 1877–78. Sasson Efendi Hasqail, another Jew, was elected to the parliament twice from the city.

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Jewish-Arab relations deteriorated after Britain promised the Zionist movement a national home—Israel—in Palestine through the Balfour Declaration of 1917. The pledge rode roughshod over the native Arabs, who accounted for 90% of the Palestinian population. The British colonialists regulated migration to Palestine over the following decades and increased the Jewish population there from 9% in 1922 to 27% in 1935. They dispossessed Palestinians by carrying out demolitions under the garb of 'urban regeneration'. The Nakba (catastrophe) struck when an estimated 750,000 Palestinians were forced out of their homes in 1948 with Israel’s creation that triggered the first of the Arab-Israeli wars. Almost all of them were never able to return to their homes. Only depraved would support such atrocities and the continued dispossession of Palestinians without even a basic understanding of the issue.

 Sameer Arshad Khatlani is an author-journalist based in New Delhi. He has been a Senior Assistant Editor with Hindustan Times, India’s second-biggest English newspaper. Khatlani worked in a similar capacity with The Indian Express, India's most influential newspaper known for its investigative journalism, until June 2018. Born and raised in Kashmir, he began his career with the now-defunct Bangalore-based Vijay Times in 2005 as its national affairs correspondent. He joined Times of India, one of the world's largest selling broadsheets, in 2007. Over the next nine years, he was a part of the paper's national and international newsgathering team as an Assistant Editor. 

Khatlani has reported from Iraq and Pakistan and covered elections and national disasters. He received a master’s degree in History from the prestigious Jamia Millia Islamia University in New Delhi. Khatlani is a fellow with Hawaii-based American East-West Center established by the US Congress in 1960 to promote better relations and understanding with Asian, and Pacific countries through cooperative study, research, and dialogue. 

Penguin published Khatlani’s first book The Other Side of the Divide: A Journey into the Heart of Pakistan in February 2020. Eminent academic and King’s college professor, Christophe Jaffrelot, has called the book ‘an erudite historical account... [that] offers a comprehensive portrait of Pakistan, including the role of the army and religion—not only Islam’.