The brown man’s burden of identity wars
Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region. It’s the best $3 billion investment we make.
— Senator Joe Biden
June 5, 1986
This could have been said by Winston Churchill or any other imperialist after him, for it echoes the post-War world order envisioned by the West and thrust on the hapless post-colonial societies in Asia. A Jewish expansionist state pushing back natives of an ever-shrinking ancient community to make way for Western settler colonialists is in consonance with the partition lines drawn and the seeds of subsequent wars sown all over the colonies as the evil empire retreated, leaving at least a million dead and 10 million homeless in India and Pakistan.
The wars of identity that the British meticulously planned more than 100 years ago after their victory over the Ottoman empire, won largely with the blood of Indian soldiers, Punjabis in particular, continue unabated. And there is not even a veil of ambiguity about which side of this sordid game of death the legatees of the old empire are rooting for. By dashing off to Israel, the US President and the UK Prime Minister have proclaimed that the “rules-based order” created by the British colonialists in Asia is intact and its foundations of clashing religious identities are being routinely strengthened.
By declaring a war on Hamas and in effect bombing unarmed civilians of Gaza, Israel has reduced itself to a Hamas-like bunch of bloodthirsty thugs.
The British genius in statecraft lay in its invention of identity politics over religions and its natural corollary of politics of hatred. It still has the power and potential to put down national aspirations and reduce them to hatred for the Other. While Yasser Arafat was accepted as the hero of a beleaguered people seeking justice and a homeland, for instance in India, Hamas’ Ahmed Yassin can only be detested as a preacher of pre-modern evil trying to poison and push the youth to certain death. Defeating collective convictions, the old empire’s inheritors have managed to create faultlines of religious identity that nobody other than a co-religionist can endorse. Worse, unlike Arafat, Yassin did not want peace or a homeland; he wanted a perpetual holy war.
The raison d’etre for the Israeli Religious Right, too, is war against the Other. Their leaders are completely powerless without hatred, which drives their politics as it does their personal careers. So, they deal with Hamas and not the Palestinian Authority; they legitimise Hamas because it does not want a solution. The right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu detests Palestinian Muslims, and Hamas reciprocates with its disgust for the Jews. The Netanyahu government cannot but legitimise Hamas as the enemy, for all it wants is to institutionalise revulsion for the Other in the body politic. The exchange of an Israeli soldier for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners in 2011 was done with Hamas and not with the Palestinian Authority.
Thus, there is no need to look deeper into the trajectory of the missiles that killed around 500 civilians at the Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza to ascertain what caused this monstrous tragedy. It is hatred. When the only politics they know is that of abhorrence for the Other’s religion, there are no lines that cannot be crossed. When the marauding Hamas killers didn’t flinch while killing babies and abducting and raping women and murdering unarmed civilians, why should their counterparts in the Israeli Defence Forces stop short of bombing a hospital? By declaring a war on Hamas and in effect bombing unarmed civilians of Gaza, Israel has reduced itself to a Hamas-like bunch of bloodthirsty thugs ready to kill anyone in Gaza — terrorist or civilian.
The baffling Hamas invasion could have been termed comical had it not been for its brutality and the death toll of 1,300 Israelis, mostly civilians. The region’s strongest army just allowed a clutch of amateurs to bring down its most sophisticated smart fence (cameras, sensors, radars, drones, satellites, et al) with rusting bulldozers and then glide, drive and ride 25 km inside without resistance. This reeks of complicity or compromise or a larger conspiracy. It is inane to get into a cost-benefit analysis to prove a conspiracy theory. But the US and the UK should have asked Israel tough questions before offering a blank cheque.
When Biden said he has Israel’s back, he did not qualify it by saying that Israel should not go to war against people of Gaza but finish off the gang of terrorists that has no qualms about getting innocent civilians exterminated. Jordan and Egypt have rightly closed their borders because Israel should not be allowed to use this moment of crisis to push residents of Gaza into another country and thereby further its expansionist policies. This is a moment that calls for genuine peace. Peace without Hamas and peace without Israeli retribution.
The people of Gaza should not be expected to denounce Hamas because all that they had seen so far is deceit and destruction by the Israelis. Just as the Tamils of Kilinochhi who held on to the LTTE as protectors even when Prabhakaran was using them as a human shield (an identity strife that the colonialists left behind and later the West exacerbated by validating terrorists), the people of Gaza might hang on to Hamas’ Kalashnikov straps because they have not seen anything better in their lifetime.
The US, which has drained much of the oil out of West Asia, and the UK, with its colonial loot, should now stop and pause. Only they can make Israel relent, shed its historical hatred and agree to a two-nation solution. While bringing the Arabs and the Israelis closer, the West ignored the Palestinians. But the Hamas invasion proves that peace in Palestine is a prerequisite for a new chapter in West Asian diplomacy.
As for India, its interests lie in the nine million expats who send home annual remittances of about $50 billion and their Arab hosts, not in a Zionist state that tries to sell technologies that failed at its own fence.
