A Tear for Palestine

JOHN DAYAL

Late on the 14th of May, the British Broadcasting Corporation’s international news service said Colonel Waibhav Kale, a former Indian army officer serving with the security wing of the United Nations, was killed on Monday, 13th of May in Gaza.  Shortly thereafter, UN Deputy Spokesperson Farhan Haq said the organisation had “no doubt” that shots from an Israeli tank hit the back of the car, which was clearly marked as a UN vehicle.

Col Kale, of Maharashtra, is the first Indian to be killed in the war Israel has waged on the Palestinian Gaza strip, and the Hamas forces, since its territory was bombed in in a rocket fusillade by the militia. His death has brought home a distant war, so far summarily ignored by the Indian mass media and its politicians, and all but unknown to the Indian people.

Hamas rockets smashed what had long been thought and an “impenetrable iron dome” over the Israeli skies, protecting it from the air forces of the Islamic nations surrounding it. Military pride was bruised, passions were raised. Israel’s many friends, the Indian government among them, condemned the rocket attack and the Hamas taking several civilian hostages, most of them Israeli women and men.

India now has a deep interest in Israeli’s military matters. Tel Aviv supplies us with futuristic surveillance equipment. It also supplies a chunk of its avionics for manned and unmanned war aircraft. It is known to have been a trainer of elite members of India’s secret domestic and international services. It is not unusual for the Indian National Security Advisor and many in the general staff to be in Tel Aviv often. 

Slowly, observers say, the still evolving ‘Indian Military Industrial Combine’, its public sector institutions now bolstered with the entry of some of the largest in the corporate sector, are seamlessly segueing into the larger military industrial network that spans the US, Israel and NATO nations such as France and Germany.

India also has deep compassion for the world’s Jewry, a term not necessarily the same as the citizens of Israel, or the adherents to the Zionist philosophy. India has had a resident Jewish community for 2,500 years in what is now Kochi and other ancient towns and ports on the Malabar and Konkan Coasts, and Mumbai.

While some nationalists shook hands with Adolf Hitler to fight the colonial British, the mainstream of the Indian freedom struggle had questioned the “final solution” of genocide demonically crafted by the Nazi regime in which 6 to 7 million Jews, Slavic groups and ethnic minorities such as the Roma were liquidated in gas chambers and huge furnaces in a Germanic industrial efficiency death machine.

This writer was among the very few civilians in a two-year course in Hebrew language and Judaism in the early 1980s. Classmates included officers of the Indian armed forces and secret services. Later, work as a war correspondent and diplomatic reporter has been a great exercise in familiarisation with the evolving grassroots situation.

It provided opportunity to see many of these death camps. Auschwitz can still make a grown man puke. The memorials in Germany are far more sombre, in way indicting the global silence during Hitler’s ascent and the start of the genocide. They also indict the common people who remained silent as their neighbours were liquidated.

In Israel, the Yad Vashem, the memorials to memory, forcefully tell us that the genocide was not phrase, or no more than a war crime for which a dozen or so Nazi politicians and generals, apart from a doctor send a editor, were hanged by the allies after the Nuremberg trials from 1945 to 1946. Yad Vashem tell us of each death as the murder of an individual, innocent, unarmed, child, mother, father and grandfather. Tears are common.

Tears must flow too on the news that in the seven months of the Israeli war on the people of Gaza has killed 100 reporters. Bombings on hospitals and homes, schools and shelters have killed 7,000 children, and 30,000 women and men.

At least seven international aid personnel of various nationalities and an Indian colonel have also been killed. The World Bank estimates that $ 18.5 bn in damage has been inflicted, the size of Palestine’s GDP.

The Indian government’s position has vacillated and silence has been a major part of it. Civil society apparently has other issues in the middle of three national general elections.

Religious groups have a complex response, rooted in theology rather than on reality, and on the argument of “an enemy’s enemy is a friend”. Israel’s military superiority over surrounding Islamic nations, has fascinated the religious right in India. They weigh heavy on government policy making too.

The Christian church has been the most severely divided. Pope Francis has called for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and an end to human suffering. But the people in India are sharply divided. A small section sympathises with the Palestinians. A larger chuck, it would seem, makes little distinction between the Benjamin Netanyahu government and the children of the patriarch Israel of the Old Testament.  No tear is shed for the dead of Palestine.

On 15th May, the Palestine News Network said “Palestinians will mark the 76th anniversary of their mass expulsion from what is now Israel, an event that is at the core of their national struggle. But in many ways, that experience pales in comparison to the calamity now unfolding in Gaza. Palestinians refer to the anniversary, which they will observe on Wednesday, as the “Nakba”, Arabic for “catastrophe”.

Some 700,000 Palestinians, a majority of the pre-war population, were driven from their homes in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war following Israel’s establishment. At present some six million were refugees, living in slum-like refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

“The Nakba means that I’m basically a stateless person and I have nothing to go back to. It is constantly living in a state of ‘qaher’, which means frustration, but it’s a different level of frustration,” Al-Shayma Nahya, a Human Rights Lawyer.

This is not too difficult to understand. And to empathise.

(John Dayal is an author, Editor, occasional documentary film maker and activist)