Mr Narendra Modi will be walking into a minefield when he visits Israel, the first Indian Prime Minister to do so. The coalition Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu heads is the most extreme right-wing government to take office in the nation’s history. Second, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has cultivated a symbiotic relationship with Israel because of its spiritual affinity for its leaders’ tooth-for-a-tooth approach to its adversaries.
Israelis like to present themselves as a beleaguered country and its reference point remains the Holocaust, despite the fact that it is today a colonial power ruling over millions of Palestinians it has disenfranchised, appropriating vast areas of the West Bank to build settlements, annexing East Jerusalem and showing no inclination to make peace on equitable terms. As a consequence, Israel is feeling increasingly isolated in the Western world, particularly in Europe, with the “boycott, divest and sanction” (BDS) movement gaining traction.Essentially, the BDS’s aim is to pull back Western investment from Israeli establishments working out of the occupied West Bank and ban goods manufactured there by Israeli entities.
Even some American universities have divested from Israeli West Bank establishments, although the American Jewish lobby remains strong and continues to frustrate all attempts at seeking a just peace. Although a minority, the J Street faction has broken away from the hardline majority.Mr Modi has to bear in mind that coupling his Israel visit with a trip to the Palestinian territories will not compensate for his befriending Mr Netanyahu because there is no equivalence between the two. India has a growing defence relationship with Israel because of the excellence and innovative qualities of its military products. But it is one thing to do business with Tel Aviv for realpolitik reasons and quite another to build a special relationship with a government even many of the Western nations have come to view as an embarrassment in the post-colonial era.
Mr Modi can hold his nose and do defence deals, the stance President Barack Obama has adopted in generously rearming Egypt despite President el-Sisi’s autocratic rule and suppression of dissent, or make a celebration of his Israeli path-breaking venture.India’s stakes in the Arab world are immense not only in the employment it provides to Indians but also as a source of energy supplies. True, some Arab countries do under-the-counter deals with Tel Aviv and there are affinities in the new and changing geopolitical picture in the Middle East with the emergence of the Islamic State. But they do not take away the bitterness of Israel ruling as an old colonial power in the 21st century.
There is some merit in the present stalemate between Israel and Palestinians. The pretence of holding peace talks with little or no real movement had falsely lulled the world for decades. Mr Netanyahu makes no pretence of making peace and said so during his last election campaign. However bad his relations with President Obama may be, he is immune from US sanctions or to cuts in the highest military and other assistance Washington gives any nation because of the American Jewish lobby and the support Israel enjoys in both Houses of the US Congress.I met Mr Netanyahu in Israel in 1990 when he was the junior Foreign Minister and he made his points forcefully.
In particular, he told me, “If you run across the breadth of Israel, you would cross it in a few hours” to stress the geographic limits of his country. Until recently, the conventional wisdom was that any peace deal would entail the retention of major Israeli settlements in exchange for territories in Israel proper and that Jerusalem would be the shared capital of two states, with the future West Bank demilitarised.Such a scenario has now receded into the never-never land, with Israel determined to keep all the land it occupied in the 1967 war and the annexed East Jerusalem, with the dreadful and untenable prospect of keeping Palestinians subjugated even though such an arrangement would see a subjugated Palestinian majority in a future Israel.
The tragedy is while the US will not permit anyone else, least of all the United Nations, to take a lead role in negotiating peace, it is handicapped domestically and has geopolitical interests to play the role of a peacekeeper. US Secretary of State John Kerry’s was the last serious attempt to revive a dead peace process and it ended up in the wilderness.
If the Republicans win the US presidency in 2017, Mr Netanyahu will have even less to worry about.With the prospect of Mr Netanyahu receiving support from India in the shape of the first prime ministerial visit, Tel Aviv and its American friends are already in a celebratory mood, with a section of the US legislators already proposing a three-way defence arrangement among the US, Israel and India.India’s intrusion into the Middle East minefield can therefore have unpredictable consequences and Mr Modi will have to watch his steps before indulging in his penchant for showmanship.
Many mediators from many nations have met their Waterloo in trying to make peace between the colonial power and its Palestinian subjects. Mr Netanyahu has now pronounced that he does not want third parties to help make peace and has rudely dismissed the efforts of the French Foreign Minister, Mr Laurent Fabius, in seeking to initiate talks.Thus far, Indian policy towards Israel has been to underplay the relationship while seeking defence material and help in areas of agricultural cultivation.
Mr Modi’s visit will give it a new salience at a time the Western world is becoming increasingly concerned with the direction Mr Netanyahu and his supporters even more to the right are taking the country.Israel has launched a full-scale war on the BDS movement because it is beginning to hurt economically and is helping to build an unflattering picture of Israel in the West. Incidents of anti-Semitism are increasing. France’s desire to show it is doing something for Israeli-Palestinian rapprochement flows from the fact that it hosts the highest proportion of Jewish population in Europe.
Modi’s Israel visit Perils of walking into a minefield | idrw.org
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