It’s fascinating how unfolding history puts tectonic pressure on narratives of societal change and nation-formation and squeezes them from one type of story-soil into some barely recognisable mutation or something totally different. Growing up in the 1960s, the first time I remember hearing the name, Israel, was in 1967. Among the grown-ups around me, there was great admiration for the Israeli air force and army for the pre-emptive air strikes that destroyed Egyptian airfields and the efficient victory that followed in the ‘Six-Day War’. ‘Oh, I wish we could do this to Pakistan!’ was one refrain because we were still seething about the unsatisfying ‘victory’ of the 1965 war. The phrase, ‘Israel’s blitzkrieg’, was also used without any sense of irony. The urban, Indian, armchair soldier got his vicarious revenge in the 1971 war when we ‘did to the Pakistanis what the Israelis had done to the Arabs’, complete with pre-emptive air strikes and, if not quite blitzy, a fairly quick river-hopping krieg. However, shortly after the Indian victory in 1971, a different kind of West Asian war came to the fore during the 1972 Munich Olympics when terrorists from the Palestinian Black September group took hostage and killed Israeli athletes. To a pre-teenager’s question — ‘Who are terrorists?’ — the simple answer was ‘those who deliberately target civilians for military or political reasons.’
As one began to delve into news about international politics, one found contradictions: the Egyptians were part of the Non-Aligned Movement and, therefore, India’s allies on the world stage; India was one of the few countries that recognised Palestine’s right to full statehood while we maintained no open diplomatic relations with Israel and, in this, we were at one with our supposed enemies, the Pakistanis; the Nixo-Kissingerist Americans supported Israel and Pakistan while being against Egypt and India — which made the Americans against genocide in Nazi Germany but fully supportive of it in our elaka, in what later became Bangladesh; the Soviets were the opposite — good when they were helping us against Pakistan and China but otherwise bad, especially when helping Arabs (and, therefore, aligning with fugitive Nazi rocket scientists allegedly helping Egypt’s missile programme, Nazis who were Soviet Russia’s sworn enemies just a few decades ago).
A lot of what one absorbed was from the Israeli point of view, the American or Western European POV, or unquestioningly sympathetic to it. A lot of my received narrative came from Time/Newsweek and from the fat bestsellers by Leon Uris and Frederick Forsyth. In that narrative, there was an immovable understanding that Israel was always the good guy. When I looked at photos of Yasser Arafat, I noticed a strong resemblance to the clownishly evil, Greek Rastapopoulos in the Tintin books; I unquestioningly internalised one racial stereotype and laid it on another person of colour.
Part and parcel of this whole unfolding saga was a growing knowledge about the Second World War and the industrialised murder of six million Jews. I first heard the word, Holocaust, being frequently used in 1971 to describe the Pakistani army’s massacre of Bengalis but, soon, I was familiar with the original use and the horror it denoted. Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau all became vivid names denoting the worst acts of which humans were capable, the terror and the tragedy of those acts still fresh, then only thirty-odd years in the past.
Israel’s unfluctuating goodness and righteousness stemmed from these names and from what the Jewish people had gone through in these black places. There seemed to be something noble, brave and just about the Israeli project and, conversely, something quasi-Nazi, evil and barren about the Arab hatred of Israel. People like me did have some sense of the tragedy Palestinian Arabs were going through but the fault seemed to lie as much, if not more, with many of the surrounding Arab states and their unwillingness to give shelter to Palestinian refugees.
All this began to shift when I spent some time in America and in New York City. On the one hand, I came across rabid Zionists, including a college roommate who threatened to beat me up over a verbal disagreement that Palestinians also had some rights to some of the land. I could see a fanaticism in his anger (he who was yet to visit Israel) that didn’t match with my notions of a democratic, liberal, forward-looking Israel. Another delectable example was my cold-hearted New York landlord. When I went to pay him my final rent before leaving for the city for good in 1982, he was all aglow: “I’m going to Israel next week!” he announced, looking at me meaningfully. “I’m going to kill Arabs!” I looked at his wrinkled, 60-something visage and almost burst into laughter. “Mr Chill, you do know I’m Indian, yes?” he nodded, waving me away, but it was clear that he thought all of us brown and not-so-brown people were the same. Conversely, New York was also the place where I met Jews who were articulately critical of Israel and the actions of its government and armed forces; it was from these Jewish friends that I understood — viscerally — that to be against the oppression and the murder of innocents was in no way anti-Semitic or anti-Jewish, that, given what the Hitlerites had done, it was, in fact, a moral duty to stand up against any act that even vaguely replicated something from the Nazi playbook.
In 1977, Menachem Begin, a known terrorist who had previously been denied a visa by the British, became prime minister of Israel. By 1982, the massacres at Sabra and Shatila refugee camps were added to the names of places where innocents were killed in the area of Palestine-Israel-Lebanon; like the Soviet general, Georgy Zhukov, standing by outside Warsaw while the Nazis massacred Poles in the city, the Israel Defense Forces under the then defence minister, Ariel Sharon, also stood by laying siege to the two camps while Lebanese militia massacred women and children inside. From then till now, we have witnessed a process where the best intentions of the most humane Israeli leaders have been whittled away into nothing while the long-dormant but undead genocidal agenda of the worst, most fanatically murderous, Zionist politicians has risen and taken over large swathes of Israeli society. Overseen by American and international indifference or outright support, these Israelis have danced an increasingly passionate close tango with the worst elements of Islamist fanaticism, a kind of aap hain toh hum hain (we only thrive if you thrive) dance that stomps innocents underfoot.
If the world politics of the 1970s was confusing, it’s mind-boggling today when a man like Benjamin Netanyahu carries out one of the most sustained campaigns of mass murder with raucous support from self-declared Jew-haters in the American South and Hitler-loving right-wingers all over the world. To place it in this sequence, we can say October 7 was terrorist rape and butchery carried out by the terrorists of Hamas, aided and abetted by the terrorists led by Netanyahu and his ministers.
