On October 7, 2023, Hamas launched a brutal attack on the citizens of Israel. More than 1,100 people were killed, of which three-fourths were civilians. The Israeli state retaliated immediately, by bombarding the adjoining Palestinian territory of Gaza, which is controlled by Hamas. One might have thought, and hoped, that after a few days or at most a few weeks, the Israelis would cease the bombardment. However, this savage campaign of retribution has carried on for a full year now.
More than 50,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces, of which perhaps 90% have been civilians. The official death ratio of Palestinians to Israelis is thus roughly 50 to 1, though even this doesn’t remotely reflect the scale of the suffering. More than a million residents of Gaza have been displaced from their homes.
After the devastation it has wreaked in Gaza, Israel has now trained its fire on the country of Lebanon. Here too, it has not cared to distinguish between terrorists and innocent civilians. In its bid to eliminate particular individuals it has killed hundreds of Lebanese citizens and rendered many thousands more homeless.
The prosecutor of the International Criminal Court has held that both the Israeli state and Hamas are guilty of war crimes. This is utterly justified. For no amount of historical contextualisation can excuse or explain away the killings of civilians by Hamas last October. That said, the crimes of the Israeli state are indubitably greater. In its pursuit of revenge, it has acted indiscriminately, bombing and flattening schools and hospitals. Apart from killing tens of thousands of Palestinians, it has, by withholding or radically restricting the supply of food, water, and electricity, sent countless other people to the brink of starvation.
The coverage of the conflict in Gaza has looked largely at the two contending parties: the Israelis and Hamas. This column shifts the focus to the other groups or nations who have played a role in causing and perpetuating the conflict. In the case of many if not most crimes, the criminal has accomplices. Who, then, are the people who have aided Hamas on the one side and the Israeli state on the other?
The principal accomplices of Hamas are the theocratic state of Iran and the terror group based in Lebanon, Hezbollah. The dominant Western media regularly names and shames them. Yet they are rather more shy of identifying the accomplices of Israel, so perhaps we must do so instead. The principal enabler of the criminal acts of the Israeli government is, of course, the United States of America. It has provided a continuous stream of military aid to Israel, sending it the weapons it needs to continue pounding Gaza (and now Lebanon). America has also offered Israel diplomatic cover, by vetoing or voting against resolutions in the United Nations that might bring about a ceasefire and a pause to the suffering.
America’s refusal to recognise its own complicity was illustrated in an interview I heard last week of the former First Lady, former senator, former secretary of state, and sometime presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton. She was asked about her recent experience teaching at Columbia University, where she is now a visiting professor. Shortly after she began teaching last fall, a series of student protests roiled Columbia (and other campuses), demanding that Israel stop the bombing of Gaza and agree to an immediate ceasefire. Clinton dismissed these protests out of hand, on the grounds that they were supported and funded from “outside”. She further insinuated that some of these protesters were activated by “anti-Semitism”.
No evidence was provided in support of these accusations. In fact, though there were a few agent provocateurs from outside who came in uninvited, the overwhelming majority of the protesters were students and faculty members of these universities themselves, acting on their own behalf and with their own resources. Besides, many Jewish students joined these demonstrations, for, in the face of the wanton killing of women and children in Gaza, their commitment to humanity as a whole trumped their partisan commitment to the faith of their ancestors. (Unfortunately, the interviewer, Fareed Zakaria, was too timid to confront Clinton with the facts, and allowed her accusations to pass unchallenged).
Listening to Hillary Clinton, it struck me that, far away from New York, there was another agency funded and supported from “outside”. This was the Israeli state, kept going by the United States government. I wonder if Clinton, were she to hear her remarks played back to her, would have this capacity for self-reflection. I rather doubt it. Conditioned by the decades she has spent at the heart of the Washington establishment, she can never see herself or her government as ever being anything other than blameless.
Long before the current conflict, successive American presidents and American governments tacitly aided Israel in its violations of international law. The expansion of Jewish settlements all across the West Bank has occasionally led to mild rebukes from Washington, but never concrete action. Whether run by Democratic or Republican administrations, the most powerful nation in the world has been unable or unwilling to stop these encroachments on Palestinian lands by Jewish settlers supported by the Israeli Army. Over the decades, these settlements have accumulated to such an extent that they have made the creation of a viable Palestinian state a near-impossibility. The blame for this rests as much with America as with Israel itself.
The United States has been Israel’s principal accomplice in its criminal violations of international law. However, there are also other accomplices. These include the United Kingdom, France and Germany. And, truth be told, our own Republic of India has not been guiltless either.
As we grimly commemorate the first anniversary of the Hamas attack on Israel, and we contemplate the ever-increasing death toll of innocent Palestinians at the hands of Israel, it behoves us to be somewhat more self-aware, and self-critical, than Americans like Hillary Clinton can ever be. We must hold to account our government for having aided the murderous Israel campaign in at least two ways, neither insubstantial. The first is by not supporting resolutions in the United Nations General Assembly calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and for Israel to comply with international law. The second is by sending Indian migrant workers to sustain the war economy of Israel, these workers actively canvassed for by state governments run by the Bharatiya Janata Party.
The uncritical support of the current Indian government for Israel stems from two reasons. One is personal – the decades-long friendship between Narendra Modi and Benjamin Netanyahu. The other is ideological – the admiration that Hindutva propagandists have for Israel’s fusion of State with faith and its suspicion/demonisation of the Muslim “other”.
By taking Israel’s side and, in effect, condoning the violence perpetrated by it, India has undermined its standing in the world. Last month, when the Middle East crisis was being debated in the United Nations General Assembly, all India could offer were some empty and insincere words about “peace”. On the other hand, the prime minister of Slovenia remarked: “I want to say this out loud and clear to the Israeli government: Stop the bloodshed, stop the suffering, bring the hostages home, and end the occupation. Mr Netanyahu, stop this war now.” And the foreign minister of Australia said: “It is now nearly 300 days since Australia and 152 other countries voted for a ceasefire. And today, I repeat that call.” She added: “Lebanon cannot become the next Gaza.”
Note that Slovenia and Australia are not just democracies, but have close ties with Israel’s chief patron, the United States. Yet their leaders have the clearsighted courage that both our prime minister and our foreign minister evidently lack.
Israel is said to be the only functioning democracy in the Middle East. The United States is the richest and most powerful democracy in the world. India boasts of being the world’s largest democracy. All these claims ring hollow in the light of what these countries have done to perpetuate the crimes against humanity in Gaza. As Pratap Bhanu Mehta succinctly puts it, “[h]ere are three democracies ushering the international order to ruin: Israel by its brutalisation of conflict, the United States by providing it cover and complicity, and India by its evasions that border on complicity.”
Ramachandra Guha’s new book, Speaking with Nature: The Origins of Indian Environmentalism, will be released on October 10. His email address is ramachandraguha@yahoo.in.
This article first appeared in The Telegraph.
