JERUSALEM DISPATCH
September's Children
by Yossi Klein Halevi
Post date 01.31.02 | Issue date 02.11.02
On September 11 some of Israel's top security experts were, as it happened, in New Delhi. They had just concluded a day of deliberations on global terrorism and missile defense with their Indian counterparts when the news arrived. As the Israelis and the Indians speculated about the identity of the culprits and the implications of the attacks, the emerging bond between the two frontline anti-terrorist nations found its emotional moment. "In everyone's mind," noted one Indian participant, "was the thought that now the world will finally understand the terrorist threat we faced."
Over the following weeks India and Israel grew even closer, bound by the common grievance of being excluded from the anti-terrorist coalition while Washington courted their terrorist-harboring enemies. And while American overtures toward both countries have since tempered their outrage, their worldviews have continued to converge, especially after the December 13 terrorist attack on the Indian parliament. Indeed, New Delhi's demands that Pakistan uproot its terrorist infrastructure almost seem borrowed from Ariel Sharon.
But the growing affinity between India and Israel is not merely strategic. It stems from more than a fear of terrorism or a struggle against radical Islam. It is also cultural: The mutual attraction of two Asian democracies, born around the same time in traumatic partition attempts, rooted in religious culture but devoted to secularism. Israel and India--countries with a 40-year history of suspicion and ill will--increasingly view one another not simply as sharing a common enemy, but a common purpose. So when the world changed on September 11, each knew exactly where to turn.
India's hostility to Zionism dates from the 1920s, when the leaders of its independence movement, trying to solidify a Hindu-Islamic alliance against Britain, sided with the Arabs over Palestine. Mahatma Gandhi set the tone. Palestine, he wrote in 1938, "belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French." In an anguished letter in 1939, the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber pleaded: "You, Mahatma Gandhi, who know of the connection between tradition and future, should not associate yourself with those who pass over our cause without understanding or sympathy." The appeal had no effect. Gandhi remained hostile to the Jewish return, and India voted against the UN partition of Palestine in 1947. India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, a close ally of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, helped define the nonalignment bloc's reflexive anti-Israel stance.
Not until the collapse of the Soviet Union, India's ally and the leader of the international campaign to delegitimize Israel, followed by the 1991 Middle East peace conference in Madrid--which further enhanced Israel's diplomatic standing--did India allow full diplomatic relations. The 1998 rise to power of the Hindu nationalist party, BJP--a party less beholden to the nonaligned movement's foreign policy traditions than the long-serving Congress--also furthered the rapprochement. But as recently as the late 1990s the relationship remained tentative. Indian security experts would slip into Israel, hoping to avoid publicity that could upset India's Muslims and jeopardize the country's still-close relations with the Arab world.
Today, however, hardly a week passes without a wellpublicized military delegation or government entourage from one country arriving in the other. In early January, Shimon Peres visited India, and an elite Israeli anti-terrorist unit hosted an Indian security team. The Indian communications minister has just come to Jerusalem, and the Israeli defense minister is heading for New Delhi. Prime Minister Sharon and Indian President Kocheril Raman Narayanan are planning trips. Nonmilitary bilateral trade has grown at least fivefold in the last decade, to more than one billion dollars. Israel has also become India's second-largest arms supplier after Russia, and India may now be Israel's largest arms purchaser. India wants to upgrade its Soviet-era planes and tanks; and Israel has a reservoir of Soviet-trained engineers and experience in adapting captured Soviet equipment to its needs. Several billion dollars worth of arms deals have either been signed or are imminent--including a joint venture to upgrade hundreds of Soviet-era Indian planes as well as Indian purchases of Israeli sea-to-sea missiles and bordermonitoring systems. And after weeks of uncertainty, Washington has given Israel the go-ahead for a billion-dollar sale of Phalcon spy planes to India (but has apparently asked Israel to wait until the current Pakistan-India crisis eases). The friendship has grown so overt that in recent months an anguished debate has broken out in the Palestinian press over who lost India.
eyond the shared interests and fears, what energizes the new relationship is romance. As in the United States in the 1960s, a generation of young Israelis has fallen in love with India. Several times a year, tens of thousands of young Israelis gather in nature reserves for Indian-style festivals, with canvas-covered chai shops and stalls selling Indian clothes and music. Over the last decade, perhaps a quarter-million Israelis, most of them just out of the army, have visited India. When India's ambassador to Israel, Raminder S. Jassal, walks the streets in his Sikh turban, young Israelis often press their palms in the traditional greeting of Namaste; sometimes he is addressed by Israelis in Punjabi. "I haven't experienced this kind of love for India elsewhere," he says.
Even religious Jews and Hindus are discovering surprising parallels. Hinduism and Judaism are the "root faiths" from which most of the world's major religions have grown. Both are ritualistic, with complex mystical systems; both are confined to a specific people. "India is one of the few countries where my hosts immediately grasp my kosher needs," says Efraim Inbar, director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University. "I can ask them whether dairy food has been cooked in a pot used for meat, and they don't look at me like I've fallen from the moon."
In fact, the two nations don't only face common external challenges; they face common internal ones as well. They are both ancient civilizations uneasily reborn as secular democracies, struggling with religion's place in their national identities. "I don't know of any other countries besides India and Israel where [religious] myth is so alive, but also where the struggle is so intense to keep myth from turning into political fundamentalism," comments Melila Hellner-Eshed, who teaches Jewish mysticism at Jerusalem's Hebrew University. In India, she says, "secular Israelis can relax and open themselves up to spirituality in a way that the politics of religion doesn't allow them to do at home."
Their absence of a biblical culture also allows Indians to develop a pristine relationship with Jews, free of the positive or negative memories that inevitably affect the relationship among Jews, Christians, and Muslims. "Indians very much admire Israel as a brave little country that has managed to be successful despite tremendous problems," says journalist Eric Silver, who heads the Israel-India Cultural Association. "I met one hotel keeper who prided himself on owning every book ever published about Moshe Dayan. Sometimes, though, it's embarrassing: Hindus would tell me with appreciation, `You Israelis know how to handle the Muslims.'"
ndeed, critics might conclude that the Israeli-Indian alliance is based on little more than hostility to Islam. But last week, when I met a dozen editors from Indian newspapers who were visiting Israel on a foreign ministry-sponsored trip, the Indian journalists vehemently rejected that notion. "India's Muslims aren't a `religious minority,'" explained one editor, "but as Indian as anyone else." India's affinity for Israel, they insisted, was based on a deep sense that to truly fight terrorism you must experience it as a daily reality. "There's a lot of talk in Delhi about the possibility of an Israeli-Indian anti-terrorism alliance, independent of the Americans," said Shobori Ganguli of The Pioneer. Joyeeta Basu of The Asian Age concurred: "America suffered a one-time attack. Until September 11 they didn't understand anything about terrorism; even now I'm not sure how much they really understand. America doesn't face the threat of attacks across its borders. That is something India and Israel share. The American war on terrorism won't solve India's or Israel's problems. We may have to do that together."
The day after our meeting, a terrorist shot up a downtown street in Jerusalem, killing two people and wounding 14. That same day in Calcutta, terrorists shot up an American cultural center, killing four policemen and wounding 20 people. Israel and India never felt closer.
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