THE GAZA APOCALYPSE AND INDIA’S GUILT
Harsh Mander
Among the Narendra Modi regime’s gravest moral and political transgressions is its support of Israel’s genocidal war and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people in Gaza
ON 4 FEBRUARY, just two weeks after he took over the office of the president of the United States for the second time, Donald Trump shocked the world with his plan for Gaza. Overtaken, as it seemed, by a sudden epiphany, aiming to resolve one of the world’s most tangled conflicts, Trump announced the plan during a press conference with Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It was, from his point of view, breathtakingly simple. “I don’t think people should be going back to Gaza,” he said. “Why would they want to return The place has been hell.”
The United States had helped Israel reduce a centuries-old home of the Palestinian people to rubble, and was now telling them that it was not in their interest to ever return. Instead, according to Trump, Gaza “would be turned over to the United States by Israel at the conclusion of fighting,” after Palestinians had “already been resettled in far safer and more beautiful communities, with new and modern homes, in the region.”
Gaza was to be redeveloped into a “Riviera of the Middle East” owned by the United States. People from around the world who could afford it would be welcome to buy property and enjoy its spectacular sea views and invigorating sea breezes. Everyone would be welcome, that is, except the original residents of this land.
Trump did not explain by which international law this was to be done, how a government could just “turn over” the occupied land of a sovereign people to a third power, or who would finance this rebuilding.
Trump’s plan was so unhinged and merciless, transparently amounting to ethnic cleansing, that even many of the closest allies of the United States publicly rejected and condemned it. However, amid global outrage and revulsion, there was one significant voice that was thunderously silent. The Indian government did not express one word of concern or condemnation of Trump’s pitiless, disdainful and casually lawless plan to expel all Palestinians from Gaza and build a real-estate paradise there instead.
When the history of India’s profoundly troubled current times is written, there will doubtless be a great deal that the Narendra Modi-led government will be held to account for – the choking of democracy; the state-fuelled hate targeting India’s Muslim, Christian and other minority citizens; the surge of oligarchic capitalism; the enfeeblement of a developmental state; levels of economic inequality even higher than in colonial times. Also very high on the list of the Modi regime’s gravest moral and political transgressions will surely be its barely tacit support for the genocidal war and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people in Gaza – crimes against humanity unleashed with unmitigated savagery by the Israeli government, armed and financed zealously by Western powers.
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FROM THE DAY he was sworn in for a second term in the most powerful office in the world, Trump has let loose a battery of shocking policy statements and decisions. These carry the potential to upturn our world, to make it much more unsafe and much less hopeful for billions of impoverished and persecuted communities, including immigrants. Yet even by his abysmal standards, Trump’s chillingly cavalier and mind-numbingly cruel plan for “solving” the Gaza problem stirred consternation and disbelief in most of the world.
Netanyahu, on a new high after Trump’s announcement on Gaza, said in an interview with Israel’s Channel 14 that Palestinians should establish a state in Saudi Arabia rather than in their homeland – which, historically, would take in present-day Israel, Gaza and the West Bank. He described Palestinian statehood as a “security threat to Israel”. He invoked 7 October 2023, when the Palestinian organisation Hamas launched a devastating raid out of Gaza on Israeli territory, setting off the Gaza war. “There was a Palestinian state, it was called Gaza,” Netanyahu said “Gaza, led by Hamas, was a Palestinian state, and look at what we got!”
As to what the United States would do with what was Palestinian territory – land that the majority of countries in the United Nations General Assembly hoped would be part of an independent Palestinian state in a “two-state solution” to the Isreal–Palestine conflict – Trump was entirely unencumbered by the most elementary human compassion or considerations of international law. He thought as the real-estate tycoon that he is.
Asked later in an interview with Fox News whether Palestinians in Gaza would have a right to return to the territory under his plan, Trump replied, “No, they wouldn’t because they’re going to have much better housing.” Instead, the newly developed Gaza would have hotels, office buildings and homes, “and we’ll make it exciting.” He added, “I can tell you about real estate. They’re going to be in love with it.”
It turned out that this plan was perhaps not a spontaneous outpouring from Trump’s unbounded imagination. The UK-based channel Middle East Eye pointed out that Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, had been advocating for a plan closely mirroring Trump’s for at least a year. It noted Kushner’s observation back in February 2024 that “Gaza’s waterfront property … could be very valuable.” Kushner had added, “It’s a little bit of an unfortunate situation there, but I think from Israel’s perspective, I would do my best to move the people out and then clean it up.” Kushner was Trump’s West Asia adviser during his first tenure as president.
“You’re talking about probably a million and a half people,” Trump said to reporters this January. “We just clean out that whole thing and say: ‘You know, it’s over.’”
The most poignant and compelling opposition to Trump’s plan for ethnic cleansing came from the Palestinian people themselves. “We came very close to dying, but we survived with the grace of God,” a Gaza resident, Moeen Mohsen, said to reporters of CBS News. “Unfortunately, there came a decision to displace us. We reject it in its entirety. We are still holding on to our right to live.”
France issued a public statement reiterating its opposition to any forced displacement of the Palestinian population of Gaza. This would constitute “a serious violation of international law,” it said, and “an attack on the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinians.” In an interview with CNN, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, declared, “You cannot say to two million people, ‘Okay, now guess what You will move.’” He added, “The right answer is not a real-estate operation, this is a political operation.”
Keir Starmer, the prime minister of the United Kingdom, was also categorical in his statement to Britain’s House of Commons. Palestinians in Gaza “must be allowed home,” he said. “They must be allowed to rebuild, and we should be with them in that rebuild on the way to a two-state solution.”
But India remained silent. What a disgraceful fall for this once-proud democracy, once a ringing voice for oppressed peoples around the world – including Palestinians. What a descent for the land of Gandhi and Nehru, of Tagore and Ambedkar, of Maulana Azad and Bhagat Singh.
IT IS NOT just by its culpable silences that India has abetted the devastation of the Palestinian people by the Israeli military. It is also done so by allowing and facilitating the flow of deadly firearms to Israel, many of them used in the destruction of Gaza.
In September last year, I joined 11 concerned citizens in filing a petition before the Supreme Court of India, seeking an immediate suspension of Indian aid to Israel – in particular its military assistance, including military equipment. Other petitioners included the former diplomats Ashok Kumar Sharma and Deb Mukharji, the peace activist Achin Vanaik, the development economist Jean Drèze, the musician T M Krishna, the retired civil servant Meena Gupta and the rights activist Nikhil Dey. Our senior counsel was Prashant Bhushan.
Our petition drew attention to an International Court of Justice (ICJ) judgment of 26 January 2024 that ordered an immediate halt to all killings and destruction being perpetrated by Israel on the Palestinian people. India is bound by various international laws and treaties – such as the 1948 Geneva Convention, to which it is a signatory – that oblige it not to supply military weapons to states guilty of war crimes, as any such weapons export could be used in serious violations of international humanitarian law. United Nations experts have also released a statement warning against the transfer of weapons and ammunition to Israel, which “may constitute serious violations of human rights and international humanitarian laws and risk state complicity in international crimes, possibly including genocide.”
Our petition also referred to a 19 July 2024 judgment from the ICJ, which held that Israel’s sustained abuse of its position as an occupying power, through the use of disproportionate violence against the Palestinian people, violates fundamental principles of international law and renders Israel’s presence in the occupied territory unlawful. We pointed out that “India therefore cannot export any military equipment or weapons to Israel when there is a serious risk these weapons might be used to commit war crimes.”
We also referred to credible reports and public records indicating that Indian authorities had granted licenses to various companies including, a public-sector company, for the export of munitions to Israel after the Gaza war began – and even after the ICJ ruling on possible genocide by Israel. We pointed out that, between 2019 and 2023, the Hyderabad-based Adani-Elbit Advanced Systems India manufactured and exported to Israel the aero-structures and subsystems for more than twenty Hermes 900 military drones. The company is a joint venture between Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer, Elbit Systems, and the Indian conglomerate Adani Group, with Adani holding a controlling stake. Gautam Adani, the head of the Adani Group, is known for his close ties to Modi. Hermes drones similar to those Adani-Elbit has helped build have been used extensively by the Israeli military in Gaza.
The Supreme Court rejected our petition. The bench, presided over by D Y Chandrachud – the chief justice at the time – maintained that the authority and jurisdiction over the country’s foreign affairs are vested exclusively with the Indian government. It observed that for it to grant the reliefs sought by the petitioners, it would have to enter into findings on the allegations raised against Israel, an independent sovereign nation that is not subject to the jurisdiction of Indian courts. It also held that the grant of the reliefs would amount to a judicial injunction for breach of contracts that Indian companies may have entered into with international entities, and that whether to prohibit foreign trade with any country is a matter to be decided solely by the government as per the applicable law.
Al Jazeera has pointed to the duplicity of Israel’s Western allies in also evading their responsibilities under international law to halt arms exports to the country. Macron affirmed that France did not send weapons to Israel between 2019 and 2023, and that the last time it sent weapons to the country was in 1998. He underlined the need to stop delivering weapons to Israel, adding “France is not delivering any.” But France does supply Israel with components used to build weapons.
Germany contributed 30 percent of Israel’s weapon imports between 2019 and 2023, with items including frigates and torpedoes. Its contribution was ten times higher in 2023 compared with 2022. An official spokesperson of the German government declared, “There is no German arms export boycott against Israel.”
The UK government assured its parliament that “no lethal or other military equipment has been provided to Israel by the UK Government since 4 December 2023.” But official data reveals that it did approve 108 licenses for military and non-military goods to be sent to Israel between 7 October 2023 and 31 May 2024.
In November, the senate of the United States rejected a proposal led by the independent senator Bernie Sanders to block a USD 20-billion weapons deal with Israel that had been approved by the administration of the previous US president, Joe Biden. Canada announced that it was halting arms supplies to Israel, but activists allege that Canadian arms exports to the country continue via the United States.
INDIA HAS TRAVELLED a very long way from its fabled friendship with and unwavering support for the Palestinian people during the years of its own freedom struggle and the decades that followed. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s showed great moral clarity in opposing the partition of Palestine – a key step in the creation of Israel in the wake of the German genocide of European Jews during the Second World War. Palestinians, he declared, should not be called upon to pay for the crimes of Europeans.
A fascinating story is told of Albert Einstein writing a four-page letter to Jawaharlal Nehru in June 1947, just two months before India became free. (Incidentally, the towering physicist had turned down an offer to become Israel’s second president.) Nehru, of course, was tipped to be the first Indian prime minister. Einstein lauded India’s constituent assembly, which had just abolished untouchability. He wrote, “The attention of the world was [now] fixed on the problem of another group of human beings who, like the untouchables, have been the victims of persecution and discrimination for centuries” – the Jews. Einstein urged Nehru as a “consistent champion of the forces of political and economic enlightenment” to rule in favour of “the rights of an ancient people whose roots are in the East” and extend Indian support for establishing a Jewish state.
In his reply, Nehru expressed India’s “deepest sympathy for the Jews and for all they have undergone during these past years.” But, he went on to say, “With all our sympathy for the Jews we must and do feel that the rights and future of the Arabs are involved in this question.” He courteously turned down Einstein’s request to endorse the idea of a Jewish state since it would be through “violence and conflict” on the land of others.
Nehru spoke often against the injustice suffered by the Palestinian people, and did so in international forums including the United Nations and the Non-Aligned Movement. India became the first non-Arab country to recognise the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) as the legitimate representative of Palestine and allowed it to open an office in Delhi. It was also among the first wave of countries to recognise Palestinian statehood in 1988. The PLO leader Yasser Arafat famously described the Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi as his sister and wept inconsolably at her funeral. These bonds continued also with her son and immediate successor, Rajiv Gandhi, and Arafat again was present at his funeral.
Nehru, Indira Gandhi and her son were all stalwarts of the Indian National Congress. But in the 1990s, the winds began to shift under another Congress prime minister, P V Narasimha Rao, who began bending towards Israel. Into the early 2000s, under Atal Bihari Vajpayee of the Bharatiya Janata Party – the same party that Modi calls home – the diplomatic turnaround was complete.
At a time when Arafat was virtually incarcerated in his office in Ramallah, in the West Bank, Vajpayee thought it fit to invite the hard-line Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon for a state visit to India. For good measure, before setting out for India, Sharon repeated his earlier call for the physical elimination of Arafat.
New Delhi’s closeness to Tel Aviv persisted even after the Congress retook power under the Manmohan Singh-led government from 2004 to 2014. The journalist John Cherian, in a piece for Frontline, writes that the perception “on the Arab street [was] that New Delhi has become a de facto ally of Israel, using terrorism as the rationale.”
An important straw in the wind was also a visit to Israel by Modi in 2006, when he was the chief minister of the state of Gujarat. This was a time when, shadowed by charges of abetting the mass killings of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, Modi was being denied visas to most Western states. Israel chose to extend him a grand welcome, and found resonance with Modi’s muscular Islamophobia. It also chose to ignore the fulsome admiration for Adolf Hitler among the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the parent organisation of Modi’s BJP and the organisation where he began his political career.
When Modi returned to Israel triumphantly in 2017 as India’s prime minister, Netanyahu and the entire Israeli cabinet turned out to receive him, extending him honours usually reserved for the country’s most special guests, like the US president and the Pope.
IF I WAS speaking only about the complicity of the Indian state in abetting the genocidal crimes of the Israeli state against the Palestinian people, there would be grief enough. But I am also speaking about many Indian people who, spellbound by the ideology of Hindutva, have not just supported Israel’s war in Gaza but also gleefully added to the hate and fake propaganda against the devastated Palestinian people.
The Israeli war was accompanied by a tsunami of fake news online against Palestinians. Many investigators confirmed that a great deal of this content – maybe even the largest quantum of it – was created by Indians. BOOM, a credible Indian fact-checker, found that the original sources of the online hate were very often verified Indian users on X (formerly Twitter), with profiles based in India or containing the Indian flag in their descriptions. These had been “mostly targeting Palestine negatively, or being supportive of Israel,” BOOM reported, and the fake videos that these users purveyed were basically designed to “showcase Palestinians as fundamentally brutal.” One video, for instance, with over six million views, “showed” a Palestinian fighter with dozens of sex slaves; this was actually a video of a school trip from Jerusalem. Another fake video suggested the kidnapping of a child by Hamas. Such videos often were accompanied by violent messages. One Indian account, claiming to belong to a retired Indian soldier, stated, “Israel must finish off Palestine from the planet.”
Mohammed Zubair, who works with the outlet Alt News and is perhaps India’s bravest and most respected fact-checker, made the same observations. Even though he was hardened by years of dedicated fact-checking of hateful content and fake news in India, the deluge of disinformation on Indian social media after 8 October 2023 left him stunned. “The scale of misinformation this time was horrific and unimaginable,” Zubair told The Atlantic. “A grim video of a beheading by a Mexican drug cartel was shared as an attack on Israeli citizens. A nine-year-old photograph of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his son, taken before the latter departed for his military service, was portrayed as the leader sending his offspring to war. Footage of a funeral staged in Jordan to evade a pandemic lockdown was misrepresented as Palestinians faking deaths in Gaza.”
And so I come to what is personally my hardest task in this essay: to hold up a mirror to the Indians who have feverishly celebrated Israel’s war on the Palestinian people, and to show them what this war actually is.
Leading human rights and humanitarian organisations have described Israel’s military offensive in the wake of Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attacks as being genocidal and constituting crimes against humanity. Amnesty International, for instance, has described how Israel has unleashed hell and destruction on Palestinians in Gaza brazenly, continuously and with total impunity. Israel has “persisted in committing genocidal acts, fully aware of the irreparable harm it was inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza,” in brazen defiance of “countless warnings about the catastrophic humanitarian situation and of legally binding decisions from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ordering Israel to take immediate measures to enable the provision of humanitarian assistance to civilians in Gaza.”
Palestinian children gather to receive food during Ramadan in a refugee camp in Gaza. The Indian government did not express any concern or condemnation after the US president Donald Trump described his pitiless plan to expel all Palestinians from Gaza. IMAGO/APAimages
Agnès Callamard, the secretary general of Amnesty International, has testified that “Israel has carried out acts prohibited under the Genocide Convention, with the specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza. These acts include killings, causing serious bodily or mental harm and deliberately inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction. Month after month, Israel has treated Palestinians in Gaza as a subhuman group unworthy of human rights and dignity, demonstrating its intent to physically destroy them.”She added, “Taking into accountthe pre-existing context of dispossession, apartheid and unlawful military occupation in which these acts have been committed, we could find only one reasonable conclusion: Israel’s intent is the physical destruction of Palestinians in Gaza, whether in parallel with, or as a means to achieve, its military goal of destroying Hamas.”
Citing the ICJ order, which said that Israeli authorities “intentionally created conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of Palestinians in Gaza in whole or in part,” Human Rights Watch has concluded that Israeli authorities have committed the crime against humanity of extermination, that this crime is still ongoing, and that Israel’s intentions were unambiguous from the start. Human Rights Watch has cited the example of an order on 9 October 2023 by Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defence minister at the time, calling for a “complete siege” of Gaza. Gallant stated, “There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel, everything is closed.”
Oxfam International has reported that more women and children were killed in Gaza by the Israeli military in the first 12 months of the assault than in the equivalent period of any other conflict in the world over the past two decades. It conservatively estimates these deaths to number more than 6000 women and 11,000 children. Before this, from 2004 to 2021, the highest number of women killed in any conflict in a single year was in Iraq during the Second Gulf War, with over 2600 perishing in 2016. Oxfam’s estimated death toll in Gaza excludes the nearly 20,000 dead who remain unidentified, missing or lost beneath rubble.
At the end of September 2024, The Lancet, one of the world’s leading medical journals, estimated the true number of deaths in Gaza was over 186,000. This was after also taking into account indirect deaths, such as those from starvation and lack of health care. It estimated that more than 25,000 children had either lost a parent or become orphans, leaving them in deep emotional distress. Most children were “grappling with anxiety and severe physical injuries, with many having lost limbs.”
Oxfam International has also pointed out that the Israeli military had relentlessly targeted infrastructure indispensable to survival. “Civilians have been forcibly displaced dozens of times to so-called ‘safe zones’ that fail to meet humanitarian obligations and have also been regularly bombed or attacked,” it reports. In early October 2024, a year after Israel’s bombardment of Gaza began, Oxfam found that civilian infrastructure had “either been completely destroyed or severely damaged, including around 68 per cent of cropland and roads. Only 17 of 36 hospitals remain partially functional, and all suffer from a lack of fuel, medical supplies, and clean water.”
The humanitarian organisation Médecins sans frontières (MSF) said in December 2024 that Israeli forces had prevented essential items such as food, water and medical supplies from entering Gaza on numerous occasions, and had also blocked, denied and delayed humanitarian assistance. “People in Gaza are struggling to survive apocalyptic conditions, but nowhere is safe, no one is spared, and there is no exit from this shattered enclave,” Christopher Lockyear, the secretary general of MSF, said after visiting Gaza.
The United Nations pointed to a pattern of destruction of Gaza’s hospitals by Israeli forces that had pushed its healthcare system to the “point of almost complete collapse.” In a report covering the period from 7 October 2023 to 30 June 2024, it found that “22 out of 38 hospitals across Gaza had been rendered non-functional.” The pattern of attacks included “missile strikes on hospital buildings, the destruction of hospital facilities, shooting of civilians, sieges, as well as temporarily taking over the hospital buildings.”
The Middle East Eye reported that during attacks on the al-Shifa and Kamal Adwan hospitals in Gaza, Israeli forces first bombarded the area outside the hospitals, then cut off supplies, rendered generators inactive, and sparked fires within hospital departments. Israeli troops then stormed the hospitals and forced many of the remaining staff and patients to strip almost naked before detaining them. The director of al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza, Dr Mohammed Abu Salmiya, was jailed for seven months for trying to save lives. The hospital’s head of orthopaedic medicine, Dr Adnan al-Bursh, was allegedly tortured to death in Israeli custody.
“It will take generations to recover from the devastating impacts of this war,” Oxfam International concluded.
Even now, at the time I write this, the Palestinians’ torment is far from over. During the always fragile two-month ceasefire in Gaza from mid-January 2025, the Israeli military continued its hostilities in the West Bank, the other occupied Palestinian territory, demolishing houses, arresting people and even killing civilians on the pretext of anti-militant operations. On 18 March, in the middle of the holy month of Ramadan, Israel unilaterally resumed hostilities, carrying out airstrikes on Gaza that reportedly killed hundreds of Palestinians. The grim toll of attacks and casualties continues to rise.
With this rising toll, we continue to get stories of Palestinian courage. On 24 March, an Israeli airstrike killed the 23-year-old Palestinian journalist Hossam Shabat. Hours after he was killed, his team shared a note that he had written anticipating his death. In the note, he describes the overwhelming difficulties of documenting the war on Gaza and its people, and ends with an appeal: “Do not stop speaking about Gaza. Do not let the world look away. Keep fighting, keep telling our stories – until Palestine is free.”
LET ME END this melancholic essay with the agonised words of conscience of Lee Mordechai, an associate professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who has written a brave monograph titled “Bearing Witness to the Israel-Gaza War”.
“We need to disconnect the way we think of genocide as Israelis – gas chambers, death camps and World War II”, he warns his people. A state commits genocide, he clarified, when it acts in concerted ways to ensure “the deliberate destruction of a group.”
Mordechai documents several instances of Israeli soldiers deliberately and cruelly killing civilians with no regard for rules of engagement. For instance, troops of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) “entered a family home and killed the two parents in sight of their children (aged 11, 9 and 5; the youngest, with cerebral palsy, lost his eye to a grenade the soldiers threw).” Israeli soldiers also sent “a handcuffed prisoner to deliver a message to evacuate a hospital in Khan Younis, then shot him as he tried to walk outside the gate. The IDF subsequently bombed the hospital.”
Mordechai details an instance when Israeli soldiers zip-tied the hands of a Palestinian man and then ran over him with a tank while he was still alive. “An image of his mutilated corpse was shared on an Israeli telegram channel with a post stating that ‘You are going to love this!!!’” He writes about a 94-year-old woman with Alzheimer’s being left to die in a burning building and her charred corpse being found later, and about a woman with a child being shot while waving a white flag.
He documents how the IDF has looted the areas it took over and how that looting has been normalised. “One case was featured approvingly in a popular Friday evening news segment, while a prominent Israeli journalist’s Telegram channel shared an image of a table full of money with the caption ‘The [IDF] paratroopers hit the jackpot in Khan Younis.’ Soldiers shared an image of themselves with tens of thousands of shekels (thousands of dollars) … An IDF soldier attempted to sell online a Gazan passport and other items he had looted while serving in Gaza. Another filmed himself sifting what appears to be flour originally delivered to Gaza by humanitarian aid organizations, and cynically thanking them as well as the UN and UNRWA.”
Mordechai’s excruciating record reveals in throbbing, horrific detail the wantonly cruel slaughter of Palestinians, including older and disabled people and children; the prevalence of sexual assault and dehumanisation; the use of starvation as a tool of butchery; triumphal looting, and more.
Mordechai is a young Israeli historian who I have never met. But in his anguish, I find echoes of my own soul. What sustained hate does to a people is frightening and, I fear, enduring coarsening of the spirit. I watch this with dismay among my own compatriots in India – especially those of my own social class – and with trepidation for the kind of world we are leaving for our children and our grandchildren.
I feel the same dismay and trepidation as Mordechai does for the people of Israel. Just generations ago, Jews were subjected to cruel extinction on a scale and with a brutality that is still hard to imagine. How can a state formed in response to that such savagery now allow, encourage and even valorise actions that lead it down the same genocidal path against another hapless people Just decades after many of their ancestors survived genocide themselves, how can the Israeli people unleash genocide on another people
Refaat Alareer, a Palestinian poet and academic who was killed in an Israeli airstrike on Gaza in December 2023, appealed to Israeli soldiers’ sense of history and humanity in his poem ‘I am you’.
I am just you.
I am your past haunting
Your present and your future.
I strive like you did.
I fight like you did.
I resist like you resisted
In a later section, he continues,
All you have to do
Is close your eyes
(Seeing these days
Blinds our hearts.)
Close your eyes, tightly
So that you can see
In your mind’s eye.
Then look into the mirror.
One. Two.
I am you.
I am your past.
And killing me,
You kill you.
Every Indian who supports Israel’s Gaza war needs to heed the same reminder by Alareer: I am you. I am just you.
In the decades that lie ahead, it is not just the ravaged people of Palestine, tortured with more cruelty than any other people in this century, who will struggle to recover, heal and rebuild. It will be equally hard for the Israeli people to heal and reclaim their humanity after supporting this war, aided and abetted by Western powers and India. They will have to find once again their souls, their capacity for simply being human to other people, their capacity to feel the pain of another.
In this time of the unending apocalypse in Gaza, may each of us – both those who bear silent witness and those who are active cheerleaders of the brutal war – search in our souls for our submerged capacities for humanism. As the Palestinian-American professor and political activist Edward Said reminded us: “Humanism is the only – I would go so far as saying the final – resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history.”
Harsh Mander is a peace and justice activist and a writer. He leads Karwan e Mohabbat, a people’s initiative of solidarity and atonement working with survivors of lynchings and hate violence in India. He chairs the Centre for Equity Studies in Delhi, and is a visiting faculty member at Heidelberg University in Germany, the Vrije University Amsterdam, and the University of York in the United Kingdom.