Mazal Tov! My friend Benjamin Netanyahu for your success, wrote India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Modi and Netanyahu have openly stated their closeness to each other as friends, Modi as leader of world’s largest democracy, can not favor any one leader of a friendly nation, overtly as per the diplomatic tradition of India, of not being involved in internal politics of any foreign nation, but the author feels he must have wished dearly for his friend Netanyahu’s victory and now when Netanyahu aced the electoral race in Israel, Modi is really happy. Modi has been really close to two leaders for a really long time, Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and the late Shinzo Abe of Japan. Mr. Netanyahu has several things to do, he has to make Israel strong, and take India along in his tenure as a friend, along with other things for the fulfilling of which the Israeli electorate gave him the mandate to rule. Hashem is the real iron dome of Israel, but the Israelis can not become lackadaisical in matters of security, because God helps those who helps themselves.
Israel has been under threat, of terror and hypocrisy by both foreign state and non state actors, many of whom are waiting to compromise the security architecture of the the only Jewish country in the world. Israel is a the only “real” democracy in West Asia, about which it is can be said in a lighter vein, that like North Korea likes testing missiles regularly, Israel loves having elections regularly. Since the creation of the UNHRC by the United Nations General Assembly, on 15 March 2006 by resolution 60/251, it has proved incapable of stopping egregious human rights abuses by China against East Turkistani Muslims ( Uyghurs ) in so called province of “Xinjiang” which is historically East Turkistan.
Organization of Islamic Cooperation which happens to be a body known for criticizing Israel now and then for violating the human rights of Palestinian Muslims, and labels Israeli army as “occupation forces”. The same organization had it’s 48th Council of Foreign Ministers, organized on 22nd and 23rd March in Pakistan, a country that still does not recognize Israel and has state sponsored anti-Jewishness, a meeting in which no Muslim country except Türkiye present made any statement on China’s violation of human rights of Uyghur Muslims, the pertinent questions are, are Palestinians the only Muslims to be saved as per the Muslim “Ummah”? Not the Eastern Turkish Uyghurs? Will they be silent to Uyghur Muslim’s genocide in China, like they were when Pakistani army was doing genocide of Bengali Muslims in 1971? Do the demands of Baloch Muslims and Shias in Pakistan do not matter for OIC? Then why only raise demand of state formation by the Palestinians and not the Balochistanis, or the Kurds in West Asia who also want an independent sovereign state? What about Muslims of Yemen? Rather than all this, in Pakistan the so called well wisher of Muslim “Ummah”, it’s evergreen friend Chinese Foreign Minister, Wang Yi was invited as a “special guest” for the aforementioned meeting! Well nothing better can be expected from this country, that promotes state-sponsored terrorism, it is the same so called “Islamic country” which committed the genocide of Bengali Muslims, in erstwhile East Pakistan and now Bangladesh, which was liberated by the efforts of Bengali Muslim freedom fighters the “Mukti Bahini”, Indian Army with support from Israel. Machiavellian doctrine “that anything is justified by reason of state” is being shown in action by China and Pakistan, the former showing its unilateral show of strength in the South China Sea, Ladakh in India and against Taiwan, whereas later is an exporter of terror, both ideologically and by men and material across the world, this has become increasingly evident by various terrorist events in the world which have had links to Pakistan.
Why is it that the international system is so biased against Israel? Well, European antisemitism has not been obliterated, and anti-Jewishness has been used for vote bank politics in different Muslim countries, who to blame for your country’s problem? Simple blame the Jews, has been the convenient political tactic employed by anti-Jewish politicians in several countries around the world. In the Turkish series Payitaht Abdul Hamid based on the life of Caliph Abdul Hamid II the main conspirators behind the fall of the Ottoman Empire, have been shown as Jews and not the British who as per a theory circulating were just acting as per the instructions given by the Jews, and the hatred
against Dönmehs, a Jewish sect founded in Salonika (now Thessaloníki, Greece) in the late 17th century, after the conversion to Islam of Shabbetai Tzevi, has grown among Turkish supporters of Erdogan. Rather a new theory is circulating that Mustafa Kemal Ataturk was a Dönmeh, and the fact that the army that came to depose Caliph Abdul Hamid II, was from Thessaloniki the so called capital of “European Jews”. It shows that Jews were anti-Ottoman, the same Ottomans who gave them refuge after the Jewish exile from Iberia after the Reconquista. Jews have had been peaceful subjects of the Ottoman Empire unlike Alevis, Albanians and Turkmans who kept rebelling against Constantinople but still today the Jews are the most demonized by several Turks.
Antisemitism on The Rise
In Italy Galeazzo Bignami, a lawmaker of the rightist Brothers of Italy party who sparked outrage in 2016 after a newspaper published a picture of him wearing a Nazi swastika on his left arm, was named junior infrastructure minister in the new Georgia Meloni government, at-least he mentioned that he felt “profound shame” for the pictures and firmly condemned “any form of totalitarianism,” calling Nazism and any movement connected to it “the absolute evil”. There are still many Politicians around the world who are antisemites and do not mince their words in demonizing the Jews and state of Israel. In 2019, Luciana Berger a member of British parliament, announced her departure from the country’s official opposition. The great niece of a postwar-era Labour government minister, Berger joined the party at age 15 and was parliamentary chair of the Jewish Labour Movement. Labour, she said, had become “ sickeningly institutionally racist ” under the tenure of its leader, Jeremy Corbyn. Before her departure Berger joined several other Jewish female Labour MPs in reading aloud some of the hateful antisemitic invective hurled at them by Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters. Antisemitism is a guiding ideology in India’s neighbor Pakistan’s foreign policy, almost every problem in Pakistan is a “Yahudi conspiracy”.
The author in his earlier article on Israel’s support to Indian war efforts for self defense has pointed out, how India then was overtly apprehensive to show any association with Israel the so called global “pariah”. India was led by a leadership that wanted Israeli support to win wars, but not recognize it overtly, weapons to be supplied to India, by Israel were requested by India to be supplied in ships not flying Israeli National Flag. The fear was obvious, the antisemites in Europe and certain Arab states may get unhappy with India’s closeness with Israel and a developing post-colonial India was at no stage to be a reason for their anger.
Times have changed, as per the latest figures from the International Monetary Fund, India became the world’s fifth largest economy overtaking the United Kingdom. Now, the United States, China, Japan, and Germany are the only nations with economies larger than India’s. India with 1,450,000 active military personnel without conscription has the second biggest army in the world, bigger than the army of United States of America. India is not just a nuclear power now it has strong economic fundamentals. S&P Sovereign & International Public Finance Ratings Director Andrew Wood has said, “The country has built up buffers against cyclical difficulties like those, which we are experiencing right now,”. As per S&P “ India’s strong forex kitty to help it ride out any external challenge”. India emerged as the world’s largest producer and consumer of sugar and the world’s 2nd largest exporter of sugar. India’s agricultural growth has been robust so has been our services sector growth, and with “Make in India” and “Make for the globe” initiative of our PM Modi, we are working hard to boost our manufacturing growth.
India has changed for sure, more urbanized, more educated, richer, more powerful and more self reliant. It has under the leadership of PM Modi broken the shackles of hesitancy and openly embraced it’s all weather friend Israel. If today readers go on social media and read any anti-Israel post and look at the comments section, they will find more Indians than Israelis defending the national interests of Israel. This is not an exaggeration the readers can actually go on social media and see this bonhomie and friendship between Indian and Israeli netizens.
Today in India it is difficult to say any anti Israel thing, on the media because there will be thousands openly supporting Israel, because of the leadership of PM Modi, who showed the way of openly supporting Israel. The world knows that Modi and Netanyahu are close friends, there is no need to write about it, what we require is to use this friendship to actually strengthen the position of India and Israel in the New World Order which is more chaotic, with centres of conflict distributed in different regions of the world. When the free world guided by democratic principles is being challenged by a competent competitor Communist China, which is increasingly trying to show the export viability of it’s political system to other countries.
The vindication of the efficacy of which it mentions is it’s extraordinary rise as an economic power, it becomes increasingly important for India and Israel to work hard to prove the efficacy and competence of democracy as a political system in the modern world. Certain assertions of Realist school of International Relations that there being ‘no one to call’ in an international emergency, and states being actors in realms of anarchy Waltzian ( International Anarchic System ) are being increasingly being proved right, by recent events like the Corona pandemic, that gave rise to subsequent vaccine nationalism and inequality between the prosperous North and the impoverished South mostly post-colonial nations on the other hand, and the Chinese unilateral aggression in the South China Sea.
The judgment by an international tribunal in The Hague came down overwhelmingly in favor of claims by the Philippines but China refused to accept it. With the rise multiple power centers in world politics, India and Israel have to augment each other’s strength to become a pole of stability in this world. Also India needs to understand and fulfill it’s obligations as a declared friend of Israel by supporting Israel at the global forums. There is still some hesitancy and sloth in this matter from India’s side, and Modi and Netanyahu can for sure being good friends work forward in this direction.
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