Shalom Israel!...

Mr Indrajit Hazra’s article about Israel and Palestine touched a note across lot of places. I wrote a mail to the HT and him, among others. So did many others I am sure, a few of which found a place the on the edit page of HT, the next Sunday. One mail, by a Mr. Obaid Nasir was particularly emotional. It went on to the extent of linking Islam terrorism to the creation of Israel. While it doest need rocket science to understand that the majority of the followers of a JuD or HUJI or all other Pakistani outfits probably can not point out Israel-Palestine on a world map, it needs some element of understanding about Israel. There is a fat book called “O Jerusalem” that might enlighten those who are really keen to comment on this particular crisis. But for the rest of us all, who do not have the time or the resources to read a real fat book, here is a carry forward, a sort of a counter argument to Mr. Hazra’s column. (And a personal tribute to Indrajit Hazra - for being one of my most favorite observers of modern times)

So? Israel has been trying to raze Gaza to ground since a few weeks now, and this massive onslaught has been nearly unstoppable. Even UN intervention doesn’t seem to have managed to melt the ice. In hindsight, this seems like Israel’s distance-learning program-offer to India on how to handle terrorism.

I am not for once, saying that whatever is happening is right. As Mr Hazra says, Israel and Palestine are so deep rooted an affair, and endless intertwining of cause and effect, of history and religion, of so high quality international muck, that they have little or no parallel across the whole world; and at 2009, we are far removed from the rights and the wrongs. I agree to that. Even Kashmir doesn’t have depths that run back to thousands of years till the birth of Christ. Then what new am I trying to say?

I am amazed – that’s what.

For those who are not good with Middle East geography, please visualize that you live in a country that is probably the size of West Bengal (or a bit bigger). Down southwest you have Egypt, ruled by the descendants of a religion that uprooted the Copts (or the off springs of the famous Egyptian Civilization) many hundreds of years ago. Egypt is arguably the strongest Islamic nation, complete with rock-solid governance and (probable) nuclear power. On the other side you have Jordan. When this strip of a nation of yours came to existence in 1948, Jordan was ruled by one of the descendants of Prophet Muhammad’s family. You have Lebanon on your north that celebrates weekly holidays by shooting rockets on your borders – thus inflicting civilian casualties and economic damages. And you have Syria – and all these nations have one thing in common: they don’t like you one bit, because you have a different religion and you have settled in a piece of land that was theirs for hundreds of years. Oh yes, you face Islamic terrorist outfits like Hezbollah, that have been near-legitimized across your neighborhood nations – you wake up with them every morning in fact. Finally, across the open border on one side you have Mediterranean Sea, beyond which lies Europe, your thousand years old torture chamber cum burial ground. Hope you get the drift now. There is no place to hide.

Internally your land is not half as productive as the fertile Ganges plain of West Bengal. It is a mix of wasteland, desert, rocky patches, and extreme temperatures – in short, copybook wilderness. But you have settled there as a part of your destiny, because your religious forefathers called it The Promised Land, and you have worked relentlessly to make it as productive as possible. To add to your emotions there is a spot on your map called Jerusalem - your holiest city, which incidentally is also deemed to be the holiest of shrines by both Muslims and Christians. They share it with you, and you don’t see eye to eye with them on anything at all. So when you were forced to leave Europe or Middle East or wherever you were being persecuted for centuries, and landed up on this patch of wilderness, you faced bloody opposition. You probably wouldn’t have faced such stiff an opposition, because Jews and Muslims peacefully co-existed in Palestine for centuries, but for the old British outlook of ‘divide and rule’. The Anglo Imperialist poured an incredible amount of venom in the minds of the local Arabs – belonging to both Islam and Christian sect. So, you had to fight even before your inception. You fought with literally no hardware because no government in the world supported your birth. You had high and mighty opponents – the outgoing British Kingdom politics, the combined wrath of seven or eight Islamic nations, the Arab-German coalition, and Bedouin mercenaries. The moment the British mandate on Palestine expired, all of them collapsed on you, from all possible sides. It’s a miracle that you survived! You lost your near and dear ones, maybe a wife or sons or daughters, but you emerged victorious - Time after time after time! You needed a place in this world you could call your own, the least of your birthright, as you have known from your Holy Book. And you had to wrestle it because other religions from your lineage did not want to give you even that bit – though they own more than three quarters of this wide world in terms of real estate. And your fight for survival is not over yet – you still fight, not in the metaphoric sense, but you fight with guns and tanks. To defend your territory. And that is what amazes my Indian mind.

Theoretically speaking, if it were so, could we have survived the Israel way till today? Three generations of guts, where every civilian is combat trained. A narrow strip of wasteland that has built one of the highest rated Army, Intelligence and Defense Hardware in modern world, in a little over sixty years. A contemporary nation, that rose from being fatal cocktail of Nazi concentration camp survivors, nomads and perfectly ignorant orthodox local Jews – to the defiant state that it is today. Surrounded by enemy states several times larger than itself across all sides but calling shots the way it wants. Mind boggling for starters isn’t it? Back home, think of Kargil, of Parliament attack, of Flight 814 hi-jack, of cross border infiltration in Kashmir and West Bengal, of Bombay attacks, of the blast affected cities… think of the unguarded coastline, of sleepy intelligence, of Mayawati and Amar Singh. Even we are of the same age as Israel.
Even theoretically, I wonder if we could survive.