Pope Francis is a man of conscience. He is also a man of courage. At a time when few major non-Muslim religious leaders have dared to criticise Israel’s relentless aggression against Palestinians in Gaza and innocent civilians in Lebanon, the Pontiff of the Vatican spoke his mind.
Last month, on 30 September, when he was asked about Israel’s attacks in Gaza and Lebanon, he said these have been “immoral” and “disproportionate”. He even remarked that Israel’s military domination has gone beyond the rules of war. Which Hindu religious leader has said anything remotely condemnatory of Israel’s actions?
What is happening in West Asia (called the ‘Middle East’ by Westerners) is a human catastrophe. For the past year, Israel has been pounding the Gaza Strip (which has been under Israeli blockade since 2007) with bombs day after day, week after week, month after month.
In September, it escalated the violence by bombing neighbouring Lebanon. Iran escalated the conflict further by raining ballistic missiles on Israel, most of which were intercepted by its air defence system. Israel pledged to retaliate. Its strikes are sure to be unprecedented in ferocity. More deaths. More destruction. Oil prices will soar. The global economy will be badly hit. Who can remain indifferent when a regional war is looming?
We should question not only the silence of Hindu religious leaders but also the stance of India’s political leaders who swear by Hindutva. Almost without exception, they are supporting Israel and rationalising all its actions in the name of its right to self-defence. As if Palestinians have no right to self-defence at all.
As I will explain later, by condoning Israel’s brutalities and ignoring Palestinians’ just struggle for freedom, they are violating India’s ─ including the BJP’s own ─ previous principled approach to this conflict.
Morally Wrong to Confuse Cause and Effect
Agreed, Hamas and Hezbollah are terrorist organisations. They resorted to violent crimes that deliberately targeted not only Israel’s military establishments but also innocent Israeli citizens. Their violent methods, inspired by religious extremism, can never yield the desired goal of Palestinian freedom. However, in order to understand the crisis in West Asia in a historically truthful and morally defensible manner, five points cannot be forgotten.
First, how many Israelis died in the Hamas attack on 7 October last year? The Israeli government has reported the deaths of 1,195 people, including the later deaths of some of the hostages held by Hamas. Of these, 815 were civilians. Now, how many Palestinians in Gaza have the Israeli military killed in the past year? Over 42,000. According to Oxfam, the victims include more than 6,000 women and 11,000 children.
Nearly 300 humanitarian aid workers have been killed, and among them, more than two-thirds of them are UN staff. Israel has also destroyed or damaged two-thirds of the buildings in Gaza. These buildings include hospitals, schools, and universities. According to the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, Israel has dropped more than 70,000 tons of bombs on Gaza since last October, far surpassing the bombing of Dresden, Hamburg, and London combined during World War II.
All this in the name of defeating Hamas.
Second, if proportionality is at all a reasonable factor in assessing who is right and wrong in a conflict, here is an even more damning fact. In the numerous episodes of violence between Palestine and Israel since 1948, around 10,000 Israelis have been killed as against the nearly 186,000 Palestinians dead due to direct and indirect causes. In contrast to a negligible number of Israelis forced to live abroad due to the conflict, more Palestinians (six million) today live outside their homeland than in the prison-like enclaves of the West Bank (three million) and Gaza Strip (two million). Remember, the number in Gaza refers to a reality before Israel’s ethnic cleansing began last year.
Third, over 1,000 people have been killed in Lebanon in the past month alone. And within days of assassinating Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s top leader, along with a large number of top functionaries, Israel also invaded Lebanon, a sovereign country, by sending its ground troops. This is its fourth invasion of Lebanon; the previous aggressions happened in 1978, 1982, and 2006. The worst aggression was in 1982 when between 15000 and 20000 people (mostly Palestinians and Lebanese) were killed.
The point to remember here is that long before Hamas and Hezbollah were born (in 1987 and 1982 respectively), Israel had been committing atrocities on the Palestinians and the Lebanese. This shows that Hamas and Hezbollah are the products of, and not the reason for, the relentless violent actions of Israel. This does not lessen the guilt of Hamas and Hezbollah, but if we blame the effect more than the cause ─ worse still, if we condone the cause altogether and blame only the effect, as many BJP supporters in India are now doing ─ then it means there is something wrong with our moral compass.
Fourth, today’s Israel was established in 1948 after displacing Palestinians from their ancestral homeland, where they had been living for centuries. After the 1967 war in which Israel defeated the Arab states, it occupied more Palestinian land, including Jerusalem (which is holy to Jews, Christians and Muslims alike), almost doubled its territory, and built illegal Jewish settlements on that land. Since then, this policy of more occupation and more settlements has continued unabated. Since its establishment in 1948, Israel has never defined its borders, and its borders keep on expanding outwards. All this makes it a settler state, an expansionist state.
Flouting UN Resolutions and ICJ Ruling
According to international law, Israel’s borders are those of 4 June 1967 ─ that is, before the start of the 6-day Israel-Arab war. Numerous resolutions of the United Nations General Assembly have called upon Israel to withdraw to its pre-1967 boundaries. Israel’s right to exist has never been denied by the world community. The clock of history cannot be reversed, and Israel cannot be erased from the world map. However, what an overwhelming majority of countries want is for the creation of an independent Palestinian state after Israel’s withdrawal to its pre-1967 status, and for the two states to co-exist peacefully.
As recently as on 19 July 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) adjudged Israel's presence in the occupied Palestinian territory as illegal. It asked Tel Aviv to dismantle its settlements, provide reparations to Palestinian victims, and facilitate the return of displaced people.
Furthermore, the ICJ also ruled that Israel's actions violate international laws, including those prohibiting racial segregation and apartheid. Last month, the UN General Assembly overwhelmingly supported the ICJ ruling and urged Israel to withdraw from Palestinian territories within one year. (Unconscionably, India was among the 43 abstentions in a vote that was carried by 124 countries, with 14 opposing.)
However, Israel has rejected this world opinion contemptuously. In July this year, the Knesset (Israel’s parliament) overwhelmingly voted against an independent Palestinian state. The resolution stated, “The Knesset of Israel firmly opposes the establishment of a Palestinian state west of Jordan. The establishment of a Palestinian state in the heart of the Land of Israel will pose an existential danger to the State of Israel and its citizens, perpetuate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and destabilize the region.”
When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a bellicose speech at the United Nations last month, his first since the beginning of the Gaza war, he displayed a map that showed Palestinian territories ─ both the West Bank and Gaza ─ as part of Israel. In other words, as far as Israel is concerned, Palestine doesn’t even exist.
If this is not expansionism, what is?
In a recent article titled Israel's Ideology of Genocide Must Be Confronted and Stopped, Prof Jeffrey Sachs, a renowned American scholar and one of the fiercest critics of his country’s blind support to Israel, has rightly commented that “Israel’s violent extremists believe that Israel has the Biblical license, indeed a religious mandate, to destroy the Palestinian people.”
What accounts for Israel’s impunity? According to Prof Sachs, “There are many sources of this Israeli brazenness, the most important being the backing of Israel by US military power. Without the US military backing, Israel could not possibly rule over an Apartheid regime in which Palestinian Arabs constitute nearly half of the population yet hold none of the political power. Future generations will look back in amazement at the success of the Israel Lobby in manipulating the US military to the severe detriment of US national security and global peace.”
Jimmy Carter, Gandhi, Deendayal Upadhyaya and Vajpayee… What They said
No less a person than Jimmy Carter, former President of the US (he turned 100 on 1 October) has called Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land illegal. On 12 March 2006, he wrote an article titled Colonisation of Palestine Precludes Peace published on the website of his own Carter Centre (and republished by Ha'aretz, Israel’s leading daily and at least 70 other newspapers worldwide).
“For more than a quarter century,” he opened, “Israeli policy has been in conflict with that of the United States and the international community. Israel's occupation of Palestine has obstructed a comprehensive peace agreement in the Holy Land.” He reminded Tel Aviv that the “universally adopted UN Resolution 242 has mandated Israel’s withdrawal from the occupied territories”. His conclusion: “The pre-eminent obstacle to peace is Israel's colonisation of Palestine.”
It is not out of context to mention here that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s unwillingness to criticise Israel’s “colonisation” is at variance with India’s principled stand since the beginning of the problem. “Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English, or France to the French,” Mahatma Gandhi wrote in an article in his newspaper Harijan in 1938.
Gandhi had deep sympathies for the Jewish people because of the persecution they faced and the Holocaust they suffered in Hitler’s Germany. But he categorically stated, “It is wrong and inhumane to impose the Jews on the Arabs…It would be a crime against humanity.”
What about Pandit Deendayal Upadhyaya, the ideological guru of the BJP and its earlier avatar, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh? When the Arab-Israel war broke out in 1967, and almost everybody became pro-Israeli, he had a word of caution, "We should not become blindly pro-Israel just because the Congress is blindly pro-Arab. We should not view the world as if it were peopled by angels and devils. We must judge issues on merit (quoted in LK Advani’s autobiography, page 147).”
Even Atal Bihari Vajpayee, when he became India’s foreign minister in the Janata Party’s government in 1975, was forthright in stating that Israel had illegally occupied Palestinian land, which it must vacate. He said it must go back to the pre-1967 position and enable Palestinians to establish their independent state.
And this is my fifth and most important point. Palestinians are not an independent nation. Hence, they do not have a proper state like any free nation does. Not being an independent nation, they do not have an army that operates like an independent armed force of any free country. Now, let’s ask ourselves this question: If their land is occupied, if their people are displaced, if their properties are destroyed and if their children, women and men are killed, how do they defend themselves? Don’t they have a right to self-defence?
Two-state Solution Needs Strong Political Will
What is the solution to this seemingly impossible-to-resolve conflict?
The solution is clear to any fair-minded person. Both international law and world opinion call for the two states of Palestine and Israel to coexist, side by side, in peace. Not only the United Nations, not only India, but almost every multilateral organisation has supported this solution. These include the Non-Aligned Movement, the G20, the Arab League, BRICS and others. Even a majority of Israel’s former prime ministers and prominent leaders ─ such as Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak ─ have opined that it is the only viable political solution to the conflict.
The most intransigent opponent of this solution has been Benjamin Netanyahu.
The two-state solution has found greater acceptance on the Palestinian side, with almost all factions showing flexibility and pragmatism. The Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) had earlier demanded the liberation of the whole of Palestine. However, after the Oslo Accord of 1993 with the Israeli government led by Yitzhak Rabin, the PLO, then headed by Yasser Arafat, recognised the state of Israel and also renounced violence.
The PLO also agreed to the creation of a state of Palestine within the 1967 border, even though it meant accepting only 22 percent of the land of historical Palestine. This led to the establishment of the Palestinian Authority (PA), which began to exercise partial civil control over Palestinian enclaves.
Although differences arose between Hamas and PA, with the former rejecting any compromise on Palestinians’ previous demands, the two sides have lately begun a reconciliation process. In July this year, under China’s mediation, 14 Palestinian groups, including Fatah (which controls the West Bank) and Hamas (which controls the Gaza Strip), met in Beijing and signed a “national unity” agreement. This is a highly positive development.
There are some people, both in Israel and in several Muslim countries, who claim the two-state solution cannot work because Jews and Muslims cannot live together. This is not true. In historical Palestine, Arabs and Jews (who were a minority) lived together for centuries. Even today, Arabs constitute 21 percent of Israel’s population. Similarly, there will be some Jews living in tomorrow’s free Palestine. The coexistence of diverse ethnic and religious communities is a universal norm in modern times. Perhaps the best example of a post-conflict success story is South Africa, where black and white communities have continued to live together after the end of apartheid.
It is now more obvious than ever that Israel’s dogged effort to impose a military solution to the longstanding conflict and achieve the mythical goal of ‘Greater Israel’ ─ which will only mean complete surrender by the Palestinians and their near-total displacement from both Gaza and the West Bank ─ will never work. It will only have two consequences: a major regional war and Israel’s further isolation from the global community, with only the neo-conservatives in the US backing it.
To avert this catastrophe, Israel has to unequivocally accept the two-state solution and genuinely guarantee the safety and sovereignty of the Palestinian state. Similarly, Israel’s neighbours and all other Arab nations ─ also Iran ─ must not only accept its right to exist but guarantee its safety and security. In the past, some Iranian leaders have made irresponsible and incendiary statements calling for the erasure of Israel “from the face of the earth”.
Most importantly, the United States must stop being partisan in this conflict, cease the supply of arms to Israel, and act, along with all other major powers of the world (including India), as an honest facilitator of a permanent, just, and peaceful solution to this conflict. Above all, the international community, under the leadership of the UN, must exhibit the requisite political will to compel Israel to accept the verdict of history.
Someday this war will end, as every war in human history has finally ended. But the following lines by the most renowned Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008), will continue to haunt the conscience of humanity.
“The wars will end
and the leaders will shake hands,
and that old woman
will remain waiting for her martyred son,
and that girl
will wait for her beloved husband,
and the children
will wait for their heroic father.
I do not know who sold the homeland
but I know who paid the price.”
The truth is that all of humanity is paying the price of this war in the Holy Land where three great religions ─ Judaism, Christianity and Islam ─ were born.
(The writer, who served as an aide to India’s former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, is the founder of the ‘Forum for a New South Asia – Powered by India-Pakistan-China Cooperation’. He tweets @SudheenKulkarni and welcomes comments at sudheenkulkarni@gmail.com. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)
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