Mihir S Sharma: Seeing Gaza from Delhi

For many Indians my age, Israelis were the first foreigners we met. They were the first people born outside our borders we had a beer with, the first whom we discussed politics with. For many of us - including me - the nature of Israeli identity, wrought out of the hundreds of different national Jewish traditions that have intertwined in the Zionist project, is a source of endless fascination; and the resilience of that identity, and of these hundreds of Jewish traditions, a matter of admiration. Besides other South Asians, Israelis are the foreigners with which we can most readily identify.
 

So the question that Indians my age continually ask each other is: why does Israel seek so often to alienate us?

I'm not speaking of the policy of the Israeli state. Most of us can separate a government's actions from the nature of a country. Under its current prime minister, Israel may have launched a series of attempts to batter Palestinian opposition into submission. But it is difficult for any of us to drum up sympathy for Hamas, either; its very definition of an obscurantist, authoritarian organisation, and that it has done works of social service in Gaza should in no way distinguish it from groups such as Hafiz Saeed's in Pakistan. That Gazans have become the primary victims of Hamas' bloodthirstiness and Israel's disproportionate, dehumanising and cynical response is tragic.

This is perhaps the most pro-Israel telling of the story possible. Like many liberals elsewhere - including an ever-growing number of Jewish Americans - those in India sympathetic to Israelis and accepting of the permanence of the Israeli state might still wish to condemn the policy of the current democratically elected government of Israel. Just as we can condemn the acts of the democratically elected leaders of Gaza, Hamas; and have occasionally condemned the acts of our own leaders.

But the abnormal paranoia of the Israeli state makes it hard for us to raise these questions, as we would of a normal state.

Last week, the Delhi police arrested, with the use of considerable and completely unnecessary force, students and activists who were protesting against operations in Gaza near the Israeli embassy on Delhi's Aurangzeb Road. There was no threat to life or property from these protestors. (We know this because many of them have protested other things before, and there was no inconvenience whatsoever caused by the objects of those protests.) The policemen at the local station complained that there was considerable pressure on them to settle the protests in this way from the ministry of external affairs - and that the embassy's own security people had been bullying them, too.

Part of life in Delhi is enduring difficult encounters with Israeli security. I remember with particular amusement one occasion, a performance organised by the Italian embassy many years ago; the Israeli ambassador was there, as was Sonia Gandhi. The burly guards of the Israeli ambassador actually tried to shut the door on the Special Protection Group men charged with protecting Gandhi. They almost came to blows. Near me, a senior member of the Intelligence Bureau was holding his head in his hands, audibly groaning his dismay.

I have friends who, lounging around with a cigarette outside the French Cultural Centre opposite the Israeli embassy, have been roughed up and threatened with arrest by plainclothes men from the embassy. Kashmiri boys staying at Jammu and Kashmir House on Prithviraj Road are regularly warned about Israeli securitymen. On one occasion a few years ago, I was told brusquely by a posse of hefty men to immediately leave the upper floor of a Khan Market restaurant, because a senior Israeli diplomat wanted to have lunch there. Such experiences, and what they reveal to outsiders about the hard security state that Israel has become, are difficult to share with Israelis themselves - given how very charming they are when one meets them otherwise.

Nor does this happen only in India. Just last month, in Stockholm, I was walking down a road near my hotel - the quickest way to a local coffee shop, and one I had taken cheerfully many times - when a man stepped into it in front me of and put a hand against my chest. "For you, the road is closed," he said. I protested, pointing out that people were walking by that he wasn't stopping. I asked for ID; he gave me none. When I protested further, he firmly turned me around and gave me a push in the direction I had come from. Spotting a police car at the end of the road, I marched up to it with irritation. Two Swedish policemen got out of it apologetically. An Israeli minister was in town, they said, and visiting a synagogue on that road. They had orders to let his security guards operate with impunity. One of them, stroking his beard, dropped his voice and apologised. "It is embarrassing for us," he said. "That man has been stopping everyone with a beard, and only them. This is not how we do things here."

Israel's diplomats deserve security. Remember, in 2012 they were the target of co-ordinated bombs. But other countries, too, are unpopular - the Pakistanis' First Secretary was attacked by a mob last year, and the Americans are nowhere the most welcome of people. But both countries handle their difficult situation with far less paranoia or profiling. Israel has not passed this test.

Israel is a small country, constantly worried about existential threats. We try to cut it some slack. But we know what we experienced; and now we have also all seen, on our TVs, the horrors to which state paranoia can lead.

mihir.sharma@bsmail.in