The big takeaway for Narendra Modi and for India from the prime minister’s recent Israel visit is not the various defence and technology deals he signed with his Israeli counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu. The visit was a heartfelt ‘thank you’ to Israelis, a great people with a long history of suffering for being Jews—first from the Christian nations culminating in the gas chambers and concentration camps of German dictator Adolf Hitler and later from the active and combined military attacks of Muslim-Arab countries.
The political reports from Tel Aviv focus on the defence and wide-ranging technology deals, which are very relevant and useful for our country. But to Indians and to Israelis, equally important is the true friend that Israel was in India’s hour of need.
Recalling them at this juncture is necessary to measure the depth of support for India that the Jewish people showed at every critical year as against the total “diplomatic untouchability” that Nehru’s India practised in relations with the young West Asian nation for three decades.
Pandit Nehru declared in the US in 1950s: “Where freedom is attacked and injustice prevails India cannot and will not be neutral”. Not neutrality, a deliberate pro-Arab leaning and action was what Nehru’s government and Congress regimes followed from the 1960s to the 1990s when several Arab nations (in fact 13 of them, often led by Egypt’s dictator Nasser) attacked Israel from different sides in several wars, terrorist attacks and imposed diplomatic sanctions.
Asked about women and children there, Nasser proudly boasted that they would not exist to be dealt with—hinting they would be eliminated after their menfolk were buried by Arab combined forces. When all this was happening and the Arab assault on Israel without any provocation from Tel Aviv was evident, the great liberal defender of freedom who was ruling India kept his silence.
While we carry a global campaign against terrorism, here is an incident which will fill us with eternal shame. A Palestinian terrorist organisation hijacked a civil aircraft in 1976 and all the Jewish passengers, women and children included, were confined in an airport in Uganda whose dictator Idi Amin gave full support to the hijacking. In a daring operation Israel rescued its people and the Congress regime in New Delhi dilly-dallied, rather than outrightly condemn the crime.
India under successive Nehruvian governments did not allow Indians to travel to Tel Aviv. Our passports were marked “not valid for travel to Israel”. That many travelled through other means is a tribute to the Indian people who admired the Jewish nation for standing up to the Arab-Muslim nations’ pariah treatment of Israel.
It was only in the 1990s when Congress had ditched Nehruvian socialism that a Congress prime minister—not from the Nehru-Gandhi family—dared to end this untouchability and accord full diplomatic status to Israel. But there was not much movement forward.
The Nehruvian Congress was more interested in appeasing the Muslim minority in India rather than stand by a country that was being squeezed to extinction and a people who had suffered gas chamber massacres and concentration camps where the inmates were deliberately starved to enable a dictator to terrorise them into submission.
But a tit for tat was not the policy that Israel followed in its relations with India. In 1962 when China attacked India, Israel rushed important intelligence regarding Chinese military and political moves to India. This was done in complete secrecy; Israel did not reveal it to the world. In 1965 when Pakistan attacked India massively, Israel again rushed with military supplies. Both in 1962 and 1965, none of Nehru’s great non-aligned colleagues had a word of sympathy for India.
We have to recall all these events of the past to realise the dynamism that the BJP regime under PM Modi has imparted to foreign policy lifting it out of a morass and underlining that the national interest alone serves the policy formulation and implementation. It was clear during the Congress regime, that the Muslim leadership was given a veto power over our policy issues particularly in regard to the Palestinian situation.
Today if his Israeli visit has evoked no adverse comments from either Riyadh or Abu Dhabi or even Tehran despite the Iranian regime’s continuing hostility towards Israel, the reading between the lines is that the Islamic regimes in the Gulf region have begun to perceive Indo-Israel relations as not in any manner hostile to their interests.
A great difference was made in agriculture thanks to Israeli technology. Farmers in Haryana were able to cultivate 96,000 kg of tomatoes per acre against 16,000 kg earlier and 45,000 kg of cucumber per acre against 3,500 before. They were also able to achieve 65 per cent reduction in water use in farms.
Significantly Israel is unhesitatingly backing New Delhi’s demand that Pakistan should not let terrorists to function from its soil aimed at Indian security services and civilians. Also the product and technologies in defence that Tel Aviv is selling or getting manufactured in India in joint ventures, are all critical, enhancing India’s defences specially against terrorist infiltration.
In all these coverage of what was rightly described as “historic” visit what was overlooked was that it is a large number of Israeli patented ultra modern technologies that are pump-priming the American industrial progress. The Jews are an extraordinary people who could survive and prosper in the West Asia cauldron, and in the last two centuries have won many Nobel prizes.
Now India, with its most ancient creative civilisation, has linked herself with this Jewish excellence. The outcome will surely be a better world.
Balbir Punj
Former Rajya Sabha member and Delhi-based commentator on social and political issues
Email: punjbalbir@gmail.com