For the Study of Israel

LAST WEEK, my wife and I had the occasion to host a young
visitor from Israel. Deeply interested in India—particularly the philosophical underpinnings of Sanatana Dharma—but well connected with political life in Israel, his appearance was visibly Jewish. Starting from the free-flowing beard and the very visible kippah (the Jewish skull cup) and extending to the kosher diet he quite rigidly adhered to, he was one person who would not be mistaken for anyone but a Jew in a public street. 

For those who are visibly Jewish in their appearance, life outside Israel has been nothing short of dangerous in the past two years since Hamas launched its war on Israel on October 7, 2023. Ordinary Jews, but particularly Orthodox Jews with their very distinctive appearances, have been picked up by gangs adhering to militant “Palestinianism”, taunted, bullied and in some cases, physically assaulted. In New York, the most Jewish of cities outside Israel, students with a kippah have been surrounded by hostile demonstrators, told to go back to Poland and prevented from attending class in institutions such as Columbia University. Worse, over- politicised faculty members have tried to intimidate and harass Jewish students. Last week, there was a case of a Jewish patient who felt threatened on an operating table by a doctor flaunting a Free Palestine badge. 

If individual Jews have felt insecure in the West—they were ethnically cleansed from the Arab Middle East after 1948—the assault on the nation of Israel and Israelis has been severe. Some of us may have read last week of a group of Israeli youth who were prevented from entering an amusement park 

in France. This follows the attack on the supporters of the Maccabi football team of Tel Aviv after a match in Amsterdam in 2024. It was said to have been masterminded by the Arab and Turkish taxi drivers of the Dutch capital. In recent weeks, Israel has been excluded from participation in exhibitions and their artists have been told they are unwelcome at important cultural events. At the same time, the ubiquitous flag of a non-country has been defiantly flown by determined activists in events and ceremonies that had never been coloured by politics. 

There have been innumerable attempts by the votaries of Palestinianism to make Gaza a domestic issue in India. Apart from a couple of campuses where the liberal arts faculties have been converted into breeding centres of evil causes, India has been moderately unmoved by the over-hype over the ‘famine’ and bombing of Gaza. When I took my Israeli friend to a very popular eating joint in Delhi serving the vegetarian fare of Karnataka, there was not a hint of any hostility, only the slight amusement that greets any foreigner struggling to eat with their fingers.

The more political of the Hindus in India also know and will hopefully remember that Israel stood unflinchingly by India during the testing days of Operation Sindoor. 

Indeed, I have heard many Indians forcefully suggest that the Indian military should take lessons of targeted, precision strikes from the Israelis. The way in which Israel took out the entire Houthi leadership with a precision strike last week  is worthy of admiration, as was the sheer audacity of its pager and walkie-talkie attacks on Hezbollah in Lebanon. Israel’s mastery of the technology of targeted warfare is important for India to benefit from, and more so now that the US has demonstrated its inherent unreliability. This implies that India- Israel ties must be made bipartisan and elevated to a level beyond the politics of the Middle East. Whether Israel concedes the two-state solution or takes steps to include Judea and Samaria in a Greater Israel or enables a 50-year American trusteeship of Gaza should not bother policymakers in Delhi, except in an academic way. 

What matters is that only Israel, among the Middle East powers, thinks of India as a natural ally in the larger conflict of civilisations. India is the world’s only Hindu-majority state of consequence. Nepal, for all its virtues, is handicapped by its size and its inability to tie its future to China rather than India. For its part, Israel is the world’s only Jewish state and the only place where a perennially persecuted minority can take shelter. This convergence of ancient faiths has the potential of making the world a much better place to live in. 

Our universities often make the mistake of looking at Israel as a tiny country in the Middle East. This leads to India’s policy being determined by Arab considerations exclusively. We should be setting up departments and centres devoted exclusively to the study of Israel and the Jewish civilisation. 

ArabsIndia-Israel relationsIsraelJews