In the Guise of Solidarity

FOR PEOPLE SUCH AS me who have led a peripatetic existence, it is difficult to identify a single home. For me, there are three cities that I can call my own, with which there are as­sociations, some recent and others dat­ing back to either childhood or youth.

First, there is Kolkata, my place of birth and the city where I went to school. It is where my parents lived and died, where I have strong family associations, and where I do my political netagiri. Then there is Delhi, the city I first came to live in at the age of 16, which my wife and son regard as their only home, and where I have spent most of my professional life. It is a city that I am comfortable in, despite my embarrassing inability to speak Hindi like a native. And, finally, there is London, the city that was the scene of many youthful adventures and indiscretions, where I have friends scattered all over and where I am the happiest negotiating the back alleys, trying to find a shop or a restaurant that carries special memories of a time long gone by.

There are two features of London I have always cherished. First, there is the anonymity conferred by a city that hosts people from every conceivable background. I think they have overdone this multiculturalism. I often find it difficult to find shop assistants and waiters/waitresses who can claim English as their third language. Secondly, like the varied cuisine on offer in the city, London is home to nearly every cause worth espousing. During my student days, I had the luxury of attending meetings of rival Iranian factions, feuding groups in Zimbabwe, anti-Zionist Israelis, and Iraqi communists. A Pakistani poet with a great sense of humour once took me to a café in West London where poets of different nationalities—all out of favour with their respective governments— vied to read their poetry in multiple languages. It was a bit too crazy, even for my Bohemian tastes. The craziest meeting that I attended was hosted by a Trotskyist sect based in the US where the main speaker got progressively drunk on red wine and finally proceeded to call the followers of the Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha “goat f*****s”.

To some extent, the reputation of London as a city of multiple causes was enhanced by the large demonstrations hosted by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and others protesting against the Israeli military action in Gaza. At the time of writing, there have been three monster demonstrations of 100,000 and over (which, by the standards of London, is truly stupendous), where the slogan “From the river to the sea/ Palestine will be free” has resonated, along with a surfeit of Palestinian flags. I understand that similar demonstrations have taken place in many other cities of western Europe.

Assertions of solidarity with Palestine isn’t new. In the 1960s till the mid-1970s, the thing to do was denounce US imperialism in Vietnam and chant “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh/We shall fight and we shall win.” After this war was decisively lost by the US in 1974, the focus shifted to the denunciation of the Apartheid state in South Africa and the white settler regime in Rhodesia. These were battles where a big chunk of exiles—both Black and white—from southern Africa were joined by British do-gooders, including the Church of England clergy. I remember the evening vigils before South Africa House in Trafalgar Square where all shades of political views were represented. The Palestine cause was somewhere there in the horizon, but its presence was never all that overwhelming.

What inhibited people from over-investing in the Palestinian cause was the very thin dividing line between opposing Zionism and anti-Semitism. Zionism is the political doctrine on which the case for a Jewish state rests. There are, for example, the ultra-Orthodox Jews who repose faith in a Jewish homeland but are either indifferent or hostile to the idea of a Jewish state. Those familiar with the history of the region after the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and, particularly, the complicated politics of Israel after 1948 will appreciate that Jews— like Hindus—come in very different shades. Israeli politics is naturally fractious—as Benjamin Netanyahu has discovered—and it is this diversity that may have contributed to the monumental enterprise of the Jews.

Alas, the richness of the Jewish experience—including the enormous suffering the community has experi­enced over the ages, not least in the 20th century—is in danger of being over­whelmed by the wave of anti-Semitism that has been unleashed in London, in the guise of solidarity with Palestine. I never imagined that the butchers of Hamas would manage to set the tone of discourse in, of all places, London.

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