The weather was wonderful on Olga Beach, south of the occupied city of Haifa, on the afternoon of July 6, 2017. The temperature did not exceed twenty-seven degrees Celsius, which made it an ideal time for the two men who we saw walking on the beach, talking in a friendly whisper, laughing out loud, and gesticulating. With their hands from time to time to the horizon in apparent optimism.
The two men looked as if they were friends reminiscing about their old days, but you would be surprised to know that the two active men walking briskly on the beach, with their legs exposed, and stepping into their eighth decade, one year apart, had only met a few times before, and that this was the first visit for one of them to another country.
The two men were none other than Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, and his guest, Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister of India, who is visiting the occupying state, ending a long history of estrangement that began since India’s declaration of independence in 1947 and its vote of rejection on the United Nations resolution to partition the country. Palestine three months later.
The day started early for Modi. He woke up at five in the morning in the Jerusalem Suite of the King David Hotel in occupied Jerusalem. The hotel was founded by an Egyptian Jew in the 1930s and the National Bank of Egypt owned most of its shares, before it was blown up by members of the Zionist Irgun gang under the leadership of Menachem Begin, in July 1946, targeting the headquarters of the Mandate Administration for Palestine with the aim of destroying Palestinian government documents so that they would not be used after the establishment of Israel.
Later, Modi, accompanied by Netanyahu, went to Haifa to visit the graves of Indian soldiers who were killed during the British Crown’s battles with the Ottoman Empire in World War I, in what appeared to be an attempt to build a link between India and Israel, decades before the establishment of the occupying state, towards a present opponent, which is the “Islamic threat.” “And its distant roots represented the Ottoman Empire.
This claim is a victim of historical truth. The Indians’ participation in the First World War against the Ottoman Empire under the banner of Britain was mainly due to their falling under the yoke of colonialism, and they could not refuse. “Modi” neglected that the Indians fighting in the English army during the British Mandate period in the era of World War II were subjected to Deadly attacks by Zionist gangs in Palestine. Indian television went a step further by adding a phrase in bold font, at the top of the screen on which pictures of the visit were broadcast, describing the relationship between the two countries as: “A friendship extending for two thousand years”!
During Modi’s first visit to the occupied territories, a famous “jasmine” flower grown in Israel was named after him. Netanyahu was aware of the nature of the Indian leader and went beyond diplomatic norms to woo him towards Israel, where Netanyahu printed his picture with Modi on a greeting card and wrote him a warm dedication. By 2022, a “new contract” was established between Israel and India, according to which the latter became the largest importer of Israeli weapons, and one of the biggest beneficiaries of the spy technology developed by the occupying state, in a relationship that both parties describe as strategic.
A Hindu state with a Zionist ideology
This new contract was established according to a Hindu fundamentalist theoretical framework that has ancient but strong roots in the Modi era, and through it, India and Israel occupy parallel positions in the Hindu fundamentalist imagination. Both are religious states, Jewish and Hindu, surrounded by Muslim enemies from within them and on the borders. The solution to their problems lies in building a solid, technologically advanced military force that treats its enemies mercilessly.
According to Hindu fundamentalism, a Hindu becomes an Indian, even if he was not born in India, and does not know it. Zionism also believes that anyone born to a Jewish mother is considered Israeli. On the other hand, the owners of the land in India or the occupied territories, who were born there and did not convert to Hinduism or Zionism, are incompetent citizens. They must dissolve into the society in which they live, without identity, religion, or culture. , distinguishes them from others, if they want to live in this society in peace.
So Hindu fundamentalism, known as the now popular Hindutva ideology, combines religion, race, and nation, just as the Nazi and fascist movements did before. Ironically, which the leaders of the occupying state ignore, the fathers of Hindu fundamentalism embraced by Modi believed in the logic of Nazism and the superiority of the Aryan race.
But while Israel was founded on this doctrine of racial separation between Jews and Arabs, post-independence India was not founded on this approach, but rather was trying hard to implement the principle of citizenship without discrimination. But the transformations that India has witnessed, especially under the leadership of Modi since 2014, have made the “jurisprudence of adversarialism” widespread, and elements of “discrimination” prevail, during his era, which transferred Muslims from the category of second-class citizens, to strangers awaiting a deportation decision.
These transformations push us to get to know the Indian leader, who does not hide his anger at his country’s history, especially in its Islamic eras, nor at its diverse human demographic component, especially the Muslim spaces in the Indian subcontinent. Which prompted him to use all the state’s tools and capabilities, with the help of an army of his loyal followers, to build a new India, radically different from the one its founders wanted, nor the one written by history.
