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Monday. February 13. 3.54 pm. A bomb
explodes in the car of an Israeli diplomat. Three people,
including the defence attaché’s wife Tal Yehoshua, are grievously
injured.
30 minutes later, embassy officials are examining the remains of
the vehicle in an area that has been cordoned off by the police.
Within three hours, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
accuses the Hizbullah and Iran: “Iran, which stands behind these
attacks, is the largest exporter of terror in the world. The
Israeli government and its security forces will continue to work
together with local security services against these terrorist
actions.”
He is pre-empting the inquiry, and the media is already talking
about “Hizbullah in Delhi” and “Israel targeted in India”. We are
calling ourselves a soft state when our own hardliners and
security forces have been killing citizens inside the country.
The question is not whether global terror is being fought on
Indian soil but how much of it is being arranged here. If it is
legitimate to ask about the role of local handlers, then why has
there been no concern about the incident of a planned vengeance by
Israelis?
Cut to a report a few days ago when there was palpable revenge.
The couple, Shneor Zalman and Yaffa Shenoi, arrived in India on a
multiple-entry visa in March 2010. After the visa expired, they
went back and returned within a month. What was their purpose that
they paid a “disproportionately high rent” of Rs. 50,000 a month
for a house in Fort Kochi, Kerala? A senior official was quoted in
a report saying: “Central intelligence got an alert about a covert
operation being carried out by suspected Israeli agents after the
26/11 Mumbai terror strike in which south Mumbai’s Chabad House
came under attack and six Jews, including a Rabbi and his pregnant
wife, were killed. We have traced the couple’s financial
transactions. They will be questioned before they are deported.
Preliminary investigations suggest some Israelis are camping in
various parts of the country.”
This comes from official sources and all that they think of is
deporting the couple. There has been complete silence from the
usually active dispensers of opinion, too.
Let us return to the scene of Monday’s crime. The Indian and
international media have gone ballistic about it without a shred
of evidence. If the argument is that the Indian prime minister's
house is in the vicinity and reveals lapses in our security, then
why is no one apprehensive about our situation? It raises
questions beyond safety measures. Why are we falling in line with
Israeli rules? What is the American effort in this proxy war? It
is not Hizbullah that is fighting in India, but Israel.
With the top leaders’ comments, Israel is not only holding India
to ransom but also trying to play its victim-aggressor game here.
A bomb that went off simultaneously in Georgia was defused, for it
does not resonate well with the anti-Arab/Iran narrative. One is
not condoning any such attacks, but this most certainly does not
look like a war against Israel, a state that has got its armour in
place. Mossad is as pervasive as the CIA.
Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman said, “It just shows that Israel
and its citizens face terror inside and outside of Israel. We deal
with it every day. We know how to identify exactly who is
responsible for the attack and who carried it out. We will not
allow this to affect our agenda.”
Has anyone questioned the agenda? The identification process
assumes reprisal.
Blindly accepting the Israeli version of domestic links with
groups will obviously lead to the blanket indictment of ‘jihadi’
organisations, many of them imagined entities of the right-wing
parties. Is it not possible that some Hindutva terror groups now
openly asserting themselves and held culpable for such activities
could be used for Israel’s covert operations? Israel does not have
suicide missions, but it understands the masochism paradigm only
too well.
The
revenge space is never empty. Philosopher Martha Nussbaum has
written: “The primitive sense of the just…starts from the notion
that a human life…is a vulnerable thing, a thing that can be
invaded, wounded, violated by another's act in many ways. For this
penetration, the only remedy that seems appropriate is a counter
invasion, equally deliberate, equally grave. And to right the
balance truly, the retribution must be exactly, strictly
proportional to the original encroachment. It differs from the
original act only in the sequence of time and in the fact that it
is response rather than original act – a fact frequently obscured
if there is a long sequence of acts and counteracts.”
We need to look at a few examples to emphasise our vulnerability.
Members of the orthodox Jewish Chabad India Trust have moved out
of Nariman House and are residing in an unknown location due to
security reasons. Soon after the Mumbai attacks, six members of a
group called Zaka (acronym for Zihuy Korbanot Ason - Disaster
Victim Identification) arrived in the city to collect and arrange
the body parts and blood of Jews so that they could be returned to
family members and were afforded a dignified burial according to
Jewish law. The police investigations were not completed.
More recently, Israeli national Nurit Toker was booked by the
Mumbai police under the Arms Act, 1959, for carrying two live
cartridges in her backpack while travelling from Mumbai to
Kathmandu. In her petition she mentioned that she had completed
her compulsory three-year training in the Israeli army and these
were her personal ammunition, compatible with the M-16 assault
rifle acquired during her military training. She had not carried
the rifle, though. Sec. 3 clearly states “there is no requirement
of use or intention to use the arm or ammunition” to pursue the
case. Yet, the Israel Consulate intervened to say that the accused
had accidentally left bullets in her bag.
This is not the first such instance. In 2006, Noa Haviv had
cleared customs at Mumbai airport as well as the security agencies
of Israeli airline El Al at Tel Aviv and arrived with 16 bullets
and a magazine in her check-in baggage. The Israeli consul general
had stated then: “We have every reason to believe that it was an
innocent mistake. She had borrowed this suitcase from her brother,
who is a licensed weapons holder. She was not aware of the bullets
inside when she packed her bags.” Amazingly, only the airline
filed a case and not the Airports Authority of India or the
security agencies of the government.
In a country that arrests whole families on mere “tip offs”, this
leniency is alarming. Worse, all 171 passengers on the El Al
flight had walked out of the green channel and cleared customs in
15 minutes. Why this express service? Even Indians returning from
a holiday take longer. The customs official at the time had said,
“…this was a flight coming from Israel, where security measures
are stringent.”
Are we to depend on another state’s security assurances? Israel is
not above suspicion. No country is.
The
attack on the embassy staff took place in India. We cannot allow
investigations to be outsourced. Hillary Clinton offered US
assistance to probe into “these cowardly acts” because the
“scourge of terrorism is an affront to the entire international
community”.
In an editorial, The Pioneer uses this incident for its
grand-standing: “Governments around the world are mindful of such
occasions when Israelis, both diplomats and civilians, are likely
be targeted; sadly, the Government of India chooses to ignore
them, busy as the Home Minister is defending himself in a
corruption case while intelligence agencies are pre-occupied with
snooping on the Congress’s political opponents and conducting
‘surveys’ in election-bound States”. It adds, with alacrity, that
at least the people should be agitated “if not the Government
whose Ministers are at the moment unabashedly pandering to Muslim
extremism in Uttar Pradesh”.
Are we to be on our toes for Israel? Why did the papers not write
editorials when suspicious activities of Israelis were noticed by
these intelligence agencies? Why suppress those?
As expected, Pakistan and its Inter Services Intelligence are used
as an example. There has been no proof. Israel is using Indian
susceptibility with regard to relationship with Pakistan. There is
an indeed an insurgency problem and the recent history of the
Mumbai attacks. The fact that the Jewish Chabad House was one of
the targets makes it appear as a legitimate connection. But
Pakistan has closer ties with Saudi Arabia and is inimical to
Iran, which is the current bone stuck in the throats of the
western powers and Israel.
There are cursory references to the four Iranian nuclear
scientists who were killed in the last two years. Instead, the
bomb blast is being touted as revenge for the death of Hizbullah’s
military chief Imad Mughniyeh in a car explosion. What is so
important about the fourth death anniversary? Do also note that he
was killed in Syria, so Israel has a virtual buffet meal at its
disposal to point fingers at.
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast said.
“Israel perpetrated the terror actions to launch psychological
warfare against Iran.”
There are sniggers, but Israel has every reason to perpetuate such
mind-numbing ideas, if not actions. In 1948, Menachem Begin’s unit
slaughtered the inhabitants of Deir Yassin. In 1953, Ariel Sharon
led the slaughter of the inhabitants of Qibya, and in 1982
arranged for their allies to butcher around 2,000 in the refugee
camps of Sabra and Shatilla. He had declared, “We must hit, hit
and hit them incessantly – not by means of large-scale war.
Suddenly someone disappears there, someone is found dead here and
somewhere else someone is found stabbed to death in a European
nightclub.”
The history if Israel is as damning as it is damaged. It has
flouted every rule and yet got the benefit of protection.
India is most certainly not a soft power that some of our own
commentators are shamelessly projecting it as. It is a bit
obsessed and still suffers from a colonial hangover. It has
created its cocoon of goodwill based on the flimsy delusion of
being a developed nation where hybrid progress is sustained in a
greenhouse. In that, it is not too different from some of the
wealthy Arab states that are only concerned about how they sell
their oil and for how much. Just as they have their pecking order,
India maintains a stoical distance from the larger pool of South
Asian countries by virtue of its “close relations” with those who
matter.
Self-preservation is the goal of any society, but when it becomes
opportunistic it is difficult to demarcate the lines of control
and of control freaks. By a process of natural selection that
imbues it as a ‘doctrinaire liberal’ society, India is being
co-opted in an unholy war.
Farzana Versey
is a Mumbai-based writer. She can be reached at
http://farzana-versey.blogspot.in/
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