Tag Archives: Ze’ev Jabotinsky

The Rebirth of a Nation

29 Wed Nov 2017

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Panama…yes; Paraguay…yes; Peru…yes. As Philippines voted next in favour of the partition plan for Palestine, cheering broke out across the yishuv in the British mandate of Palestine. It was late in the evening as the news from Flushing Meadows crackled over radio sets in the Middle East. In essence, the British had announced their intention to abandon the Mandate and it was up to the locals to pick up the scraps of civilisation from the mess left behind. On November 29, 1947, United Nations Resolution 181 created legal ground for the formation of a Jewish state partitioned from the Arab domains of the region. The State of Israel had not been declared yet – that would have to wait until May 14, 1948 – or the 5th of Iyar if you want to get all Jewish about it – the day before the British mandate formally ended.

Seventy years hence, there is an air of inevitability around the story of the partition. Israel’s march from strength to strength makes the tense moments of its past seem like mere signposts to the present generation. However, the United Nations resolution came in the midst of tumult among even Zionist ranks, not all of whom were supportive of the partition plan. The Levant was a powder keg, something that would become customary over the decades. International opinion had been against the Jews and flipped at the last minute with some impressive Zionist diplomacy and an inexplicable Soviet change of heart. Although the United States has long been presented as Israel’s saviour at this crucial moment, the Soviet Union (and its four satellite nations) had a larger role to play than many realise.

In the immediate aftermath of the Jewish diplomatic victory in New York, riots broke out across Palestine. Angry Arab mobs attacked Jewish shops and residences to punish them for the partition plan and to dissuade them from further political audacity. The formal war would come later, the day after the declaration of the State of Israel, when the fledgling Jewish state’s six Arab neighbours would invade it. In the meantime, however, Jewish blood flowed in a frenzy of disorganised violence. In a single week in March 1948, over a 100 Jews were killed.

Zionist leaders had predicted such a reaction and had prepared themselves well. In their experience, the British government could not be trusted – in the past, they had stood by as Arabs massacred Jews and even intervened to disarm Jewish defence groups to place them at the mercy of the Arabs. In April 1947, the Haganah had little more than 10,000 rifles and less than 3,000 machine guns of poor quality and varying calibers; by independence, David Ben Gurion had almost tripled the Jewish arsenal and even added a couple of dozen Messerschmitts left over from World War II. In addition, a fund-raising drive by Golda Meir in the United States had garnered $50 million for the new Jewish state.

The plan to “save Israel” had been put into play since at least July 1945, when Ben Gurion met with 18 millionaires at the residence of his friend, Rudolph Sonnenborn, in New York. Under the guise of shipping medical equipment to hospitals, the Sonnenborn Institute would collect funds to purchase arms for the future Israeli military. Ben Gurion was fully aware that Washington’s feelings on Zionism were lukewarm at best and he was willing to evict the British, weakened by war, from Palestine by force if necessary. London, however, announced in February 1947 that it would leave Palestine by May 15 of the following year.

When war did break out six months after the passing of UN Resolution 181, the Western powers imposed a strict embargo against arms to the region. This seemingly fair step only helped the Arabs, who not only had established armies but also had British officers to consult with and train under. Israel had to use some clever tricks to procure arms: in one case, a sympathiser posed as a Hollywood producer interested in making a war film and smuggled all the props of his set to Israel. The bulk of the assistance came, as several of the founding generation attested, from the Soviet bloc. A vital purchase from Czechoslovakia, obviously approved by Moscow, saw Israel through the darkest days of its short existence.

The British Mandate of Palestine The separation of Jordan in April 1921 Israel, before and after the War of Independence

Diplomatically too, as Martin Kramer has recently written in Mosaic, the creation of Israel was forged largely through unexpected Soviet support. Zionist leaders such as Ben Gurion and Chaim Weizmann had long argued the Jewish case at the court of the Red tsar, particularly through the Soviet envoy to Britain, Ivan Maisky, but lack of sufficient access to Soviet archives has kept still kept a mystery the reason Stalin eventually allowed the vote to play out as it did. Despite their egalitarian dystopia, the Bolsheviks were only marginally less anti-Semitic than the prevailing currents in Europe. The vote, therefore, was a total surprise even to experienced Eastern Europe hands among the Zionists.

The United States’ role in the creation of Israel has been hyped beyond compare, Harry Truman even anointing himself a modern-day Cyrus, after the Persian emperor who liberated the Jews from Babylonian captivity, in a November 1953 speech to the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. Yet like the British Balfour Declaration, a seemingly pivotal moment in Jewish history tarnished by its context of the White Paper of 1922, the US vote in favour of the creation of Israel was followed by a declaration that partition was impossible to implement and the British mandate be temporarily passed on to the United Nations. Even on the eve of Israeli independence, US diplomats were still busy warning Zionist leaders to defer from statehood.

Besides the superpowers, the international community – perhaps with some transient shame for the Shoah – voted overwhelmingly in favour of the partition of Palestine into a Jewish state. Only Cuba, Greece, and India, along with Muslim countries, voted against partition. The final tally was 33 countries for the resolution, and 13 against, with 10 abstentions and one absence.

The military and political dimensions aside, Resolution 181 was not a completely kosher proposal even in its terms. The Arabs resented it for obvious reasons – they saw European Jews as usurpers of the land, if not a theologically inferior people – and there was no way the holy sites of the Scriptures could be surrendered to them. There was also some power play involved in the Arab position: Haj Amin al-Husseini aspired to build an independent Palestinian state out of the partition, while King Abdullah of Transjordan (Jordan attained its modern name in 1949) sought to annex the remains of Mandatory Palestine into the rest, which was his own kingdom. To this end, the king even negotiated in secret with Jewish representatives to foil Husseini’s bid for a separate state.

A not insignificant minority of Zionists were also unhappy with the partition plan. They argued that the mandate had already been partitioned once in April 1921 when Arab Jordan was created from 77 percent of the Mandatory domains; why should there be a further partition to deprive the Jews of even the little that was left? If the Arabs wanted a state out of the Mandate, they already had one in Jordan.

The Revisionist Zionists, led by Ze’ev Jabotinsky until his demise in 1942, had argued that Israel should extend across the river Jordan such that all the Biblical holy sites fell in the Holy Land. The Smol Ha’Yarden, a poem by Jabotinsky that later became one of Betar’s famous songs, encapsulated this ideal extent of Israel’s borders as that of the British Mandate. Several Zionists were unwilling to give up Judea and Samaria, what is today more commonly known as the West Bank, because it holds so many of their religious places.

This was not an uncommon view even among those who were more receptive to Resolution 181. Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, pleaded with his colleagues that they accept the UN resolution as it would constitute a formal international endorsement – for the first time – of the Jewish state. If the boundaries of the plan were not to their liking, he told them, they could later be redrawn. It was with careful thought, thus, that the boundaries of Israel were not announced in the declaration of independence. In fact, one of Ben Gurion’s biographers, Michael Bar Zohar, reveals that the prime minister clung to this notion even during the Suez Crisis of 1956, withdrawing Israeli forces from Sinai with great reluctance and only after repeated pressure from US president Dwight Eisenhower. The southern boundary was finally set, despite fierce domestic disapproval, only in 1979 during the Camp David accords between Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat.

Between the in-house Zionist squabbles, the Arab machinations, and the international warm-up to the Cold War, a narrow window of opportunity opened for a brief moment for the creation of Israel and was quickly shut. The political tumult of the past is obscured in the light of Israel’s military, economic, and political successes. Almost two thousand years after the last Jewish king – Herod Agrippa II –  had ruled, Israel would rise up again. And just as when it had fallen last, it had no allies but those it might be lent it for a fleeting moment by time and fate. Like Galba, Otho, and Vitellius; like Maisky, Andrei Gromyko, and, perhaps, Stalin.

That Longest War

17 Sat Jun 2017

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A High PriceByman, Daniel. A High Price: The Triumphs and Failures of Israeli Counterterrorism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. 496 pp.

Think of Israeli counter-terrorism and you are likely to conjure up an image that rivals any Hollywood blockbuster action film. The tiny Middle Eastern country is admired and looked up to by security professionals the world over from India to the United States for its grit, boldness, and methodical approach to counter-terrorism. Israel’s intelligence elite have maintained and even encouraged this myth for its psychological effect. The reality of this David and Goliath story, however, is closer to A Bridge Too Far than Raid on Entebbe. In his extensive study, A High Price: The Triumphs and Failures of Counterterrorism, Daniel Byman details the unending challenges, grinding successes, and mixed impact of Israeli counter-terrorism operations on its security and the national psyche.

Byman, a professor at Georgetown University, takes Carl von Clausewitz’s dictum that war is a continuation of politics by other means seriously and looks at the political fallout of Israel’s counter-terrorism strategies rather than a tactical or operational analysis. Israel’s foes have also been varied over the years – some terrorist groups have been disciplined and methodical, others were rag-tag militia; some are state-backed, others independent. Some terrorist groups are militant branches of a larger social movement while others are small radical cells. The Jewish community has faced virtually every type of terrorist that has been imagined.

It is not surprising then, that most counter-terror tactics have also been pioneered in Israel and have been implemented by other law enforcement forces around the world. Although some analysts scoff at Israel’s record, claiming that its methods have not solved the terrorist plague even after decades of conflict and thousands dead, Byman’s research indicates that the world has much to learn from even the imperfect solutions.

A High Price starts in the pre-independence era when the Yishuv were threatened by Arab terrorism in the aftermath of the Balfour Declaration. Byman argues that Israeli counter-terrorism strategy is broadly based on the experience of British administration in Mandatory Palestine. The legacy of one pro-Zionist officer in particular, Charles Orde Wingate, is visible in Israeli security doctrine to this day.

Israeli strategy has essentially three components. One aspect is deterrence: the belief that Israel’s enemies would cease and desist from hostile operations against it out of fear of retribution. Another component is offensive operations: Israel’s small size means that it cannot risk fighting wars on its own soil. Furthermore, fighting on Israeli soil would mean damage to infrastructure and civilian casualties. Therefore, the conflict must be taken to the enemy. The third feature of Israeli security thinking is preemption and speed: like Napoleon Bonaparte preferred, strike first, strike fast, and maintain the element of surprise; keep the enemy off-balance until he capitulates.

Israeli politicians often felt restricted and cornered in their response to Arab violence. Besides national morale, Israeli leaders found it difficult to advocate restraint to people who had just escaped the Holocaust. Their new country was founded specifically on the premise that it would defend Jewish lives at all costs and it was not possible to appear to renege on that promise. Their only hope was to bludgeon their neighbours into inaction.

Ironically, Israeli actions also put Arab leaders in a corner: their retaliatory operations against the Israeli military humiliated the very militaries on which their power depended, and it outraged the Arab people. Arab capitals were very quick to embrace the idea of asymmetric warfare.

For their part, Israeli leaders – military and political alike – understood the Arab hatred towards them. “Can we argue with their intense hatred for us?” Moshe Dayan asked, “before their eyes we are turning the land and the villages in which they and their forefathers lived into our inheritance.” Similar warnings had been uttered by Ze’ev Jabotinsky and other luminaries of Zionism decades before Israel became a reality. The harsh choice was, according to Dayan and these others, “to be prepared and armed, strong and determined, otherwise the sword will fall from our hands and our lives will be obliterated.” As Golda Meir would say later, Israel’s secret weapon against the Arabs was that they had nowhere else to go.

Byman explains how the nature of warfare that Israel faced shifted rapidly from inter-state to non-state agents. This altered the rules of the game dramatically. Suddenly, the media became immensely important and the military could not use indiscriminate force in civilian-populated areas. Terrorists also improved over the years – from the early fedayeen who were essentially unskilled, angry, displaced Palestinians crossing back into Israel to retrieve as much of their belongings as possible to cool and zealous individuals who had received professional training from Arab and Communist armies or other terrorist groups. While Israel was able to deter the Arab states, particularly Egypt and Jordan, from supporting cross-border terrorist raids, non-state actors proved much harder to deter.

Of most value to readers should be the attention A High Price pays to the self-goals Israeli security services have scored in their war on terror. As Washington and its partners are learning now after their invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, military victory does not matter if you lose the battle over public perception. Israel has experienced this bitter lesson first-hand several times and years earlier as its leaders bought into the false dichotomy of physical security and perception. Wingate’s methods gave psychological satisfaction but did not always produce satisfactory results. David Ben-Gurion had realised this even in the 1940s and used it against the British but countries – not just Israel – seem doomed to repeat this error.

Byman argues that the Knesset has often ignored the political consequences of their counter-terrorism. The assassination of terrorist leaders, Raed Karmi for example, have sometimes unleashed cycles of violence that resulted in the loss of several lives. Some operations, such as the attempted assassination of Khaled Mashal in Amman, jeopardised important alliances. The IDF’s success in demolishing a group has usually been only temporary – in some cases, several splinter groups emerge in the place of one or space is made for more radical (Islamist) terrorists.

Israel is also guilty of underestimating the importance of the media and public narrative. Its opponents, be they state on non-state actors, have excelled at manipulating domestic, regional, and international fora, think tanks, and news organisations to portray an image of the conflict that is slanted, incomplete, exaggerated, and, at times, blatantly false. Israeli engagements in Lebanon, for example, were overwhelmingly successful militarily if losses of men and materiel were to be tallied. However, the perception of victory and defiance holds more water than the reality. What have often been successful Israeli operations are sometimes perceived as failures even by Israeli citizens.

Byman also notes that while Israel excels at the tactical and operational levels, a long-term strategy for the region is sorely lacking. Israelis are still debating whether they have temporarily occupied the territory that in the end belonged to Arabs or liberating historic land that really belonged to the Jews. A banal, vacuous, and unconsidered desire for peace is a sufficient strategy only if you are building a graveyard. Many of Israel’s problems arise from predictable long-term consequences of its ad hoc decisions. The invasion of Lebanon in 1982 to root out the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, for example, turned into a gruelling occupation that gave birth to a far more dangerous threat in the Hezbollah. Eventually, it led to the collapse of the very state that Israel was trying to pressure into curtailing the PLO. Similarly, some of Israeli policies in the West Bank and Gaza, though they may have succeeded in stemming the tide of terrorist attacks, have altered the situation on the ground so much that peace talks have become difficult; both sides claim to a different stunde null as the basis of negotiations.

One of the astute observations in A High Price is that there is a growing expectation in the media and its poorly uninformed subscribers of proportionality in military operations against terrorists. The very nature of deterrence, however, is the threat of disproportionate force against the enemy. While this doctrine may work well against the militaries of Israel’s neighbours, it does less so against terrorists who hide in civilian areas with the expectation that either propriety will spare them or an opportunity for propaganda will present itself.

As Byman contends, with no considered policy in place, day-to-day counter-terrorism is sometimes not conducive towards achieving the broader goal. However, he is also quick to admit that most often, the choice before the IDF or Knesset is between different shades of bad. Israeli security officials have been fully aware of this but see no escape. Collective punishment, for example, was not justified or moral but effective, admitted Dayan. The IDF’s organisational ethos gives commanders tremendous autonomy with the understanding that there could be occasional mistakes. “I prefer initiative and excessive action, even if they’re accompanied by the occasional mistake, over passivity”, Dayan is supposed to have said.

It is also true that the IDF’s harsh measures have the support of the Israeli people. House demolitions, cross-border strikes, targeted assassinations, and the refusal to recognise the PLO have many supporters. Each time there was a terrorist attack or peace talks broke down, the uncompromising Israeli Right gained supporters. Continuing talks under terrorist activity was unacceptable to Israelis for whom the very purpose of talks was to end terrorism. Additionally, the assassination of senior operatives did hurt terrorist groups in that they lost valuable experience in bomb-making, logistics, money laundering, arms acquisition networks, and other aspects of the terrorist’s craft. The number of warm bodies that Hamas or Hezbollah can throw up is not nearly as much a concern as the skills some of these bodies may possess.

Byman walks a fine line between the Israelis and the Palestinians and presents an objective study of Arab terrorism against Israel. He does not shirk from calling out the IDF’s excessive policies even if he admits they may bring immediate gains while at the same time pointing out that there is much that the Palestinians have done to hurt their own cause. The civil war between Fatah and Hamas in 2006 is but one example. It also goes unacknowledged that in the first five years after the Six-Day War, Israeli assistance in terms of fertiliser, irrigation, and farming techniques tripled the agricultural production of the West Bank. Yet although violence diminished, support for violence did not.

It is disconcerting to note that over the years, support for talks has reduced and both Israelis and Palestinians appear more unwilling to compromise, readier to shed blood, and accepting of atrocities against the other. Decades of living in terror has, as many psychologists have suggested, caused a nationwide post-traumatic stress disorder in Israel. This does not bode well for the peacemakers, for their efforts will be viewed with suspicion and the bar of acceptability has inched that much higher.

A High Price is an indispensable read for anyone interested in counter-terrorism and its pitfalls. Furthermore, there can be no no better case study than Israel where citizens have lived experience first as conscripts in the IDF and then as civilians or politicians. A High Price is chronologically packed with events as well as interviews with senior officials that gives readers a view from the cockpit, so to speak. Byman’s ability to present facts and arguments dispassionately is an incredible achievement for a topic that is not known for calm and rational discussion. In the Age of Terror that we live in, I do not see how A High Price is a book that can be skipped.

Hindutva and Zionism: Parallels

01 Thu Jun 2017

Posted by in India, Israel, Middle East, Opinion and Response, South Asia

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Hindutva and Zionism. Few words—ideas—have been as misunderstood or reviled as these two have been. Both are similar, scholars of nationalism will tell you, because they espouse ethnic nationalism—the notion of a national community based on religion, race, or blood. Notwithstanding the differences in the symbols they choose to venerate or vilify, the core dynamics of identity and emotion are identical.

However, there lies a deeper similarity between the two than merely rhetoric. Between Hindutva and Zionism, there exist three core similarities that shape their worldview in profound ways. It is not my contention that these concurrences are responsible for a subconscious affinity between India and Israel: in fact, it is an uncomfortable and unspoken verisimilitude that much of the sympathy and admiration for Israel in India probably comes from the perception of a common enemy. Despite Jewish presence in the subcontinent for two millennia, Indians are only now beginning to discover Jews—perhaps speaking to the seamless harmony in which Hindus and Jews existed.

The first point of congruence between Hindutva and Zionism is that, as nationalism goes, both are weak. It is not their fervour that is in doubt but the fact that neither held the land which they claimed on behalf of their nationhood. For the Zionists, they had been in exile from the territory that was the object of their nationalism for 18 centuries; expelled by the Romans after the Bar Kokhba Revolt in 135 CE, Judea (renamed Palestina during the Diocletian reforms at the end of the 3rd century) was subsequently ruled by the Byzantines, Arabs, Ottomans, and finally the British. All nationalism needs to look inwards to create a community; colonial nationalism also has an outside enemy to rally against in the form of an imperial power. Zionism had a third obstacle in that the Jewish people had not even been living on the land they claimed as their own. While a very small number of Jews always remained in Herod’s fallen kingdom, they usually faced persecution at the hands of the occupying power and immigration to the region was tightly controlled. On the eve of the First Aliyah in 1882, the number of Jews in Palestine was barely 20,000.

It may seem farcical at first glance that Hindus—the subjects of Hindutva—did not possess their own land. After all, they were, and remain, the vast majority of the inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent. Yet habitation alone does not mean possession: one must be able to exercise hegemony over it. For centuries before even the advent of the Raj, the Hindu kingdoms of the Indian subcontinent had been relegated to the footnotes of history. Four centuries after the first Muslim raids into Sindh, Muslim rule was firmly established in India with Muhammad of Ghor’s victory at the second battle of Taraori in 1192. It was not until the appearance of the British East India Company and the Maratha Confederacy in the late 17th century that the Dar al-Islam ceased to be the predominant power in the subcontinent.

Sultanates in Delhi, Bengal, Gujarat, and the Deccan expanded Muslim rule as far south as Madurai and subjugated all major Hindu kingdoms. The result was not just the loss of political sovereignty but the end of state patronage for Hindu society. Hindu art, literature, music, and welfare systems went into decline, and the famous temple construction projects as evidenced at Ellora, Khajuraho, Thanjavur, Badami, Belur, and elsewhere ceased; philosophy and theology stagnated. The short-lived ascent of the Marathas breathed some life into a moribund society before suzerainty over India passed into British hands but it was not enough.

The second core commonality between Hindutva and Zionism is how the exposure to secular, civic nationalism shaped their ideologies along similar lines. The decay of Hindu society and the dilution of Jewish identity preyed on early Hindutva and Zionist leaders’ minds. Both feared that living under foreign rule and gradual assimilation over the centuries had weakened the sense of identity in their communities. Despite a Hindu majority, religion was not the clarion call to the masses during India’s independence movement. Rather, mainstream Indian nationalists argued in the Western lexicon of liberty, self-determination, equality, and good governance.

The Jewish people were the first victims of the myth of civic nationalism—the notion of a national community based on shared values rather than the contrasting immutable properties of race and blood that ethnic nationalism privileged. It is an interesting observation that while immigration to Israel was central to Jewish identity and the land features centrally in their liturgies, there was not much of a rush to return to the Holy Land. This hesitation gives l’shana haba’ah b’Yerushalayim—next year in Jerusalem—uttered at the end of the Yom Kippur and Passover Seders, an unintended, tongue-in-cheek meaning! Zionist ideology and immigration to Israel began to increase only in the aftermath of the first set of pogroms after the French Revolution.

It seems strange that it was the emancipatory message of the French Revolution that fuelled Zionism. After all, the new French laws allowed Jews to come out of their ghettos, take up whatever profession they desired, serve in the military, and be considered full French citizens as long as they swore an oath to defend the secular French state. Many Jews welcomed this sudden inclusiveness and began to assimilate into the mainstream cultures of France, Germany, Russia, and other European nation-states. They spoke European languages, were comfortable in their literature and philosophy, adopted many of their customs in clothing and other banal aspects of life. Until 1815, owing to their exclusion, Europe’s Jews had contributed hardly anything to politics, philosophy, finance, medicine, the arts, or the law. Yet by the end of the 19th century, Jews were heavily concentrated in the major metropolis—Berlin, Vienna, Budapest, Warsaw, and to a lesser degree, London, Paris, and Odessa.

These “modernising” Jews also gave up attending yeshiva and, in the process of deracination, lost familiarity with their culture. During their exclusion, the Jewish community had established a parallel education system, in a language Europeans ironically considered dead. Hebrew had long been an exclusively liturgical language but fewer Jews could now read it. This distanced them from the scriptures.

Yet the secular modern nation-state did not hold all the answers. Suddenly, the myriad smaller issues of quotidian life intruded upon newfound Jewish liberty. For example, France would not accept the Sabbath, which put the bureaucracy and educational system on a collision course with Jewish tenets. Or, the adherence of the Jewish community to their dietary laws restricted Jews only to restaurants of their own community. In essence, gentiles viewed emancipation as a vehicle for the integration of Jews into general society and their ultimate disappearance within it. Thus, ironically, secularism and liberalism did not solve problems of Jewish identity but exacerbated them by asking them to meld into the purgatory of undifferentiated universalism.

Doubts over the benefits of Jewish emancipation were quickly washed away when a fresh wave of anti-Semitic pogroms swept across Europe. It reiterated to the Jews that despite their assimilation, to true Europeans they would forever remain Judas. As Jewish elders also began to ask, could a Jew in France truly identify with Vercingetorix, the chieftain who united the Gauls against Rome, and would Germans really view a Jewish colleague as a true descendant of Arminius, who liberated Germania from the Roman empire? The inclusivism of the universalistic principles of the French Revolution came to be tempered by the historicist exclusivism of modern nationalism.

Jews had been persecuted throughout their history—first by the Visigoths and the Byzantines, and later by Muslims and Christians. They had been massacred during the Crusades and expelled from England, France, and Spain. Jews were not allowed to reside in the imperial cities of the Holy Roman Empire, forcibly converted in Spain, and made to wear distinctive clothing and barred from public office in Italy. The pogroms of the 19th century, however, were different. Zionism, then, a post-Jewish emancipation phenomenon, was a response to the challenges of European liberalism and civic nationalism much more than a response merely to anti-Semitism.

Hindu nationalists came to the same conclusions about liberalism and the whole general caboodle of post-Enlightenment European values. Efforts to turn Indians into Macaulay’s children notwithstanding, Indians were kept out of the upper echelons of colonial administration. Under the guise of freedom of religion, proselytism was allowed even though it was detrimental to local traditions that did not proselytise. These policies were justified in the name of development while they slyly whittled away any sense of an Indic identity. The scientific temper had a decidedly European accent, as if there had been no intellectual achievements elsewhere. Being modern meant for the Indian what the Enlightenment and emancipation meant to the Jew: the disappearance of the communal essence of their culture through atomisation and alienation—for this, as Max Nordau described, was the nature of the modern world based as it is on deracinated individualism.

Moreover, Hindu nationalists saw their community as a victim of centuries of excessive pluralism. While Hindu kings had welcomed refugees and traders of other faiths warmly, the sentiment was not reciprocated when foreign rulers dethroned them. Hindu nationalists remembered only too vividly the forced conversions, the rapes and massacres, the pillaging and looting, the destruction of temples, and the overall attempt to erode Hinduism at the hands of Muslims and Christians. The Raj and opposition to it presented a unique opportunity which held the potential of uniting India under one administration again and reviving Hindu society.

Both Hindutva and Zionism have several different strands and are evolving phenomena. Independence has not meant stagnation, though the principal actors and foci change. Early Zionism, for example, was strongly opposed by the religious sections for they saw it as playing messiah and interference in God’s work. The questions that preoccupied the Jewish community then were also not religious but European emancipation and liberalism. It is little wonder, then, that the towering Zionists of the era preached cultural revival as the first step towards Jerusalem.

The philosopher-historian Nachman Krochmal, for example, saw history through a Hegelian lens and the nation as Herder did. Thus, he recognised the particularities of the Jewish people that forge a unique nation distinguished from others and argued that this was not an end unto itself but only a step in the development of universal culture. What Krochmal attempted to do philosophically, historian Heinrich Graetz did historically, firmly establishing the idea that the Jews were one nation among a community of nations. Rather than search for and expand a gap between the Jewish community and religion as many Jewish intellectuals of the time tried to do, Graetz maintained that “Judaism is not a religion for the individual, but for the community…and the fulfillment of commandments do not refer to the individual”, but rather are intended for the entire people.

Yet as Moses Hess, one of the founders of Labour Zionism, had disappointedly noted, the Jews suffered from Mangel an Nationalsinn—an absolute lack of national consciousness. One way to rebuild kinship was through a national language. Although Eliezer Ben Yehuda would later go on to resurrect Hebrew, it was Rabbi Yehuda Hai Alkalai who first gave sanction to the idea. His standing as an Orthodox rabbi lent some weight to the effort, for the clergy were strongly opposed to the idea of desacralising their holy language.

Cultural Zionism got its poster boy in Asher Ginsberg, who wrote under the pseudonym Ahad Ha’am. He rejected anchoring Zionism in traditional religious symbolism. Instead, he argued, the creation of a body politic is the apex of the cultural and spiritual forces of a people. A state based on a purely political imagination, such as that of Theodor Herzl, may perhaps be a State of Jews—Judenstaat, but it could not be a Jewish state—Jüdischer Staat, for the sociocultural infrastructure is a necessary condition for political life. Ahad Ha’am believed that a political ideal which does not rest on the national culture is apt to seduce the people from a loyalty to spiritual greatness and turn them onto a quest for material power and political dominion, thus making the Jewish state an ordinary one. Moshe Lilienblum’s corollary to Ginsberg was the observation that in contemporary Europe, just as in historical Judea, redemption and liberation came from the popular masses, not from the assimilated elites.

The Zionist emphasis on a cultural revival in service of a political goal echoes closely to the thoughts of Hindu nationalists. Although Hindutva is most closely associated with Vinayak Damodar Savarkar for it was he who coined the term in his 1923 essay, Essentials of Hindutva, its definition could well encompass thinkers who came before then just as many prominent figures of Zionism lived and died before 1890 when the term was coined by Nathan Birnbaum. Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, for example, was a key figure in the revival of cultural Hinduism. Besides his famous novel Anandamath which speaks of an ascetic army taking on the British, he wrote an important commentary on the Bhagavad Gita and Krishna Charitra, in which he tried to demystify the deity and bring the values inherent in Krishna to the popular masses.

As in Judaism, it is difficult to separate culture from religion and several of Hindutva’s cultural revivalists spoke in religious or philosophical tones. Swami Vivekananda and Aurobindo Ghose are perhaps two of the most prominent of such figures who tried to revive dharmic thought and values. At a social level, Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Gopal Ganesh Agarkar organised the Deccan Education Society whose goal was to impart education with an Indic emphasis. Additionally, via their feuilletonistic bon mots, they passionately put forth to the multitudes their vision for a free India. Others such as Dayananda Saraswati worked to uplift the status of women in society.

Disparate though these labours may seem, they were all held together by the common belief in the reemergence of Hindutva in India. The distinction between religion and culture is crucial here: while all of these personalities were personally religious, their advocacy of their causes was not borne out of a desire to spread or preserve their religion and rituals but to instill the values of a philosophical system that has informed all Indic faiths since time immemorial.

The third similarity between Hindutva and Zionism is their openness and pluralism. Hardly the words that most would use to describe ethnic nationalism, they are nevertheless accurate depictions of Hindutva and Zionist ideology at least until the early years after independence. As Hess conceived nationalism, it followed Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini’s thoughts in that it combined national particularity with a universal vision. Mazzini held that only by being a member of a nation, one can also be a member of the human race, and the only way of belonging to humanity is by belonging to a specific nation.

Later Zionists very much followed this pluralistic view—for them, the new state was to be informed by Jewish values just as France was informed by Catholicism and Britain by Protestantism but other communities would be welcome participants in the state if they could adapt to the majoritarian Jewish ethos.

Ze’ev Jabotinsky, considered to be the devil child of Zionism, also supported a pluralistic state. Although Jabotinsky’s innovation in the Zionist cause was the demand to immediately set up an armed Jewish militia, preferably with British help, he was ideologically more of an aggregator. His own views emphasised the military and the political over the cultural but his goal was a capitalist and pluralist Jewish state of Israel. This should be no surprise, given the strong influence of Italian nationalists, particularly Mazzini, on Jabotinsky during his youth.

Savarkar’s Hindutva is no different. He explains the characteristics of his Hindu nation in terms of matrubhumi, jati, sanskriti, and punyabhumi. This flattens not just all castes in the Hindu fold but even other religions that arose in India such as Jainism, Buddhism, and Sikhism. These, Savarkar felt, were bound by a similar philosophical structure that other communities lacked. Although contemporary commentators have chosen to portray this as a stigma on Hindutva, this same reservation was held by several prominent non-Hindutva leaders such as Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar as evidenced in his Pakistan, or, The Partition of India. Savarkar’s Hindutva may have no room for India’s Christians and Muslims in the nation but that did not mean that India could not be a pluralistic state. Like Jabotinsky and Mazzini, the Hindutva leader only wanted a nation-state that would be sensitive to its own values. Neither Zionism nor Hindutva advocated the dispossession of the civil and political rights of other communities to the extent that they did not conflict with the national culture.

These three characteristics—dispossession of land, experience with civic nationalism, and pluralism—mark Hindutva and Zionism as unique among nationalist movements. On pluralism, many nationalist groups are also imbued with a touch of xenophobia and unwilling to tolerate outsiders as equal citizens if not members of the nation. On the experience with civic nationalism, few nations outside East and Southeast Asia have a similar experience. This is largely due to the immense proselytism efforts that went hand in hand with the age of imperialism and spread Christianity to large parts of the world. The Christian roots of liberal secularism remove any grounds for contention between state and community if the society is Christian. Countries where this is not so, mostly along the northern rim of the eastern Indian Ocean, would share the Hindutva and Zionist experiences with the civic nationalism of a secular, modern liberal state.

On the matter of not having control of the land for which nationalism is espoused, this phenomenon is sometimes known as Fourth World nationalism. The term refers to the nationalism of nations that are not recognised by the United Nations, such as Kurds, Assyrians, Yezidis, Pashtun, Rohingya, Balochi, and others. While the situation has certainly changed for the Jewish people since 1948, the situation prior to that is still rather uncommon. It is difficult to imagine, for example, a Russian or Spanish nationalism that originated outside Russia or Spain. For Hindutvawadis, they now endure their own “emancipation” as the Jews of Europe did two centuries ago.

While the Indian and Israeli people seem to share an inexplicable warmth for each other—the Indian state had maintained an icy distance from the Jewish state until recently, they remain largely ignorant of each other’s cultures and customs. There are, no doubt, many differences, both superficial and profound. These seem to be, however, balanced by similarities that are equally superficial and profound. Perhaps it is a subtle sensing of these resemblances that brings these two people together.

This article first appeared in the June 2017 ‘Israel Special’ print edition of Swarajya.