India has just invoked a form of martial law in the states of Jammu and Kashmir without calling it that. It certainly did not wish to do so in order not to draw the world’s opprobrium, since it prides itself on being the largest democracy in South Asia. However, shutting down all communication, locking millions of residents in their homes, arresting all major political leaders, cancelling the special political status guaranteed to the territory by decades-old agreements, and summoning tens of thousands of troops to patrol the streets–that is a declaration of martial law (or as it was called when Indira Gandhi imposed it in the 1970s–national emergency).
In canceling these rights conveyed to Jammu and Kashmir in agreements signed in the 1950s and later, the Indian government abrogates a good deal of local political power and control and convey it to the central government. In effect, India has rescinded autonomy and commenced a process leading to full-scale annexation to the Indian state. Prohibitions against Indian non-residents settling in the territory or buying property will be canceled. Narendra Modi’s Hindu-nationalist government already plans, Israel-like, to create new Hindu settlements in Kashmir.
The goal is to mirror what both Israel and China have done (in Tibet, Xinjiang and the Occupied Territories). In the case of India and Israel, a religious-nationalist supremacist regime seeks to expand its power and control over enclaves with majority non-Jewish populations (in Israel’s case) and non-Hindu (in India’s). Not so coincidentally, in both cases the displaced population is Muslim.
China is different only in that its motivation is pure nationalism, without any religious element. It does not have a state religion, unless you count the Communist Party as such. Though China does have a strong antipathy toward religious belief (Falun Gong, Tibetan Buddhism, etc.), seeing it as a dangerous threat rival to national cohesion. Also, both Tibet and Xinjiang have populations that worship religions (Buddhism and Islam) which are different from the majority Chinese Han.
Both China and Israel have mounted enormous national projects extended over decades to transfer their own national populations into the disputed territories. By populating Tibet and Xinjiang with the dominant Han ethnic group; and by populating the West Bank with a million Jewish settlers–each country has staked its claim of national sovereignty over these lands. Both countries exert further control by stationing tens of thousands of local police, militia and army personnel inside these zones. Both also intervene in, and sabotage the religious practice of the indigenous populations. China has cracked down on the activities of numerous Buddhist monasteries in Tibet. In Xinjaing, it has detained a million local residents in concentration camps which demand that they renounce their Muslim faith and swear allegiance to the central government. Israel too regularly restricts Muslim pilgrimages to the holy sites in Jerusalem, with some senior ministers threatening to destroy the third holiest shrine in the Muslim world, the Haram al-Sharif.
The Indian prime minister has likely monitored developments in both countries closely and developed close ties, especially with Israel’s Bibi Netanyahu. He has observed China’s massive campaign of suppression of Xinjiang’s religious and cultural identity. He’s watched the concentration camps being built and filled with a million detainees. Both Israel and China have given him inspiration for his plans for Jammu and Kashmir.
Israel’s history offers yet another example that parallels the founding of India and Pakistan. When the British colonial rulers left India in 1948, there was a huge spasm of Hindu-Muslim violence–over 1-million died and 15-million were forced to flee their homes. Muslims largely fled to what became Pakistan and Hindus to what became India. This was the Partition, which led to the sundering of colonial India into two separate, religiously homogenous (or segregated, depending on your perspective) states.
Israel too implemented a more organized campaign of ethnic cleansing at its founding in 1948, which became known as the Nakba (Ben Gurion called it Plan Dalet). It was designed to substantially reduce the Palestinian population and guarantee a long-term Jewish majority. Through a series of pogroms, and ethnic cleansing, 1-million non-Jews were expelled. As in the case of Partition, the Jews eventually appropriated the villages, homes and lands of the fleeing Palestinians for themselves. They also prohibited the new refugees from returning to their former homes on pain of death. These Palestinians, unlike the Indian Muslims, had no new Muslim majority country to flee to. Instead, they were forced to scatter to the winds in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and elsewhere.
While Modi cannot expel the current Muslim residents of Kashmir to Pakistan as Israel did, he can, as the Chinese and Israelis have done, transfer hundreds of thousands of Hindus into the enclave. This will diminish the power of the current Muslim majority and exert the central state control of a Hindu-supremacist government.
The Indian prime minister faces a major hurdle in bringing his plans to fruition: an appeal by the opposition Congress party and human rights activists to the Indian Supreme Court. As Modi has deliberately torn up solemn agreements signed by previous national governments regarding the governance of Kashmir, a strong case may be made that his new declarations are null and void.
In Israel’s case, its own judiciary had no such legal covenants or precedents to look to when it ruled on issues of Israeli settlements and ethnic cleansing. So it offered virtually no opposition to political maneuvering by various governments to deepen Israeli control of the Territories. That has enabled Israel and its dominant settler lobby to entrench Occupation, which eventually could lead to full annexation.
Both China, Israel and India are regional economic and military powerhouses. No one can brook or interfere with their plans. The rest of the world, which could express condemnation or sanction, has a competing desire to trade with these nations and reap major economic rewards. In a battle between morality and commerce, the latter almost always wins. Certainly, in these cases it has.
Speaking in military terms, the power each of these countries wields means that no rival will stand in the way of their expansionist policies. Though Pakistan furiously denounced the Indian moves, its military would be no match in a war with its traditional rival. Similarly, while Israel has fought many wars with its Arab neighbors, none currently has the will or capacity to oppose the apartheid and ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
It’s also no accident that Israel is India’s largest weapons supplier with nearly a billion dollars in sales in some years. There is not only mutual political interest in subjugating captive populations, but also military cooperation in carrying out these repressive policies. Call it, the solidarity of the ethnic cleansers.
But just as Israeli Occupation, and continuing violence has incited renewed resistance among the Palestinians, so Modi’s moves to consolidate Hindu/state control over Jammu and Kashmir will have the opposite effect to what he hopes. They will not offer a decisive blow to Kashmiri activists seeking to break the bonds with India. Instead this will incite them and Pakistan to escalate their resistance in the form of renewed acts of terror. Those who were moderates before will be radicalized now. India has created its own quagmire and nothing Modi has done will end it any time soon.
This is a perfect example of Modi’s delusions:
I salute my sisters and brothers of Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh for their courage and resilience. For years, vested interest groups who believed in emotional blackmail never cared for people’s empowerment. J&K is now free from their shackles. A new dawn, better tomorrow awaits!
— Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) August 6, 2019
It is imperative that the movements supporting the rights of Kashmiri, Palestinians, Tibetans and Uighurs understand the critical intersectionality of their struggles. BDS is a key element in this process. I am sure if it has not already done so, it will be reaching out to all these movements for political rights to reinforce their mutual struggles.
Given developments so far, it seems possible that each of these three nations may eventually win the battle to ethnically cleanse their respective territories and exert dominance on behalf of the national religious or ethnic majority. It’s impossible to tell whether this will lead to the Hindu nationalist goal of equilibrium and stability; or whether the brutal attempt to impose cultural, religious and ethnic homogeneity will lead to full-scale rebellion and revolution. It could go either way.
Sorry Charlie, but the mainstream historical view, backed up by prominent historian of this period Benny Morris who maintains that there was no Zionist “plan” or blanket policy of evicting the Arab population, or of “ethnic cleansing”.
Plan Dalet of March 10, 1948, was the master plan of the Haganah to counter the expected pan-Arab assault on the emergent Jewish state.
Plan D was a limited, regulated military plan to empty hostile Arab villagers along the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv corridor.
Later on, during Israel’s War of Independence, Plan D was used to ethnically cleanse Arab villages, mainly in the North.
Plan D was drafted as a military solution to a clear and imminent threat. It was not drafted as a political solution to the ‘Arab problem’.
Read Plan Dalet for yourself, here.
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/plan-dalet-for-war-of-independence-march-1948
@ Crimson: You’re telling me what the “mainstream historical view” is based on what? You’re a historian? LEarned in Zionist history? Or just an average propagandist shooting the s***?
Benny Morris is a “historian” who actually advocates and defends ethnical cleansing. Literally. So of course he’s going to minimize the nature of Plan Dalet. Nor do all historian of Zionism agree with him. I notice you neglect to offer Ilan Pappe or Avi Shlaim as sources. Why have you cherry-picked yours and omitted others just as credible or moreso?
Everything you’ve written is sophistry. I don’t really care much about how or why Plan D was drawn up. What’s important is the outcome. It resulted directly in the expulsion of 1-million Palestinians. It was a plan for ethnic cleansing on a massive scale. It corresponded precisely to writing from BG’s only diaries about the need for a Jewish majority, even if it meant expulsion of the non-Jewish indigenous population. THe only difference between Plan D and the Wansee Conference is that the latter ended with 6 million dead and the former with 1 million refugees. Other than that they were both borne from the same racist supremacist mindset. BG was smart enough to realize he couldn’t get away with exterminating the Palestinians, so he expelled them. He left just enough to be able to show them as proof that he wasn’t guilty of genocide or ethnic cleansing on a mass scale.
And never ever quote hasbara sites here including Jewish Virtual Library. It was created by an Aipac staffer with a huge grant from the Schusterman Foundation, America’s leading pro Israel foundation. Nothing it publishes is credible or reliable.
Ilan Pappe!
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine!
ROFL!
Ilan Pappe is less a historian than an advocate for the Palestinian narrative, something which he is quite unapologetic about.
“I am not as interested in what happened as in how people see what’s happened. (“An Interview of Ilan Pappé,” Baudouin Loos, Le Soir [Bruxelles],Nov. 29, 1999)
“I admit that my ideology influences my historical writing…”(Ibid)
“Indeed the struggle is about ideology, not about facts. Who knows what facts are? We try to convince as many people as we can that our interpretation of the facts is the correct one, and we do it because of ideological reasons, not because we are truth seekers”. (Ibid)
“My bias is apparent despite the desire of my peers that I stick to facts and the ‘truth’ when reconstructing past realities. I view any such construction as vain and presumptuous. This book is written by one who admits compassion for the colonized not the colonizer; who sympathizes with the occupied not the occupiers.”–A History of Modern Palestine.
So if you choose to believe Pappe’s ‘history’ of Israel’s War of Independence, as opposed to the histories of more highly regarded historians like Benny Morris, than you do so at your own peril, because Ilan Pappe’s entire chronology of the war is off by several months!
Pappe dates the beginning of Israel’s War of Independence to April, 1948, but many historians, including Morris, argue that the war began in November 1947 when the UN voted in favor of the Partition Plan. Immediately following that vote, Arab gangs began attacks on Jewish cities; Jerusalem’s City Center on November 30 and the Husseini backed Salameh gangs attack (400 armed men) on Tel Aviv’s suburbs on December 8.
The fact is, between the U.N. General Assembly vote to partition Palestine on November 29, 1947, and Israeli independence almost six months later, Arab irregulars killed 1,256 Jews in Palestine[1]–almost all of whom were civilians. Pappé might be onto something if Plan D had been drafted in the absence of Arab violence against Jews, or if the Arab states surrounding Palestine were not so serious about answering the declaration of a Jewish state with a war of annihilation. But inconveniently for Pappé, those were the realities of the time–realities that undermine the thesis of his book.
The Palestine Post provides a detailed window into the period. Between 1932 and 1948, the paper, which would later change its name to The Jerusalem Post, was Mandatory Palestine’s newspaper of record. An English-language daily, it catered both to Palestine’s British administrators and the relatively small number of Jewish residents in Palestine who spoke English. It was not always sympathetic to Zionists, especially not to those who resorted to force of arms, and often sided editorially with the British against the Irgun and Stern Gang. For instance, on February 20, 1948, it headlined a story about an Irgun attack on British servicemen, “Terrorists Murder Soldier in Jerusalem.”[2] And rather than ignore the Arab population, The Palestine Post perhaps overemphasized their claims. Analysis of the newspaper’s casualty reports shows that between November 1947 and May 1948, it over-reported Arab casualties threefold when its figure of over 3,500 is compared to British Mandatory statistics.[3] The editors of The Palestine Post did not know how history would be written, and there is every reason to believe the reports between November 29, 1947, and May 15, 1948, sought to depict events accurately.
A genuine, unbiased historian doesn’t ignore context, as Pappé willfully does.
Those who read The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine will not learn that in the first week after the passage of the U.N. partition plan, Arabs murdered 62 Jews. In the following month, Arabs killed an additional 200. By March 1, 1948, 546 Jews had been murdered and, by Ben-Gurion’s declaration of independence, the total was over 1,000.[4] Arab paramilitaries, militias, and terrorists besieged Jerusalem and cut the Jewish neighborhoods’ water supplies and surrounded Jewish villages in the Negev. Arab snipers attacked Jews in Haifa and other mixed villages.[5] A sniper from Beit Dajan shot a 14-year-old girl,[6] and Arab fighters attacked more than a dozen kibbutzim between December 1947 and March 1948.[7] Massacres were common: Arab rioters killed 39 Jews at Haifa’s oil refinery on December 30, 1947, and two weeks later Arab irregulars killed 35 Jews trying to reach Gush Etzion. On February 1, 1948, an Arab or British terrorists blew up The Palestine Post building and, three weeks later, a terrorist’s bomb killed 44 Jews on Jerusalem’s Ben Yehuda Street. On March 21, the bodies of 11 missing Jews were found; three had been burned.[8] Local Arab villagers or Bedouins may have precipitated the autumn 1947 violence,[9] but by spring 1948, Arab volunteers from Iraq and Syria were increasingly participating.[10] On April 11, 1948, for example, Egyptian members of the Muslim Brotherhood attacked Kfar Darom near Gaza City.[11]
Simply put, Israel’s War of Independence began in late 1947, albeit at a state of low-level terrorism and violence that Pappé, given the narrative he wishes to promote, is loath to disclose.
[1] The Palestine Post (Jerusalem), May 6, 1948.
[2] The Palestine Post, Feb. 20, 1948.
[3] The Palestine Post, May 6, 1948; British mandatory figures published in The Palestine Post, Nov. 29, 1947 to May 1, 1948.
[4] The Palestine Post, Jan. 2, 7, 27, Feb. 2, Mar. 2, Apr. 1, May 1, 1948.
[5] The Palestine Post, Dec. 9, 11, 1947.
[6] The Palestine Post, Mar. 21, 1948.
[7] The Palestine Post, Dec. 1947 through Mar. 1948; David Tal, War in Palestine, 1948: Strategy and Diplomacy (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 57-123.
[[8] The Palestine Post, Mar. 21, 1948.
[9] The Palestine Post, Dec. 14, 1947.
[10] The Palestine Post, Apr. 19, 1948; Tal, War in Palestine, 1948, p. 20.
[11] The Palestine Post , Apr. 12, 14, 1948.
BTW, Avi Shlaim’s history is no better than Pappe’s.
Avi Shlaim claims that Israel and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan conspired to give Jordan the West Bank so that no Palestinian state could be formed pursuant to the Partition Plan, but Avi Shlaim’s chief critic, Professor Ephraim Karsh, demolished Shlaim’s collusion claims in Karsh’s book, Fabricating Israel’ History, Cass (1997).
@Crimson: And you earned your PhD where? Of course you don’t have one. Take any courses at University in Zionist history?Of course not. Read Pappe or Shlaim or any other New Historian than Benny Morris? Of course not. Which means you’re claims are bulls***.
As for bias, every historian has biases. The difference between you, Morris, Pappe and me is that we admit our biases and take them into account, while you deny yours. Which makes you a fraud and Morris unreliable. Benny Morris is no more reliable or “distinguished” than Ilan Pappe. And any historian who advocates nuking Iran, as Morris has done Is a ghoul, not a trusted academic.
You have committed an unpardonable offense in violation of a major comment rule. You have committed plagiarism by quoting Seth Frantzman’s review of Pappe’s book from Middle East Forum (itself a pathetic Hasbara rag), and not placing his words in quotation marks or acknowledging him as the author. This is inexcusable. Even had you placed FRantzman’s words into quotation marks you’d be violating the comment rules, which clearly state NOT to quote long passages from external sources, but to summarize and argument and add short quotations if necessary.
You are banned.
“This was the Partition, which led to the sundering of colonial India into two separate, religiously homogenous (or segregated, depending on your perspective) states” … Perhaps you need to re-visit the books on partition to understand the differences in the idea of India and Pakistan.
Additionally, do remember that India has 200 million Muslims as citizens who are as diverse as the remaining ~1 Billion Hindus by caste, sect, language, etc. Kashmir is a complex issue that has its roots beyond the 70 years that most of us tend to talk about.
This comment is an experiment in a different type of communication. I hope you will embrace it.
I am also Jewish but see things very differently from you. However, I am not trying to convert you; only to understand you.
Scientists say that human beings are emotion and belief driven and that our logical and evidential arguments only come later. So if you see evidence for ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and I see the dispersion occurring differently, chances are our emotional wiring is different.
So I would like to share my own emotions.
I feel FEAR with respect to the potential termination of a Jewish-sovereign state since to me, this would signal a reversion to helpless vulnerability for Jews. Thus I feel that Israel is in need of defense, not only physically, but rhetorically. (I also feel ANGER when I see criticisms of Israel that I find illegitimate, but this emotion is a correlate of my FEAR that such criticisms have destructive consequences.)
Like many Jews who criticize Israel, you reference your Jewish identity, which suggests that Israel has an emotional relevance for you. I’m guessing maybe it’s also to do with FEAR, but perhaps the fear of some social disgrace regarding your Jewishness or maybe even fear of catastrophic retribution against Jews (delivered by whom…?) if Israel doesn’t stop acting in ways you consider provocative, immoral, or “un-Jewish.” But I am only speculating; you know best.
You state on your “About” page that you have worked all your adult life to “promote dialogue.” So please be a trail-blazing peacenik with me and dialogue about your EMOTIONS, as I have about mine. And please don’t say “empathic pain for Palestinians,” or “moral outrage at wrong-doings” because these are not primal emotions…and they are also felt by those with opposing views.
Thank you!
@ teresa: Thanks for bringing to my attention how outdated that portion of my About page was. It was written 16 years ago and a lot has changed. I have revised that passage accordingly. I do not believe in “dialogue” as a means of achieving justice in the I-P conflict. Dialogue alone is an excuse and a delaying tactic designed to prevent a just solution. Nor do I believe in emotions or fear as excuses for doing the right thing. The only thing that will resolve the conflict is political power and action. That is all that matters. As long as the world refuses to act against Israeli apartheid and Israel refuses to compromise, there will be war and killing on a mass scale, the vast majority inflicted by Israel on Palestinians and its other Arab neighbors.
If you do not want this to happen you will adopt a more forthright view on these matters. If you don’t, then you’re admitting that the Arab and Palestinian lives lost are less important than protecting your own projection of Israeli weakness and vulnerability.
You base your views on incohate emotions while ignoring the fact that Israel has the strongest army in the Middle East and one of the strongest in the world. There is no legitimate fear of extinction or even defeat militarily. If you believe there is you are blind to reality.
And please don’t project your own feelings on to me or try to assume you know my views or my feelings. You don’t.