The Indian model in which people of different religions, sometimes with difficult pasts, live together with equal rights in a single polity is the only solution towards which Jews and Muslims are bound to move. One could only wish that they did it before inviting more miseries upon themselves from each other’s hands. – Ibn Khaldun Bharati
The Israel-Palestine imbroglio needs an Indian solution. Both sides, Jews and Muslims, have much to learn from India’s successes and mistakes. Without imbibing the Vedantic value of universal humanism, Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam (The World Is One Family), there is no escape from the vicious cycle of violence into which the two sides have been plunging headlong with unfailing regularity. The 75-year-long continuum of war-pause-war can’t be broken unless there is a paradigmatic shift from the clichéd solution of either two states or a bi-national one state.
In 1947, India acquiesced to partition and a two-state solution in order to avoid civil war. Result: We not only had a civil war of holocaust proportions, and a never-ending series of communal riots but also four wars between the two countries which have remained on the brink of yet another, possibly, a nuclear one. Like Pakistan, the proposed Palestinian state would intrinsically be a war state whose ideological raison d’être would be the reconquest of Israel, much like Pakistan’s has been the reconquest of India.
Though partition was forced in the name of two irreconcilable nations in India, one-third of the Muslims of undivided India, about four crore at that time, still remained here. That India didn’t become a theocracy a la Pakistan is one side of the story. Another is that it neither became a bi-national state in which Hindus and Muslims shared political power in the name of their respective religions. The new India, a nation-state, belonged to its citizens, individually, and not to their denominational identity. A bi-national state would result in imperium in imperio, a state within a state, which would sanctify the two-nation theory and accord constitutional sanction to competitive communalism.
True, pseudo-secular discourse and vote-bank politics have often compromised the character of the polity, but these efforts have been more underhand than upfront. A bi-national state of Israel-Palestine would compound the problem, much the same as the separate electorate did for India.
The confederacy of religions is a medieval model in which different nationalities lived their separate lives under the suzerainty of an overarching imperial power; where individuals were subsumed in their respective nationalities and had no direct relation with the state. In a modern state, where individuals count, every citizen has a direct relation with the state. If nationality were to be one’s primary political affiliation, and relation with the state was to be mediated through it, before long the state would unravel. A bi-national Israel-Palestine state would be the first step towards two mutually hostile states. Therefore, it’s not a viable solution.
As for the two states, the Muslims said no to it so many times as to render the idea eventually implausible. They said no to the partition plan proposed by the Peel Commission in 1936-37 under which only about 20 per cent of areas were earmarked for the Jewish state. Again, they rejected the UN partition plan of 1947 under which the Jews were to have about 55 per cent of the land. In principle, the Jews were not opposed to a Muslim state in Mandatory Palestine. The Muslims, however, wouldn’t have a Jewish state in what they considered their country. The result, therefore, was that while the Jews established their state in 1948, the Muslims couldn’t establish theirs.
The deeply ingrained Islamic antisemitism wouldn’t countenance a Jewish state in their midst. Besides, there were significant structural reasons too. Palestine had never been a state, and Palestinians were not a nation. Therefore, they lacked the political personality necessary for building a state. Under the Ottomans, Palestine was a mere district of their Syrian province. Its distinct political personality emerged only in 1920 with the grant of a mandate to Britain for the area west of River Jordan. The area east of the river—as much Palestine as the area west—was named Transjordan, which was formed into a state under the son of Sharif Hussein of Mecca.
The Muslims said no with such persistence to forming a state until the Jewish one was annihilated that, hurtling through the wars of 1967 and 1973, the areas in which a notionally viable state could be founded, had passed into Israeli occupation. By the time Intifada occurred and the Oslo Agreement led to the formation of the Palestinian Authority, Jewish occupation and settlements had splintered the West Bank into hundreds of non-contiguous enclaves, which couldn’t be banded together to build a state with territorial integrity. As is evident, instead of one integrated entity, there would be hundreds of disintegrated Bantustans, wherein each enclave would be a state unto itself.
Having seen the unviability of both the conventional solutions, i.e., two-state and binational state models, let’s consider an unorthodox, even heretical, model of one state, Israel, where Muslims would live as equal citizens with full civil rights as available in civilised societies of the day.
The biggest hurdle in visualising such a polity is the monotheistic ideological framework to which both the Jews and the Muslims belong. Monotheism does not tolerate difference, diversity and dissent. Thus, the European Christians, belonging to the same Abrahamic tradition, exterminated the native populations of America and Australia. In India, however, despite successive waves of invasions, there have always been adjustments and accommodations. Neither the invaders could think of wiping out the native population nor the natives thought of throwing out the newcomers, no matter whether they were invaders or immigrants. This could be possible only because of the quintessential Indian ethic of coexisting with difference and diversity and recognising all religions to be equally true.
The classical Indian wisdom, pithily summarised in epigrams like sarva dharma sambhav (all religions are the same), ekam sat vipra bahudha vadanti (truth is one, the wise perceive it differently) and Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam are emblems of the collective psyche which has gone into shaping the temperament of tolerance, acceptance and coexistence. This, and not constitutional interpolations, underlies Indian secularism.
Until both sides learn from Indian culture, they won’t be able to break free from the spiral of violence. Neither Abrahamic monotheism nor Western secularism could show the path. A monotheistic religion regards all other religions as false, and their followers misguided. No wonder Jews and Arab Muslims, both progenies of Abraham, both monotheists, both circumcised, find it impossible to build a shared polity. As for Western secularism, while it’s true it has helped them curb Christian antisemitism to a great extent, it’s also true that their current Judeophilia has materialised only after the diaspora vacated Europe to relocate to Palestine.
Therefore, the Indian model in which people of different religions, sometimes with difficult pasts, live together with equal rights in a single polity is the only solution towards which Jews and Muslims are bound to move. One could only wish that they did it before inviting more miseries upon themselves from each other’s hands.
One thing, however, should remain clear. As in India, any attempt to change the Hindu character of the country would unsettle its secular polity as Indian secularism springs from its Hindu ethos, in Israel, the Jewishness of the state could be challenged only at the cost of a relapse into its racist recess. The state has been formed by the Jews, and levers of power should remain in their hands until they themselves elect Muslims like Britons elected Sunak and Americans elected Obama. Principles of equal rights shouldn’t be used to subvert the system which granted it in the first place. In India, using constitutional secularism to promote communalism has had a backlash in which there is a lesson for everyone.
When Prophet Muhammad migrated to Medina, he tried to weld the Jews and Muslims into a single polity, Ummat Wahida! The experiment failed. Maybe, it’s time to revive it. – News 18, 6 December 2023
› Ibn Khaldun Bharati is the pen name of a student of Islam who looks at Islamic history from an Indian perspective.
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