The first anniversary of Hamas’ attack against Israel passed last month, which killed around 1,200 Israelis and took 250 Israelis as hostages. What has continued to unfold following the Oct. 7 attack presents the most appalling scene in recent decades.
As anticipated, Israeli forces launched an unprecedented military assault in Gaza, evolving the ongoing war into the deadliest conflict in the century-old Israel-Palestine tension. Today the Jewish state is employing all weapons in its arsenal except the nuclear bomb but ironically the outcome of the military strikes has surpassed the scale of the damage that a nuclear bomb could have inflicted. Gaza has been turned into a mound of debris and another warzone is already unfolding in Lebanon. Soon after the launch of the Gaza bombing, millions across the world poured to the streets against the killing of innocent children and women. All major cities began to resonate with the cry “Stop the war!”
Amid the global outcry against the war, the utter silence on Arab streets was not so difficult to fathom but it was of course terrifying to see over-stated states and their growing control over people’s hearts and emotions. There is no point saying that sympathy or antipathy toward the obliteration of Gazans or voices for or against Palestinian rights is a litmus test for political correctness and humanism and the same holds true for the Indian Muslims.
Indian Muslims have an old association with the cause of Palestine not only because it houses the Al-Aqsa Mosque but also because of their emotional attachment to the Palestinians. The issue of forceful expulsion of Palestinians from their ancestral land and the growing Jewish settlement there in the early 20th century dominated the first generation of Muslim freedom fighters in undivided India. Mohammad Iqbal, the great philosopher-poet of undivided India attended the World Islamic Congress on Palestine and visited Al-Aqsa Mosque while coming back after attending the Second Round Table Conference in 1931. Similarly, Mohammad Ali Jauhar, a Cambridge graduate is buried in the premises of the Al-Aqsa Mosque. When Ali Jauhar died in January 1931 during the Second Round Table Conference in Britain, Haj Amin al-Hussaini, given the former’s love for Palestine, requested Ali Jauhar’s elder brother, Shaukat Ali to bury him in Jerusalem. With such a cherished memory of affection for Palestine, it is not uncommon for today’s Muslims in India to be in grief over the ongoing annihilation of Palestinians in Gaza.
Owing to the emergence of a new diplomatic template and the evolution of a new political landscape in India over the years, the scale of protests witnessed during the heydays of protest in other countries was almost invisible in India. However, several Muslim religious organizations and the members of the Muslim intelligentsia condemned the innocent killing in Gaza in their own ways. For example, the deputy chief of India’s oldest Islam-based organization, Jamaat-e-Islami Hind, Malik Muhtasim Khan says that the core issue for the Palestinians is the establishment of an independent state of Palestine. He also pointed out that it is the state of Israel along with its Western cohort that has continued to deprive the Palestinians of their natural rights and there can be no peace without the state for Palestinians. On the role of Arab leadership, Malik accuses them of betraying the Palestinian cause and failing to fulfill their historical and religious duties. Gaza mayhem, according to him, has further exposed the Western hypocrisy and the myth of Israeli invincibility.
The intellectuals in India never shy away from expressing their opinions on global Muslim issues and have always decried the unilateral and hegemonic policy of Israel vis-a-vis Palestine. Akhtarul Wasey, professor emeritus in the Centre of Islamic Studies at Jamia Millia Islamia University (New Delhi), was more critical of the U.S. instead of Israel. He says that the world should ask the U.S. as a principal arbitrator, not Israel, why it failed to implement the Oslo Accord of 1993, which envisaged an independent state of Palestine. On Gaza, Wasey does not buy the Western narrative and claims that Oct. 7 did not occur in a vacuum but was an outcome of the decades-old Israeli brutalities. According to him, today, unlike Israel, Hamas has nothing to lose and he sees the victory for Palestinians as inevitable.
India is home to a significant number of Shiite populations that equally associate themselves with the cause of Palestine. When Hassan Nasrullah of Hezbollah was killed, several Shiites considered it the second biggest loss for Iran after Qasim Suleimani and numerous rallies were organized in Shiite-dominated cities. One prominent Shiite clergy is Maulana Noori, who says that genocide is going on in Gaza before the eyes of a global community and with every passing moment, all hope for the state of Palestine is diminishing. Noori believes if the war does not stop soon, the state will be buried in the debris of Gaza before it can see the light of the day. He called it a sad state of affairs where there is no rule of law and "might is right" seems to have replaced the political wisdom of the past.
The legal luminaries have their own way of expanding or looking at the horror of Gaza. Fuzail Ahmed Ayyubi, a prominent lawyer of the Supreme Court, looks at the situation in Gaza through the prism of international law. For him, Gaza represents a total collapse of the international legal system. What is more obnoxious for him is the silence of the world’s so-called civilized nations that have allowed the Israeli death machine for so long, which could inspire other powerful nations to do the same against weak nations. He is equally critical of bodies like the U.N. that have failed in their duty to establish peace or deter the mounting tolls.
The Palestinian issue has always received significant attention among Muslim political commentators who have never remained oblivious to what is going on in the larger Arab world. Zafrul Islam Khan, who for three decades published a weekly political magazine (Milli Gazette), says that one should distinguish between the views of the Arab states and Arab streets while evaluating the Arab’s diplomacy on Gaza or Palestine. He is quite outspoken in his assessment and says that the Arab masses are with Hamas. However, he believes the regimes are scared of the resistance group and support the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which is no longer relevant. He says that Arab regimes support the state for the Palestinians but want no role for Hamas in the political sphere of Palestine because they fear Hamas’ resistance ideology could instigate Arab youth against the monarchs. He sees the elimination of the Hamas, as coveted by Israel, as an unachievable goal.
Likewise, another prominent journalist and the writer of a masterpiece, published recently, “Being Muslim in Hindu India,” Ziya Us Salam, speaking on the absence of street protests by the Indian Muslims in Gaza, says it is because of growing fear of the government of the day, with Muslims not pouring into the streets and no physical protests, contrary to what was witnessed in other countries. For him, the silence of so-called liberals in the country was equally disturbing as they failed to speak against the atrocities which was not the case earlier. Even the national media in India failed to cover an issue that sought the attention of all the global media from right to left.
The student politics in India cannot be seen in isolation from the larger national politics as they have always played a key role in shaping the course of politics. The protest of millions of Muslim students and youth across India in 2019-20 against the National Register of Citizens (NRC) and Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) is still remembered as a watershed moment in the history of student politics.
In the capital city of Delhi, one of the most visible faces of the anti-CAA movement was Eeman Usmani, who, on Gaza, says that ongoing Israeli military action in Palestine is highly arbitrary and one cannot be branded as a terrorist merely for taking up arms and particularly when it is against the forces of occupation. Unlike many, she does not blame Hamas for Oct. 7 because one should understand, according to her, that Hamas has a strong political base both in Gaza and the West Bank and no resistance movement such as Hamas can sustain for long without the mass support. She further claims that what Israel is doing today is a replica of what other colonial powers did in the past. Many voices trace the lineage of today’s catastrophe to the Cold War politics when the larger Arab world was in the camp of the erstwhile USSR.
Saiful Islam, a retired senior government official and a keen watcher of Muslim politics holds a similar view. He says that the Palestinian cause has been an old victim of global politics and internal division among the Muslim countries has equally damaged the future prospects of Palestine. He sees success in the pursuit of the path of resistance alone.
There are voices for the cause of Palestine but they are not visible in the streets owing to innumerable factors, both internal and external. The Muslims in India from across the spectrum have their well-informed opinions and for them, the Palestinians are the victims of the Israeli atrocities, Western explicit bias and the Arab’s silence.
