Sauce for the goose isn’t sauce for the gander

Israelis should know better than anyone else that one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist

The bonhomie between Narendra Modi and Benjamin Netanyahu and the oozing unctuousness of TV commentators reminded me of Golda Meir’s tart comment when Israel’s sixth prime minister, Menachem Begin, Egypt’s Anwar Sadat, and Jimmy Carter were proposed for the Nobel Peace Prize. “I don’t know about the Nobel but they certainly deserve Oscars,” she remarked.

I asked Meir once at a lunch in London whether she wanted diplomatic relations with India. Instead of replying directly, she said she knew Indira Gandhi. They had met at some jamboree in East Africa. Then she added somewhat bitterly, “India is so huge, we are so small, you don’t need us!” Little can that tough old Yiddisher grandmomma have known that Gandhi would seek Israel’s military help only a few years later when the Bangladesh war broke out. Jawaharlal Nehru had similarly appealed to Begin in 1962. Even if thanks to Modi, such approaches become part of the normal diplomatic give and take, one hopes India won’t again be plunged into a crisis necessitating emergency assistance.

From the way in which he stumbled over my old friend Jake’s name (Gen JF R Jacob), Modi is even more ignorant about “Indian” Jews than Gandhi, who was stumped when Ed Koch, New York’s mayor, asked her about them. He can’t understand the difference between Bnei Menashe and Beni Israel or know that today’s Cochin Jews are not the Paradesi Jews, who created an independent state there after Jerusalem fell. Sally Solomon, descendant of Shalom Aaron Cohen of Aleppo, who founded Calcutta’s Jewish community in 1797, asked in her delightful memoirs, Hooghly Tales: Stories of Growing Up in Calcutta under the Raj and Where Rivers Meet: Memories of Madras 19481972, “Are we English? Are we Indian?” She didn’t feel either. Nor could she relate to European Jews, who had suffered the Holocaust. When emigrating to Britain in 1972, Sally made her husband promise to buy a house in India. But visiting Madras in 1998, she knew it was no longer home. She also realised that being a Jew wasn’t enough to be an Israeli.

We are told the new relationship is not so much about weapons, agriculture or water management as a guard against terrorism. That sounds commendably pious but Israelis should know better than anyone else that one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist. My Jewish friends always boasted that the Balfour Declaration committing Britain to a Jewish homeland would have achieved nothing if militant Zionist groups like the Irgun Zvati Leumi (National Military Organization), Lehi (popularly known as the Stern Gang) and Haganah hadn’t fought British and Arabs alike. The Polish-born Begin was Irgun’s leader with a £10,000 price on his head.

I wonder if anyone told Modi of the 1948 Deir Yassin massacre when around 120 Irgun and Lehi fighters attacked a Palestinian village of 600 men, women and children near Jerusalem. Women were raped and civilians decapitated or disembowelled. Prisoners were paraded through Jerusalem’s Jewish quarter before being murdered. It was a forerunner of the even more gruesome 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacres of Arab refugees by Lebanon’s Christian Falange militia under Israeli military supervision. Modi may not even know that on July 22, 1946, Jewish freedom fighters (terrorists?) blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem where he stayed, killing 91 people. The King David unearthed a tea cosy for Modi’s comfort. Staying there 46 years ago, I ordered bed tea at 6.30 to the wonderment of the hotel management because the dining room was already open.

Disguised as Arab workmen and waiters, Irgun guerrillas planted bombs in the basement of the hotel, which housed British administrative and military offices. Weeping heavily, Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist leader and Israel’s first president, told the British Labour politician, Richard Crossman, “I can’t help feeling proud of our boys. If only it had been a German headquarters, they would have gotten the Victoria Cross.”

Three days later, Britain’s prime minister, Clement Attlee, wrote to US President Harry Truman, “I am sure you will agree that the crime committed in Jerusalem on July 22 calls for the strongest action against terrorism but having regard to the sufferings of the innocent Jewish victims of Nazism this should not deter us from introducing a policy designed to bring peace to Palestine with the least possible delay.”