India must not imperil its ties with Israel
The focal point in India’s calculus has to be the nature and character of Hamas that preaches the politics of hatred.
New Delhi’s recent abstention from voting at the United Nations Human Rights Council motion on accepting and sending the Mary McGowan Davis Commission Report on the 2014 Israeli strikes in Gaza to the International Criminal Court is justified from the perspective of India’s interests.
The Davis report accuses Israel of actions amounting to war crimes. It says the Israeli military deliberately targeted civilian areas in Gaza, hitting residential buildings, “which are prima facie civilian objects immune from attack”. The Israeli conduct was “reflective of a broader policy, approved at least tacitly by decisionmakers at the highest levels of the government of Israel”. The report has also criticised Hamas for violence committed against Israeli citizens. Based on this report, the HRC motion called on Israel and Hamas to “cooperate fully with International Criminal Court” and bring those responsible for human rights violations to justice.
The truth is, the Davis report follows the same old pattern of the HRC functioning, where the Council is selective in its concerns over rights violations. The UN General Assembly established this body in March 2006, replacing the UN Commission on Human Rights with a new mandate to promote and protect rights in general and freedom of association and assembly, freedom of expression, freedom of belief and religion, women’s rights, LGTB rights and the rights of racial and ethnic minorities in particular. But this noble mission has remained a far cry.
For years the Council has been overlooking rights violations in swathes of the world in general and the Middle East in particular. Under the influence of groups such as the Organization of Islamic Conference, the Council has been focusing mostly on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with the sole aim of condemning Jerusalem. By 2014, it condemned Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, in 46 resolutions. The Council’s special reporters, such as Richard Falk has compared Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians with the Nazi treatment of Jews during the Holocaust.
New Delhi should not let any friction creep into its relations with Jerusalem. Ever since India under the then Prime Minister, P.V. Narsimha Rao established full diplomatic ties with Israel, relations between the two democracies have been attaining new heights in areas such as defence, counter terrorism, intelligence, agriculture and science and technology. This momentum has to be maintained in the mutual interests of the two countries.
New Delhi does not have any obligation to comply with any reference to the International Criminal Court (ICC). It is the Rome Statute that created the ICC. India is not a signatory to it. More importantly, the HRC resolution amounted, in a way, to equating the state of Israel with the terrorist, non-state actor Hamas. This is not acceptable.
The Hamas has been a terrorist organisation throughout. It has had the support of certain reactionary establishments in the Middle East. For long it had the support of the “Axis of Resistance” (Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, and the Islamic Jihad). In the recent past the Emir of Qatar is said to have granted $400 million to the Hamas.
There has been little change in the Hamas’ doctrine or pattern of behaviour over the years. During the Gaza crisis of 2014, former Gaza Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of the Hamas announced that the third Intifada had begun in the West Bank. He praised the terrorism of the Hamas’ military wing and described the Israeli civilians killed in its terrorist operations as “settlers”. Senior members of Hamas, such as Khalid Mash’al, Fauzi Barhum, and Mushir al-Masri praised the abduction and later killing of three Jewish teenagers.
This put Jerusalem under pressure to use all means possible to protect its citizens by destroying the entire Hamas infrastructure. Jerusalem felt its previous offensives, including the “Operation Pillar of Defense” (November 2012) had failed to end Hamas’ operational control in Gaza Strip and it needed “Operation Protective Edge” to corner Hamas.
As for the civilian casualties that took place in Israel’s retaliatory strikes, it was because Hamas used the civilian population in Gaza as a human shield. They thus protected themselves and managed to portray the civilian casualties that followed as crimes against humanity.
The focal point in New Delhi’s calculus has to be the nature and character of Hamas. The Hamas charter preaches the politics of hatred and violence not only against Israel but against the entire civilised world. It does not spare even the liberals among the Palestinian population. India and the civilised world, the democracies in particular, must not impart any kind of political legitimacy to Hamas, as that will embolden them to proceed with their violent activities in the Middle East and beyond. New Delhi cannot afford to gloss over Hamas’ links with India-specific terrorists.
Some analysts seem to argue that by its abstention from voting on the resolution at HRC, New Delhi has offended the sentiments of the Muslim world and that this might even affect India-OIC economic relations. Such arguments are fallacious. Politics today is too factional and bilateral to govern economy substantially. Increasingly, economy is becoming global.
Pertinently, New Delhi must bear in mind that unlike the Jewish state of Israel, most of the Islamic states in the Middle East have hardly cared for India’s political sovereignty and territorial integrity. They have sided with Islamabad on the issue of Kashmir. Also, New Delhi’s abstention at the HRC vote is not antithetical to its policy of support to the Palestinian struggle. The OIC rulers have hardly been serious about the Palestinian cause they pretend to espouse daily. They have constantly denied the Palestinian refugees living in their nations the status and treatment they deserve. Jagdish N. Singh is a senior journalist “Tax the rich, feed the poor, ‘til there are no rich no more. I’d love to change the world, but I don’t know what to do. So I’ll leave it up to you.” Those pessimistic lyrics sung by the British band Ten Years After came from the cell phone ring of a Greek education official I was interviewing in 2011. (The official took the call, and later we got back to the interview.) The moment has stuck in my head for four years because at the time — and certainly now — those lyrics seemed to characterize the dominant Greek position toward politics, economics and the country’s ongoing financial crisis.
Many Greeks feel this way about inequality and socialism, and identify as Marxists — though certainly not all.
For that reason, one way to look at the crisis playing out between European politicians, finance ministers and technocrats is as an arm-wrestling match over what many academics call “political economy” — the study of how economic theory affects politics. Greeks — like citizens of some other European countries — have a schizophrenic approach to their own political economy. (We can thank the Greeks for the characterization: the Greek word “schizo” means “split” and “phrene” means “mind.”)
The crisis has shed light on the fact that European citizens — and Greeks specifically — are divided between those who favor a more socialist long-term political and economic order, and those who prefer a more neoliberal one.
The new Greek finance minister, Euclid Tsakalotos, is an Oxford-educated Marxist academic economist. But some Greeks calls him a “champagne socialist” because he owns several houses and lives the life of a European elite that they and he — as an early Syriza member — despise. His predecessor, Yanis Varoufakis, also identifies as Marxist and has spoken about how much he would like to replace capitalism.
At the same time, 80 percent of Greeks want to remain part of the EU. They want Greece to have access to capital markets and foreign investment. They are fed up with life in a sluggish, collectivist economy. EU payments exceed what Greece pays into the EU, and have improved infrastructure throughout the country in the past 30 years. But many Greeks aren’t sure if the Troika (comprised of the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank) is out to help them or exploit them.
Many highly educated Greeks believe that three decades of socialist leaders have dented the country’s economic optimism. “I think Papandreou [Andreas, a socialist prime minister in the 1980s and 1990s] started the country on a downhill path with his policies,” my father-in-law, Evangelos Mavrogeorgis, a member of the roughly 3 million person Greek diaspora in the United States, told me this week. Papandreou formed the leftist Pan-Hellenic Socialist Movement in 1974, created generous social welfare programs financed by massive public borrowing and was stridently anti-American.
Mavrogeorgis believes that life improved when Greece joined the EU, even though the other member states were willing to overlook Greece’s underlying fiscal problems. He thinks the country should comply with needed reforms, but that the EU should also give another bailout and, possibly, debt relief. “To go back to the drachma, the country would be in distress,” he said.
The debate between “two Greeces” mirrors a parallel divide within economics, pitting the neoliberal direction of the Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman tradition against the modern neo-Keynesians such as Joseph Stiglitz,
But the Keynesian crowd’s critique doesn’t solve the underlying problems in the Greek economy, including an extremely bloated public service sector that employs one in four Greeks, pension plans more generous than other developed countries and too many state monopolies. (The Greek word “monos” means “alone.”)
Few modern neoliberal economists seem to be paying attention to Greece. But their ideological comrades from Wall Street and in government seem to ignore the more vocal Keynesians. A report from J.P. Morgan last month notes the “Greek crisis does not pose an existential threat to either the euro system or to Europe’s financial system.” And Germany’s finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, has been publicly frustrated with Syriza’s antics and shown a willingness to let Greece exit the euro.
Modern history suggests Greece would be much wiser to follow Germany’s “ordoliberal” approach that advocates free markets, guided by a strong, lean government and the social conscience of religion to maximize the potential of an economy while also preventing it from destroying itself.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Bundesbank President Jens Weidman adhere to the ideas of German economist Walter Eucken, who was the father of “ordoliberalism.” Eucken opposed National Socialism and after World War Two, his ideas were fundamental to the rapid rebuilding of West Germany that became known as the Wirtschaftswunder or “economic miracle.”
Both Eucken and Hayek believed in the importance of individual liberty, the power of free markets, competition and the idea that government should have limits. But they differed on the role of the state and the role of religion.
Eucken argued that human dignity goes hand in hand with competitive markets and a smart government helping to create ordered liberty. He also believed pure capitalism doesn’t have enough concern for the poor. He believed religion in society helped provide that social conscience. That thinking would gain traction in Greece, where key leaders of the Orthodox Church — arguably the most important cultural and economic institution in the country — expressed support for remaining in the EU.The positions advocated by the ordoliberal school provide the best hope to save Greece, and should be taken seriously by other countries wrestling with political economy schizophrenia.
Greece should agree to a more neo-liberal path and the European creditors, in return, should create a program of graduated debt relief over the next 10 to 20 years to get a more competitive Greece on its feet.