A meeting organised by Janhastakshep slammed Narendra Modi govt for siding with the Zionist regime of Israel.
Abdul Bari Masoud | Clarion India
NEW DELHI — Prominent academics, journalists and activists have denounced Israel and its main backers, the United States and the United Kingdom, and demanded an immediate halt to the Zionist aggression against the powerless and hapless people of besieged Gaza Strip since the Hamas strike on the Jewish state earlier this month.
At a meeting organised here on Thursday by Janhastakshep, a campaign against fascism, speakers came down heavily on the BJP government for turning an apologist for the US-backed Israeli aggression on Palestine.
The meeting condemned the brutal war Israel is waging against the besieged Palestinians with active support from Western imperialist powers under the tutelage of the United States.
The well-attended meeting was addressed by eminent journalists and scholars including Achin Vinayak, fellow Transnational Institute, Amsterdam and formerly professor of international relations at Delhi University; noted journalist with extensive experience of reporting on Middle Eastern affairs, Saeed Naqvi; Nivedita Menon, professor at the School of International Studies, JNU; and Aditya Nigam, former professor at the Centre for Studies in Developing Societies (CSDS).
The speakers expressed regret over the deaths of innocent civilians during the conflict and denounced the Israeli war on Gaza as a genocide carried out with the explicit approval of Western imperialist powers. Furthermore, they said the US and its Western allies have encouraged and supported Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s extreme reactionary Zionist government, exposing their hypocrisy and double-standards on democracy and human rights issues.
Th moral turpitude of these countries, the speakers said, has been seen in the repeated atrocities and tragedies in Korea, Vietnam, South and Central America, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, and Palestine.
The speakers also criticised the role played by the Narendra Modi government, where the Prime Minister personally sided with the Zionist Israeli rulers, abandoning India’s long-standing support for the Palestinian right to self-determination. However, the meeting noted, the Ministry of External Affairs later made amends.
The speakers described the situation as “dark humour” when an occupying force asserts its right to self-defence against an occupied people and then utilises that claim as justification to impose severe repression on the people in their pursuit of their unalienable right to self-determination. This position bears an uncanny resemblance to the thesis furthered by Hindutva forces in India wherein the Hindu majority is allegedly threatened by a beleaguered Muslim minority.
The well acknowledged principle of international law, it was stated, is that while the occupied people had every right to resist occupation with military or other means, the occupying power did not enjoy right to use any kind of means to maintain its illegal occupation. In this respect the struggle of the Palestinian people is fully justified.
Achin Vinayak stressed that Israel is nothing but a ‘settler apartheid’ state that has earned the dubious distinction of running the longest known occupation from the 20th century. Welcoming the heroic struggle being waged by the Palestinian people even when they are subjected to death and mayhem, he emphasised the need for the Indian people to come out in support of the Palestinian people as is happening in large numbers in many of the countries of the Middle East and elsewhere.
Saeed Naqvi traced the history of the Middle East and American imperialist policies since the demise of the Soviet Union to bring out the salience of the rise and then the decline of American power and its unilateralism of which Israel has been a regional contractor in the Middle East. He highlighted the geopolitical factors such as the rise of China, defeat of America in Afghanistan, the petering out of the American designs in the Ukraine war, the diminishing aura of G-7 countries, the expansion of BRICS and the peace brokered by China between Iran and Saudi Arabia as constituting an interesting backdrop to the war in Gaza which possibly underscore the ultimate realisation of the national aspirations of the Palestinian people. He said the US and Israel are now engaged in a last-ditch attempt to shore up their dying unilateralism again.
Nivedita Menon and Aditya Nigam drew upon their first experience in Palestine to provide perspectives to the Palestinian struggle that are not much talked about outside of the Palestinian territories. They emphasised the futility of trying to make sense of the whole thing from the perspective of what has unfolded since 7 October 2023 and the need to see the present events as only constituting a snapshot in the entire series of events unfolding in the region since the creation of Israel. Howsoever much may the world decry Hamas as a terrorist organisation, for the Palestinian people, cutting across religious beliefs, it is an organisation most sincerely committed to the cause of consummation of the Palestinian right to self-determination
To sum up the position of Hamas in the eyes of the Palestinian people, Nivedita quoted celebrated Palestinian author Mariam Bargouti who described the attack by Hamas on Israel as a jail-break by the Palestinians. Bargouti also said it was perhaps the first time that a ‘weeping kid’ finally had his punch which left the bully shaken.
The meeting passed a resolution criticising the BJP government for turning into apologists of American-backed Israeli aggression on Palestinians and called for an immediate cessation of the ongoing hostilities against the besieged people of Gaza. It also demanded that international relief be allowed into Gaza without further delay.
The resolution also envisaged implementation in letter and spirit of all UN resolutions calling for the right to self-determination of the Palestinian people and formation of an independent Palestinian state.
