“Why is it that when Hindus kill hundreds of Muslims it elicits an emotionally muted headline in the Arab media, but when Israel kills a dozen Muslims it inflames the entire Muslim world?” This question is raised by Thomas Friedman, a New York Times columnist, who says he put it to many people during a tour of the region but received no answers.
Well, let us attempt an answer.
To begin with, the Muslims killed in India are victims of sectarian violence that has a long history in the subcontinent. The latest round of killings started with the massacre of 60 Hindus by Muslim militants in Gujarat. The government does not conduct the killings in India. In Palestine, however, it is the Israeli government that does the killings.
India is a secular republic in which anyone with any religion has a share in government and can reach the highest echelons of the state. India has already had two Muslim presidents while many Muslims have served in Cabinet positions. Israel, however, is a Jewish state in which non-Jews, even those that become citizens of the state, do not enjoy equal status. By assuming an exclusive Jewish persona, Israel cannot but encourage others to also emphasize their religious identity.
There is one more difference. Gujarat is not an occupied territory. Its people freely chose to be part of India when Britain partitioned the subcontinent. Muslims had the option of either staying in India or transferring to the newly created Pakistan, which at the time included the present-day Bangladesh. Israel, on the other hand, is killing people, demolishing homes and dismantling infrastructure in occupied territories.
The fight in Gujarat is an internal Indian tragedy. The fight in the occupied territories is a colonial conflict, with one nation seeking to exercise its right of self-determination against an occupying power. This is not a Jewish-Muslim fight as such just as the struggle of the Algerians to liberate themselves from French rule was not a duel between Islam and Christianity. One more point: not all those killed by Israel in the occupied territories are Muslims. Some are Christians while others, although Muslim by birth, could not be described as soldiers of Islam, as Friedman presents them. They are just ordinary people going about their business when they are hit by gunfire and missiles.
Finally, let us also underline an arithmetical point. During the past year or so Israel has killed 1,100 Palestinians and wounded a further 7,000. Relative to the total population in the occupied territories that is the equivalent of killing 110,000 and injuring 700,000 Muslims in India, assuming that there are 120 million Muslims in that country. In other words, Israel is killing far too many people among a relatively small population. To be sure, the same principle applies to the number of Israeli victims, bearing in mind that Israel’s population, although four times that of the occupied territories, is also small.
Friedman also asks why Muslims are supposedly silent about Saddam Hussein who has “ snuffed out two generations of Iraqis using murder, fear and poison gas?”
That, of course, is not quite true. To begin with, the Iraqi people themselves have fought Saddam’s regime almost from its first days in 1968. That a quarter of Iraq’s population is in exile shows that many were not prepared to be “ mute” in the face of Saddam’s policies. There are dozens of books in Arabic, Persian and other Islamic languages, written by Muslims that denounce Saddam’s atrocities. Hardly any self-respecting Muslim commentator is prepared to justify the Iraqi ruler’s policies. But even then the comparison with Israel’s killings is far-fetched. Saddam is not a foreign tyrant but a domestic one who must be dealt with by the Iraqi people in the context of their turbulent history. His behavior does not justify similar behavior by Israel in Palestine.
Finally, Friedman wonders why the Chinese or the Mexicans who might disagree with this or that aspect of American policy do not react against the US as Muslims do?
This is a disingenuous comparison. We will not know exactly how the Chinese or the Mexicans might react until we create similar situations affecting them. For example, imagine the US supporting the creation of a hostile and expansionist Christian state on Chinese territory somewhere between Shanghai and Beijing. Or imagine the US sponsoring an aggressive Buddhist mini-state on Mexican territory near Acapulco. Only then might we know how the Chinese and Mexicans would react in a comparable situation.
The Palestinian issue is a political one: it is about territory, self-determination, statehood and decolonization. It is not a religious duel between Islam and Judaism. It would make little difference if Israel were Buddhist or Presbyterian or atheist. By pretending otherwise, Friedman would be playing the Islamist fundamentalists’ game.
