Robert Fisk: Israel’s fingerprints are all over India’s escalating conflict with Pakistan

India was Israel’s largest arms client in 2017, paying £530m for Israeli air defence, radar systems and ammunition, including air-to-ground missiles – most of them tested during Israel’s military offensives against Palestinians and targets in Syria. Israel itself is trying to explain away its continued sales of tanks, weapons and boats to the Myanmar military dictatorship - while western nations impose sanctions on the government which has attempted to destroy its minority and largely Muslim 
Rohingya people. But Israel’s arms trade with India is legal, above-board and much advertised by both sides. The Israelis have filmed joint exercises between their own “special commando” units and those sent by India to be trained in the Negev desert, again with all the expertise supposedly learned by Israel in Gaza and other civilian-thronged battlefronts.

At least 16 Indian “Garud” commandos – part of a 45-strong Indian military delegation – were for a time based at the Nevatim and Palmachim air bases in Israel. In his first visit to India last year – preceded by a trip to Israel by Indian prime minister Narendra Modi Israeli prime minister... Brussels researcher Shairee Malhotra, whose work has appeared in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, has pointed out that India has the world’s third largest Muslim population after Indonesia and Pakistan – upward of 180 million people. “The India-Israel relationship is also commonly being framed in terms of a natural convergence of ideas between their ruling BJP and Likud parties,” she wrote last year. Hindu nationalists had constructed “a narrative of Hindus as historically victims at the hands of Muslims”, an attractive idea to those Hindus who recall partition and the continuing “turbulent relationship” with Pakistan. In fact, as Malhotra pointed out in Haaretz, “Israel’s biggest fans in India appear to be the Internet Hindus who primarily love Israel for how it deals with Palestine and fights Muslims.” 

Malhotra has condemned Carleton University professor Vivek Dehejia for demanding a “tripartite” alliance between India, Israel and the US – since they have all suffered “from the scourge of Islamic terrorism”. In fact, by the end of 2016, only 23 men from India had left to fight for Isis in the Arab world although Belgium, with a population of only half a million Muslims, produced nearly 500 fighters. Malhotra’s argument is that the Indian-Israeli relationship should be pragmatic rather than ideological... read more:

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