Should Israel be nonviolent like India?

Thomas Friedman is a writer for the New York Times.  He is an admirer of Manmohan Singh.  The latter was India’s prime minister in late November 2008, when Pakistani militants invaded his country and murdered almost 200 totally innocent citizens and residents.  Did Singh return the favor and invade Pakistan?  He did not.  Instead, he relied upon “diplomacy” to rectify that situation.

What lesson does Friedman draw from this episode of brutality followed by military inaction?  It is that Israel should borrow a leaf from India and confine its retaliation against Hamas to “diplomatic, covert and other [such] means.”

There are all sorts of disanalogies between India and Israel.  India and Pakistan have similar sized populations; their land masses are much like one another in terms of geographic and demographic dimensions.  The size of the population in Israel is some nine million.  If you add up the population size of all its neighbors, it reaches into the billions.  The same sort of disparity arises with regard to land mass.  Israel’s is less than one percent of all of that of its neighbors, and potential enemies, Abraham Accords or no Abraham Accords.  Barring nuclear war, the existence of neither India nor Pakistan is at stake in any altercation between them.  The same cannot said for the warring parties in the Middle East.  The existence of Israel hangs in the balance in the present engagement between the IDF and Hamas, if its neighbors decide to “pile on.”  The same cannot at all be said for all the Arab and Islamic countries in this geographical area.  An Israeli victory does not at all spell the demise of all of them, again abstracting from the use of nuclear weapons.

The Pakistani raid was not at all as vicious as was that of Hamas.  There were no rapes, beheadings, torture, etc., involved.  The members of the Lashkar-e-Taiba group did not film their depredations, show them widely, and thereby create even greater anguish for the Indians.  No hostages were taken.  Fewer than 200 victims out of a population size that of India is a drop in the bucket, in both percentage and absolute terms, compared to 1,400 out of nine million in the Israeli case.

There is historically worldwide antisemitism.  There is no analogous anti-Indianism.  Thirty student groups at prestigious Harvard University immediately after October 7, 2023, a day that will live in the annals of infamy for all time, blamed all of the deaths that took place solely on Israel.  Pictures of the children held captive were torn down all over the world.  Nothing even remotely resembling these outrages took place in the earlier unjust episode in Asia.  If there were a viciousness meter available, what Hamas did to Israel would be off the charts; what occurred to the Indians, horrid as it was, would not compare.

There was no holocaust for India.  There was for Israel — well, for Jews.  The Indians never came within a million miles of total annihilation.  The Jews did.  It makes them a bit nervous.  Both pairs fought each other several times.  But it was never life or death for either India or Pakistan.  The same cannot be said for the two adversaries in the Middle East.

Israel is dependent on the U.S.  India is not.  The latter, then, is able to fight its enemies with both hands free, so to speak.  In sharp contrast, Israel is forever looking over its shoulder for U.S. approval, or at least not serious disapproval.  Thus, it must fight its enemies with one hand tied behind its back.  India can afford not to repay the Pakistanis in kind; Israel cannot, regarding its enemies.

Need another disanalogy?  We Jews are continually being accused of killing Christ.  Of being money-lenders and hucksters.  Of being wickedness incarnate.  No one makes any similar critique of India.  The worst they are accused of, at least in the U.S., is taking call center jobs away from Americans.  Thus, almost before Israel launched any military counter at all to that below-the-belt attack on helpless civilians, mothers and children, it was accused of a disproportionate response, or being responsible for all the deaths involved.  At that time, there were only Israeli casualties.  Nothing of the sort ever occurred in the Indian-Pakistani context.

India is not Israel, apart from both starting with the letter I.  I am deliriously happy that Thomas Friedman has no official power in Israel.

Image via Pxfuel.