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ABSTRACT
Israel Studies in India faces five specific challenges. The presence of a small Jewish population and weaker Zionist sentiments; the absence of Judeo-Christian tradition and unfamiliarity with Jewish historical affinity with the holy land; viewing Israel and its claims through the Islamic prism due to the presence of a large Muslim population; the ideological baggage of framing of Arab-Israeli conflict through the “progressive lens” and the resultant anti-Israeli narrative among the elite; and the limited utility of historical guilt due to the absence of any role or association with the Holocaust or anti-Semitism. Moreover, the four decades of a recognition-without-relations policy of the Indian government has impeded a balanced understanding of Israel and its dilemma vis-à-vis the outside world. Hence, Israel Studies in India demand a different, innovative, and non-Western approach.
Acknowledgments
The author wishes to thank the unspecified number of anonymous referees for their critical comments on the earlier draft.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. “PM Modi Features in Netanyahu’s Election Campaign in Israel.”
2. Kumaraswamy, India’s Israel Policy; Blarel, The Evolution of India’s Israel Policy: Continuity, Change and Compromise since 1922.
3. Roland, “The Jews of India: Communal Survival or the End of a Sojourn?,” 75.
4. Hodes, From India to Israel: Identity, Immigration, and the Struggle for Religious Equality, 3.
5. Bhatnagar, “For India’s Jewish Community, Wait for Minority Status Continues.”
6. Kumaraswamy, “Time is Right to Upgrade The Minorities Commission.”
7. Kumaraswamy, India’s Israel Policy, 61–67.
8. Jangid, “Imagining Nations, Creating States: Nehru, Ben-Gurion and an Analogical Study of India and Israel in Post-Colonial Asia.”
9. Caplan, “The 1956 Sinai Campaign Viewed from Asia: Selections from Moshe Sharett’s Diaries.”
10. Azaryahu and Reiter, “The Geopolitics of Interment.”
11. Agwani, “The Palestine Conflict in Asian Perspective,” 443.
12. Brecher, The New States of Asia: A Political Analysis, 126.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid, 126–27.
15. Kumaraswamy, “Did Normalization Change Anything?”
16. CWMG, Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, 19:139. Emphasis added.
17. Shimoni, Gandhi, Satyagraha and the Jews: A Formative Factor in India’s Policy toward Israel; Chatterjee, Gandhi and his Jewish Friends; Kumaraswamy, Squaring the Circle: Mahatma Gandhi and the Jewish National Home.
18. Shimoni, Gandhi, Satyagraha and the Jews: A Formative Factor in India’s Policy toward Israel, 12.
19. Kumaraswamy, “The Jews.”
20. CWMG, Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, 19:230.
21. CWMG, 19:230.
22. CWMG, 19:114.
23. Shimoni, Gandhi, Satyagraha and the Jews: A Formative Factor in India’s Policy toward Israel, 19.
24. See note 12 above.
25. Kumaraswamy, “UNESCO Tries to Rewrite Jerusalem’s History.”
26. Stein, The Balfour Declaration, 496–97.
27. PEW Research Center, “10 Countries with the Largest Muslim Populations, 2015 and 2060.”
28. PEW Research Center, “Mapping the Global Muslim Population.”
29. Minualt, The Khilafat Movement: Religious Symbolism and Political Mobilization in India; Niemeijer, The Khilafat Movement in India, 1919–1924.
30. Kumaraswamy, Squaring the Circle: Mahatma Gandhi and the Jewish National Home, 91–109.
31. Kumaraswamy, India’s Israel Policy, 68–84.
32. Kumaraswamy and Quamar, India’s Saudi Policy, 83–108.
33. See note 31, 146–50.
34. For an official version of the events see, Singh, “Oral History – India at the Rabat Islamic Summit (1969).”
35. Appadorai, The Domestic Roots of India’s Foreign Policy, 1947–1972, 148–60.
36. Wright, “Ethnic Group Pressures in Foreign Policy: Indian Muslims and American Jews.”
37. Prashad, “Between India and Israel.”
38. Varadarajan, “When Jaswant Took Indian Politics to Foreign Shores.”
39. Sitapati, Half Lion: How P V Narasimha Rao Transformed India, 161.
40. Dixit, My South Block Years: Memoirs of a Foreign Secretary, 311.
41. Kumaraswamy, India’s Israel Policy, 108–37.
42. India, MEA, Documents of the Gatherings of Non-Aligned Countries 1961–1979, 203.
43. Special Correspondent, “Basu Stamp on Bridge to Israel.”
44. Cherian, “A Breach of Trust.”
45. Singh, “Reviewing the BDS Movement in India.”
46. Zaidi, Immutable Policy of Friendship and Cooperation: The Foreign Policy of the Indian National Congress during the Last Hundred Years, 52.
47. Bhatti and Voigt, Jewish Exile in India, 1933–1945.
48. Prof. S H Bergman and Yaacov Shimoni, Report on the Inter-Asian Conference, 6 and 17 April 1947, Central Zionist Archives, S25/7485
49. Kumaraswamy, “From Auschwitz To Treblinka.”
50. Jangid, “Images of Israel in India.”
Additional information
Notes on contributors
P. R. Kumaraswamy
Professor P. R. Kumaraswamy teaches Israeli politics in Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and is the author of The Arab-Israeli Conflict: A Ringside View (Routledge, 2023); Squaring the Circle: Mahatma Gandhi and the Jewish National Home (New Delhi: for ICWA, 2018); Historical Dictionary of the Arab Israeli Conflict (Scarecrow Press, 2015) and India’s Israel Policy (Columbia University Press, 2010) and editor of The Palgrave International Handbook of Israel (2020ff)