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Correspondent

23 August 2024 at 4:29:04 pm

Red Romance

For long, the Naxalite in news was recognisable by the gun. But the more insidious version of Naxalism has never needed a rifle. It has thrived in varsity classrooms and newspaper and magazine columns, fostered by men and women sympathetic to it. These academics and other members of the so-called intelligentsia have long enjoyed their status as ‘respectable dissenters’ even when their politics offered intellectual alibis for Naxals carrying guns. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent...

Red Romance

For long, the Naxalite in news was recognisable by the gun. But the more insidious version of Naxalism has never needed a rifle. It has thrived in varsity classrooms and newspaper and magazine columns, fostered by men and women sympathetic to it. These academics and other members of the so-called intelligentsia have long enjoyed their status as ‘respectable dissenters’ even when their politics offered intellectual alibis for Naxals carrying guns. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent Independence Day warning about “dimaagi Naxals” should therefore not be dismissed as another political label. His larger point was that an insurgency does not survive on ammunition alone. It survives on ideas and people willing to make violence appear morally fashionable. The most revealing feature of India’s Maoist movement was never simply its brutality. It was the strange attraction it exercised over sections of the metropolitan Left elite. The Naxalite with an AK-47 could be transformed into a romantic revolutionary while the policeman he killed became an instrument of an oppressive state. This was not merely naïveté. At its ugliest, it was the intellectual laundering of political violence. The fantasy of the romantic revolutionary has always been seductive. In this narrative, amplified through sympathetic media priding itself on telling ‘truth to power,’ India was not a constitutional democracy struggling with inequality and corruption but an inherently illegitimate state waiting to be overthrown. In the minds of this elite Left, Maoist violence has often been recast as resistance while attacks on infrastructure as blows against capitalism. The armed overthrow of the Indian republic was the liberation they craved for. Some of India’s most celebrated intellectuals have flirted dangerously close to that moral inversion. The issue here is whether intellectual prestige can be used to sanitise an ideology whose practitioners have murdered civilians, policemen and public servants and terrorised some of India’s poorest districts. A university cannot be the place where Maoist romanticism acquires the legitimacy of a fashionable campus cause. Professors who turn armed insurgents into heroic revolutionaries are not merely exercising academic freedom. If they knowingly excuse violence, they are helping to construct the moral vocabulary that makes violence possible. Let’s be clear here. A professor who criticises the Indian state is not a Naxal while a journalist who exposes state excesses is not an enemy of India. But an intellectual who repeatedly excuses, glorifies or rationalises political violence cannot hide behind the word ‘dissent.’ India has paid an enormous price for the Maoist fantasy. Thousands have died. Entire regions were held back by fear while development was obstructed. The people supposedly being liberated were often the first to suffer. The armed Naxal is now being pushed towards extinction. But the Indian republic cannot afford to leave behind the romantic mythology that made the gun respectable. A democracy can tolerate dissent. It should never be expected to tolerate the glorification of those who seek its violent destruction.

How Trump Could Answer Palestinian Question?

Donald Trump

The re-election of Donald Trump as the next US President was greeted in the Middle East with a mixture of rapture and dread, especially among Palestinians.


While it is impossible to know exactly how a second Trump Presidency will act toward the Palestinian people and their demands for statehood, his first Presidency provides a guide to what they might expect.


Like all his predecessors, in his first term, President Trump's dealings with Israelis and Palestinians were overwhelmingly influenced by domestic political pressures, which meant unwavering support for Israel. However, true to the nature of his norm-breaking first term, Trump often dismissed long-held diplomatic norms in search of a resolution to the Palestinian/Israeli conflict.


By doing so, his Administration sought to remove any obstacles to “peace” between Palestinians and Israelis – a “peace” that would paradoxically see the end of any hope for a Palestinian state.


Jerusalem divided

The 1948 War of Independence divided Jerusalem, with East Jerusalem controlled by Jordan and West Jerusalem by Israel. When Israel captured East Jerusalem in 1967, it was hugely symbolic because it meant that for the first time in almost two millennia, Jews controlled all the ideologically, religiously, politically, and culturally significant city of Jerusalem.


Nevertheless, the international community refused to accept Israel's occupation nor its subsequent annexation of East Jerusalem in 1980, declaring that the negotiations concerning the two-state solution would decide the fate of Jerusalem. Consequently, most states have their embassies in Tel Aviv. Palestinians and Israelis interpreted the Trump administration's decision as US recognition of Israeli sovereignty of all Jerusalem.


Settlements expanding

According to Peace Now, in 2023, approximately 465,000 Israeli settlers were living in the West Bank, located in over 350 settlements and outposts. There were also an additional 230,000 Israelis living in settlements in East Jerusalem.


The administration's decision mirrored the long-held Israeli legal argument that the settlements are not illegal because the international community never deemed Jordan's occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem as legal. As these territories were not part of Jordan's sovereign territory, they could not be “occupied” by Israel, meaning it could settle the land as it wished.


Nevertheless, this position ran contrary to Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which states that: “the Occupying power shall not deport or transfer parts of its civilian population into the territory it occupied.” Consequently, the international community, including the United Nations, the International Criminal Court (ICC), and the International Court of Justice (ICJ), has consistently deemed Israeli settlements as illegal and as impediments to any peace agreement between Palestinians and Israelis.


However, the administration's rationale for its decision was that declaring the settlements illegal only restrains and impedes the negotiation process and, thus, any progress towards a successful resolution of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict.


Around the same time, the Trump administration announced that it would no longer contribute funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), the principal UN aid agency for Palestinians.


What followed was a budget cut of 30%, culminating in profound humanitarian effects on Palestinians, especially for Gazans, who relied heavily on UNRWA's provision of essential services to survive after Israel placed the Strip under siege following Hamas's election victory in 2006.


Trump's “Deal of the Century”

In 2020, the Trump Administration published its so-called “Deal of the Century”, intending to resolve the Palestinian/Israeli conflict finally. However, Palestinians rejected the plan outright, incensed by proposals to rescind Jordanian custody of Haram al-Sharif and transfer control to Israel.


Haram al-Sharif, or the Dome of the Rock mosque, is the third holiest site in Islam. When Jordan signed a peace agreement with Israel in 1994, Israel agreed to recognise Jordan's custodianship of the Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem, specifically Haram al-Sharif. Rescinding control of Haram al-Sharif to Israel meant it would control all the disputed city.


Importantly, for Palestinians in any peace agreement with Israel, East Jerusalem would become the capital of the future Palestinian state — without East Jerusalem, there can be no Palestine.


How far does Trump's support for Israel go?

During the Presidential campaign, Trump stated on several occasions that he wanted Israel to win the war quickly. On 3 December, Trump posted on social media that Hamas needed to release all remaining hostages before he took office on 20 January 2025. Otherwise, there would be “hell to pay in the Middle East, and for those in charge…”.


Whether President Trump would risk such a calamity by supporting Israel's ultra-nationalist agenda is again uncertain. What is more certain is that the President holds little respect for diplomatic conventions and considers himself a deal-maker, meaning that he could indeed gamble on being able to make the Arab world bend to his diplomatic will without having to compromise too much on US support for Israel.

-AP

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