Security First, Sentiment Later: Why India Must Learn from Israel Before It’s Too Late

After Pahalgam, it is time India abandoned illusions and learned the hard truths about national security.

In the days leading up to the gruesome Pahalgam attack in which more than 25 hapless tourists - mostly Hindus - were slaughtered, Pakistan’s Army Chief, General Asim Munir, had offered a chilling ideological prelude. Speaking in Islamabad, Munir invoked the lethal ‘Two-Nation Theory,’ stating that Hindus and Muslims are destined to remain separate, divided by customs, traditions, and ambitions.

Except to the ideologically warped (and there are many such among India’s intellectual elite), the message that Munir sent out was deliberate and unequivocally clear: Pakistan’s establishment has not moved on from 1947 – it never had. Many drew comparisons with Yahya Khan’s infamous speech in 1971, when his refusal to grant dignity and autonomy to East Pakistan led to the killing of lakhs of Bangladeshi (then East Pakistan) Muslims and Hindus by the Punjabi Pakistanis and ultimately birthed independent Bangladesh.

Kashmir has never been merely a territorial dispute; it has always been an existential confrontation, long sustained by the Pakistani state and its ideological progeny.

In the wake of such ghoulish attacks, we (as people of other nations do as well) often cite Israel as an unflinching template. Faced with a fraction of India’s provocations since its troubled birth in 1948, Israel - surrounded by hostile Arab states on all sides and facing existential threats since its birth - has consistently demonstrated an uncompromising approach to national security. The Israeli response to terrorism has never been shaped by sentiment, but cold strategic calculation.

When Hamas militants stormed southern Israel on October 7, 2023, the response was immediate and overwhelming. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) did not split hairs about “militants” versus “civilians,” did not fret over editorials in The Guardian or lamentations from Hollywood ‘liberals’ like Susan Sarandon. Despite fierce conflicts with their establishment, they bombed (and continue to do so) Gaza’s heart out, flattening the infrastructure that nursed the terrorism in the first place.

Israel’s response has been undeniably brutal and unflinching. It was also survival made manifest, evinced in each of their signature operations whenever their civilians have been killed or national security threatened. After Palestinian ‘Black September’ terrorists murdered Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, Israel launched ‘Operation Wrath of God’ - a methodical, years-long campaign by Mossad to track down and eliminate those responsible, wherever they were hiding. No sanctuaries were respected. No apologies were offered. No illusions were entertained.

When Israeli hostages were hijacked to Entebbe, Uganda, in 1976, Israel, in an incredible operation, sent commandos 4,000 km. halfway across Africa to rescue them in a dazzling raid that became a byword for audacity and efficiency. The message was clear: no Israeli life is expendable, no matter how far, no matter the cost. Ali Hassan Salameh, the ‘Red Prince’ of Palestinian terror and the brain behind the Munich Olympic massacres, was shadowed by the Mossad for years before he was finally assassination by a car bomb in Beirut in 1979.

Even today, while Western diplomats natter about ceasefires and ‘root causes,’ Israel’s security services relentlessly and ruthlessly continue their work, whether eliminating Islamist militants in Beirut, Damascus and elsewhere, with neither fanfare nor regret.

For Israel understands that survival in a hostile environment requires not sympathy but strength and that in the balance between protecting citizens and courting the approval of liberal critics abroad, there can be only one choice.

India, by contrast, has always sought a moral high ground that its enemies have neither respected nor reciprocated. Forget Pakistan, even Bangladesh, whom we helped ‘liberate’ in 1971 from the massacre perpetrated by their own Muslim co-religionists of West Pakistan, bares its fangs at us today by fomenting unrest within India. Every retaliatory strike against Pakistani-backed terrorists like Uri and Balakot is followed not merely by outrage from Islamabad, but by strident lamentations from within India’s own intellectual class. Ferocious outbursts against the Indian Armed Forces have been voiced by this so-called ‘left-liberal’ elite, who hit out against the alleged ‘disproportionality’ of the Indian response, the ‘alienation’ of the local Kashmiri (Muslim) population, and their ‘human rights.’

It is high-time India fortified its internal discourse. Counterterrorism efforts cannot succeed if every security measure is second-guessed in the name of civil liberties, while the victims of terror receive only passing sympathy.

The ideological fervour driving attacks like Pahalgam cannot be reasoned with. That said, I am well aware that the contrast with Israel is imperfect. India’s Muslim population numbers nearly 200 million and the internal calculus for our country is far more delicate. Yet, invoking fears of communal riots as an excuse for inaction has become over the years a psychological crutch, an abdication disguised as ‘prudence.’

Israel understood long ago what India still wrestles with, that survival sometimes demands the courage to be hated.

In the 14th century, under the reign of Sikandar Shah Miri, known by his infamous moniker butshikan (‘the iconoclast’), Hindu temples were razed, scholars driven into exile, and a once-pluralistic region systematically Islamized.

The pain of Kashmir’s Hindus is the echo of centuries, which found a disturbing voice in Pahalgam on Tuesday when the terrorists callously gunned down the tourists after checking if they were Hindus and by being asked to repeat Islamic verses.

They’ll be those who scream that ‘terror has no name.’ India’s history has regrettably been one long, ‘Dark Age’ where terror had a name and was later subsumed under the glitter of glorious architecture and the efflorescence of cultural exchange.

Modern India, ever anxious to appear magnanimous, has often buried this history under layers of revisionism and amnesia. In textbooks and diplomatic communiqués of earlier decades saw the violence diluted, and the memory of this terror domesticated.

And yet, the ghosts persist. In Kashmir, they have lingered in the slogans of the militants, in the graffiti scrawled across shuttered shops, in the hollowed-out temples where Pandits once prayed.

When terrorist asked the hapless tourists if they were ‘Hindu,’ it hits us that Pahalgam, in its awful way, is a continuation of that long historical line. The blood spilled at Pahalgam demands not eloquence but action. India must finally decide: will it continue to endure these massacres stoically, waiting for the next, or will it, like Israel, make the wages of terror so unbearable that its enemies think twice before daring again?

To state the obvious, India will have to swiftly restore the credibility of deterrence. Deterrence works only when the enemy knows that violence will invite certain, swift, and severe retaliation.

As we come to grips with slaughter at Pahalgam, there is a keen sense of anger across a country where patience with bloodletting has long been praised as virtue. There is a growing, brittle hunger for something more primal: survival without apology. After all, in security, as in life, there are no prizes for virtue-signalling from the grave.

The barely suppressed demand is that India must be willing to strike not only across the Line of Control by recognizing its real enemy – not a handful of ragtag terrorists but the Pakistan state, the headquarters of its generals, the ideological factories of hatred.