As the world woke up to the horrors of terrorist acts committed by Hamas in Israel, Kerala’s communist party leaders equivocally stood behind ‘Hamas’ and called Israel a terrorist state. This was a shocking revelation to the people of the state and proved the fundamentalist nexus within the Marxist party that runs the state. At this juncture, it is important that we look at the history of the Israel-Palestine issue which is largely a product of the failure of Western diplomacy to understand how left liberalism can be the breeding ground for fundamentalism and terrorism.
Palestine was a region under Ottoman Syria. It was not a country, neither had any political unity. It was a habitation of a large number of Arabs under the Ottoman Sultanate. The Arabs were composed of the Jewish Arabs, Muslim Arabs, and the Christian Arabs. There was no National identity or political unification. The Arab polity revolved around five layers. The first layer was the pure Arabs of Islamic origin, followed by converts to Islam called Mawali, below them were the Dhimmis who were the protected people of other religions, then came non-Muslim free men and finally the slaves. This complex structure was created highly on the basis of religion. Whereas the West was highly critical of the Varnashrama Dharma of Bharat, their left-liberal historians never ventured into studying this complex organisation of Arab society which was heavily discriminatory.
Much like the happenings across Palestinian land, Jews were scattered across the globe. They were citizens of the US and other European countries. It’s ironic that the same Kerala which now criticises the Jewish nation, gave refuge to a large Jewish population at Mattanchery in the 15th and 16th centuries. In June of 1895, Theodore Herzl wrote in his diary, ‘ For some time past I have been occupied with work of infinite grandeur. At the moment I do not know whether I shall carry it through. It looks like a mighty dream. But for days and weeks, it has possessed me beyond the limits of consciousness. It accompanies me wherever I go, hovers behind my ordinary talk, disturbs and excites me ‘. Herzl’s book ‘ The Jewish State: An Attempt at a Modern Solution to the Jewish Question’ paved the way for the thought process of establishing a Jewish state. Herzl established the First Zionist movement which received wide support from the European states at that time. Many of the European states were facing the Jewish problem of exclusion. Many of the citizens of these states which had a large catholic population saw Jews as outcastes. Herzl’s Zionist movement thus enabled a way for these states to settle their Jewish population at some permanent place so that the odds between the Catholics and Jews could be minimised.
The seizure of power by the Young Turks in Turkey changed the whole scenario. The young turk movement paved the way for the meeting of Marxian ideologies with political Islam. Even to this day, sadly a road in New Delhi is named after one of the prominent figures of this Young Turk Movement. This movement to this day is venerated by Marxian theorists and philosophers for its revolutionary character. The arrival of this liberal movement opened the largely restricted press to the public. Once the freedom of the press was unleashed in the Ottoman world, fundamentalists started reigning ground. They started spreading antisemitism and this made the world power realise the gravity of the situation. Between 1908 and 1913, Ai-karmil, an anti Zionist newspaper founded at Haifa in 1908 ran a series of 134 articles spreading antisemitism across the Arab world. The newspaper received a large patronage from the liberal left media of the age and found a large number of takers amongst the Muslim community. There were nearly 35 Arab newspapers that openly rejected the Zionist demand for a Nation-State. At the same time, the British Government was in favor of a unified Arab state from Aleppo to Aden as was mentioned in the famous ‘Hussein Mc-Mahon correspondence’ of 1915. In the initial years when the Zionist movement was taking shape, there were not many takers for it from Britain. A large part of the area was controlled by Britain after World War I. Edwin Montagu, who later became Secretary of State for India himself was a Jew but was not a supporter of the Zionist movement. Many of the British politicians largely looked to the Arab world as future partners. The Sykes Pikot agreement had raised large discontent against the British Government. In order to suppress the rising Arab nationalism, the foreign policy apparatus of the British Government soon started working. The anti-Jewish movements were on the rise in France, Germany, Russia, Britain, and the Arab world. The Jewish pogrom by the Czarist regime in Russia and the Holocaust during World War demanded an early settlement for the Jewish question. Thus in the land that Britain possessed under the Sykes Pikot agreement, an independent state of Israel came into being. Palestine identity was not a national identity that was defined by the boundaries of the state, it was an identity based upon the five divisions of the society where the superior Arab race reigns supreme. It was in this layer-dominated society that the third layer of ‘Dhimmis’ was building a nation-State. Hence the ‘Dhimmi‘ became the ‘Kafirs’ who were to be expelled at all costs. It was this social and religious exclusion that has led to continuous attacks on the Israeli settlement by one terror organisation or the other.
What the Marxists and neo-Marxists of today’s age forget is this societal division of Arab society. This social division was never acknowledged and the Arab world was seen to be a champion of the egalitarian social order. It was in reality not Israel invading an Arab land, but Arab social hierarchies excluding other religions. It is this social superiority that the Arabs feel over others that led to the charter of Hamas mentioning that the main objective of the Hamas is to establish an ‘Islamic state throughout Palestine’. Sadly the left liberals of the Marxian order of Kerala failed to understand the history. It is due to this support enjoyed by the left-liberal intellectuals that certain Kerala media went on to hail Hamas as a ‘democratic movement’ of Palestine.
There is one more point worth mentioning here as to from where the fundamentalist thoughts breed in Kerala society. The oil-wealthy nation of Qatar raises funds for the cause of Islamic jihad across the world. Many of its wealthy barons have been directly involved with funding the Jihad camps in Syria, Afghanistan, Palestine, and many other countries of the world. Qatar also hosts the largest channel of the Arab world, Al Jazeera which has been the bitterest critic of our Government. Qatar funds have been largely flowing to some of the media networks. Recently National Investigation Agency has found that the fundamentalist Popular Front of India cadets largely travelled to Qatar. Qatar and Al Jazeera network was the consistent backer of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt which inspired the Hamas. The proximity to the Gulf region leads to a flow of ideas into Kerala’s society some of them being extreme fundamentalist inspired by the Wahhabi’s. It is important that the Government of Bharat look into this liberal network that feeds into fissures by the spread of radical and fundamentalist ideologies in Kerala. Bharat must use its good offices in the region to target and isolate such individuals and organisations that spin a web of fundamentalism.
