Yet again, a senior Palestinian diplomat has praised a terror attack on Israel, exposing Ramallah’s schizophrenic attitude towards violence and bloodshed. This is one of the biggest reasons for the continued misery of the Palestinian people
A certain country in South Asia used to host an active terror sympathiser, who not only bays for the blood of innocents in another country, but also has high-level access to Government ministries, frequents the corridors of power and is a fixture in diplomatic circles. If you thought the reference was to Pakistan and its harbouring of Hafiz Saeed, think again. The country described above was India, at least till September 2014, and the man in question is the Palestinian Ambassador to India, Mr Adli Shaban Hassan Sadeq.
Thankfully, last year, he quietly packed his bags and left the country, but his most recent Op-ed in the pages of the Palestinian Authority’s daily, Al-Hayat al-Jadida, positively celebrates the murder of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah. Consider his words verbatim: “The Palestinians followed the developments of yesterday’s event together, full of hope that the resistance fighters (ie Hezbollah) would capture Israeli soldiers and hold them in order to exchange them (for Palestinian prisoners), thereby breaking Israel’s inflexibility regarding the prisoners’ issue and forcing it to free them all… We do not deny our joy at the fact that this quarrelsome occupation received a limited response, the minimal response on Hezbollah’s part.”
Now, this isn’t the first display of this supposedly moderate Palestinian diplomat’s bloodlust. His Op-ed, again in Al-Hayat al-Jadida, dated August 19, 2011, when he was still serving as the Palestinian Ambassador to India, praised the ‘martyrs’ who carried out a terror attack on the Israeli city of Eilat killing six civilians, and injuring 30, on August 18, 2011. His tone was just jubilant and his salivating at the senseless killing of women and children was barely contained, as he wrote, “May Allah have mercy upon the martyrs who fell during Ramadan, those of them who went out to confront the occupation forces and did not return, and those of them who were bombed in the home of Khaled Shaath (commander of unit manufacturing rockets and bombs in the Popular Resistance Committees) and died a shahid’s death.” He went on to regret its one-off nature, writing, “This was a quality operation that will be difficult to repeat.”
Now, pause for a minute and think how our blood would boil if, let’s say, the Pakistani Ambassador to our friend, the United States, wrote an Op-ed in a Pakistani daily expressing joy at the beheading of Indian soldiers, saying, “We do not deny our joy that this Indian occupation of Kashmir received a limited response, a minimal response on lashkar-e-Tayyeba’s part.” For that matter, one would expect that the US State Department would have spoken very harshly, even if it tolerated a Pakistani Ambassador writing an Op-ed in The Dawn on a day after 26/11, claiming that Ajmal Kasab was a ‘martyr’ and that, “May Allah have mercy upon the martyrs who confronted the Indian occupation force”.
The Pakistanis, of course, are smart cookies and don’t allow their Ambassadors to do things that are so transparently terrorising, but clearly, the Palestinians are not. When the Israelis point out that the Palestinian Authority talks the language of peace in English but bays for Jewish blood in Arabic, they clearly have a point; in much the same way as Pakistan denounces the 26/11 attack in English and aids, abets and supports Hafiz Saeed in Urdu.
Today, Israel is a crucial pillar of India’s military modernisation and has stood by India through some of our darkest hours. During the 1971 liberation war, when Israel’s ally, the Unites States, sent its aircraft carriers to threaten India, the Israelis, seeing the moral righteousness of the Bangladeshi cause, broke ranks with US foreign policy and became the only foreign Government to supply India with arms during the conflict — something that even India’s staunchest ally at the time, Soviet Russia, refused to do.
However, the realist in you might just say that foreign policy cannot be based on gratitude. In fact, the realist in you might say , “Hang on a minute, every country practises double standards” — and to a large extent, you will be right. Israel, for example, has made common cause with the grand-daddy of international terrorism — Saudi Arabia — in its quest to contain Iran. This is the same Saudi Arabia that has televised fund-raisers for families of suicide bombers whose sole aim is to kill Israeli women and children.
The US has also made common cause with Syrian rebels, and now supplies them with weapons and training. This is despite the fact that it knows full well that there’s a high probability that these weapons will fall into the hands of the Islamic State, and will be used against US troops at some point. India tacitly supports and sympathises with Iran in the hope that the latter will provide an ideological and military bulwark against Wahhabi perversion.
But equally you will not be wrong in any of these conclusions, you should also ask yourself: What geo-political asset has, is, or can, the Palestinian State ever be to IndiaIJ The fact remains that largely, as a result of their own duplicity and their policies of aiding and abetting terror, successive Palestinian Governments have reduced themselves to an international joke. Today, people only pay lip service to the genuine suffering of the Palestinian people, again largely inflicted on them by their own Government’s double-speak. In much the same way, the international community has also grown sick and tired of the whining of the Pakistani establishment about its country being a ‘victim of terrorism’ for much of that terrorism is self-inflicted.
Today, if the Palestinian people suffer, it is precisely because of the schizophrenic attitude to terror of people like Mr Sadeq. Far from being a champion of the Palestinian cause, he and his kind are one of the biggest reasons of the continuing misery of the Palestinian people. But, really, why should we, as Indians, care about the PalestiniansIJ We need to care about India and our national interests. We should ask ourselves, why does the Ministry of External Affairs persist in carrying along this diplomatic deadweightIJ Why do we shoot ourselves in the foot by supporting causes and states that are exact mirror images of Pakistan with an equal propensity for self-destructionIJ
At some point, the new Government will have to crack the whip on the Ministry of External Affairs and put an end to the latter’s self-defeating tendencies. But for starters, we should ask the serving Palestinian Ambassador to India, where he stands on the rocket-firing of Israel.