By aligning with US-Israel duo against Palestine and Iran, India has lowered its global stature 

Ghazala Wahab

Last month, on August 18, the government of Israel issued a tender for construction of 3,401 housing units, according to Israeli newspaper Haaretz, in the East 1 (E-1) area of the West Bank. These proposed housing units will sit between East Jerusalem and the Israeli settlement of Ma’ale Adumim in West Bank, effectively dividing the supposed Palestinian territory under the notional control of Palestinian Authority into two—north and south--with a fenced off Israeli corridor running astride. The factsheet by the Institute for Middle East Understanding says that it will displace about 3,700 Palestinian Bedouin in 18 villages.

So, if in the moment of naivete one still believes in the future ‘two-state solution’, the envisaged Palestinian state will comprise three disconnected pockmarks on the face of Israel—northern West Bank, southern West Bank and Gaza. Incidentally, West Bank itself is pockmarked with Israeli settlements—about 140 to 160 ‘legal’ and close to 400 ‘illegal’, both of which are under the protection of the Israeli government. Legality is just a matter of semantics, here.

Israeli soldiers searching a Palestinian in Tel Rumaida, by Gilbert checkpoint near Hebron

Even today, a Palestinian citizen of the West Bank has to navigate several Israeli checkpoints in pursuance of her daily activities, such as accessing school, office, hospital, bank, relatives and so on, with each entailing the threat of humiliation at best and violence at worst. In this respect, not much will change for the Palestinians if E-1, a ‘legal’ settlement, comes about.

E-1 was planned by Tel Aviv way back in the Nineties when Oslo I and Oslo II Accords were signed between Palestinian Liberation Organisation’s (PLO) Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Brokered by the United States (US), Oslo Accord (1993) envisaged gradual redeployment of Israeli military in the West Bank and Gaza strip to facilitate the creation of some kind of a viable and contiguous Palestinian state in the future, provided certain conditions were met. Israel had captured these Palestinian territories in the 1967 war, along with some Egyptian and Syrian areas.

In the 1973 Yom Kippur war, even though it briefly lost control of the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula and Syrian Golan Heights, it retained the West Bank and Gaza strip. But the sudden reverses that it suffered during the war forced it to consider a negotiated settlement over the next two decades, consolidating what was critical for it at that point, leaving the rest for the future, while buying a period of peace, not only within Palestine, but also in the larger West Asian neighbourhood. And that’s why E-1 was deferred.

But first a bit on Oslo Accord, which ensured that the ‘two-state solution’ remains a rhetoric to be articulated from time to time.

At the heart of Oslo Accord was total non-violence by the PLO. To mollify Israel’s perennial insecurity, fewer restrictions were imposed on it and its legal-illegal settlements by the US. All it had to do was recognise PLO as the sole representative of the Palestinian people and to create conditions for the future Palestinian state by redeploying its troops in the occupied territories.

To further soften the blow on Israel, Oslo II was signed in 1995, which divided West Bank into three areas—A, B and C. Area A, comprising 18 per cent of the West Bank territory and home to towns like Ramallah, Bethlehem, Jericho, Nablus, Jenin and parts of Hebron, was meant to be exclusively inhabited by Palestinian people. This is also where the Palestinian Authority (PA)-run Mahmoud Abbas’ administration is based. Palestinian Authority has the power to administer this area, taking care of all civic and policing issues here. However, in case of a dispute, civilian or criminal between a Palestinian and an Israeli, the latter’s laws take over, mainly because PA has no authority to enforce its diktats.

A Palestinian-Israeli dispute is not uncommon because while Israeli citizens are not allowed to enter Area A by Israeli law, Palestinians have to frequently enter and exit the area, because it is not contiguous. For example, Ramallah is about 60 km from Nablus through areas held by Israeli forces. Nablus also houses a site for Jewish pilgrimage, tours to which are escorted by Israeli military. 

Despite Oslo Accord, explicitly reserving this for Palestinians, according to Amnesty International, in early 2026 government of Israel started building a military base close to Jenin. In July, Israeli government signed 15 land confiscation orders covering roughly 20 hectares to build more settlements and connect them through protected corridors in complete contravention of the Oslo Accord. PA is totally helpless in stopping this. 

Area B, about 22 per cent of the West Bank, is not exclusively Palestinian and PA’s control is limited to civilian matters among Palestinian people. The policing is done by Israeli military, ostensibly in coordination with PA. Unlike Area A (though no longer true), Israelis are allowed to enter Area B, which they have been doing at will and establishing what is called ‘illegal’ settlements by occupying Palestinian farms, homes and orchards, throwing out Palestinian residents. This leads to disputes, which are either settled in favour of the settlers or the Israeli government, which confiscates disputed land. This happens because the government asks for proof of ownership, i.e., land registration documents, which Palestinian landowners are unable to produce, as historically held land had passed on from one generation to another without ‘official’ registration. After all, while the state of Israel is only 78 years old, the continuously inhabited land goes back to a few millenniums. For this reason, it is suspected that even ‘illegal’ settlements have official encouragement as they lead to confiscation of Palestinian territory.

The largest area in the West Bank is Area C, which is about 60 per cent of the entire territory. To better understand this, Area C is the whole of West Bank with dispersed pockets throughout marked as A and B. Legal Jewish settlements are allowed in Area C, which under Oslo Accord is governed entirely by Israeli civil administration and the army.

The obvious question is why Arafat signed the Oslo Accord which is blatantly skewed in favour of Israel. The reason was a combination of personal and political desperation. In 1993, Arafat was already 64 years old. By then he had spent 27 years in exile. His organisation PLO was designated as a terrorist organisation by the US-Israel combine. He wanted to return to Palestine. He wanted the terrorist tag removed. Oslo provided acceptability to PLO. Both US and Israel recognised it as a political entity and Arafat as a leader of his people instead of a terrorist. So, he chose to believe the West that Oslo Accord would eventually lead to peace and resolution of the Palestinian issue.

Coming back to the E-1 project. This will be in Area C, where under Oslo II, Israel can legally build settlements. As mentioned earlier, even as Israel was signing on the Accord agreeing to reduce its settlements, it was planning a new settlement E-1. At that time, the US government managed to prevail upon Israel to defer it, as it would have spoilt the atmospherics so soon after the signing of the peace agreement, which promised reduction in settlements.

Thereafter, the West has been sensitive to E-1 primarily because it would essentially rule out east Jerusalem as the capital of the future independent state of Palestine, something that PA has repeatedly insisted upon and the West has assured. The carrot of east Jerusalem also helps in keeping the myth of western justice alive, as it continues to support the two-state solution. The Israeli E-1 tender has pulled the mask off the West.

Hence, embarrassed by Israel’s complete disregard for pretensions, the West has unanimously expressed criticism of the E-1 project, bids for which will close on October 19. According to a report in the BBC, the former colonists, the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Canada have issued a joint statement calling this project ‘unacceptable’. 

Reporting the joint statement, BBC quoted UK’s foreign secretary Ed Miliband as saying, “Britain will not stand back and accept the destruction of the Two-State Solution… The UK has been clear privately and publicly in our opposition to E1 and our support for a two-state solution… all settlements damage that prospect and are a flagrant breach of international law.”

Maintaining form, two weeks after this condemnation, on September 2, Germany announced approval of nearly USD 930 million of arms in export to Israel.

Lie Told Many Times

The truth is, one of the biggest farces played on the world after World War II was the idea of a two-state solution to justify Israeli occupation of Palestine in the name of a Biblical promise. Enough has been recorded about the colonial ‘desire’ or ‘strategic compulsion’ to create a Jewish state amidst Islamic states in West Asia as a means of exercising control over this energy rich and navigationally important region.

What has fallen through the sieve of selective recall is the total annihilation and ethnic cleansing of the local population that the creation of Jewish state has and continues to, entail. Because at the end of this very dark tunnel of Zionist expansionism, the colonial West, both Europe and the US, dangled the carrot of a two-state solution. Once the fighting ends, there will be two independent states of Israel and Palestine, the developing world was promised, suggesting that they will be similar in their independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity.

The world, including India, has dutifully repeated this refrain, believing the lie. Because believing a lie is easier than confronting an uncomfortable truth—that no Palestinian state exists or ever had a possibility of existing in the erstwhile territory of Palestine, militarily captured by the colonisers for the creation of Israel. The Oslo Accords simply put the last nail on the coffin of the state of Palestine. Since then, there just have been western platitudes about ‘two-state solution’, partly to assuage their guilt at one of the biggest ethnic cleansings in the world, and partly to shape a conducive West Asian neighbourhood for Israel to feel secure and expand.

As seen above, two-state is a chimera. Even in brief periods of relative peace, with ‘relative’ being the operative word, especially between the signing of the Oslo Accord and the breakout of the second Intifida in 2000, Israeli settlements in the West Bank did not stop, both in Area C and Area B. And now in Area A as well. The two-state rhetoric hides the fact that since the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, more than 10,75,000 Palestinians have been ethnically cleansed from their land; 7,50,000 were evicted in 1948 and 3,25,000 in 1967. 

Today, Israeli cabinet ministers, defence minister Israel Katz and national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir are holding press conferences to declare that the only solution to the ‘Gaza problem’ is emigration of the two million Palestinians. While the West often dismisses Ben-Gvir’s statements as crazy and not to be taken seriously because he is not from Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu’s party, but a coalition partner, Katz is from the Likud party itself. What he speaks in his official capacity is a policy statement. And when he says, there is ‘no real solution for Gaza in the end without this migration’, it must be taken seriously.

Incidentally, Israel evacuated Gaza in 2005 after the second Intifida as the focus then was on the West Bank to render it completely untenable as a Palestinian state. Gaza became problematic when Hamas won the elections there, because clearly two non-contiguous areas divided by 50km of hostile Israeli territory, with multiple checkpoints restricting access could hardly operate as one state. Since then, perhaps by design or coincidence, world’s attention was fixed on Gaza because of Hamas, which incidentally was nurtured in the early years by Israel itself to undermine the authority and influence of PLO.

Once the PA in the West Bank was completely emasculated by encircling even Area A with Israeli settlements and military outposts, the military action in Gaza began on the pretext of Hamas’ 7 October 2023 attack. And continues till date. The scope of Gaza operations has systematically expanded into Lebanon and Syria, not to mention the war against Iran. In the midst of all this, the occasional calls of ‘two state solution’ by those who have been the creators of this inhuman catastrophe sound juvenile at best and mocking at worst.

India’s Call

At least India should be mindful of joining their ranks. When India supported Palestinian people, it did so because it recognised the Israeli project as colonialism by another name, and not because it thought that this would curry favour with the Indian Muslim population. Not just Gandhi, but Nehru too opposed the imposition of the Israeli state on Palestine without factoring in the political aspirations of the native dwellers.

India’s over 150 years of colonial experience had made it both sensitive and mindful of what equitable future of the world should look like. Independent India’s foreign policy, not non-aligned as claimed, was shaped by this sensitivity and mindfulness. It was aligned with the former colonies and the developing world, who saw in India’s policy a moral strength of someone who has the courage to stand with justice, instead of power. The closeness with the Soviet Union was also driven by that sense of equality and justice, as Nehru and his successors’ notions of a socialist state found echoes in Soviet Communism.

Today, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and foreign minister S. Jaishankar claim that Indian foreign policy is no longer ideological but pragmatic, driven by national interests. Like the ‘two state solution’, this is another farce being played upon Indians. Modi’s foreign policy is driven so much by the RSS ideology that it is no longer mindful of even national interests or national reputation. Because of RSS’ total convergence with the Zionist ideology, India is among the handful of friends Israel has in the world today.

On the contrary, as early as 1947, when Nehru was only the interim prime minister, he understood what foreign policy should be about. Replying to Albert Einstein’s letter urging him to support the creation of Israel, Nehru wrote to say why India wouldn’t do that,

‘…As you know, national policies are unfortunately essentially selfish. Each country thinks of its own interests first and then considers others. If an international policy aligns with the national policy, then the nation employs lofty language about international betterment. However, as soon as that international policy appears to clash with national interests or selfishness, a host of reasons are found to justify not adhering to that international policy…’

India’s self-image of a major power projected by the government is also antithetical to pragmatism and stems from RSS’ notion of Hindu superiority. In foreign policy, this self-image translates into perennial hostility against Pakistan and competition with China. Since none of this is possible without external support, India has attached itself to the US and its closest ally Israel, whatever be the cost. 

Truth be told, our current foreign policy is driven by cowardice and subservience towards former colonial masters, which we mask as national interest. If it wasn’t, India would add its voice to the global south demand urging end of genocide in Gaza and Israel’s expansionism in the West Bank and the neighbouring countries. It would point out that the two-state solution is dead and the resolution of the Palestinian issue needs another framework. Finally, it will tell the US-Israel combine that from endless wars they should move towards the end of war.

It seems that Modi’s India is frightened to embrace the new emerging world, which professes equality because we are not confident of our place in it. Ironically, in a happy coincidence, it is in the new world order that both our ideology and pragmatism would converge, because not only is it the future, but it also serves our national interests.