Sunanda K. Datta-Ray | Will Trump’s ‘Hammer’ Create a New West Asia?

Ostensibly, the United States committed wanton aggression against an unoffending nation with which India also enjoys cooperative ties in order to further the territorial, regional and ideological ambitions of a racist power that is Washington’s prized protege. To complicate matters, Narendra Modi’s India, too, enjoys close diplomatic and defence ties with Israel while viewing the region’s Muslim multitudes with suspicious fear. What might add to the embarrassment of the more sensitive among India’s leaders is New Delhi’s own ambiguity on the questions of nuclear proliferation. In February 1997, then external affairs minister (later Prime Minister) Inder Kumar Gujral reiterated India’s opposition to the 1996 Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty, saying that “India favours any step aimed at destroying nuclear weapons, but considers that the treaty in its current form is not comprehensive and bans only certain types of tests”.

India is one of three countries — the other two non-signatories of the CTBT being Pakistan and North Korea — that have tested nuclear weapons since the treaty opened for signature in 1996. India maintains a “no first use” nuclear policy and has reportedly developed a nuclear triad capability as a part of its “credible minimum deterrence” doctrine. Far from being praised, this position, like India’s opposition to the CTBT, invites charges of double standards from countries that do not share India’s objection that the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty imposes nuclear apartheid by recognising only China, France, Russia, Britain and the United States as lawfully possessing nuclear arms. For instance, Japan, which is believed to enjoy the capability to develop its own nuclear weapons but resists the temptation to do so, doesn’t side with India.

However, US President George W. Bush emphatically rejected scepticism on this score in July 2005 when he granted Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh an epochal civil nuclear agreement that wiped the slate clean and transferred benefits historically reserved for countries that forswore nuclear weapons. Dwelling on the sequence of events, Ayatollah Ali Hosseini Khamenei, the dignified bearded octogenarian cleric who has been Iran’s Supreme Leader since 1989, may wonder what India has that Iran doesn’t to be so favoured.

Not that India was always regarded as a pampered American ally. But no whisper has been heard for many decades of suspicions that the US Central Intelligence Agency tried to thwart India’s nuclear programme by assassinating Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri and the Indian nuclear scientist Homi Bhabha just 13 days apart in 1966. Attributed to Robert Trumbull Crowley, a West Point graduate who became second in command of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, the story was apparently published in two books, David Wise’s Molehunt (1992) and Conversations with the Crow, by a journalist, Gregory Douglas (2013). India’s media doesn’t appear to have gone overboard over these revelations.

As the Asian tragedy unfolds, however, the murderous aggressions which have inflicted enormous misery and suffering on countless poor people appear to be as pointless as Israel’s boastful “Operation Rising Lion” against Iran (named after a Biblical verse promising a victorious future for Israeli might) or Mr Trump’s spectacular falling out with the world’s richest man, South Africa-born Elon Musk, who spent more than $290 million in getting the 47th President elected to the world’s most powerful job. The only governmental action of note amidst all these resounding clashes is the decision by Britain’s Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, to impose sanctions on two hardline Israeli politicians, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, respectively minister of national security and junior minister of defence under the egregious Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Both men want more than two million Palestinians expelled from Gaza and the occupied territory filled with Israeli settlers. Similar ethnic cleansing of the West Bank with its three million inhabitants may follow so that the more than 670,000 Israeli settlers there not only reign supreme but can invite other Jews to take over the vacated territory.

Sir Keir’s sanctions are no more than an irritant since all they can do is to prevent the two men from setting foot in Britain and freeze whatever British assets they might hold. But this mild censure at a time when even supposedly moral Asian nationalists are only too flattered to hob-nob with the triumphant Israelis has drawn sharp criticism from Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, and naturally from Tel Aviv. Of course, Indians, especially the so-called saffron brigade, have no knowledge of — or interest in — the Zionist vision of “Eretz Yisrael”, the expanded homeland that is expected to swallow up even more Arab land and push its inhabitants into the sea. The Indian commitment being communal, Jews are defined by the religion of their West Asian adversaries and guaranteed support.

Since hostilities can suddenly erupt at any time, the challenge is to lay the foundations of a lasting settlement while the fragile peace still holds. Despite his innocence of history and tradition, Mr Trump should know that Israel’s opponents in the region will never be reconciled to its intrusive presence unless they themselves are guaranteed sovereign independence. Even “Operation Midnight Hammer” had violated their rights by unilaterally abusing their airspace to bomb Iran. Saudi Arabia and Jordan may have tolerated it because they now see Shia Iran as the greater threat; if Syria and Iraq acquiesced, it was because they had no choice.

It will not always be so. America’s West Asian allies have agendas of their own, irrespective of whether the United States needs them more than they need the US.

Either way, the most effective way of restraining their historic passions is to underwrite their security, borders and territorial integrity through a stable sovereign Palestine that Israel will dare not touch. Such a Palestine might not dare to touch Israel either. It would have no reason to. Only the US can ensure this equilibrium.