As legacies of colonialism go

PALESTINE and Kashmir have too readily been likened to each other, and to this end, they were mentioned in the same breath last week at the UN — not for the first time — by Pakistan’s prime minister.
There are a few similarities, yes, but they are mostly notional. Israel was created in 1948, the year India and Pakistan clashed over Kashmir. They are legacies of colonial cynicism, and their people have been bludgeoned for seeking rights promised by UN resolutions.
Military conflicts between India and Pakistan over Kashmir have ended in stalemates, and this doesn’t include the 1971 war, which had an entirely different set of reasons and outcomes. Unlike the unending Palestinian struggle, the Kashmir dispute went into a freeze in 1972.
It stayed thus until the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, which signalled the demise of the USSR and announced the West’s triumph in the Cold War. That’s when an armed revolt flared up in Kashmir and it continues to stalk the heavily militarised region unabated. Palestinians and Kashmiris have also hijacked planes to press their rights, but this is where the similarities begin to wane. Palestine was supported by the USSR and Kashmiris had the backing of the West, not least because Pakistan was a handy ally.

Palestine straddles a different history altogether. All countries in the Middle East that were close to Moscow stand wrecked today by US-led military campaigns. Needless to say, this could not have happened without the vengeful support of the West’s allies, led by Saudi Arabia and Jordan. (The Pakistani military was used to crush a Palestinian uprising in Jordan in 1968.) Among the US-led targets are Libya, Syria, Iraq, and the erstwhile Marxist-ruled South Yemen. Iran got into the crosshairs by overthrowing the Shah. The ongoing targeting of Palestinians thus has different roots from Kashmir. India was spared the ordeal inflicted on former Soviet allies as it changed corners in the footsteps of Egypt. The former non-aligned friends ardently support Israel as America’s “unsinkable ship” in the region.
In the 1990s, at the height of the upsurge against Indian rule in Kashmir, it was normal to hear from resistance leaders in Srinagar that the dispute over their Himalayan region could lead to nuclear war. It was offered as a reason for nuclear-armed India and Pakistan to settle the Kashmir dispute amicably before it was too late. The argument was romantic at best and luckily delusional. It was spawned by well-regarded thinkers of the Hurriyat Conference. Prof Abdul Ghani Bhatt, the mild-mannered, Rumi-loving Persian scholar, led the field, peppering his fears of a war with ornate stanzas from Persian anthology.
Last week’s speech at the UN by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif claiming preparedness against a real or imagined military adventure by India was of a piece with what Indians clumsily call Pakistan’s ‘internationalisation of the Kashmir issue’. It’s worth noting though that China, which also has territorial disputes with India, has seldom, if ever, taken the international stage to raise bilateral differences with India. Part of the reason could be that it seeks to have India as a partner, not adversary in its economic and political plans. Nor do we hear of dire threats made against China by India. This is not to say the two sides don’t remain militarily primed for a contingency.

In its zeal to take on India before an international audience, Pakistan may have missed the visuals of India itself ‘internationalising’ the Kashmir issue, which it laughably did by giving a guided tour of the elections underway in J&K to a clutch of foreign diplomats. (Did we ever see a foreign diplomat taken to elections in Uttar Pradesh?)
Unlike the skies over Kashmir, nine Western satellites are permanently stationed over territories of interest to Israel’s defence. For years they have been observing the landscape very minutely, a point Prof Bhatt shouldn’t miss. The eyes in the sky have been watching Hezbollah, Syria and Iran, and possibly the Houthis, but curiously, not Hamas.
Thus, when the Israeli woman officer who detected Hamas activity in Gaza before the catastrophic events of Oct 7 last year, alerted the male colonel responsible for keeping vigil on the open prison, he told her: “Your job is to ply us with coffee, just keep that coming.” The exact details of the conversation would be known when Benjamin Netanyahu is removed from office, which he is working feverishly to delay by widening Israel’s war in the region and keeping it perpetually on the boil. Else, peace was an earshot away: heed the call to end the Gaza slaughter and nobody would shoot rockets into Israel anymore. The US elections gave Netanyahu the leeway to dismiss the ceasefire calls with contempt and impunity.
Hassan Nasrallah’s death thus followed a deep study of his bases for years with human, visual, and technical intelligence. The Israeli military was preparing for this venture, not the conflict with Hamas, an embarrassment hard to live down. The satellites and saturated intelligence enabled the precision killing of a Hamas leader in Tehran, followed by decapitating strikes against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Striking fear among Lebanese civilians was part of the battle drill, and it was staged by exploding pagers, killing dozens and injuring thousands.

Having said that, the war in Lebanon may have only just begun, unless big powers, out of sheer self-interest, douse the inferno quickly. An estimated 90 per cent of Hezbollah fighters, commanders with their lethal arsenal of well concealed hardware, are believed to be keeping the powder dry.
This was evident in the signal from Tehran, which said the “battle against Zionism” post Nasrallah would continue to be led by Hezbollah. Iran sees itself as more useful guarding the supply lines to Lebanon, and this it’s doing without the need for an untenable arsenal India and Pakistan keep flaunting, mercifully vacuously, over Kashmir.
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
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Published in Dawn, October 1st, 2024