Israel is fighting this war for all free-thinking people

The Israeli-Indian rail link may be a pipe-dream; the Israeli-Indian dream is a link

When Israel attended a peace conference in Brussels on 27 January 2024, they used part of the time available to them to show a presentation of a projected rail link from Israel to India. Just to remind you, here is a map of the area between Israel and India:

The route would go through Syria or Jordan, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, perhaps also Saudi Arabia and/or Afghanistan. Looks unlikely? Of course it’s unlikely: the right-wing Hindu party in India would not countenance running a major rail link through Muslim Pakistan, obviously. So Pakistan is out.

There are existing proposals for rail links entering Europe through Turkey or Moscow and they centre on Iran as a hub. There’s no question but that a link to Israel is a possibility, but, as this plan at least shows, India is no way near the rails, which stop in Iran. You can get to India by sea from there, but you can get to anywhere in the world from there, if it’s at the seaside.

One way to get to India without using a ship is this:

A proposed tunnel carrying freight, passengers, pedestrians (hmmm…), water and oil from the United Arab Emirates to India. That’s a lot of pipes, and, for the moment, it’s a lot of pipe-dreams. I wonder what the water pipe is for. In case it catches fire?

So, what is it, besides railway pipe-dreams, that links India and Israel? Apart from the letter “I”? Apart from them both being in Asia? Apart from them both being a bit—just a tad—right-wing? And, of course … de–mo–cra–cies? Hm? Can you guess?

One thing that links them is labour. Israel has seen fit to decimate its labour force by waging war on Palestine for five months and, because of that, there is a shortage of labour in Israel and (no joke) in the Palestinian territories as well. About 100,000 of the people who, up until October 2023, worked there no longer work there, and that is leading to a shortage of manpower.

Taking up on a pattern that has installed itself over time and was especially visible when Qatar was building the infrastructure for its hosting of a global football championship, the subcontinent is being looked to as a source of reliable, skilled and, above all, poor labourers. Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi labourers travelling abroad can make around four times the wage that they would earn at home, and this attracts many, mainly, men to travel within the broader region for work. There is, it has to be said, a great deal of infrastructure work going on in India, some of it controversial in terms of its environmental compatibility, but the work is there. However, the prospect of earning four times the Indian wage, as it was in Qatar, for instance, is an attractive proposition.

The work that needs doing in Israel is not offering four times an Indian wage, but twenty times an Indian wage. Some men will travel 1,000 kilometres to camp out and part with the equivalent of 3,000 US dollars just in order to get the chance of an interview for selection and to be taken on in Israel, so attractive is the remuneration package. That said, Israel does have something of a sketchy track-record when it comes to foreign workers’ rights, and the press was also full of scandalous reports concerning working and living conditions for migrant workers in Qatar for the World Cup (over 6,000 of them died). But an offer of five times the Indian wage would surely draw such manpower to the Middle East, would it not? So, then, why twenty times?

The shortage would appear to have arisen in the building trade, and the building trade covers two aspects: building (putting bricks together to build walls) and demolition (the reverse process), and, it seems, Israel needs both of these skills sets. There is a great deal of rubble in the western part of Israel, which needs clearing before the land can be reassigned; in use, let alone in ownership. This is one task for which Israel is looking to hire Indian manpower, and it has the encouragement of the Indian government in doing so, mostly in the states of India where the ruling BJP has a strong following (that’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party).

One way to analyse the 20x wages is to see part of that as remuneration for work done and part of it as remuneration for taking a considerable risk: danger money. Because the work needing doing is partly in Israel and partly in the Gaza Strip (besides the dream of a railway to India, there is the dream of a pop-up port off the Gaza coast). The 20x wage is clearly a hefty incentive to get civilian workers to do building and demolition work in an active war zone. That is a proposition that has incurred the wrath of Indian trades unions.

I might add that some workers are being encouraged not only to take up a pick and a shovel, but even to take up arms, and to fight alongside members of the Israeli Defence Force.

Mr Modi recently re-dedicated a former mosque in Ayodhya as a Hindu temple and seems determined to turn India from a multi-cultural democracy into a Hindu-styled monocultural, ethnocentric state, and he has turned increasingly to Israel, a paragon example of such a state, to aid him. India buys more weapons from Israel than any other country, besides co-producing Israeli armaments in factories in India. India was very reluctant to join other states in calling for a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, and it has voiced no support for South Africa’s case against Israel in the International Court of Justice. The former staunch support shown by India for Palestine has gradually been turned around as India forges a new narrative among its people, linking the technological and infrastructural progress its sees in Israel to the great infrastructure projects that India is moving ahead with, such as in the Himalayas: the roads and settlements built by Israel portend a progress that India is persuaded it can share, by pursuing similar projects in which the expansion of infrastructure comes at the cost of culture and, especially, confessional belief. Part of India’s friendship with Israel comes from their having a common enemy. They both defend their culture, their religion, their civilisation against the bugbear: Islam. India has borrowed the by-line from Ukraine, where that country is fighting its war for the future freedom of Europe; in India, Israel’s war against Palestine is being moulded as a joint cause: Israel is fighting this war for all free-thinking people.

The BJP is modelling India on Israel, transforming it into a strong, militaristic, ethno-nationalist state, a Hindu rashtra, in which certain citizens belong more than others, and that in the state with the third-largest Islamic population on Earth. For this, India is seeking closer ties to the object of its adulation, and recasting its relationship to Palestine, by fantasising and sensationalising the threat posed by the Islamic world, just as, in its time, the threat posed by communism was blown out of proportion in the Cold War:

“The Hamas fighters were slicing open the stomachs of expectant mothers and pulling out the foetuses. They were cutting open chests and eating people’s hearts.” (Sangeet Som, representative of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party in Uttar-Pradesh.)

“Do you really think, ladies and gentlemen, that the terrorist attack that you’ve seen on Israel will never happen in India? That it’s really that far off? It is not that far off. The same radical, jihadist, Islamist, terrorist thinking that Israel is a victim of, we are a victim of as well…” (announcer on Republic TV, a mainstream Indian TV news channel after the 7 October attack.) “Israel is fighting this war on behalf of all of us. Israel is fighting this war for you and me. Israel is fighting this war for all free-thinking people across the world.”

There you are. Israel is fighting this war for you, chaps.

The Indian support in the immediate aftermath of 7 October harkened back to the reactions of Indians to a 2008 Pakistani terrorist attack in Mumbai; any parallel that associates the destiny of India with that of Israel is at this time being actively sought out and billboarded as truth and evidence of the righteousness of Israel’s battle with, not Hamas, and not even Palestine, but with the Muslim religion as a whole, giving India its cue to cry out, “Hear, hear!”

The guys queueing up in Uttar-Pradesh to get an interview for work in Israel, hoping they’ll be selected to go off there within the month, have been told that they needn’t apply if they are Muslims. It is to be assumed that this injunction comes not from the recruitment agencies themselves, who would have every interest in recruiting every last valid candidate they can find (at 3,000 dollars a whack). But their instructing principal will no doubt have imposed this condition.

If India thinks Israel is fighting this war for all free-thinking people, then the free-thinking are certainly doing their thinking as they observe this war. And, in fairness, you can hear here that there are free-thinking people across India who certainly do not agree with their leader, or with Israel’s, either. That much India and Israel also have in common: a stalwart body of opinion that is revolted by their governments’ rapprochement and mutual high-fives.

Who Israel is fighting this war for is an open question. Some say it’s for Mr Netanyahu, and none other. Some say it’s for Israel. Some say it’s for Jews, across the world. Now India says it’s for India, and even for all free-thinking people across the globe. If it’s for the free-thinking, therefore, it surely cannot be for Mr Netanyahu. Take your pick. Take your shovel. Or take up your arms.

One thing’s true: Israel is not fighting this war for Palestinians; for they are thinking people, deep in thought, whose thoughts will deepen yet more in the fullness of time, but they are not—not yet—free.