May 18, 1998

Reflections of an Indian refugee on the partition of Palestine.

Mani Shankar Aiyar

India was the only non-Muslim country to vote against the UN resolution of November 1947 partitioning Palestine. It was the first really important vote cast in the UN by independent India. It was cast by an India which itself had been partitioned just weeks earlier. We knew, as none knew better, that partition solves nothing.

The Brits, of course, thought otherwise. They had maintained their empire on the principle of "divide and rule". They scuttled their empire on the principle of "divide and quit". They first did that in Ireland. The island was granted independence on condition that it be partitioned, the six counties of the northern part of the island -- Ulster -- being retained in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The reason given was that the Irish Republic was overwhelmingly Catholic, while Ulster had a bare Protestant majority.

That one of the most impassioned Irish freedom fighters, Charles Stewart Parnell, was a Protestant was of as little account to the departing imperialists as Maulana Azad being a Muslim was when it came to partitioning India. The Brits were to do the same a few years later in Cyprus, hiving off the Muslim majority areas from the Greek Orthodox regions before quitting.

By fascinating coincidence, the partitioning of Ireland is being undone in the same month as the Israelis celebrate the golden jubilee of their independence. For the Palestinians, the celebrations mark 50 years of dispossession. In this century of self-determination, the Palestinians are the only people to be found in much larger numbers outside their country than within. The irony is that Jews living anywhere in the world have an automatic "right to return". Palestinians who have been driven into exile have none.

Those Palestinians who have remained on Zionist-controlled territory, whether in Israel as it was at independence on May 15, 1948 or through subsequent occupation, are either denied citizenship or left to suffer the iniquities of second-class citizenship. Israel is the only country in the world (now that South Africa is freed of apartheid) where the law itself stipulates that Jewish citizens shall be more equal than non-Jewish citizens.

That is why the UN, in a more enlightened day, described Zionism as a form of racism. The resolution has been rescinded but the truth of the perception cannot be changed. Not until the philosophical basis of the partition of Palestine is radically altered.

As it is being altered in Ireland. There, after nearly 75 years of sectarian killings that partition merely aggravated, an agreement has just been reached to set up cross-border institutions and an assembly which could, eventually, reunite the island. The agreement will succeed only if it paves the way to the annulment of partition. Irish Catholic and Irish Protestant must live together.

Although no Israeli, and few Palestinians, see it that way, reunification is the only sustainable solution to the tragedy of their shared land. Oslo was a fraud because it promised an independent Palestinian state, which it had no capacity to deliver. Panchayati raj in the Gaza strip is all Yasser Arafat has secured. Far from moving nearer the goal of a separate state of Palestine, Israel is retarding autonomy in areas allegedly governed by the Palestinian Authority. Worse, withdrawal of Israel's armed forces from the still-occupied territories has been made hostage to the Palestinians doing to Hamas what Israel wants them to do to Hamas. The Palestinian Authority, of course, has no jurisdiction over Zionist terrorists.

The truth is Jawaharlal Nehru's solution is the only solution for that much-desecrated land: a federal state in which Jews and Arabs have equal rights and govern themselves democratically as equal citizens of one country. That is, secularism and democracy -- the winning formula for India. It is impossible to believe Israel will ever voluntarily relinquish sovereignty over Palestine; and if that sovereignty is denied, civil war is ineluctable. Lasting peace is possible only if the lion and the lamb learn to lie together: the Biblical -- or Nehruvian -- injunction for the land of the Bible.

Nehru's solution for Palestine was, ironically, the thrust of the Cabinet Mission Plan for India, which Nehru repudiated. Partition then became the only road to Independence. There is little to be gained today by speculating what might have been if Wavell rather than Mountbatten had been retained as the midwife of freedom. But peace, friendship and cooperation between India and Pakistan is the way of putting behind us the horrendous consequences of partition. Annulling partition, as the Irish are inching their way towards doing, known in BJPspeak as Akhand Bharat, is not practical politics for the sub-continent; Indo-Pakistani friendship is.

If India and Pakistan succeed, it may show the way to Israel and Palestine. An agreement between Jew and Arab signed in Islamabad and sealed in Delhi would have far greater possibilities of enduring than the fraud perpetrated in Oslo and perpetuated in Washington.

The author is secretary, All-India Congress Committee.

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