LEADER ARTICLE
Flimsy Foundations: Theological Roots of Israel & Pakistan

It is generally believed that peace moves between Palestine and Israel are wrecked by the terrorist attacks of militant groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Israel’s response of sending tanks into Palestinian towns in West Bank and Gaza, and launching helicopter gunship attacks is seen as a defensive measure, though excessive at times.
The Israeli accusation that Palestinian chairman Yasser Arafat is responsible for not reining in the Islamic militant groups has also a plausible ring to it.It would be futile to argue, as some seem to do, that the terrorist attacks of Hamas and Islamic Jihad have to be judged in the context of a recalcitrant Israel, which refused to implement the Oslo Accords, or that the latest cycle of violence really began when Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon had gone round the Al Aqsa Mosque in September, 2000 as a defiant gesture of asserting the Zionist claim over the old Jerusalem temple.
Violence cannot be justified whatever the provocation, and the defenders do immense harm to the cause of Palestine by trying to make dubious distinctions about the violence of a desperate people. There is also the other problem with the Palestinian militant groups, which is again not sufficiently recognised by the Palestinian advocates. The militant groups have no thought for building a Palestinian state on principles of justice and fairness, something that the majority of Palestinians want.
Given the widespread revul-sion towards terrorist violence post-September 11, 2001, it is natural that the acts of Hamas and Islamic Jihad loom so large in the minds of people that some of the substantial questions about the Palestine-Israel conflict are not even mentioned, let alone analysed. There are two such major questions about this conflict. First, the simple one of dividing territory between the two states of Palestine and Israel. This solution was at the heart of the United Nations partition plan of Palestine in 1947.
In retrospect, it is clear that the Palestinians made a historical blunder by rejecting the plan. A map of the proposed partition of 1947 reveals that the Palestine state would have been larger than what is envisaged under the Oslo Accords and the US president George W Bush’s roadmap.
The second relates to ideology. Many analysts pretend as though there is no ideological angle to the whole problem. There is just no ignoring the fact that the state of Israel is an ideology-derived one, and it is this that will continue to be a destabilising element in the future in the region, even after the territorial question has been settled. The ideological basis of Israel is religion, though Zionists have talked of Jewish identity in strictly secular and nationalist terms, without a glance at Judaism as a religion.
It is the same sleight of logic that the Hindutva proponents try to use when they use Hindu as a secular and nationalist term, but with much less intellectual sophistication than the Zionists. Whatever the Zionist casuistry, the state of Israel remains a historico-theological entity, and it is this fact that infuses an atavistic element into the politics of the region, and becomes a destabilising factor. All those western critics, including Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami, refuse to face up to the fact that Israel is an anomalous modern state, created on the basis of an untenable religion-based ideology.
The only other modern state which is based on the same anomalous foundation is Pakistan, where again religious identity has been made into the sole justification for the creation of a state. Like Israel in West Asia, Pakistan too poses the same kind of instability in South Asia because of its atavistic ideological thrust. There have been arguments that once the goal is achieved, the religious orientation is thrown away. As a consequence, Israel is a post-Zionist entity, and it has left the arguments of Zionism far behind.
In the same way, it is believed that Islam is no more the identifying marker for Pakistan once the state was created. And this was reflected in the speech of Mohammed Ali Jinnah to the national assembly in Karachi immediately after Independence, where he exhorted that people of the new state of Pakistan will have to sink their religious differences, and that irrespective of their faith, they are all equal citizens of the new country. The Israelis too point to the Israeli-Arabs, who have emerged as key participants in Israeli politics.
But the religious tag cannot be discarded so easily either by Israel or Pakistan. The religious justification of the state comes up time and again. The American conservative columnist William Safire quoted Mr Sharon as saying that Jerusalem should be the capital of Israel because the word Jerusalem occurs 555 times in the Bible. There is not much difference between Sharon/Safire and Praveen Togadia. It is the religious factor again that is behind Pakistan’s claim over Kashmir.
It is a delightful irony, then, that Israel and Pakistan are the client-states of the US, and that the American intellectuals blissfully hector the Arabs about the virtues of modernity and secularism. It is quite possible that the Americans are blind to the religious question because theirs is essentially a Christian society. That is why Mr Bush and his fellow-Republicans deal with Israel and Pakistan as Christians with Jews and Muslims.
It is no wonder that a secular India has remained an eyesore for the Americans, and that they are much more comfortable dealing with the Hindutva politicians of India.