Palestine and Greta
We can be wildly misled when minds are not calm and feet part earth’s company. Some in the world were frightened and others delighted by the “optics” from Tianjin’s SCO summit and from the Beijing parade that swiftly followed that summit. “Rallying under China, the non-Western world is going to upend US-Europe’s hegemony!” That sort of assessment, not necessarily in those words, was widely made.
Including, for some moments, by President Trump, who fired off this memorable (and forgettable) tweet: "Looks like we've lost India and Russia to deepest, darkest, China. May they have a long and prosperous future together!" A photo from Tianjin of a “happy” and seemingly close-knit trio -- Xi, Putin and Modi -- accompanied the tweet.
Across the world, statesmen and pundits weighed Trump’s pronouncement. By consensus, the second sentence was declared “sarcastic.”
Because this tweet from Trump had come on the heels of his 50 percent tariff on India, outrage in the godi media of the world’s most populous country was expressed in a high pitch. (By now this column’s readers must know that godi media is how Indians speak of the by-and-large servile or sycophantic TV channels and mainline newspapers in their country, where democratic institutions have been under assault for years but where courageous groups and individuals are putting up a great fight. Godi is the lap -- the ruler’s.)
SLAP TO INDIA’S PRIDE?
Until May of this year, when Trump insisted that he and his team had ended that month’s India-Pakistan war, the aforementioned media had been highlighting the U.S. president’s bonhomie with Modi. Also lauded was the role Americans of Indian origin were playing in his administration. India was reminded that the FBI chief was an Indian called Patel, that the wife of Vice-President Vance was a Hindu of Indian origin, and that Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s director of national intelligence, was a Hindu from Hawaii. A favorable image of the US president was being sold.
The ceasefire claim in May was therefore taken as a slap to India’s pride. The tariff that followed and the “You are lost to China” tweet were received as a pair of hammer blows. Another Trump aside, declaring that India’s economy was “dead,” deepened the blows’ impact. TV anchors and commentators in India expressed shock, disbelief, anger.
“Allying with China should not be unthinkable” was one response. In some minds, wounded pride erased the still fresh memory of China’s support to arch-enemy Pakistan during the May conflict. Others were willing to shut their eyes to the gargantuan reality on the Himalayas: large armies of China and India posted opposite one another along an extensive, high-altitude, and in places contested border.
COOLED TEMPERS
All that, however, was “yesterday.” Since then, tempers have rapidly cooled. Within hours of the tweet that offended fans and as well as critics of Modi, Trump told reporters in the White House (September 5): “[Modi is] a great prime minister. He’s great. But I just don’t like what he’s doing at this particular moment. But India and the US have a special relationship. There’s nothing to worry about. We just have moments on occasion.”
Modi lost no time in sending a warm response, not by speaking to reporters (that’s not his wont), but by tweeting on X:
"Deeply appreciate and fully reciprocate President Trump's sentiments and positive assessment of our ties. India and the US have a very positive and forward-looking Comprehensive and Global Strategic Partnership.”
At times even seasoned world-watchers forget a glaring fact. Trump’s off-the-cuff remarks are not, and not intended to be, statements of policy. It makes no difference whether his “shocking” utterance is a bargainer’s move, a plug for one more headline, a trial balloon, or something else. Columnists should not waste their or their viewers’ time excavating the reason for a Trump remark while the world picks up the pieces of what he has shattered.
In any case, it will take much more than a short period of erratic leadership to break the interdependence between the peoples of the Western world and of countries like India, an interdependence that goes beyond defense, commerce, tech, and AI to include culture, personal lives, and in some cases even a search for life’s purpose. We may mark, too, that “the average American citizen” (if there’s such a thing) does not take Trump’s ad hoc remarks seriously, although he/she may take Trump himself seriously.
What is utterly serious for the people of the world is the apparent willingness of most governments in North America, Europe, and Asia to permit the liquidation or removal of Gaza’s Palestinians as well as the removal or subordination of all the Palestinians of the West Bank. Dare anyone claim that what Hamas did two years ago justifies the destruction and starvation that followed, or the expulsion-or-enslavement that is being proclaimed?
DE FACTO TAKEOVER
Michelle Goldberg is brutally categorical in her New York Times op-ed of Sept. 8:
“[T]here’s not going to be a remotely humane resolution to this conflict anytime soon. In the near term, we’re staring down Israel’s annexation of the West Bank — de facto if not official — and the ethnic cleansing of Gaza carried out with the full support of Donald Trump. For the foreseeable future, the only state between the river and the sea is likely to be Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel.”
“It’s Time to Give Up on the Two-State Solution” is part of the melancholy headline to her column.
Earlier (on September 6), the Washington Post published this story:
“[Israel’s] Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich on [September 3] unveiled a plan to annex 82 percent of the West Bank. Smotrich has overseen an aggressive expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, territory Palestinians hope will make up the bulk of a future independent state. The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs warned in June that settler violence had reached a 20-year high.
“National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, another far-right leader, raised annexation at the meeting with Netanyahu Thursday [September 4] ... Ben Gvir called for dismantling the Palestinian Authority, which governs parts of the West Bank, and forcing the collapse of the economy even if that meant giving up any hope of establishing diplomatic ties with Saudi Arabia, a person with knowledge of the meeting said.
“Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand in June announced sanctions on Smotrich and Ben Gvir for, they said, having ‘incited extremist violence and serious abuses of Palestinian human rights.’
“Dan Diker, the president of the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, a think tank close to the Israeli government, predicted Netanyahu would annex at least the Jordan Valley and the hills on its western face — a step Diker described as ‘a critical, nonnegotiable security need.’”
As I type these lines, I find that Smotrich is in India discussing economic ties with Modi’s finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman. Once a staunch backer of an independent Palestine, India under Modi has forged deep intelligence and military ties with Israel, while the Modi regime’s anti-Muslim policies align neatly with the Greater Israel dream, which, according to Michelle Goldberg, is on its way to realization.
IS GRETA THE FUTURE?
Much of humanity will feel wounded, cheated, and angry if this happens. It would mean a restoration of the medieval practice of brute force overpowering the human wish for dignity.
Will the world find a way to stop what is being predicted? Greta Thunberg is making her attempt. Right now she is in Tunis with her brave flotilla. This young woman from Europe’s far north has become the entire planet’s face of concern. Concern for our common home and for the humans living in it.
Let us not too readily announce Greta’s defeat. Or the defeat of the Palestinians, the vast majority of whom merely want the right to continue to live on their soil, on which their forebears lived for centuries, and to continue to grow trees, grain, fruit, and flowers on that soil.
The future of Palestine may be the world’s greatest single moral question today. If powerful governments permit the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza and the creation of a Greater Israel where the West Bank’s Palestinians live as subordinates, serfs, or slaves, we will be witnessing the most shameful reversal in humanity’s journey in a 250-year period.
The American Revolution of the 1770s and the French Revolution of the 1780s and 1790s fired minds across the globe. Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity became humanity’s desires but were assured only to some sections within some nations. After World War II, equality between races and nations became the global norm. As this 21st century began, supremacy again raised its head – supremacy within and between nations. In 2025, Greta Thunberg and the people on her boats are the inspiring emblems of democracy’s fightback.
THE BOTTOM-LINE
If Israel and its supporters are actually afraid that an independent Palestine would threaten its existence, they should ask for an international reassurance force along the lines of what much of Europe is organizing for Ukraine, and what Trump may support in his bid for peace between Moscow and Kyiv. Palestine should certainly ask for it. An international force keeping the peace between Israel and an independent Palestine will be neither an unprecedented idea nor a particularly expensive one.
But an independent Palestine possessing a viable area is the bottom-line.
Much depends on what pro-democracy and pro-equality political leaders in the US and in Europe will do. Will they submit to Netanyahu, Smotrich, Gvir, and Dieker? Or will they support Greta and her boats?
One of India’s courageous writers, the academic and commentator, Mukul Kesavan, says the following in a significant article in the UK’s Guardian daily:
“Western benevolence has always been predicated on western hegemony. Once the climate crisis and China’s rise made it clear that the west’s supremacy wasn’t future-proofed; once the promise of steady economic growth, the modern measure of secular progress, became unredeemable, western centrists began to secede from the world order they had created in their pomp. Gaza is the sum of this secession. The WTO, overseas aid, due process for asylum seekers, international humanitarian law, the UN system – the whole postwar order built by the west and led by the US – is being cast aside as rich countries circle their wagons against a needy, unruly world.”
By firmly defending the barest rights of the Palestinian people, by rallying around Thunberg and the vast numbers of youth in the Western world who recognize those rights, opinion-makers in the US and Europe can refute Kesavan’s assessment.
A final thought: In the US and in Europe, children of migrants have risen to prized positions, including in politics. Some face unfair hostility from nativists or from descendants of earlier migrants. These influential non-white figures will have stronger claims to equal treatment in the US, in Europe, in the UK, in Australia, and in Canada if they also raise their voice in defense of Palestine and Palestinians, and in defense of Muslim, Christian, Sikh, and Buddhist minorities in India, and threatened minorities elsewhere.
North India’s floods: Readers have pointed out that when, last week, this column noted the damage from floods in Pakistan and an earthquake in Afghanistan, the loss that floods were causing in northern India – in Punjab, Himachal, Jammu & Kashmir, Uttarakhand, Haryana, and Delhi -- was not mentioned. As some would have surmised, the simple reason for the omission was that word of the harm in northern India had not reached me when the column was written. Since then I have caught up with the scale of the damage and with the heroic response of farmers and other citizens. Ravish Kumar’s remarkable and instructive report can be accessed here.
