On May 17, 2021, Ambassador T.S. Tirumurti, India’s permanent representative at the UN, announced the official Indian response to the latest round of Israeli brutalities against Palestinians in East Jerusalem, Gaza and also the West Bank.
While there was condemnation of the “indiscriminate rocket firings from Gaza” there was silence about Israel air strikes. After Trump’s policy shift in 2017, India has been careful – as displayed in this UN statement – to not speak of East Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state even as it declared its support for a two-state solution, as if Israeli behaviour has not effectively destroyed in any meaningful sense this possibility.
This shameful pro-Israeli stance is of course rationalised by our Indian or Indian-origin ‘Advisors to the Prince’, i.e., a set of prominent journalists and academics (be they in India or in universities in Singapore, UK or the US) who pronounce this as a more or less ‘balanced’ position protecting Indian ‘national interests’. Opposition parties have made loud noises about the asymmetry of force but only the Left parties dare to call for ending India’s military relationship with Israel – Israel is India’s second-largest supplier after Russia and India its largest purchaser – and for supporting the BDS campaign against the Israeli government and allied institutions.
This is where India has finally arrived at. The Congress government initiated the strategic turn towards Israel from the end of the eighties onwards thereby
— source thewire.in | Achin Vanaik | 26/May/2021