Syed Qamar Afzal Rizvi
NEEDLESS to say, the policies, the intentions, the acts being practised in both Palestine and Kashmir reflect nothing but an Indo-Jewish nexus of delusion and anti-constructivism formed by Israel’s Netanyahu and India’s Narendra Modi—which aims at downplaying the writ of international law. Professor Otto Kimminich advanced an international law doctrine— the UN’s Declaration on Friendly Relations— to mean that, as long as a state respects the rights of minority groups, ‘’these groups can find their protection within the State in accordance with present-day international law. As soon as that State consistently violates these rights a situation arises in which the ethnic group may invoke its right of self-determination in order to bring about constitutional changes within the State or to find an international solution by seceding’’. Obviously, this doctrine is objectively applicable in the current situation of Kashmir and Palestine.
05 August 2019, the Kashmir revocation order, the introduction of new domicile law and the current Indian law — authorising the Indian security forces to buy land in Kashmir — all remain in direct conflict with the norms of international law. In December 2019, Narendra Modi orchestrated the CAA (Citizenship Amendment Act), granting thereof a path for citizenship to migrants who had fled religious persecution in other countries, but not for Muslims, against whom Modi’s BJP Party severely discriminates. Those two legislative acts incorporated by Israel and India are not merely hot air; yet they are identical to a piece with more dramatic acts of territorial realignment — basically, land grabs in defiance of international law. And obviously a few months before the Citizenship Amendment Act, Modi had rescinded the long-standing autonomous status of the disputed region of Kashmir—thereby negating the will of Kashmir’s majority Muslim population.
BIBI, the Israeli PM Netanyahu took a devious measure in July 2018 when his government passed the Nation-State Law in the Knesset, thereby effectively enshrining in law the supremacy of Jews over Arabs in Israel. Whereas in the case of Kashmir, there is a long line of United Nations Security Council resolutions and letters, from 1948 to 2019, calling on both India and Pakistan to refrain from altering the territorial status of the region. In the case of the West Bank, there is a long-standing international consensus that Israel’s occupation stands in violation of the 49th clause of the 4th Geneva Convention from 1949, which explicitly states: “The occupying power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own population into the territories it occupies. “Yet Israel has repeatedly transferred or permitted the movement of its civilian population to the occupied West Bank over the past half century.
The Israeli PM Netanyahu revived the pledge that he would apply Israeli sovereignty over the Jordan Valley and he urged the Blue and White leader to back such a move. But Gantz seems to have distanced himself away from such a move. Needless to say, subsequent upon the rollout in January, the Trump’s Israeli-Palestinian peace plan, Netanyahu seemed vowing to secure immediate government approval for annexing the Jordan Valley and Israeli settlements in the West Bank, but was compelled to back off promise after the US Administration put the brakes on the move regarding the Jordan Valley, where 10,000 settlers and 80,000 Palestinians reside, makeup nearly 30 percent of the West Bank.
Whimsically, as for the Jews, President Trump’s Mideast peace plan was expected to help Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thereby instantly applying a campaign promise to annex occupied land that Israelis and Palestinians have fought over seventy, three years. But it didn’t go as Netanyahu had hoped. Trump’s plan, announced on January 28, was seen as a land lottery for Israel, but subsequently the Trump Administration pragmatically distanced itself from this devious annexation plan. Yet the Trump Administration’s backing for the current Israeli-UAE deal has many recipes for the Mideast turmoil. Israeli forces have accelerated the rocket attacks on the Gaza Strip just after the current deal was announced. According to the leader of Israel’s movement of hundreds of thousands of West Bank settlers, David Alhayani, chairman of the Yesha Council, the top settler leadership organization, tells NPR arguing that Netanyahu is seeking the Trump administration’s blessing for Israel to claim at least one settlement. The geopolitical motives of the current UAE- Israel deal need no explanation.
India’s Hindu nationalists and the Israeli right have a remarkable policy congruity. The two premiers, both were seen battling for re-election in spring 2019, shared a warm rapport, and regularly referred to each other on Twitter as “my friend Narendra” and “my friend Bibi.” The Modi-Bibi bonhomie rests on much more than personal chemistry, or even the Israeli military-industrial complex’s significant role in servicing Indian needs. It is rooted in the profound admiration of generations of Hindu nationalists for Zionism and its product, Israel, whose model of nation-state they seek to emulate in India. And yet not surprisingly, Indian secularists have been claiming that the Hindu nationalists intend to turn India into a Hindu state via Hindustan, the sweeping political ideology of Hindu nationalism born in the 1920s.
Article 51 of the Indian Constitution directs the state to respect international law although it does not make international law as a part of Indian law. Article 51 is a directive principle i.e. it is to be read with article 37 of the Constitution of India which lays down the provisions contained in part iv shall not be enforceable in any courts but the principles therein laid down are nevertheless fundamental in the governance of the country and it shall be the duty of the State to apply these principles in making laws. All that said, the changing swings in the US political atmosphere reflecting a decline in Trump’s power, the international political chaos in Israel unity government on the one side, while the faltering Modi’s popularity in India on the other, it all indicates that the nefarious Modi-Netanyahu plans will never be successful, and obviously, the fault does lie with those powers who wield the control of enforcing international law—the UNSC and the other global actors must now dilute their selfish interests by rejecting the Indo-Jewish policies of occupation, usurpation and annexation.
—The writer, an independent ‘IR’ researcher-cum-international law analyst based in Pakistan, is member of European Consortium for Political Research Standing Group on IR, Critical Peace & Conflict Studies, also a member of Washington Foreign Law Society and European Society of International Law.
