An article titled “In Defence Of Israel” is being circulated to media-persons in India by the Spokesman of the Embassy Of Israel in Delhi. This article, published in Open magazine, was written by Jonas Moses Lustiger (a student based in Paris, who has earlier lived in India). The article names me specifically, and refers to mine and Aditya Nigam’s posts on Palestine in Kafila, but I was not interested in engaging with Lustiger’s largely ill-informed, propagandist and misrepresenting rant. But now that it appears we are responding directly to the Israeli state, I feel perhaps I should put some things on record.
(Our three posts on Kafila are Nakba and Sumoud, Living the Occupation and Imagining Post-Zionist Futures)
Let me begin by stating my complete agreement with Lustiger on three of his key statements in the Open article.
First:
It is true that Israel’s current government is one of the worst it has known and most of its citizens have lost hope for peace. It is also true that Israeli society is turning more racist, intolerant and ignorant of the suffering and existence of their immediate neighbours—Palestinians. Of course, the Palestinian people have been denied many rights and have been living under precarious conditions since Israel’s 1967 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. True, they have been repeat victims of unjustifiable violence and a large proportion of Israeli politicians deny their claim to an independent land, even as Israel threatens the viability of a Palestinian state by wielding tools of colonisation.
Pretty much sums up our three posts on Kafila – what’s not to agree?
Second: Continue reading Sex, Lies and God’s Promise: Response to a Diatribe
On Sunday evening, November 4th, about 60 friends of Palestine — theatre persons, writers, artists, film makers, academics, students and activists — gathered outside Delhi’s Siri Fort auditorium, the venue for the Israeli state-sponsored performance by The Cameri Theatre. Their form of protest was an unusual one. All of them wore T shirts which said, in bold black letters on white, No to Israeli Apartheid. There were no slogans or placards. Instead, they stood around the entrance, distributing leaflets and talking to theatre goers about the boycott. A few theatre goers actually responded and did not go in. A couple even joined the protest. One woman, who took a T shirt to wear inside, found a different form of discrimination being practiced in the auditorium; the Israeli theatre goers were let in, but the Indians had to wait. She read the leaflet in her hand, came out to join the protestors. 
Satyamev Jayate, the popular Aamir Khan-helmed TV show, aired an episode in May this year that praised northeast India [an unfortunate “directional category” (Barbora) that homogenizes a complex, polyglot region] for its virtual absence of dowry-related crimes and its general “liberalism” on gender issues. Subsequently, one saw a virtual deluge of “Proud to be from the northeast”- type of messages on social networking sites such as Facebook. June and July, though, were cruel and dispiriting months that belied such declarations of identitarian pride, especially for people from Assam. 
On February 21 this year, Maria Alyokhina (24) Nadezhda Tolokonnikova (22) and Yekaterina Samutsevich (30) of the punk band Pussy Riot, stormed into Moscow’s Christ the Saviour Cathedral and belted out a ‘punk prayer’, asking the Virgin Mary to “Throw Putin out!” They were charged with hooliganism motivated by religious hatred.
