As Prime Minister Modi says, terror anywhere is a threat everywhere and its planners and perpetrators need to be opposed.
The response of the Israeli Defense Forces on the political command of Prime Minister Netanyahu has often been judged to be excessive. (Photo: AP)
The horror which took place on Bondi Beach was the replay of a script that has been played out on many occasions. The small worldwide Jewish community has suffered a disproportionate number of such attacks. Steeled by centuries, indeed millennia, of persecution, cognizance of such threats has been embedded into the DNA of the Jewish mind. The 20th century witnessed the Shoah or Holocaust, in which millions of Jews were put to death through incineration by Adolf Hitler and his substantial following of the time. The Germans have given the world priceless scientific discoveries, including the secrets of the atom first uncovered by Albert Einstein. He was Jewish, and as a consequence Hitler ignored the significance of the discovery right until the time Germany was laid waste by Allied land, sea and air forces. This was fortunate for the “Jewish Science”, as Hitler termed the discoveries of Einstein and his associates that resulted in the two atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that led to the surrender of Japan, thus ending World War II. The scientist mainly responsible for unlocking the nuclear genie, Dr Robert Oppenheimer, was persecuted and prosecuted on the suspicion that he had given the Soviet Union the secrets of the atom bomb. He had not, but spent years fighting the false charges. It is another cruel irony that Alan Turing, the man who won the war for Britain by his cracking the code of the Enigma cipher device used by the Nazi armies spent his last year in misery and confusion of mind caused by chemical hormone injections administered by elements of the very government that was aware of his contribution to winning the war. The cracking of the Enigma code was ignored by Winston Churchill in his telling of the war, for that would have detracted from the contribution of the centrepiece of his memoirs, Churchill himself.
As Prime Minister, Churchill was lucky to an astonishing point. After Dame Luck and the suddenly inclement weather over the English Channel succeeded in accomplishing his brainwave of sending a fleet of largely civilian vessels to rescue the entire British army which had been mobilised to sail home across the Channel from Normandy in Occupied France. In his sacrificed 3,000 soldiers in Calais whose order was to divert Nazi attention from Normandy by a fierce resistance, which they did at the cost of almost all their lives and limbs. Their Churchillinspired courage ensured the safe retrieval of the British Expeditionary Force from Normandy. With what can only be called genius, Churchill ensured that the British armies escaped relatively unscathed from the war with Nazi Germany. It was the Russians, then the Soviets, who sacrificed more than 20 million lives to bleed the Wehrmacht to the point of surrender. The Western Front against Nazi Germany was opened only in June 1944, by which time the Nazi Wehrmacht had effectively lost the war because of the Eastern Front against Soviet Russia.
The response of the Israeli Defense Forces on the political command of Prime Minister Netanyahu has often been judged to be excessive. Hamas seems to have forgotten the Holocaust of the earlier century when it launched a terror attack on the Jewish state in 2023. Memories of the Holocaust and the determination to never again suffer the same fate have driven Netanyahu towards his intended objective of wiping out the military wing of Hamas. Given that its cadres are embedded within the civilian population of Gaza, IDF attacks on the former have resulted in the deaths of several in that population. Had there been a free election in Gaza, the population would have voted against Hamas, but that has never been the case in Gaza from 2005. Whenever IDF forces withdrew from a part of Gaza, militant Hamas cadres re-emerged from their hiding places and executed those who had expressed their dislike of Hamas within the earshot of an often covert cadre of Hamas.
Terror is the weapon used against Hamas foes as well as their political opponents. Such is democracy, terrorist style. Unlike some other democracies, India has never used the weapon of terror to tackle its foes. Which is why almost all attempts at terror attacks in India have been foiled by the Prime Minister and the Home Minister. The reason for such a record of success is that in several instances, it is the local population in the bullseye of the terrorists that have provided input on the planning of the intending attackers. Every community has provided such input.
Although Mossad, the Israeli secret service, has a well-deserved reputation for success, it is regarding the Hamas attack that the organisation is supposed to have failed. The failure was caused by a refusal to believe that Hamas would try something as suicidal to it as a terror attack in Israel. It ought never to be forgotten that what passes for rationality to the normal mind is usually unknown to the perpetrators of terror. They follow a rationale, a logic of their own. They were shocked when the same Prime Minister Netanyahu, who had exchanged 2,000 Hamas prisoners for the return of a single IDF soldier, decades later did not accept the Hamas logic that the Jewish hostages they had taken back into a terrible captivity would prevent the ferocious IDF response that followed the October 7, 2023 terror attack. As Prime Minister Modi says, terror anywhere is a threat everywhere and its planners and perpetrators need to be opposed.
President Trump disregarded this sage advice when he sat down at the White House for dinner with Asim Munir, the planner of the Pahalgam attack. What took place at Bondi Beach against innocent celebrants of a Jewish feast needs to be a lesson for all leaders, that correctness is what saves innocent lives while political correctness tosses them away. What is happening in Gaza under IDF attack is yet another lesson that allowing control of a territory by terrorists eventually brings extreme misery to its population.
