Fields of Blood (68 page)

A collective memory of humiliation and imperial domination has also inspired a desire for a national character of strength in India.
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When they look back in history, Hindus are divided. Some see a paradise of coexistence
and a culture in which
Hindu and Muslim traditions combine. But Hindu nationalists see the period of Muslim rule as a clash of civilizations, in which a militant Islam forced its culture on the oppressed Hindu majority.
⁶⁵
The structural violence of empire is always resented by subject peoples and can persist long after the imperialists have left. Founded in the early 1980s, the
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the “
Indian National Party,” an affiliate of RSS (
Hedgewar’s nationalist religious party), feeds on this bitterness and enhances it. It campaigned for a militarily strong India, a nuclear arsenal (whose warheads are named after Hindu gods), and national distinctiveness. At first, however, it made no headway in the polls, but its fortunes changed d
ramatically in 1989, when the issue of the
Babri mosque once again hit the headlines.
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In India as in
Israel, sacred geography has become emblematic of the nation’s disgrace. Here too, the spectacle of a Muslim shrine atop a ruined temple aroused huge passions, because it so graphically symbolized the Hindu collective memory of Islamic imperial dominance. In February 1989 activists resolved to build a new temple to Ram on the site of the mosque and collected donations from the poorer castes throughout India; in the smallest villages bricks for the new shrine were cast and consecrated. Not surprisingly, tensions flared between
Muslims and
Hindus in the north, and
Rajiv Gandhi, who had tried to mediate, lost the election.

The BJP, however, had made large gains at the polls, and the following year its president,
L. K. Advani, began a
rath yatra
(“chariot pilgrimage”), a thirty-day journey from the west coast to
Ayodhya, that was to culminate in the rebuilding of the Rama temple. His Toyota van was decorated to resemble
Arjuna’s chariot in the last battle of the
Mahabharata
and was cheered by fervent crowds lining the route.
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The pilgrimage began, significantly, at
Somnath, where, legend has it,
Sultan Mahmud of the Central Asian kingdom of Ghazni had slaughtered thousands of Hindus way back in the eleventh century, razing
Shiva’s ancient temple to the ground and plundering its treasure. Advani never made it to Ayodhya, because he was arrested on October 23, 1990, but thousands of Hindu nationalists from every region of India had already assembled at the site to begin the mosque’s demolition. Scores of them were shot down by the police and hailed as
martyrs, and Hindu-Muslim riots exploded throughout the country. The Babri mosque was finally dismantled in December 1992, while the press and army stood by and watched. For Muslims, its brutal destruction evoked the horrifying specter of Islam’s
annihilation in the subcontinent. There were more riots, the most notorious being a Muslim attack on a train conveying Hindu
pilgrims to
Ayodhya, which was avenged by a massacre of Muslims in Gujarat.

Like the
Islamists, Hindu nationalists are lured by the prospect of rebuilding a glorious civilization, one that will revive the splendors of India before the Muslims’ arrival. They have convinced themselves that their path to this utopian future is blocked by the relics of Moghul civilization, which have wounded the body of Mother India. Countless Hindus experienced the demolition of the Babri mosque as a liberation from “slavery”; but others argue that the process is far from complete and dream of erasing the great mosques at
Mathura and
Varanasi.
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Many other Hindus, however, were religiously appalled by the Ayodhya tragedy, so this iconoclasm cannot be traced to a violence inherent in “Hinduism,” which has, of course, no single essence, either for or against violence. Rather, Hindu mythology and devotion had blended with the passions of secular
nationalism—especially its inability to countenance minorities.

All this meant that the new Ram temple had become a symbol of a liberated India. The emotions involved were memorably expressed in a speech by the revered
renouncer
Rithambra at
Hyderabad in April 1991, which she delivered in the mesmerizing rhymed couplets of Indian epic poetry. The temple would not be a mere building; nor was Ayodhya important simply because it was Ram’s birthplace: “The Ram temple is our honor. It is our self-esteem. It is the image of Hindu unity … We shall build the temple!” Ram was “the representation of mass-consciousness”; he was the god of the lowest castes—the fishermen, cobblers, and washermen.
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Hindus were in mourning for the dignity, self-esteem, and Hindutva, the Hindu identity, that they had lost. But this new Hindu identity could be reconstructed only by the destruction of the antithetical “other.” The Muslim was the obverse of the tolerant, benign Hindu: fanatically intolerant, a destroyer of shrines, and an arch-tyrant. Throughout, Rithambra laced her speech with vivid images of mutilated corpses, amputated arms, chests cut open like those of dissected frogs, and bodies slashed, burned, raped, and violated, all evoking Mother India, desecrated and ravaged by Islam. The 800 million Hindus of India can hardly claim to be economically or socially oppressed, so Hindu nationalists feed on such images of persecution and insist that a strong Hindu identity can be restored only by decisive, violent action.

Until the 1980s, the
Palestinians had held aloof from the religious revival in the rest of the Middle East.
Yasser Arafat’s
PLO was a secular nationalist organization. Most Palestinians admired him, but the PLO’s
secularism appealed mainly to the Westernized Palestinian
elite, and observant
Muslims played virtually no part in its terrorist actions.
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When the PLO was supressed in the
Gaza Strip in 1971,
Sheikh Ahmed Yassin founded
Mujama (“Congress”), an offshoot of the
Muslim Brotherhood, which focused on social welfare work. By 1987 Mujama had established clinics, drug rehabilitation centers, youth clubs, sporting facilities, and
Quran classes throughout Gaza, supported not only by Muslim alms (
zakat
) but also by the
Israeli government in an attempt to undermine the PLO. At this point Yassin had no interest in armed struggle. When the PLO accused him of being Israel’s puppet, he replied that, on the contrary, it was their secular ethos that was destroying Palestinian identity. Mujama was far more popular than
Islamic Jihad (IJ), formed during the 1980s, which attempted to apply Qutb’s ideas to the Palestinian tragedy and regarded itself as the vanguard of a larger global struggle “against the forces of arrogance [
jahiliyyah
], the colonial enemy, all over the world.”
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IJ engaged in terrorist attacks against the Israeli military but rarely quoted the Quran; its rhetoric was frankly secular. Ironically, the only thing that was religious about this organization was its name—and this may explain its lack of mass support.
⁷²

The outbreak of the First
Intifada (1987–93), led by young secularist Palestinians, changed everything. Impatient with the corruption and ineffectiveness of
Fatah, the leading PLO party, they urged the entire population to rise up and refuse to submit to the Israeli occupation. Women and children threw stones at Israeli soldiers, and those shot by the IDF were hailed as
martyrs. The intifada made a strong impression on the international community: Israel had long presented itself as plucky David fighting the
Arab Goliath, but now the world watched heavily armored Israeli soldiers pursuing unarmed children. As a military man,
Yitzhak Rabin realized that harassing women and children would ruin IDF morale, and when he became prime minister in 1992, he was prepared to negotiate with Arafat. The following year Israel and the PLO signed the
Oslo Accords. The PLO recognized Israel’s existence within its 1948 borders and promised to end the insurrection; in return,
Palestinians were offered limited autonomy in the
West Bank and Gaza for a five-year period, after which final status negotiations would begin on the issue of Israeli settlements, compensation for Palestinian
refugees, and the future of
Jerusalem.

The
Kookists, of course, regarded this as a criminal act. In July 1995 fifteen Gush rabbis ordered soldiers to defy their commanding officers when the IDF began to evacuate the territories—an act that was tantamount to civil war. Other Gush rabbis ruled that
Rabin was a
rodef
(“pursuer”), worthy of death under Jewish law for endangering Jewish life. On November 4, 1995,
Yigal Amir, an army veteran and student at
Bar Ilan University, took this ruling to heart, shooting the prime minister during a peace rally in
Tel Aviv.
⁷³

The success of the Intifada made younger
Mujama members aware that its welfare program was not truly addressing the Palestinian problem, so they broke away to form
Hamas, an acronym of Haqamat al-Muqamah al-
Islamiyya (“Islamic Resistance Movement”), meaning “Fervor.” They would fight both the PLO and the Israeli occupation. Young men flocked to join up, finding the egalitarian ethos of the Quran more congenial than the secularism of the Palestinian
elite. Many recruits came from the lower-middle-class intelligentsia, educated now in Palestinian universities, which was no longer prepared to kowtow to the traditional authorities.
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Sheikh
Yassin lent his support, and some of his closest associates staffed Hamas’s political wing. Instead of drawing on Western ideology, Hamas found inspiration in the history of secular Palestinian resistance as well as Islamic history; religion and politics were inseparable and intertwined.
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In its communiqúes Hamas celebrated the Prophet’s victory over the Jewish tribes at the
Battle of Khaybar,
⁷⁶
Saladin’s victory over the
Crusaders, and the spiritual status of Jerusalem in Islam.
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The Charter of Hamas evoked the venerable tradition of “volunteering” when it urged Palestinians to become
murabitun
(“guardians of the frontiers”),
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defending the Palestinian struggle as a classical defensive
jihad: “When our enemies usurp some lands, jihad becomes a duty on all Muslims [
fard ayn
].”
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In the early days, though, fighting was a secondary concern; the charter quoted none of the Quranic jihad verses.
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The first priority was the Greater Jihad, the struggle to become a better Muslim. Palestinians, Hamas believed, had been weakened by the inauthentic adoption of Western secularism under the PLO, when, the Charter explained, “Islam
disappeared from life. Thus, rules were broken, concepts were vilified, values changed … homelands were invaded, people were subdued.”
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Hamas did not resort to violence until 1993, the year of the Oslo Accords, when seventeen Palestinians were killed on the
Haram al-Sharif, and Hamas activists retaliated in a series of operations against Israeli military targets and Palestinian collaborators. After Oslo, support for the militant
Islamist groups dropped to 13 percent of the Palestinian population, but it rose to a third when Palestinians found that they were subjected to harsh and exceptional regulations and that Israel would retain indefinite sovereignty over Gaza and the West Bank.
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The
Hebron massacre was a watershed. After the forty-day mourning period, a Hamas suicide bomber killed seven Israeli citizens in Afula in Israel proper, and this was followed by four operations in Jerusalem and
Tel Aviv, the most deadly of which was a bus bombing in Tel Aviv on October 19, 1994, which killed twenty-three people and injured nearly fifty. The murder of innocent civilians and the exploitation of adolescents for these actions was morally repugnant, damaged the Palestinian cause abroad, and split the movement. Some Hamas leaders argued that by losing the moral high ground, Hamas had strengthened the Israeli position.
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Others retorted that Hamas was merely responding in kind to Israel’s aggression against Palestinian civilians, which indeed had increased after the outbreak of the Second Intifada, when there were more
bombings, missile attacks, and assassinations of Palestinian leaders. Ulema abroad were equally divided.
Sheikh Tantawi, grand mufti of
Egypt, defended suicide bombing as the only way for Palestinians to counter the military might of Israel, and
Sheikh al-Qaradawi in
Yemen argued that it was legitimate self-defense.
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But Sheikh al-Sheikh, grand mufti of
Saudi Arabia, protested that the
Quran strictly forbade suicide and that Islamic law prohibited the killing of civilians. In 2005 Hamas abandoned the suicide attack and focused instead on creating a conventional military apparatus in Gaza.