Charlie English in The Guardian:
Mishra is a relative latecomer to the Palestinian cause. It was Israeli heroes, not Arabs, with whom he was infatuated as a boy growing up in India: he even had a picture on his wall of Moshe Dayan, Israel’s defence minister during the Six Day War. Conversion came during a 2008 visit to Israel-Palestine, where Mishra was shocked to witness the humiliations heaped on the inhabitants of the West Bank. “Nothing prepared me for the brutality and squalor of Israel’s occupation,” he writes, “the snaking wall and numerous roadblocks … meant to torment Palestinians in their own land … the racially exclusive network of shiny asphalt roads, electricity grids and water systems linking the illegal Jewish settlements to Israel.”
Crucially, he felt a strong racial bond with the Arabs. “Here,” he writes, “was a resemblance I could not deny.” They were “people who looked like me”. It is in this connection – their shared presence on the darker-skinned side of what WEB Du Bois identified as the “colour line” – that Mishra locates both his credentials and the origins of his critique. India had freed itself of western white supremacism, but the Palestianians “now endured a nightmare that I and my own ancestors had put behind us”.
More here.
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