Why have so many people refused to condemn Hamas?

I remember, as so many Indians of my generation do, the stamp of my Indian passport. It said that the document was valid for travel in every country except in (apartheid) South Africa and (Zionist) Israel.

India has no history of anti-Semitism. Jews and Muslims have also never had any conflict in India. For instance, Jews from Iraq who made Kolkata their home in the 18th century employed Muslims as cooks. Even today, Muslims, look after the synagogues in Kolkata.

Navras Jaat Aafreedi, assistant professor of history at Kolkata’s Presidency University, where he offers a course in global Jewish history, says: “Once the synagogues came up, Muslims were a natural choice for caretakers. In India, the Arab-Israeli conflict has not dented the historic cordiality between the Jews and Muslims.”

British-Israeli historian Avi Shlaim has spoken of his life as an Arab Jew living in Iraq and how there had never been any conflict. He emphasised the fact that the Arabs – whether Jewish or Muslims – had a shared culture. Shlaim is an emeritus fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford and a former professor of international relations there.

Shlaim is known as one of Israel’s “new historians”, a group of scholars critical of the...

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