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00:00and I include, you know, India in that category, are plunging headlong into a chaotic period.
00:11So I think I also wrote this book partly to warn against this outcome, and to in a way
00:19prepare people psychologically, intellectually, for these for these sort of incredibly rocky
00:26times we're going to see very soon.
00:30Right.
00:31You speak about India.
00:33I was reading your book.
00:35It also points it out that India was among the countries that in 1975 passed a UNGA resolution
00:42declaring Zionism to be a form of racism and racial discrimination.
00:45Yet a Pew survey, I think 2023 Pew survey says Israel views India more favorably than
00:52any country in the world.
00:56For us, you know, who are trying to make sense of this and to understand this, how do we
01:01see this dichotomy?
01:04I think, you know, at the level of, you know, political parties or governments, there is,
01:15of course, a new relationship between Israel and India.
01:20But I think it would be a mistake to underestimate the depth of the pro-Palestinian sentiment
01:29within the Indian population.
01:32I don't think that can be measured by opinion polls, opinion polls that really take into
01:39account mostly, you know, an urban, if not largely metropolitan population in India.
01:46I certainly don't think it can be assessed by taking into account the views and opinions
01:50of major politicians, whether in this country or in Israel.
01:58Because I think, you know, India has traditionally been a supporter of the Palestinian cause,
02:03not just at the government level, but also at the popular level.
02:06And I think, I don't think that reality has changed a great deal.
02:12Not even, not even after 10 years of BJP rule in this country.
02:18Okay.
02:22You also talk about the instrumentalization of the Holocaust and, you know, a particular
02:27version of the Shoah that is being used or could be used to legitimize expansionist Zionism.
02:34Could you talk about this particular version?
02:36And is it being used by Israel in the ongoing, you know, war against Palestinians?
02:42I think that's the major, in a way, propaganda campaign.
02:46That's the biggest propaganda platform that they have, is to constantly invoke the memory
02:52of the Holocaust and say, look, this is what happened to the Jewish population of Europe.
03:01And if you don't take preventive steps, and those preventive steps obviously include,
03:08you know, the eradication of Gaza at this point, we will face, again, another Holocaust.
03:16This has become, obviously, this memory of the Holocaust has become a way of justifying
03:23endless expansion on the part of the state of Israel.
03:28So it's become a very cheap and cynical ploy for expansionism.
03:34In the process, it has degraded, desacralized the memory of the Holocaust.
03:41It has cheapened the enormous suffering and trauma millions and millions of people underwent,
03:50you know, in Europe and afterwards.
03:54So in every sense, it's a sort of, it's a violation.
03:58It's a real horrible violation of this enormous tragedy, this enormous event.
04:08For it to be degraded into, you know, a propaganda campaign for an aggressively expansionist
04:16nation-state, it really is an extraordinary tragedy.
04:23Yeah, I was also going through your views on when you first visited Israel in 2008.
04:34And you said that you had two perplexing questions that you, you know, you sought an answer to.
04:39The first one was how did Israel come to exercise such a terrible power of life and death over
04:44a population of refugees?
04:46And two, how can the Western political and journalistic mainstream ignore and even justify
04:52its clearly systematic cruelties and injustices?
04:55Do you think this book, The World After Gaza, you know, you found some answers to that?