Manu Joseph: What being in awe of Israel actually says about people

Mint

10 hours ago

A few months ago, Hezbollah's operatives in Lebanon experienced something surreal—their pagers exploded. The next day, their walkie-talkies did the same. Israel, at first, said nothing officially. But later, it admitted what everyone already suspected: that its intelligence agency Mossad had orchestrated it.
Israel managed to plant small explosives inside Hezbollah's pagers and walkie-talkies, possibly by creating a shell company that made these devices. A transmitted code then triggered blasts in thousands of devices, killing or maiming Hezbollah fighters and an unknown number of civilians. Israel seized this moment of chaos to launch a military air offensive, effectively decapitating the once-formidable militia that, like Iran, refused to accept Israel's right to exist.
It is hard not to be impressed by Israel. But it's a complex sentiment. Awe for a nation whose survival strategies often involve morally devastating acts is also a peep into human nature.
Israel elicits the admiration of outsiders for some unspoken reasons. Part of it is a masculine admiration for military genius, elegant tech and ruthless efficiency. Part of it is tangled with disdain for Muslims or the rest of West Asia. Perfectly good and sane people can claim, even to themselves, that they are moved by the plight of Gaza and also objectively dazzled by Israel. This may be because they do not consider all humans the same, even if they do not realize it.
Some horrible things happen to humans. Once a population is framed as poor, the world tolerates a level of death and suffering among them. A dark algorithm seems to run, by which the perceived value of a life correlates with its wealth, or its nation's wealth. So the lives of air passengers in India are seen as more valuable than those of people on a public bus. Israeli lives appear more valuable than Iranian lives. And Iranian lives more valuable than Palestinian.
There is something unsettling about awe. It is an omen that being 'neutral' is impossible. A person can resist all base human emotions to form an opinion about a faraway war. But then awe draws you in. Through awe, even objective observers pick a side. It is as though awe is human nature's way of forcing people to accept that they are primarily emotional above analytical. You can either marvel at the brilliance of Israel and submit to your hidden biases, or not be in awe at all because the oppressed remind you of your own oppressors, or maybe you are just a lovely person.
If you accept there is such a thing as awe, Israel satisfies every condition to be a subject of this emotion. A tiny nation that is about 470km long and 135km at its widest, with a population of 9.5 million, has not only survived Arab nations that questioned its right to exist but also defeated their coalitions more than once, prospering all along with no oil but just people.
Also consider Israel's sabotage of Iran's nuclear programme. The Natanz facility was 'air-gapped'—completely isolated from the internet to prevent cyber attacks. Yet, in 2009, Israel managed to infect it with the Stuxnet virus, probably developed in collaboration with the US.
There is a theory that a Dutch engineer, reportedly recruited by Mossad, physically introduced the virus via a USB stick while servicing the facility. The malware disabled around a thousand centrifuges, setting Iran's nuclear ambitions back significantly.
When Iran persisted with its uranium enrichment and, according to Israel, reached a point when it was just days away from developing a nuclear weapon, Israel struck in a spectacular way. In the opening hours of that offensive, it eliminated key figures in Iran's leadership.
Israel's Iron Dome remains a modern marvel. As Iran launched waves of missiles, the system intercepted most of them with near-clinical precision. Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei had to go into hiding, much like Salman Rushdie after the leader's predecessor issued a fatwa against him. Khamenei emerged after the ceasefire to make a defiant speech.
A major reason behind Israel's success is its extraordinary human intelligence network, which is based on a remarkable way of the world: Israel manages to find traitors in other nations; other nations almost never find one in Israel.
So, intellectually, objectively, analytically, it is possible to acknowledge Israel's genius without endorsing its transgressions. But such objectivity is rare and most people who are not Israeli and think their awe of Israel is objective are probably deluded or unable to face their own bias.
Awe for Israel has a private history for many of us. I first encountered Israel's story as a child, listening to grown men discuss world affairs. One day, the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat went missing for many hours, and the men were saying that the amazing Israel might have picked him off.
Eventually, Indians overimpressed by Israel could have ended with an imbalanced analysis of the world. India's right-wing often assumes there is a global fraternity of right-wing movements—that Netanyahu is somehow a brother-in-arms in their own politics. But this is a delusion. As this column has argued before, only the left can be a global fellowship. The right-wing everywhere is fundamentally local. If anything, right-wing governments tend to compensate for their harshness at home through exaggerated gestures of concern for foreign humanitarian causes—particularly those that do not cost them anything.
The author is a journalist, novelist, and the creator of the Netflix series, 'Decoupled'.