more specifically
Taking Benedict Anderson’s model of the nation-state as an “imagined community,” I will explore the stage of international politics and alliances, specifically the relationship between Israel and India. Widening the analysis of imagined communities to examine ties between nations - be they economic, military, touristic, or diplomatic in nature - sheds light on the multiple imaginings that take shape as nations turn out towards (or against) one another. In this sense, Timothy Mitchell’s conception of modernity as a mode of representation is only one way in which nations may imagine one another.
In the last ten years, a polysemic relationship has developed between Israel and India, characterized by seemingly unrelated, or loosely bound, multiple phenomena: an upsurge in Israeli tourism to India, largely by young Israelis who have just finished their time in the army; a burgeoning relationship of military diplomacy in which Israel has become an arms-supplier for India; and the increased circulation and popularity of Indian import goods in Israel. Anderson and Mitchell’s theories offer a framework by which one may ask: what makes this relationship thinkable? How are these ties - formed by individual and state actors - part of a plurality of national imaginings, i.e., a multiplication of India and Israel, not only as imagined communities, but as communities imagined by one another?
At stake here is not only a theoretical model of international relations, but, more concretely, the ways in which Israel attempts to situate itself as a nation and its own legitimacy within the geopolitical map of “the East.” Thus, its choice of alliances is key: while it’s clear that Pakistan, for example, would make an unlikely and unsuitable partner for Israel, one may ask why India has become the object of not only diplomatic but popular fixation. From a preliminary stance, two major contradictory trends appear as possible points of entry into this discussion: the ascendancy (and then the loss) of the Hindu Right; and the recent appropriation of India by certain subcultures in the West to stand metonymically for an exotic, peaceful multiculturalism.
These two trends represent a multiple imagining of India - one, by a political community of ethnonationalists, who, like Israel, fight not only a political but a demographic battle against a more or less substantial Muslim minority (not to mention the partitioned Other, or the Occupied Territory/ies); the other, an external imagining, by which a cheerful façade of peaceful multiculturalism simply writes out its Muslim citizens altogether. This is not to disregard the major historical and political differences between the two states - particularly in relation to colonialism - but rather, by exploring the ways in which a relationship between these two states has become thinkable (especially from an Israeli vantage point), I hope to illuminate the ways in which Israel continues a process of nation-building and a self-conception resting not only on an (imagined) historical identity, but through the building of extra-regional national alliances.
In the last ten years, a polysemic relationship has developed between Israel and India, characterized by seemingly unrelated, or loosely bound, multiple phenomena: an upsurge in Israeli tourism to India, largely by young Israelis who have just finished their time in the army; a burgeoning relationship of military diplomacy in which Israel has become an arms-supplier for India; and the increased circulation and popularity of Indian import goods in Israel. Anderson and Mitchell’s theories offer a framework by which one may ask: what makes this relationship thinkable? How are these ties - formed by individual and state actors - part of a plurality of national imaginings, i.e., a multiplication of India and Israel, not only as imagined communities, but as communities imagined by one another?
At stake here is not only a theoretical model of international relations, but, more concretely, the ways in which Israel attempts to situate itself as a nation and its own legitimacy within the geopolitical map of “the East.” Thus, its choice of alliances is key: while it’s clear that Pakistan, for example, would make an unlikely and unsuitable partner for Israel, one may ask why India has become the object of not only diplomatic but popular fixation. From a preliminary stance, two major contradictory trends appear as possible points of entry into this discussion: the ascendancy (and then the loss) of the Hindu Right; and the recent appropriation of India by certain subcultures in the West to stand metonymically for an exotic, peaceful multiculturalism.
These two trends represent a multiple imagining of India - one, by a political community of ethnonationalists, who, like Israel, fight not only a political but a demographic battle against a more or less substantial Muslim minority (not to mention the partitioned Other, or the Occupied Territory/ies); the other, an external imagining, by which a cheerful façade of peaceful multiculturalism simply writes out its Muslim citizens altogether. This is not to disregard the major historical and political differences between the two states - particularly in relation to colonialism - but rather, by exploring the ways in which a relationship between these two states has become thinkable (especially from an Israeli vantage point), I hope to illuminate the ways in which Israel continues a process of nation-building and a self-conception resting not only on an (imagined) historical identity, but through the building of extra-regional national alliances.