Posted on 06/17/2003 10:38:47 AM PDT by yonif
Powdered milk and a Golani Brigade private.
Those were two things that helped me see the real Israel, the Israel beyond the heavy screen of leftist, rightist, and Islamist propaganda that is the staple of the public discourse in most Third World (and many First World) countries. Especially so in the world’s second biggest Muslim country, Bangladesh, which I called home.
In 1989, right after high school, my buddies and I went through a male-bonding kind of a vacation that took us overland from Bangladesh into the vast expanses of India and then Pakistan. The first stop was that great city of Calcutta with its bustling alleys and exotic nightlife. Out of a chance meeting at a tourist watering hole, the four of us found a fifth pal. A few years older than ourselves, Erez Hasdai had completed a tour of duty in the intifada-torn administered territories, and had come to see the wonder that was India. Soon, he ended up losing his wallet to a pickpocket. He stuck with us for the next couple of days until those wonderful people at American Express got him all fixed up and ready to go to his next stop in Bombay.
The chap was a regular fellow, not the supposed monster who takes pleasure in killing stone-throwing toddlers. Except, as he related to us with a sincerity that even us skeptics could not doubt, the intifada, even in its earliest years, involved more than stones: Molotov cocktails, grenades, home-made bombs, crude cudgels, you name it, and the Israeli troops faced it. Then there was the million-dollar question from our new friend, “Do you think that if we were really into wiping out Palestinians, we would have been using rubber bullets rather than our tanks and F-16s?” Only silence could answer that query. He also mentioned something far more intriguing: “I have read some history. Israel was there to help your people in your war. Check it out some day.” Sure, we will, I thought. Frankly, history and history books were the last thing on our minds that summer, but I promised to look into that strange possibility later when I had some time to waste. I mean how many people in Israel even know of a place called Bangladesh?
Private Hasdai was not making it up. Years later, one summer during college, I did find out a few sketchy details about Israel sending the first cartons of baby formula to the refugee camps in eastern India in 1971. These were the camps that housed the ten million Bangladeshis who had fled the genocide of the Pakistan army in the midst of our War of Independence. Two Israeli diplomats, one in Chicago and one in Kathmandu, who I chanced to communicate with on different occasions, were to verify those facts independently of each other, with characteristic diplomatic curtness. The only other thing they mentioned was that the legendary Abba Eban had recognized Bangladesh, in a Knesset speech, almost immediately after she became independent. Also, in private, two senior Bangladeshi officials, with whom I was acquainted socially, confirmed the aid and the recognition. Both were active in the high echelons of the freedom movement in 1971 and would have known.
Lest the world forget, Israel’s actions in 1971 stood in stark contrast to those of the Arabs, including Chairman Arafat, whose money, support, and diplomats were at the service of a Pakistani regime that was fighting for ‘Islam’ by killing, raping, and brutalizing Muslims in what the Sunday Times reporter Anthony Mascarenhas was to call the “ugliest genocide in history”.
All that is past. What rankles today is the sheer ungratefulness of my people as they display their hatred of Israel through rallies, newspaper columns, speeches, sermons and what-not. They lionize the terrorists of Mr. Arafat and fall prey to any and every anti-Semitic canard that their leftist intellectual elite can dish up. Their traditional religious leaders of the introverted Sufi brand of Islam have been largely replaced by the Saudi-funded Wahabi generation of activist, hateful preachers. In spite of everything, Israel was generous enough to repatriate immediately the several hundred captured Bangladeshi mercenaries, left behind cold by the PLO cowards who escaped to Tunisia and elsewhere in the summer of 1982 from Beirut.
The debts have piled up. That is my answer to people who wonder why a Bangladeshi youth would be such an ardent supporter of Israel’s right to exist within safe and secure frontiers. Be it raising a few dollars for Israeli victims of terror or organizing rallies for a united Jerusalem, it is but a minuscule apology and a minute contribution towards the repayment of a huge debt that my people have ignored for more than a generation.
That debt will never be repaid in full until the day that Bangladesh reciprocates the late Abba Eban’s recognition from three decades ago. Until then, this one Bangladeshi will be there everyday acknowledging, in his own humble way, the kindness of Israel to his people in their darkest hour.
My friend Erez, wherever you are, may God bless you and may He protect Israel always.
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Esam Sohail writes from Kansas, USA.
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