The latest Israeli-Hamas war has divided the international community into diametrically opposed camps, but Russia and India are notable exceptions due to their balanced policy towards this conflict. They both support Israel’s right to exist and defend itself, especially after falling victim to terrorist attacks, but they also support the right to Palestinian independence in line with relevant UNSC Resolutions. Readers can learn more about their policies in these two analyses below if they aren’t already familiar with them:
* “Russia Has A Balanced Approach Towards The Latest Israeli-Hamas War”
* “Interpreting India’s Position Towards The Latest Israeli-Hamas War”
The only difference is that Russia blames the US for failing to resolve this long-running dispute up until now while India hasn’t officially opined about that country’s role in this conflict. Apart from that, however, their positions are identical. The example set by them is that it’s indeed possible to balance between both sides without doing so at either’s expense. This upsets each warring party’s respective American and Qatari backers, which is why they’re actively attempting to discredit those two.
Julia Davis (who was banned from Russia in May 2022) is leading America’s efforts to discredit Russia via her work at the partially government-funded Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) think tank while publicly funded Al Jazeera is doing the same at the Qatari state’s behest when it comes to India. Regarding the first, she published a piece titled “‘Only Good News Today’ — Russia’s Propagandists Delight as Israelis Die”, which deceitfully conflated certain influencers’ opinions with the state’s.
As for the second, it just ran an article titled “Analysis: Why is so much anti-Palestinian disinformation coming from India?”, which took a page from Davis’ disinformation playbook to misportray certain accounts’ social media posts as supposedly being influenced by the Indian government’s policy. Those readers who reviewed the previously hyperlinked analyses about those two countries’ approaches towards this conflict, which cite official sources, will realize that these articles are literally propaganda.
Each takes for granted that their targeted audience isn’t aware of these governments’ official policies and that they’ve also fallen under the false impression that freedom of speech doesn’t exist there anymore. That’s why CEPA’s Davis and Al Jazeera’s Marc Owen Jones, who’s an Assistant Professor at Qatar’s publicly funded Hamad bin Khalifa University, thought that people would assume that those social media accounts’ opinions reflect their respective state’s.
The reality is that Russians and Indians have the right to share whatever views they want about this conflict as long as they don’t violate the law by supporting terrorism. Contrary to popular Western perceptions, these governments don’t control their countries’ influential social media accounts, which occasionally express opinions that are at odds with their state’s as proven in these two examined cases. Those who are unaware of these facts are susceptible to being manipulated by the US and Qatar.
Those two want to correspondingly mislead people into thinking that Russia supports Hamas at Israel’s expense while India supports Israel at the Palestinians’ expense, which is intended to discredit their balanced approaches towards this conflict out of fear that they could inspire others to follow their lead. Although the US and Qatar are on opposite sides in this conflict since first fully backs Israel while the second hosts Hamas’ leadership, they still officially remain strategic partners and thus closely coordinate.
With that in mind, it can’t be ruled out that they decided to divide their disinformation operations in such a way that the US takes the lead in discrediting Russia while Qatar does the same with India, which is sensible since the US doesn’t want to risk ruining its strategic partnership with India by smearing it. Qatar was more than happy to play this role since Al Jazeera has been fearmongering about Muslims’ safety in India for years already and the spin that Jones put on his latest article plays into this narrative.
Even before he published his piece, some folks who should know better had already fallen for the fallacy of conflating certain Indian social media accounts’ opinions with that state’s. One of RT’s opinion columnists wrote here that “The majority of the Global South (minus India) see that the latest escalation in the Israel-Palestine conflict proliferated over decades”, which is counterfactual as proven in the previously hyperlinked analysis citing official sources to confirm India’s balanced position on this issue.
The same goes for one of the Russian-based Strategic Culture Foundation’s columnists, who wrote here that “India has just stabbed itself in the head as a leader of the Global Majority: their leadership does seem to get a hard on when facing Israel”, which is also counterfactual for the exact same reason. These two examples from otherwise reputable Alt-Media outlets suggest that even their editors are unaware of India’s policy since neither thought to fact-check their columnists’ claims about Russia’s strategic partner.
This insight goes to show just how widespread misperceptions are about its official stance towards this conflict, but hopefully drawing attention to this problem can lead to those outlets setting the record straight so that their audience isn’t inadvertently misled about India’s policy going forward. By doing so, Russian media can play an invaluable role in counteracting the effects of Qatar’s disinformation operation and thus possibly incentivize Indian media to play a complementary role for Russia in return.
As was earlier proven citing official sources from each, their positions are identical with the exception of Russia blaming the US for the latest violence while India hasn’t opined about this, so they actually help one another by clarifying the other’s respective policy. Doing so can serve as yet another tangible manifestation of their strategic partnership, which would in this case inform the Global South that they’re being lied to by the US and Qatar about Russia and India’s stances towards this conflict.
Russian media already commands tremendous respect among developing countries owing to RT’s legacy of supporting anti-imperialism, while India’s has grown in renown over the past year as a result of Prime Minister Modi presenting his country as the Voice of the Global South during its G20 chairmanship. Considering that they’re both victims of a disinformation campaign, one that’s so effective that it’s even misled the editors of two Russian outlets, they have a reason to work together to thwart this operation.
The more that the world learns about Russia and India’s truly balanced policy towards the latest Israeli-Hamas war, the more likely it is that other countries could follow their example by promulgating similar policies, which could lead to the creation of an influential bloc of neutral countries in the UN. That would in turn powerfully dispel false perceptions that Palestinian independence poses a threat to Israel’s legitimate security interests, which could pressure Israel to finally give them freedom after the war ends.
