I remember, as so many Indians of my generation do, the stamp of my Indian passport. It said that the document was valid for travel in every country except in (apartheid) South Africa and (Zionist) Israel.

India has no history of anti-Semitism. Jews and Muslims have also never had any conflict in India. For instance, Jews from Iraq who made Kolkata their home in the 18th century employed Muslims as cooks. Even today, Muslims, look after the synagogues in Kolkata.

Navras Jaat Aafreedi, assistant professor of history at Kolkata’s Presidency University, where he offers a course in global Jewish history, says: “Once the synagogues came up, Muslims were a natural choice for caretakers. In India, the Arab-Israeli conflict has not dented the historic cordiality between the Jews and Muslims.”

British-Israeli historian Avi Shlaim has spoken of his life as an Arab Jew living in Iraq and how there had never been any conflict. He emphasised the fact that the Arabs – whether Jewish or Muslims – had a shared culture. Shlaim is an emeritus fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford and a former professor of international relations there.

Shlaim is known as one of Israel’s “new historians”, a group of scholars critical of the history of Zionism and the development of the country in the 1940s and 1950s.

He has claimed in his autobiography to have uncovered “undeniable proof” of Israeli involvement in attacks on Jewish communities in Iraq in the early 1950s.

Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab Jew, which details Shlaim’s childhood as an Iraqi Jew and subsequent exile to Israel, provides proof of Zionist involvement in the terrorist attacks that prompted a mass exodus of Jews from Iraq between 1950 and 1951. He explains how these attacks helped to quicken the transfer of 110,000 Jews in Iraq to the then-newly created state of Israel.

Shlaim was to speak in Liverpool Hope University in October but his lecture on Gaza was cancelled. The university’s defence was that the decision had been made taking into consideration the wellbeing and safety of students and staff.

However, we can listen to the professor in his interview with Karan Thapar about Israel-Palestine history. It explains the Hamas attack but does not justify it.

It is quite clear from our history that India’s opposition to the creation of the state of Israel was not rooted in anti-Semetism but political opposition to the occupation of a territory by an armed force. This led to the violent displacement and dispossession of the Palestinian people and the destruction of their society, culture, identity, political rights and national aspirations.

India’s position was that the killing of Jews by the........

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