Opinion | Are Israel and India, Zionism and Hindu nationalism, unholy blood brothers?

Azad Essa, the award-winning Indian-South African journalist with Middle East Eye, offers an interesting and thought-provoking perspective in his book Hostile Homelands: The New Alliance between India and Israel (Pluto Press, 2023).

But while the book raises some valid questions against militarism, narrow nationalism and the transactionalism of world politics, it is made up of interpretations and inferences which demonize both the states of India and Israel. It problematizes the growing relations between the two, with the help of often repeated tropes of Indian/global left against India and Israel.

This book considers the India-Israel story to be an unholy and violent association of ideas, because India has become hostile to its Muslim minorities, particularly the people of Kashmir under the current government, and Israel has been repressive regarding its Arab minority from the start. And according to Azad Essa, the latter’s conflict is one-sided, and Israel already bears all the burden of the statelessness of the Palestinian people.

The book, which has no preface, consists of five chapters: the two partitions, the military-industrial complex, the kinship between Hindutva (religious nationalism of Hindus) and Zionism, the Indian diaspora and its growing ties with Jewish diaspora in the U.S. and Kashmir-Palestine analogy.

Linah Alsaafin, a Palestinian journalist and writer who penned the foreword, believes that India has erred by having diplomatic relations with Israel, saying it is a sign of times of “moral-political degeneration” in world politics. Her description of India as a “so-called democracy” is as frivolous as Azad Essa’s analogy that Kashmir and Palestine are one story of two occupations. This is plain rhetoric.

The author offers a worthy chapter on Hindutva and Zionism as two religious nationalisms with mutual attractions today. Essa parallels these two, but fails to deliver meaningful meeting points. There is comprehensive writing in “Hostile Homelands” on the origin and rise of Hindutva, but not much substance on the basis and evolution of Zionism. Their origins, circumstances and goals were quite different in the past.

‘Hostile Homelands: The New Alliance between India and Israel’ by Azad Essa.

As rightly underlined by Azad Essa, the idea of a Hindu nation was inspired by the “cocktail of science, hyper-nationalism and militarization” of Western Europe in the times of Hitler and Mussolini. Whereas Zionism was inspired by the historical oppression of Jews in Europe much earlier than Hindutva, as Jews went through antisemitism – a factor not mentioned anywhere in the chapter that compares the whole history of Zionism with Hindutva. The Jews suffered exclusion and discrimination in most parts of the world, where they were in significant numbers, albeit as minorities.

What defined Israel and the Jewish national movement was labor Zionism – a socialist-democratic progressive form of nationalism, much like the Indian national movement led by Jawaharlal Nehru. Labor Zionism did not “function as a Trojan Horse” as suggested by Essa, for settler-colonialism.

Labor Zionism accepted the two-state solution given by the UN partition plan of 1947, even at the cost of facing internal crises with Jewish ultra-nationalists. Many Indian socialist leaders such as Ram Manohar Lohia, Ashok Mehta, Jayaprakash Narayan and others appreciated labor Zionism for its democratic socialism, and advocated for full diplomatic relations in 1950s.

It is spot-on that the role of religious nationalists in India and Israel is a dominant factor today. But it is still not the primary force here. The discreet deepening of ties between India and Israel happened before the Hindu nationalists came to power in 1999 and 2014. The period of 2004-2013 was a crucial phase for their bilateral relations, when the center-left Congress party was in control in India. It was under this party that India established full diplomatic relations with Israel in 1992.

An Indian paramilitary soldier guards at a busy market in Srinagar, Indian controlled Kashmir, this month.Credit: Mukhtar Khan /AP

It is important to note that the Indian state needed technological assistance and know-how for defense, agriculture, water and food security, for which it rightly turned to Israel. India’s weak wherewithal in fighting terrorism was another essential issue for collaboration between the two, much before the Indian national political ecosystem became ultra-religious and nationalist.

The author’s brightest and most original contribution is in the chapter on the Indian and Jewish diaspora in the United States. India’s diaspora in the U.S. is significant, with around five million Indian Americans, and it plays a pivotal role in India’s national and international affairs. Unlike the Jewish diaspora, the Indian diaspora is understudied, and Essa’s precise knowledge of its growing alliances with the Jewish diaspora is rewarding.

He finds that the two diasporas’ more conservative and religious segments came to meet in the 1980s. Now, they hold regular gatherings and conferences for policy interventions in the U.S. and in Israel and India. India-Israel relations have, therefore, an external factor, namely the U.S.

India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi strolls along an Israeli beach with Prime Minister Benjamin NetanyahuCredit: Kobi Gidon/Laam

The convergence of interests of the Jewish and Indian diaspora has been helpful to U.S. administrations, which have been keen on extending political and material support to India lately, as a counterweight to China. More importantly, to conservative Americans and religiously nationalist Jews and Indian, the India, Israel and U.S. trio appears to have common cause against “radical Islamic” elements.

For the author, this is yet another reason to claim that the growing alliance between India and Israel is injurious. The book is full of such heavy conclusions. I tend to go for ideational connections and parallels between India and Israel; however, this book dehumanizes Indians and Israelis by crediting ill intentions and conspiracies behind some of the most complex issues involved with the Palestinian statelessness or lack of democratic rights for the Kashmiris.

Khinvraj Jangid teaches at the Jindal Center for Israel Studies at the OP Jindal Global University in Delhi. He is currently adjunct professor at The Azrieli Center for Israel Studies at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Sde Boker Campus.