That three staunch allies of Israel – UK, France and Canada – would threaten ’concrete actions’ against it for its genocidal campaign in Gaza whilst India continues to supply arms and drones will only surprise those who have accepted too unquestioningly the official pronouncements of unshaking support for the Palestinian cause by successive Indian governments since independence.

Whilst India as a new postcolonial state started from a position of deeply felt anti-imperialist solidarity for the Palestinian liberation struggle, it simultaneously contained from its inception seeds of partial recognition and even on occasion advocacy for the Zionist entity. Realpolitik considerations about improving relations with the West or countering Pakistan through greater influence and support from countries in the Middle East were also at play and became more important over time. After the fall of the Soviet Union and the liberalisation of the Indian economy this contradictory relationship developed into more open collaboration with Israel well before the arrival of the Modi government. However, with the advancement of neoliberal Hindutva in the last few decades even the symbolic denouncement of Israeli crimes is fast becoming a thing of the past, as the Indian and Zionist states become more ideologically aligned and economically and militarily collaborative.

Admittedly, this western trio too has not ended its material support, which includes arms sales to Israel. But what a contrast between the respective official statements! Whilst their joint statement released on 19 May 2025 did not accuse Israel of breaking international law, it did state that Israel’s military operations in Gaza were ’wholly disproportionate’ and that ’We will not stand by whilst the Netanyahu Government pursues these egregious actions.’ Furthermore, their statement added ’We will not hesitate to take further action, including targeted sanctions’.

Israel had signed a ceasefire deal with Hamas on 17 January 2025 but on 18 March 2025, it renewed air strikes breaking that ceasefire. Netanyahu declared hours later that Israel has ’resumed combat in full force’. An official Indian statement two days later said nothing about this rupture from what Israel had earlier agreed with Hamas and apart from a host of anodyne proclamations was extremely careful never to say anything that might imply criticism (forget condemnation) of Israel by name. The closest it came to a reference to what was happening to Gaza was to say ’India welcomed the January 2025 agreement for the release of hostages and ceasefire in Gaza. India has emphasised the need for safe, timely, and sustained delivery of humanitarian assistance’. India’s permanent representative to the UN, P. Harish, in a Security Council debate on 30 April this year, again repeated the usual platitudes about the need for a ceasefire, release of hostages and unhindered humanitarian assistance, but made sure (although 20 months have passed) to again condemn the terrorist attack of 7 October 2023. What reveals the ugly moral double standards of the current Modi government is that not once since then has it ever called any act of Israel in Gaza a terrorist act; nor its deliberate killings of civilians en masse, a terrorist campaign let alone being prepared to call it genocidal. Indeed, although India has signed and ratified the Genocide Convention the Modi government has refused to approve or even comment on South Africa’s initiative in calling on the International Court of Justice (India is a member) to investigate and rule on Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

This is not all. In Canada, the US and in many European countries including Germany, there have been significant public demonstrations in support of Palestinians and Gazans in particular. In what is supposed to be the world’s largest democracy, the response of civil society in India has been by comparison much more limited. This is partly due to the fear of coercion in some form—in Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) [1] ruled states and in Delhi there have been police clampdowns when action has taken place. It is also testimony to the success of Hindu Nationalist forces (or Hindutva meaning ’Hindu-ness’) in cultivating Islamophobia by presenting Palestine as a supposedly anti-Hindu and therefore ’anti-national’ issue. So much so, that of the around 41 parties and electoral bodies represented in today’s lower house of parliament, the Lok Sabha, 31 have not uttered a word about what is happening between Israel and Gaza since 7 October 2023. Why bother to take up a foreign policy issue especially one which might be seen by many sections of the majority Hindu community and voters as ’Muslim appeasement’. That this should be the view amongst so many political groupings, is itself indicative of how widely and deeply Hindutva sentiments have percolated across civil society. Even in non-BJP ruled states such as Congress-ruled Karnataka, efforts at carrying out public demos in support of Palestine have been curtailed if not as brutally as in the BJP-ruled state of Uttar Pradesh, that population wise, would rank fifth amongst the world’s countries.

What has happened to the India that was supposed to be a leading country of the South, known for its supposedly longstanding and consistent support for the Palestinian cause? Yes, an India of the past had supported the Palestinian cause, but it was never as consistent or as principled as its governments and its lobby of supporters have tried to make out. Yes, even before the BJP achieved governmental power (1998 to 2004 and 2014 onwards), other governments were prepared, in some measure or another, to sell out Palestinian interests for the sake of deeper relations with Israel. And yes, the BJP-led governments significantly accelerated relations between India and Israel since the Hindutva that lies at the heart of the BJP, of its cadre-based father organisation, the RSS (Rashtriya Sevak Sangh or National Volunteer Corps) and of its numerous affiliate bodies, has always assumed a certain ideological kinship with Zionism. [2] The BJP under Narendra Modi as Prime Minister was elected in June 2024 for the third straight five-year term.

This, in clear outline, represents the historical trajectory of governmental changes in India and the main account that we will seek to present here will trace the evolution of India-Israel-Palestine relations in rough parallel to these shifts in Central governance. The nature of the relations between Israel and South Asia’s four other neighbours of India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh will also be briefly examined.

Gandhi and Nehru

After the end of WWI and the rise of the Indian National Movement against British colonial rule, its leaders like Gandhi and Nehru would also identify with struggles elsewhere against British imperialism. Support for Palestinian resistance followed naturally especially after the great 1936 uprising which lasted till 1939. [3] Additionally, Gandhi saw the creation of Hindu-Muslim popular unity as key to his perspective of how best to confront the British and the Congress Party would join leading Muslim organisations like the All India Muslim League in its support for Palestine. But what about the rise of Jewish nationalism and the Zionist ambition to secure a Jewish majority state in Palestine? Many of its leading advocates sought to win Gandhi’s support for this goal and the fact that during his South African sojourn (1893-1914) he had close political and personal relations with many Jews who were subsequently won over to the Zionist cause like Herman Kallenbach and Henry Polak. This made them informal ambassadors for trying to recruit Gandhi.

In 1931 in London Gandhi attended the Second Round Table Conference to discuss possible political reforms in India, where he gave an interview to the weekly Jewish Chronicle. In that interview he highlighted that he saw Zionism or the return to Zion as a search for inner spiritual fulfilment that could take place anywhere and was separate from the geographical claim to ’reoccupy Palestine’ and that migration there required Arab assent. Kallenbach’s visit mid-1937 to Gandhi at an ashram outside Bombay (now Mumbai) and his more than a month-long stay there, however, did persuade Gandhi that Zionist spiritual fulfilment could not be disconnected from settlement in Palestine. This moment thereby introduced an ambivalence in Gandhi’s thinking that was to remain even as he reasserted that the Balfour Declaration [4] could not justify this and settlement should only be when ’Arab opinion is ripe for it’.

Those in India like the Left parties and their intellectuals today who claim Gandhi was never ambivalent, always quote his editorial of 26 November 1938 in his own Harijan paper where he said that Palestine belongs to Arabs as much as England to the English and France to the French. This has been the dominant and basically uncontested view of the overwhelmingly majority of intellectuals commenting and writing on the historical trajectory of India-Israel-Palestine relations till recently. With the rise to political power of the BJP, a few intellectuals aligned with it, seek to reinterpret the legacy of the ’father of the nation’ as a way of giving more credibility to today’s strongly pro-Israel policy.

In March 1946 Gandhi received Mr. Honick, a member of the World Jewish Congress and S. Silverman, a Jewish Labour party MP in UK. In the ensuing discussion a question was posed to Gandhi and duly recorded by his personal secretary, Pyarelal Nayyar – ’May we take it that you sympathise with our aspiration to establish a national home for the Jews?’ Gandhi’s reply was not recorded, indeed after Gandhi’s death in 1948, Pyarelal selectively destroyed some papers on Palestine. But Silverman later reported the reply to the American journalist Louis Fischer who some three months after this discussion contacted Gandhi and confirmed the veracity of this reply. Gandhi had said, ’I told Silverman that the Jews have a good case in Palestine. If the Arabs have a claim, the Jews have a prior claim.’ Later in the 21 July issue of the Harijan Gandhi says, ’It is true I did say some such thing in the course of a long conversation with Mr. Louis Fischer on the subject.’ He then goes on to say of the Zionists that they should abjure terrorism and be completely non-violent. ’Why should they resort to terrorism to make good their forcible landing in Palestine? If they were to adopt the matchless weapon of non-violence...their case would be the world’s...this would be the best and brightest.’ Nevertheless, the most balanced assessment of Gandhi’s overall position is that he combined support for Palestine becoming a sovereign and independent state under Arab control whilst also seeing Jewish desire to migrate there as natural and that their cultural rights be protected. Whether he would have later opposed continuous Jewish migration to Palestine one does not know but it is possible that he might have added the proviso that any such flows be subject to Arab consent.

Nehru like Gandhi had considerable sympathy for Jews given how they had been treated before and during WWII. But this did not extend to supporting the effort to establish a Zionist state in collaboration with imperial Britain. India was one of the 11 members of the UN Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) set-up in May 1947 to report to the General Assembly when Britain handed over its mandate responsibility. India (along with Iran and Yugoslavia) put forward a plan maintaining federal unity and voted against the majority plan to divide Palestine. This would have given 55% of the territory to Jews (then around 30% of the population) but demarcated in a manner where mostly Palestinians would bear the burden of shifting. In any case this plan was only a recommendation and not to be imposed. Furthermore, this whole exercise was repudiated by the Palestinian side since it violated the mandate commitment to giving full independence. Yet in 1950 Nehru recognised Israel even as, contrary to the Partition Plan, though it had now forcibly secured 78% of the territory. In September 1950 the Jewish Agency set up an immigrations office in Bombay (now Mumbai) since there were around 60,000 (Bene and Baghdadi) Jews said to have migrated to India or been converted to Judaism in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. [5] This office was later converted into a trade office and then in 1953 it became a small consulate.

First, in the aftermath of the 1947-49 Nakba [6] there was no genuinely independent and representative political entity that could really speak for and prioritise Palestinian interests. [7] Second, post-Partition India had recognised Pakistan so why not Israel. The two Muslim majority countries of Iran and Turkey had already recognised Israel. Furthermore, Israel was accepted as a member of the UN in May 1949 and as a condition of its entry accepted Resolution 194 on the ’Right of Return’ of Palestinians displaced, which of course it has never done. Third, the Soviet Union was the first country to legally recognise Israel in May 1948 so the Communist Party of India (CPI), then the main opposition force, posed no objection to Nehru. In partial deference to Arab sentiment, he refrained from establishing full diplomatic relations. It was realpolitik pragmatism that first pushed Nehru to give recognition and then held him back.

War over Kashmir had broken out between India and Pakistan in 1948, and whilst Nehru’s India sought to pursue a nonaligned posture to remain aloof from US-Soviet rivalry, Pakistan was more open to US political-military overtures. Keeping relations with Israel in limbo would not disturb existing Muslim support for his government but more importantly for Nehru was that in 1952 Gamal Abdel Nasser came to power in the key Middle East country of Egypt. Nasser advocated Arab nationalism, was similarly inclined to pursue non-alignment and was more sympathetic to India than to Pakistan. Besides, improving Indian relations with the Arab governments for trade and diplomatic support was seen as more beneficial than fast-tracking relations with a nascent Israel. On the other hand, and expressive of the fact that Palestinian sufferings were of little or no consequence in foreign policy thinking, Nehru was keen to get Israel into the Bandung Conference of 1955, the prelude to the subsequent formation of the Non-aligned group of countries. Indeed, in December 1954, the leaders of Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Burma and Ceylon met in Bogor, Java to prepare for the conference. Nehru pressed for the inclusion of Israel at Bandung. Fortunately, this was blocked by a Pakistan concerned about the sentiments of the Arab countries given their conflict with Israel.

In 1955 Pakistan joined the Baghdad Pact [8] formally aligning itself militarily with the US. This Pact that also included Iran, Iraq, Turkey and the UK was opposed by both Egypt and India who signed their own Friendship Treaty that year. After the 1956 Suez invasion and war, launched by Israel, UK, France, there was no question of India moving towards deeper relations with Israel. This diplomatic hiatus would extend beyond Nehru’s reign to cover the whole of the 1964-84 stretch which also saw the Israeli-Arab wars of 1967 and 1973 and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. However, despite the diplomatic freeze there were significant behind-the-scenes interactions between India and Israel. Nehru passed away in May 1964 but during the 1962 war with China, India received heavy mortars and munitions from Israel and purchased more arms from it during the Indo-Pakistan wars of 1965 and 1971.

From 1965 to 1998

After the interim Congress party leader, Lal Bahadur Shastri died in 1966 (he concluded the Peace Treaty with Pakistan ending the 1965 war) Mrs. Indira Gandhi, the daughter of Nehru, became the new Prime Minister. In 1968 the secret service agency, called Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) was set up by her and began collaborating with Mossad [9] – Pakistan and China were then seen as common adversaries by New Delhi and Tel Aviv and Mrs. Gandhi was concerned about the growing military ties between the two and then later between Pakistan and North Korea.

As for Israel, it was believed that Pakistani army officers were providing training to Libyans and Iranians on how to handle Chinese and North Korean military equipment. This was kept under wraps whilst in 1974 India publicly proclaimed recognition of the PLO as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. In 1975, India co-sponsored UN Resolution 3379 equating Zionism with racism. [10] In June 1975 Gandhi imposed Emergency rule and only restored general elections in March 1977 but was defeated. In January 1980 Gandhi and her Congress Party faction was re-elected to central power and certain developments helped bring India and Israel closer together. But the interregnum of 1977-79 when a coalition government under the Janata Party was in power, was important in its own right.

The Janata Party was a loose alliance of different parties and political groups that had agreed to work together. Its strongest component was the Hindu Nationalist Jan Sangh (the forerunner of the BJP which was formed after the collapse of the Janata Party in 1980) that had always been pro-Israel seeing it as an important bulwark against the Muslim dominated countries of the Middle East. Its principal leader A.B. Vajpayee was the foreign minister, and this helped pave the way for the secret visits of Israel’s then foreign minister Moshe Dayan to India. In August 1977 he met Vajpayee and the then Prime Minister Morarji Desai. Though no policy change by India resulted, the very fact that there was this visit was indicative of where the new winds, however gentle, were blowing.

RAW and Mossad collaboration had earlier been set in motion, and no doubt played a part in arranging Dayan’s visit. He is said to have again come in 1978 to meet top Indian counterparts and perhaps senior members of RAW, possibly in Nepal. It appears that amongst the matters discussed during this period, was an Israeli offer for a joint effort to carry out a strike on Pakistan’s Kahuta uranium enrichment plant [11] to forestall the making of a nuclear bomb. Only a future opening up of secret government papers can confirm or deny Dayan’s part in these discussions. But other sources make it clear there was such a plan for a joint operation to carry out such an assault sometime between 1982-84 but then at a late stage it was called off. After all, in 1981, Israel had done just that when it destroyed Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor.

Following Gandhi’s assassination in 1984, the Congress swept the polls and her son Rajiv Gandhi, who previously had shown no interest in his family’s political heritage, became the Prime Minister. On 1 October 1985 Israel carried out an air assault on the PLO headquarters in Tunis killing 60 men, women and children which was quickly condemned by the UNSC. Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi arrived in New York City later that month for the fortieth anniversary of the UN and despite this brutal assault, had no qualms in having on the side lines a private meeting with his counterpart Premier Shimon Peres. This was the first ever meeting of the topmost leaders of the two countries, itself indicating a new Indian insensitivity to the Palestinian cause.

This Indian drift was further facilitated by the shifting perspectives of the PLO itself. After the 1982 Israeli war on Lebanon, the Fatah leadership of the PLO had been ejected to more distant Tunisia. Moreover, it had become much clearer to its leadership that its guerrilla strategy was not leading to victory. Indeed, in 1987 the first Intifada [12] in the Occupied Territories (OTs) was locally led. Whilst Fatah in exile played a role in supporting the intifada, the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising (UNLU) comprised predominantly of local community councils and their leaders as well as having representatives and veterans affiliated not only to Fatah but to other Palestinian factions like Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the left-wing Popular Front, the Democratic Front and the Communist Party.

After the Intifada, the PLO under Arafat carried out a fundamental strategic shift towards accepting a two-state solution with a claim on just the 22% of the total land that had been taken over by Israel, namely the part that Israel occupied after the 1967 war. A new political dynamic had been set which would eventually lead to the Oslo Accords of 1993-95 [13] whose key outcome was the beginning of the transformation of Fatah, as the ruler of the newly established Palestinian Authority (PA), into a sub-contractor for maintaining Israel’s occupation. The path was cleared for India under the Congress-led government of Prime Minister Narasimha Rao (1991-96) to move towards full recognition of Israel in 1992, opening embassies in Delhi and Tel Aviv. Subsequently, every successive government in New Delhi would on one hand pay lip service and even money to the Palestinian cause, whilst on the other hand steadily deepen its political, economic, military, ’cyber-security’ and ’counter-terrorism’ ties with Israel.

The rise of the far-right

A non-Congress and non-BJP coalition government, the United Front comprising some 13 parties emerged in June 1996 and fell in March 1998. There were mutual deals for Israeli supplies of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), the Green Pine Radar system, and long-range surface-to-air missiles. This was followed by the first BJP-led governments of 1998-99 and then re-election for the full five-year term from 1999 to 2004, both under Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee. It was during his reign in 2003 that the first ever official visit to India by an Israeli Premier, Ariel Sharon, took place. Earlier in the 1999 Kargil war with Pakistan, Israel gave military support to India whilst Washington put successful pressure on Islamabad to withdraw its forces. The initial US anger at India’s nuclear tests in May 1998 soon subsided and a new India-Israel-US strategic alignment was being forged. But the bigger breakthroughs would come a little over a decade later under Modi.

Between Vajpayee and Modi there would be a ten-year interregnum (2004-14) when a Congress-led coalition led by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh would win two consecutive elections. Forget that in the past the Congress party, led by the likes of Nehru and Mrs. Gandhi, there was a degree of genuine moral and political sympathy and support for the Palestinian cause despite realpolitik considerations. Now relations with Israel were reinforced whilst genuine concern for the Palestinian cause had largely evaporated. A proper Palestinian state had not emerged whilst Israel was a powerful and fairly developed capitalist state with which lucrative economic relations could be forged by businesses on both sides. Moreover, apart from being a source of top-quality military hardware Israel was something of a conduit to the US. Closer relations with it increased the prospect of closer relations between India and the US economically and politically. Only occasional rhetorical pronouncements about the ’need for a two-state solution’ plus funding for it, remained.

After the 26 November 2008 terror attack in Mumbai by two Islamist groups that have bases in Pakistan, Israel helped set-up a surveillance infrastructure under a designated Central Monitoring System that created the capacity to move from targeted to mass surveillance. At the time of the November 2008 attacks and immediately after, besides regular political communication at higher levels, Israel sent intelligence officers, paramedics, a team of reservists, and a few volunteers who all offered advice, material support and criticisms of how inadequate India’s prior preparations were when it comes to dealing with such terrorist threats. The presence of Israeli actors at this juncture helped to craft a broad consensus view that there were serious Indian failings that required Israel’s special expertise. A qualitatively new and closer nexus was now said to have occurred.

Between 2003 and 2013, India had become Israel’s top arms customer. In February 2014 when general elections were still a few months away and the Congress still in power, a formal agreement was reached (but put into practice after Modi’s electoral victory in May that year) for sending Indian police and security personnel for training in Israel in ’counter-terrorism’, ’crowd control’ and ’border management’, i.e., receiving lessons for how to deal with trouble back home especially in the insurgency-hit regions of the Northeast and in Kashmir. Apart from denying any ’right to political self-determination’ to Palestinians and Kashmiris, the huge presence of armed personnel makes Kashmir a site of sustained military occupation and control just as is the case in the Occupied Territories. Again, for both Palestinians and Kashmiri Muslims, violence is exercised as a matter of routine and legally justified by the use of the most anti-democratic and authoritarian of laws. The construction of settlements for Hindus in the Indian part of Kashmir is being done through greater land capture for them and for the Central government’s various purposes and the infrastructure for segregating Hindus from Muslims broadly similar to Israeli policy in the West Bank.

But it is in the Modi era that the ideological kinship Hindutva felt with Zionism would lead to a more unequivocal admiration and indeed emulation of how Israel dealt with the Palestinian ’enemy’ in the occupied territories.

Before turning our attention to what can be described as a significant (even in certain respects qualitative) change in India-Israel relations since mid-2014, we turn our attention to India’s four South Asian neighbours and their respective historical and contemporary ties with Israel. This is important for a number of reasons. The political significance of the India-Pakistan-Israel nexus is obvious. For a Hindutva-ised India, Israel is an important ally against its primary enemy Pakistan. Bangladesh broke away from Pakistan to become an independent state in December 1971. Since then, Bangladesh, like Sri Lanka and Nepal, have had more reason to fear India’s sub-imperial ambitions to be regionally dominant and this shapes their foreign policy behaviour. In the case of Bangladesh, the Muslim factor explains its diplomatic-political opposition to Israel and its unease with the deepening alignment of India and Israel at the political and ideological levels. The much smaller and weaker nations of Sri Lanka and Nepal have from their inception been basically uninterested in the Palestinian cause and unlike early India have hardly had any compunctions about developing better relations with Israel though this in Sri Lanka has had a topsy-turvy character because of the occasional pressures from its domestic left. In Nepal governmental compromises with an internal left force came only in the new millennium and this left has been quickly tamed. Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal also see stronger ties with China as an important counterweight to India whilst the latter two for straightforward political-diplomatic reasons do not want India to have a South Asian monopoly over ties with Israel.

Sri Lanka, Nepal, Pakistan and Bangladesh

Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka, (known as Ceylon till 1972 when it changed its name) achieved formal independence on 4 February 1948. Its first Prime Minister of the ruling United National Party (UNP) was D. S. Senanayake. In fact, it became the first Asian country to initiate ties with Israel. In the early 1950s it bought arms and even a frigate from Israel. This was not to the liking of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), a more left-wing social democratic type opposition party that preferred adoption of a non-aligned foreign policy position. It achieved periodic electoral success first in 1956 under the leadership of S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike as Premier and then again between 1960-64 under his widow Sirimavo Bandaranaike, the world’s first woman to be elected to head a government. She and the SLFP were keener to develop relations with the PLO and faced with resistance from parties and groups further to the left of her party, during the election campaign in 1971 she promised to close down the Israeli embassy which she did after her victory.

By the mid- and late seventies there was growing resistance by the Tamil population to discrimination against them, especially in the northern Jaffna region of the country, and a more militant force, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) emerged. The UNP came back to power in 1977 and its head J. R. Jayewardene who was Prime Minister for a year and then through an amended constitution became the more powerful executive President, reigning from 1978-89. He restored relations with Israel and a major reason being to secure their military support. India under Rajiv Gandhi whilst seeking better relations with Israel also saw South Asia as India’s sphere of influence. Israeli military support was replaced through the 1987 India-Sri Lanka Accords [14] where for the first time ever, India sent its armed forces to another country to intervene in the country’s civil war against the Tamil population. This was to fight the LTTE which earlier New Delhi, sensitive as it was to the sentiments of its own Tamil population in the south of the country, had actually supported. Failing to succeed in weakening the LTTE, Gandhi was asked by the new Sri Lankan President R. Premadasa (1989-93) to pull out all troops which it did by March 1990.

However, the erratic policy positions with Israel continued. Muslims are around 10% of the Sri Lankan population mostly residing in the northeast. To try and win over their political support and to distance them from the LTTE – which was only finally militarily defeated in 2009, Premadasa suspended relations with Israel in 1992. This was restored again in 2000 since Sri Lanka was keen again to receive military support and Israel was willing to defy the Western arms embargo operating from the 1980s to 2009. Since then, there have been no serious disruptions in these bilateral ties. After 7 October 2023, Sri Lanka did not hesitate to help Israel by enabling migrant labour in the country to replace Palestinians expelled from Israel. The domestic political turbulence in recent years finally led to a popular upheaval that overturned the previous government and threw up the National People’s Power (NPP) presumably a new more left-wing party government that in November 2024 achieved a two-thirds majority in parliamentary elections and a new President, with a left-wing history, A.K. Dissanayake. This new government is more vociferous in supporting a ceasefire in Gaza and in calling for Palestinian self-determination. However, labour migration to Israel continues and there have been recent agreements to send workers in specific sectors with Colombo justifying this as beneficial and that other countries are also maintaining economic ties with Israel.

Pakistan

Pakistan is amongst the countries that have never to date opened diplomatic relations with Israel. Officially it is not supposed to trade with Israel but there is the indirect route via third countries like the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Even so this is very limited and consists mostly of clothing exports to Israel estimated worth in 2023 of US$37 million (€34 million). In 2022 Pakistan imported mainly medical equipment worth only US$39,000 (€36,000). Contrast this with the levels of indirect trade between Israel and Saudi Arabia or with the UAE which now, after the Abraham Accords [15] is more direct and currently running to several billions of dollars annually. All governments in Islamabad have been consistent in their formal and material support to Palestine. In the 1967 and 1973 wars Pakistani fighter pilots fought for Jordan and Iraq to help Palestine and during the 1982 Israel-Lebanon war the country sent volunteers to fight with the PLO.

Pakistan has been quite consistent in its support for Palestine and unlike India there is little internal pressure to do otherwise. It has repeatedly declared that only after the emergence of a ’viable’, ’independent’ and ’contiguous’ Palestinian state on pre-1967 borders would it consider moving towards closer relations with Israel. It cautiously welcomed the Oslo Accords and distanced itself from any endorsement of the Abraham Accords re-stating that its own position in support of a prior two-state solution before any overtures to Israel, remained unchanged.

However, it is not that Palestinian interests are paramount and shape government thinking and practice, or that realpolitik considerations are absent amongst government decision-makers. During the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan (1979-89) under the US organised ’Operation Cyclone’, funds and arms including from Israel, were funnelled into Pakistan to help the Mujahideen resistance against Kabul and Moscow. But that had more to do with the US-Pakistan relationship than with any warming of ties with Israel. Tel Aviv, of course, would want to open diplomatic relations with Islamabad. Netanyahu during his 2018 visit to India did say that his country did not see itself as an enemy of Pakistan which should not behave towards Israel as an enemy.

However, three factors make any shift in Islamabad’s position quite difficult to anticipate for some time to come. Mention has earlier been made of the plan between India and Israel in the early 1980s to bomb Kahuta and to the subsequent dismay of Pakistan when both US and Israeli ties with India have become much stronger. Unlike in India, there is also much stronger support domestically for Palestine by not just religious and political Islamist groups, but also by the general public. This restricts the government’s room for manœuvre. Even Islamabad to its own benefit, from time to time compares Israel’s brutal occupation of the Palestinians with India’s occupation of the province of Jammu and Kashmir. To then soften criticism of what Israel is doing, especially after its current ongoing genocidal assault on Gaza, would detract from the humanitarian case it tries to make against the Indian occupation. Finally, a number of Muslim majority countries with whom Pakistan has close relations like Turkey and Iran would be quite disturbed by any such shift.

Bangladesh and Nepal

Bangladesh became independent in 1971 and was promptly recognised by Israel. However, the country did not reciprocate and hosts a Palestinian Embassy whilst advocating for a two-state solution. Like other Muslim majority countries, it does have indirect trade with Israel via a growing number of third countries in Asia, the Middle East and more recently through Europe and the US. It has a healthy trade surplus with its exports (mainly textiles, footwear and leather goods) to Israel in 2023 reaching US$205 million (€188 million) whilst its imports of plastics and therapeutic appliances reaching US$148,000 (€136,000) in 2022. However, this does not include the fact that there are reasonable grounds for suspicion that Bangladesh has bought surveillance equipment as well as receiving security personnel training by Israeli forces in third countries such as Hungary and Thailand. As a result of a popular upsurge the earlier Hasina Sheikh government fell in August 2024 (she fled to India), parliament was dissolved and an interim government headed by a former Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus came to power promising constitutional changes that would reform the electoral system and deepen democracy. There has been no shift from the prior pattern of bilateral relations with Israel.

Of all the South Asian states Nepal has had the friendliest and least troubled relationship with Israel. Britain recognised it as an independent monarchical state in 1923. The 1951 democratic movement finally led to the first general elections in 1959 and the leader of the Nepali Congress, Prime Minister B.P. Koirala first visited Israel. The following year, Nepal became the first country in South Asia to grant Israel full diplomatic recognition. Israel set up its embassy in Kathmandu in 1961 though Nepal could only reciprocate much later. Ever since, even when the Maoists were in power between 2008 and 2012, bilateral relations have been consistent. To be sure, Nepal dutifully echoes the general call for peace in the Middle East, and for a two-state solution with both Israel and Palestine existing side by side and declares its support for all measures promoting peace in the region. But it has been careful all this whilst not to forge formal diplomatic relations with the PLO.

Unlike its neighbours, Nepal opposed the 1975 UN resolution equating Zionism with racism and economic cooperation has been regular and includes some military training provided by Israel with growing Israeli tourism helping Nepal to partly compensate for its large bilateral trade deficit. Nepal largely exports woollens, tobacco, jute and vegetable products and imports items such as agricultural equipment and electronic machinery. Nepali female caregivers are welcomed in Israel, but most migrant remittances are from Nepalis working in the Arab Middle East which explains why Kathmandu on occasions mildly irritates Tel Aviv when it comes to voting with the majority on certain UN General Assembly resolutions on the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Nepal’s government strongly condemned the Hamas action of 7 October 2023, when 10 Nepali agricultural students were killed at kibbutz Alumim. But like India, Nepal does not use the word genocide or genocidal to describe Israel’s assault on Gaza nor did it join South Africa in support for the International Court of Justice (ICJ) intervention. When Israel attacked the peacekeeping forces of the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) in October 2024, Nepal did join the other 33 countries which had contributed personnel to UNIFIL in a joint statement which whilst condemning the assault in South Lebanon was careful not to indict Israel by name. In May 2025, regardless of what Israel is doing in Gaza, there were formal diplomatic assurances of continued diplomatic and material support and cooperation between Israel and Nepal.

The Modi Era

Coming to power in June 2014 it did not take Modi long to show that he would treat Israel differently. Note the following contrast. On 31 May 2010, Israel had attacked a flotilla of six ships carrying aid to Gaza from Turkey. Fifteen international activists were killed and many more injured. The then Congress-led government came out with an official statement condemning the attack and saying there was no justification for ’such indiscriminate use of force’ but was careful not to indict Israel by name. In July 2014 allegedly in retaliation to Hamas rockets that killed one soldier and six civilians, Israel launched Operation Protective Edge – a ground and air invasion over 50 days which flattened the large parts of Gaza (and not counting injuries inflicted), killed 2,251 Palestinians including 1,462 civilians. When days later the opposition in the Lok Sabha tried to pass a resolution condemning Israel’s disproportionate response, Modi blocked any condemnation even! Where once for forms sake, India would go along with United Nations General Assembly resolutions condemning Israel, it would now more frequently abstain.

In 2017 Modi became the first Indian PM to officially visit Israel for three days with the relationship formally upgraded to a ’strategic partnership’. He also broke an established tradition founded by earlier Indian official visits by not also visiting the Palestinian leadership in the occupied territories. A deliberate message was thus being sent that the Palestinian question is essentially irrelevant as far as Indo-Israeli ties are concerned. According to the New York Times this is when the Modi government struck a deal for the purchase of Pegasus – the military grade spyware supplied by an Israeli firm, the NSO that is sold only to governments. In 2018, it was detected by Toronto University’s Citizen Lab as being used to install malware and carry out surveillance in 45 countries including India; again in 2021 being used illegally on at least 300 Indians including human rights activists, journalists critical of the Modi regime, and on Rahul Gandhi, leader of the Congress party. This purchase was never denied nor confirmed by the Indian government with the Supreme Court abnegating its responsibility to demand a clear answer.

On 10 February 2018, Modi visited Ramallah for three hours and met Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority (PA). There, the long standing standard official Indian declaration supporting a ’sovereign and independent’ Palestinian state was made. But now for the first time this statement dropped all references to a ’united’ Palestinian state and also to East Jerusalem as its capital. The implication was clear. New Delhi would comfortably accept a future Bantustan type two-state resolution on whatever terms Israel would prefer, should that ever come about. India was no longer morally or politically bothered by Israeli violence against civilians, be it the brutal siege of Gaza or in the way illegal settlements were expanding in the West Bank. The Abraham Accords of 2020 was welcomed by New Delhi as a positive step forward to further normalisation of relations in the Middle East and on 14 July 2022 an India-Israel-UAE-US group also known as I2U2 was officially established for joint economic purposes. Hours later Haifa port (Israel’s most important) was sold to Adani Ports [16] to operate jointly with the Israeli company Gador. The IMEC (India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor) was launched at the G-20 summit in New Delhi on 9 September 2023 when a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed by India, US, Saudi Arabia, UAE, France, Germany, Italy and the EU. But it is not yet in operation and its further development has been held back by the subsequent war on Gaza.

After the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023 the Modi government has waxed eloquent on that ’horror’ assuring its full support for Israel. As the genocide drags on, New Delhi will occasionally voice, in the vaguest and feeble language, platitudes about welcoming a ceasefire and humanitarian aid. On the more material level Indian companies, with full government acquiescence, have provided Hermes 900 drones and munitions as well as sending thousands of migrant workers to replace Palestinian labour especially in the construction sector.

Previous non-BJP governments have, since the end of the Cold War, sought to strengthen ties with the US and looked to the Indian diaspora there to help in this effort. Israel, moreover, has been seen as a conduit in this respect given how close Israel-US ties have enduringly been. But the Modi government has invested much more effort and resources via its own civil society Hindutva organisations that have their branches in the US and UK, to generate a wider support base there. The relative growth and influence of Hindu Nationalist lobbying groups has been greater in the US. Here, AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) is seen by many such groups including the supposedly bi-partisan United States India Political Action Committee (USINPAC) and the Hindu American Foundation (HAF) as the model to emulate. Relations between such groups with AIPAC and the American Jewish Committee (AJC) have grown, encouraged as they have been by both the Modi government and Israel under the political umbrella of a Capitol Hill that has grown more conservative and Islamophobic over time.

What now?

A major global turning point was the sudden end of the Cold War with its collapse of the Communist bloc and their transformation into capitalist countries having varying degrees of state control and guidance of the economy. From the 1990s onwards till the present we have seen more and more governments worldwide shift towards ever greater accommodation with Israel even as Tel Aviv has consistently betrayed, in letter and spirit, what it was supposed to do under the Oslo and later Accords. Gaza was turned into the world’s largest open-air prison; settlements expanded in the West Bank; the Fatah leadership and security structure of the PA turned into a subcontractor of the illegal Occupation and the PA’s economic reproduction made dependent on Western largesse.

Even member countries in the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) and certainly the countries of the Middle East and North Africa where dictatorships and monarchical rule of one kind or the other has survived longer than elsewhere, did little to disturb Israel’s ’management’ – an ugly euphemism for the brutal manner in which it has sustained its control of, and expansion in the occupied territories. Besides the Iran-led ’axis of resistance’ the other counter-trend to this steady drift by governments towards more accommodation with Israel has been the rise of greater civil society support for the Palestinian cause especially in UK, Western Europe, North America as well as in parts of Latin America, Southeast Asia and Africa, especially South Africa which overcame its apartheid past.

What then is the story in India? As mentioned in the beginning of this text, civil society protests in India in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have been comparatively weaker than in other countries considered democratic. To move in a more positive direction and chart a way forward we need to understand why this has been the case, the better to be able to change it. One part of the story is repression and legal actions by the Hindutva government and by its vigilante groups who do nasty social trolling, register false cases with colluding police and lower courts, even on occasions physically attack Palestine supporters deemed ’anti-national’. The other part of the story lies with the socio-economic character of Indian society.

Though India’s current population is around 1.4 billion, the working population is around 640 million with over half being in the primary agricultural/fishing/mining sector. Only around seven per cent work in the formal sector receiving regular wages, paid leave, social security benefits and job security. The rest are in the informal sector having none of the protections of the formal sector, are lower paid and do not have the formal right to have unions. As it is, only an estimated three per cent of the work force are in Trade Unions (TUs) and the overwhelming majority of these belong to larger Federations themselves under the control of different political parties and obedient to their respective political lines. The biggest such Federation today comes under the BJP, the next under the Congress and then come smaller ones under left-wing and other regional parties. What this has long meant is that the vast majority of the public have been preoccupied with basic livelihood issues and with concerns relating to democratic freedoms and rights.

Yet this is also the reason why there are social movements that have emerged independent of political parties. These have focused on specific development policy concerns that have caused economic suffering, on violations of particular freedoms and on forms of discrimination, social and regional. For the general public, foreign policy issues have been seen as remote from weightier domestic preoccupations and problems. So, for the most part they go along with what the organisations they feel affiliated to say, be these political parties, TUs or the socio-religious bodies they identify with that provide emotional and some degree of material support.

The point is simple.

Until more recently, pro-Palestine protests and larger scale demos have over the years taken place very sporadically in the main metropolises of Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai, Hyderabad and occasionally extending to other urban centres. These mobilisations are invariably organised by the mainstream parliamentary left parties who rely on their trade union, and more so on their student wings, to achieve a reasonable turnout. Also willing to express their public solidarity on occasions are Muslim political parties, religious organisations and Muslim Student bodies though it is more the religious prism, rather than that of a universal humanism, through which they look at the Palestinian issue. [17] Not surprisingly, one place where the majority Muslim community feels a particular affinity with the plight of Palestinians in the OTs is in the Kashmir Valley where for decades there has been a huge presence of Indian military armed personnel of all kinds. Shortly after 7 October 2023 in the face of the Israeli assault there were congregational prayers and protests across several mosques in Kashmir. Official authorities however subsequently imposed restrictions to bar all forms of solidarity for Palestine in Kashmir including warnings to Muslim clerics not to mention Palestine in sermons. Despite this there have been outbreaks of solidarity action, the more recent in March and June 2025.

Until more recently, pro-Palestinian solidarity action by organisations that are both secular and independent from political control from above has, unlike in the West, not been a significant feature or presence. In Western liberal democracies it-makers. During the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan (1979-89) under the US organised ’Operation Cyclone’, [18] funds and arms including from Israel, were funnelled into Pakistan to help the Mujahideen resistance against Kabul and Moscow. But that had more to do with the US-Pakistan relationship than with any warming of ties with Israel. Tel Aviv, of course, would want to open diplomatic relations with Islamabad. Netanyahu during his 2018 visit to India did say that his country did not see itself as an enemy of Pakistan which should not behave towards Israel as an enemy.

However, three factors make any shift in Islamabad’s position quite difficult to anticipate for some time to come. Mention has earlier been made of the plan between India and Israel in the early 1980s to bomb Kahuta and to the subsequent dismay of Pakistan when both US and Israeli ties with India have become much stronger. Unlike in India, there is also much stronger support domestically for Palestine by not just religious and political Islamist groups, but also by the general public. This restricts the government’s room for manœuvre. Even Islamabad to its own benefit, from time to time compares Israel’s brutal occupation of the Palestinians with India’s occupation of the province of Jammu and Kashmir. To then soften criticism of what Israel is doing, especially after its current ongoing genocidal assault on Gaza, would detract from the humanitarian case it tries to make against the Indian occupation. Finally, a number of Muslim majority countries with whom Pakistan has close relations like Turkey and Iran would be quite disturbed by any such shift.

Bangladesh and Nepal

Bangladesh became independent in 1971 and was promptly recognised by Israel. However, the country did not reciprocate and hosts a Palestinian Embassy whilst advocating for a two-state solution. Like other Muslim majority countries, it does have indirect trade with Israel via a growing number of third countries in Asia, the Middle East and more recently through Europe and the US. It has a healthy trade surplus with its exports (mainly textiles, footwear and leather goods) to Israel in 2023 reaching US$205 million (€189 million) whilst its imports of plastics and therapeutic appliances reaching US$148,000 (€136,000) in 2022. However, this does not include the fact that there are reasonable grounds for suspicion that Bangladesh has bought surveillance equipment as well as receiving security personnel training by Israeli forces in third countries such as Hungary and Thailand. As a result of a popular upsurge the earlier Hasina Sheikh government fell in August 2024 (she fled to India), parliament was dissolved and an interim government headed by a former Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus came to power promising constitutional changes that would reform the electoral system and deepen democracy. There has been no shift from the prior pattern of bilateral relations with Israel.

Of all the South Asian states Nepal has had the friendliest and least troubled relationship with Israel. Britain recognised it as an independent monarchical state in 1923. The 1951 democratic movement finally led to the first general elections in 1959 and the leader of the Nepali Congress, Prime Minister B.P. Koirala first visited Israel. The following year, Nepal became the first country in South Asia to grant Israel full diplomatic recognition. Israel set up its embassy in Kathmandu in 1961 though Nepal could only reciprocate much later. Ever since, even when the Maoists were in power between 2008 and 2012, bilateral relations have been consistent. To be sure, Nepal dutifully echoes the general call for peace in the Middle East, and for a two-state solution with both Israel and Palestine existing side by side and declares its support for all measures promoting peace in the region. But it has been careful all this whilst not to forge formal diplomatic relations with the PLO.

Unlike its neighbours, Nepal opposed the 1975 UN resolution equating Zionism with racism and economic cooperation has been regular and includes some military training provided by Israel with growing Israeli tourism helping Nepal to partly compensate for its large bilateral trade deficit. Nepal largely exports woollens, tobacco, jute and vegetable products and imports items such as agricultural equipment and electronic machinery. Nepali female caregivers are welcomed in Israel, but most migrant remittances are from Nepalis working in the Arab Middle East which explains why Kathmandu on occasions mildly irritates Tel Aviv when it comes to voting with the majority on certain UN General Assembly resolutions on the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Nepal’s government strongly condemned the Hamas action of 7 October 2023, when 10 Nepali agricultural students were killed at kibbutz Alumim. But like India, Nepal does not use the word genocide or genocidal to describe Israel’s assault on Gaza nor did it join South Africa in support for the International Court of Justice (ICJ) intervention. When Israel attacked the peacekeeping forces of the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) in October 2024, Nepal did join the other 33 countries which had contributed personnel to UNIFIL in a joint statement which whilst condemning the assault in South Lebanon was careful not to indict Israel by name. In May 2025, regardless of what Israel is doing in Gaza, there were formal diplomatic assurances of continued diplomatic and material support and cooperation between Israel and Nepal.

The Modi Era

Coming to power in June 2014 it did not take Modi long to show that he would treat Israel differently. Note the following contrast. On 31 May 2010, Israel had attacked a flotilla of six ships carrying aid to Gaza from Turkey. Fifteen international activists were killed and many more injured. The then Congress-led government came out with an official statement condemning the attack and saying there was no justification for ’such indiscriminate use of force’ but was careful not to indict Israel by name. In July 2014 allegedly in retaliation to Hamas rockets that killed one soldier and six civilians, Israel launched Operation Protective Edge – a ground and air invasion over 50 days which flattened the large parts of Gaza (and not counting injuries inflicted), killed 2,251 Palestinians including 1,462 civilians. When days later the opposition in the Lok Sabha tried to pass a resolution condemning Israel’s disproportionate response, Modi blocked any condemnation even! Where once for forms sake, India would go along with United Nations General Assembly resolutions condemning Israel, it would now more frequently abstain.

In 2017 Modi became the first Indian PM to officially visit Israel for three days with the relationship formally upgraded to a ’strategic partnership’. He also broke an established tradition founded by earlier Indian official visits by not also visiting the Palestinian leadership in the occupied territories. A deliberate message was thus being sent that the Palestinian question is essentially irrelevant as far as Indo-Israeli ties are concerned. According to the New York Times this is when the Modi government struck a deal for the purchase of Pegasus [19] – the military grade spyware supplied by an Israeli firm, the NSO that is sold only to governments. In 2018, it was detected by Toronto University’s Citizen Lab as being used to install malware and carry out surveillance in 45 countries including India; again in 2021 being used illegally on at least 300 Indians including human rights activists, journalists critical of the Modi regime, and on Rahul Gandhi, leader of the Congress party. This purchase was never denied nor confirmed by the Indian government with the Supreme Court abnegating its responsibility to demand a clear answer.

On 10 February 2018, Modi visited Ramallah for three hours and met Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority (PA). There, the long standing standard official Indian declaration supporting a ’sovereign and independent’ Palestinian state was made. But now for the first time this statement dropped all references to a ’united’ Palestinian state and also to East Jerusalem as its capital. The implication was clear. New Delhi would comfortably accept a future Bantustan type two-state resolution on whatever terms Israel would prefer, should that ever come about. India was no longer morally or politically bothered by Israeli violence against civilians, be it the brutal siege of Gaza or in the way illegal settlements were expanding in the West Bank. The Abraham Accords of 2020 was welcomed by New Delhi as a positive step forward to further normalisation of relations in the Middle East and on 14 July 2022 an India-Israel-UAE-US group also known as I2U2 was officially established for joint economic purposes. Hours later Haifa port (Israel’s most important) was sold to Adani Ports [20] to operate jointly with the Israeli company Gador. The IMEC (India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor) was launched at the G-20 summit in New Delhi on 9 September 2023 when a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed by India, US, Saudi Arabia, UAE, France, Germany, Italy and the EU. But it is not yet in operation and its further development has been held back by the subsequent war on Gaza.

After the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023 the Modi government has waxed eloquent on that ’horror’ assuring its full support for Israel. As the genocide drags on, New Delhi will occasionally voice, in the vaguest and feeble language, platitudes about welcoming a ceasefire and humanitarian aid. On the more material level Indian companies, with full government acquiescence, have provided Hermes 900 drones and munitions as well as sending thousands of migrant workers to replace Palestinian labour especially in the construction sector.

Previous non-BJP governments have, since the end of the Cold War, sought to strengthen ties with the US and looked to the Indian diaspora there to help in this effort. Israel, moreover, has been seen as a conduit in this respect given how close Israel-US ties have enduringly been. But the Modi government has invested much more effort and resources via its own civil society Hindutva organisations that have their branches in the US and UK, to generate a wider support base there. The relative growth and influence of Hindu Nationalist lobbying groups has been greater in the US. Here, AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) [21] is seen by many such groups including the supposedly bi-partisan United States India Political Action Committee (USINPAC) and the Hindu American Foundation (HAF) as the model to emulate. Relations between such groups with AIPAC and the American Jewish Committee (AJC) have grown, encouraged as they have been by both the Modi government and Israel under the political umbrella of a Capitol Hill that has grown more conservative and Islamophobic over time.

What now?

A major global turning point was the sudden end of the Cold War with its collapse of the Communist bloc and their transformation into capitalist countries having varying degrees of state control and guidance of the economy. From the 1990s onwards till the present we have seen more and more governments worldwide shift towards ever greater accommodation with Israel even as Tel Aviv has consistently betrayed, in letter and spirit, what it was supposed to do under the Oslo and later Accords. Gaza was turned into the world’s largest open-air prison; settlements expanded in the West Bank; the Fatah leadership and security structure of the PA turned into a subcontractor of the illegal Occupation and the PA’s economic reproduction made dependent on Western largesse.

Even member countries in the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) and certainly the countries of the Middle East and North Africa where dictatorships and monarchical rule of one kind or the other has survived longer than elsewhere, did little to disturb Israel’s ’management’ – an ugly euphemism for the brutal manner in which it has sustained its control of, and expansion in the occupied territories. Besides the Iran-led ’axis of resistance’ the other counter-trend to this steady drift by governments towards more accommodation with Israel has been the rise of greater civil society support for the Palestinian cause especially in UK, Western Europe, North America as well as in parts of Latin America, Southeast Asia and Africa, especially South Africa which overcame its apartheid past.

What then is the story in India? As mentioned in the beginning of this text, civil society protests in India in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have been comparatively weaker than in other countries considered democratic. To move in a more positive direction and chart a way forward we need to understand why this has been the case, the better to be able to change it. One part of the story is repression and legal actions by the Hindutva government and by its vigilante groups who do nasty social trolling, register false cases with colluding police and lower courts, even on occasions physically attack Palestine supporters deemed ’anti-national’. The other part of the story lies with the socio-economic character of Indian society.

Though India’s current population is around 1.4 billion, the working population is around 640 million with over half being in the primary agricultural/fishing/mining sector. Only around seven per cent work in the formal sector receiving regular wages, paid leave, social security benefits and job security. The rest are in the informal sector having none of the protections of the formal sector, are lower paid and do not have the formal right to have unions. As it is, only an estimated three per cent of the work force are in Trade Unions (TUs) and the overwhelming majority of these belong to larger Federations themselves under the control of different political parties and obedient to their respective political lines. The biggest such Federation today comes under the BJP, the next under the Congress and then come smaller ones under left-wing and other regional parties. What this has long meant is that the vast majority of the public have been preoccupied with basic livelihood issues and with concerns relating to democratic freedoms and rights.

Yet this is also the reason why there are social movements that have emerged independent of political parties. These have focused on specific development policy concerns that have caused economic suffering, on violations of particular freedoms and on forms of discrimination, social and regional. For the general public, foreign policy issues have been seen as remote from weightier domestic preoccupations and problems. So, for the most part they go along with what the organisations they feel affiliated to say, be these political parties, TUs or the socio-religious bodies they identify with that provide emotional and some degree of material support.

The point is simple.

Until more recently, pro-Palestine protests and larger scale demos have over the years taken place very sporadically in the main metropolises of Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai, Hyderabad and occasionally extending to other urban centres. These mobilisations are invariably organised by the mainstream parliamentary left parties who rely on their trade union, and more so on their student wings, to achieve a reasonable turnout. Also willing to express their public solidarity on occasions are Muslim political parties, religious organisations and Muslim Student bodies though it is more the religious prism, rather than that of a universal humanism, through which they look at the Palestinian issue. [22] Not surprisingly, one place where the majority Muslim community feels a particular affinity with the plight of Palestinians in the OTs is in the Kashmir Valley where for decades there has been a huge presence of Indian military armed personnel of all kinds. Shortly after 7 October 2023 in the face of the Israeli assault there were congregational prayers and protests across several mosques in Kashmir. Official authorities however subsequently imposed restrictions to bar all forms of solidarity for Palestine in Kashmir including warnings to Muslim clerics not to mention Palestine in sermons. Despite this there have been outbreaks of solidarity action, the more recent in March and June 2025.

Until more recently, pro-Palestinian solidarity action by organisations that are both secular and independent from political control from above has, unlike in the West, not been a significant feature or presence. In Western liberal democracies it is the more comfortably placed middle class (income-wise) freer from worry about basic livelihood needs that has been more preoccupied with foreign policy issues and the stances taken by their respective governments. The problem with the so-called Indian middle class, which over the last two decades has been growing, is that on average its political orientation has been more reactionary than progressive, hence the growing support for the BJP and Hindutva more generally not just amongst the elite but also amongst the upper, middle and lower layers of what is termed the middle class.

Nevertheless, there are progressive sections within this middle class, and these have grown in numbers and because of social media have also become more aware of what is happening in the world and in Palestine in particular. It is this section, especially the youth, that has expanded the socio-political reservoir beyond the organised left parties, groups and group-lets (of which, given India’s continental size, there are many) for pursuing a host of progressive causes and for making commitments to and with the struggles of those more economically, politically and culturally deprived. There are now a variety of Palestine solidarity groups that have emerged up and down the country.

Some are connected to existing cultural, political or (Muslim) religious bodies. Others are more stand-alone solidarity groupings that are progressive and therefore more generally critical of Hindutva and the Modi government. These groups join in with the different actions organised by the big left parties and their affiliated women, student and union wings that mobilise numbers in the range of several hundred to several thousands. [23] They also separately carry out their own actions individually or sometimes in collaboration with other such groups. They have provided information, analysis and videos on social media in English, Hindi and in regional languages. They have also carried out small scale street actions distributing leaflets, usually in states not ruled by the BJP. But even in those states these are frequently sudden ’flash’ protests at a particular crowded market space or junction and then quickly moving away before the police arrive. Between May and mid-July this year, the outlets for McDonald’s and Domino’s Pizza have faced Boycott Disinvestment and Sanctions (BDS) protests. These have taken place in different cities such as Hyderabad, Pune, Delhi, Mumbai, Chandigarh and elsewhere. One must also mention the formation of the Indian Dancers for Gaza’s Children (IDGC) that through its performances raises money for humanitarian aid and connects to the Princess Basma Centre in Gaza for children with disabilities. All this is quite new and an expression of how Palestine has caught the imagination of a growing number of Indians particularly amongst the young. It is still an uphill battle against the Indian state, but advances are being made.

What then is the way forward? Almost all governments in their official positions say they are for a two-state solution to resolve the Israel-Palestine imbroglio. This has long been a convenient mask to cover-up these governments own failures, indeed their un-interestedness and unwillingness to do anything meaningful, whether individually or collectively, to help bring it about.

Leave aside Gaza, Israeli settlement expansion and armed interventions in the West Bank, often with the permission and sometimes collusion of Fatah, has effectively destroyed any chance of Palestinians getting at best anything more than a truncated and resource poor slice of territory – a Bantustan – if even that! Eradicating all the illegal Jewish settlements in what they call Judea and Samaria is tantamount to asking Israel to risk nothing less than a civil war. In fact, the Hamas assault in 2023 has served as an excuse for openly advocating and for a systematic practical pursuit of what many on the political right and far-right, and even some centrists in Israel, consider their ’Final Solution’.

This admittedly is a longer-term process but one which has now been put in motion. In Gaza it involves territorially taking over much or all of the north of the Gaza Strip. It means encouraging greater de-population through starvation, malnutrition, disease, military assaults and further displacement to even worse prison-like confinement in restricted parts of the South. The aim is to make life unliveable for most, if not all.

The latest plan is to keep the UN institutions out and disburse minimal aid at only a few distribution points. This plan is not at all intended to properly or fully address the basic food, health and shelter needs of Gazans but to assuage Israel’s allies who can then with a ’better conscience’ keep quiet whilst the process of ethnic cleansing carries on. In this way the conditions will be created for more and more Palestinians in Gaza to opt for ’voluntary transfer’ to other countries.

Here the Trump administration is playing its role of contacting various countries – Sudan, Somalia, Somaliland (a breakaway), Libya, Indonesia are apparently some – to whom financial and other offers may have been given. In the West Bank the illegal settlements will be expanded and control over Palestinians to be made ’manageable’ through a stronger combination of repression and bribery for its leaders. There is also for Tel Aviv and Washington a particular version of the ’Jordanian Option’ to consider. This would be to apply a similar strategy of sticks and carrots for its rulers to make Jordan, in large part or in its entirety, the Palestinian homeland, i.e., re-settling West Bank Palestinians there. However, both with respect to Gaza and the West Bank, there still remains for such Israeli ambitions a huge gap between intention and fulfilment.

Focus on apartheid

To completely nullify this Israeli project, the key question is how to change the political relationship of forces and power in favour of the Palestinian struggle and against Israel? For a start the focus should not be on the ultimate goal, whether of a two-state or one-state solution – that must be left to Palestinians to decide. However, political pressure must centre the character of Israel as the world’s only settler-colonial, apartheid state. Israel denies equal rights to non-Jews and Palestinians within Israel. It denies, even as an illegal occupier, the rights that are owed by international law to the occupied. It denies the Right of Return to the families and descendants of the Palestinians who were forcibly displaced in the past and which it was formally committed to accepting as a condition for becoming a member of the UN. The discourse of equality, rights, justice, and democracy becomes a way of unifying three important terrains of struggle, and in the Indian case, a focus on apartheid appeals to a broader base.

The focus on the settler colonial and apartheid nature of Israel also opens the possibility to talk about Palestinians who are second-class citizens within Israel, and the Palestinian diaspora which has become a more important external source of support given their growing influence on the public and governments, particularly in the West. The struggle for democratic rights also allows the conversation to include neighbouring Arab countries that for the most part continue to suffer under dictatorships of one kind or the other. There is a reciprocal and feedback relationship between progressive advances and successful resistances whether they take place in the OTs or in the Arab world.

Ruling autocracies in the Middle East and North Africa have more reason to fear these developments than Israel itself. If one of these dictatorships were to fall and be replaced by a stable and enduring democratic set-up, the whole regional and even global picture would change for the better. It would provide a serious fillip to the Palestinian struggle; have a genuine domino effect on other dictatorships; force major outside powers to re-evaluate existing patterns of alliances and the thinking behind them. A stable democratic regime has still to emerge in this region, but one can be sure that the first and second set of Arab Uprisings (early 2010s and 2018-2024) will be followed by a third with yet again the possibility of achieving the change most desired.

There remains much truth in the aphoristic slogan that the road to Jerusalem (meaning liberation and justice for Palestine) may have to pass through Cairo and Amman! As for greater unification of purpose and practice amongst the different Palestinian factions and greater democratic accountability of the leaderships to the Palestinian public in and outside the OTs let us hope that the promise made in March 2025 to hold elections for the Palestine Legislative Assembly and for a new President of the PA, takes place. Furthermore, that there is the convening of the Palestinian National Council [24] (the world parliament for the PLO which is the umbrella body for all Palestinian political groups and has over 700 representatives) which last met in 2018 and which elects the Executive Council of the PLO will also happen soon. The Palestinian people deserve no less.

Irrespective of when and whether this strategic shift happens, the pathway for strengthening solidarity work in India is clear. Israel is the only remaining settler-colonial, apartheid state in the world today. All parties in India including the Hindu Nationalist forerunner of the BJP, the Jan Sangh, also opposed South African apartheid and supported the stand of all Indian governments that imposed a complete – diplomatic, commercial, cultural, sports – embargo against it. This is a history that now can, and should, be used against the current government and the wider array of Hindutva organisations. It is something of a surprise that the mainstream Indian left parties have not made more of this fact. Given their relatively greater size and resources as compared to the range of smaller left groups, they have at times been in the forefront in organising public protests for Palestine. But they have not yet been prepared, despite the ongoing genocide, to call for India to sever its diplomatic relations with apartheid Israel and impose arms embargoes and other sanctions including the call for the return of all Indian migrant workers.

Of course, this Indian government will not do this, nor will they be joined in this call by the political parties opposed to the BJP. But it is a stand that must now be taken as part of the effort to win more public hearts and minds, to put pressure for New Delhi to take some steps back and to create a wider appeal and constituency for the politics of the left domestically.

That there are crucial similarities between this Hindutva-inspired government and Zionist Israel should be obvious. Israel is an apartheid state, not a democracy or an ’ethnocracy’. India under Modi is not yet, but is well under way to, becoming an apartheid state. However, the position of most Jews in Israel and in the settlements is very different from that of the majority of Indians. They are nowhere near as poverty stricken or materially insecure as the majority of Hindus. There is the pernicious caste system in India affecting mostly but not only Hindus. There is far more everyday violence and routinised corruption in India and class and caste power erodes democratic rights and manipulates the law to the detriment of the poor than is the case for Jews in Israel despite racial discriminations and unequal power relations amongst them.

For the organisations and movements that have been specifically focused on promoting solidarity with Palestine the lesson is clear. They must join up with those other forces resisting Hindutva at the political-democratic, economic and cultural fronts. That is to say, to succeed in advancing the Palestinian cause in India it is necessary to do more than simply focus on solidarity. This is also the way to create a wider arena of human and institutional sympathy and support for the Palestinian cause.

What would this kind of an approach entail in practical terms? There are a range of organisations that are involved in activities to defend civil liberties and peoples’ livelihoods. Amongst these are bodies that try to operate at an extra-regional and national level like the Peoples Union of Civil Liberties (PUCL) who have now taken up the issue of Israeli genocide. There is also the National Alliance of Peoples Movements (NAPM), a three-decade old network of various popular and progressive struggles.

To the dismay and anger of the Indian government the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) have repeatedly affirmed that Caste falls under the Race Convention since it is an institutionalised form of discrimination based on descent and occupation. Whilst the Indian Constitution bans ’untouchability’ it does not outlaw the caste system itself. Here again, is where solidarity work for Palestine can align with not just forces fighting Islamophobia but with Dalits, [25] other lower castes and groups opposing the caste system itself. Nor should one forget that India’s neoliberal agricultural and mining policies are displacing middle and smaller peasants in the pursuit of corporatised farming as well as indigenous populations in the central forest belt as well as in the northeast.

Israeli technological cooperation in agriculture and its military knowhow given existing class relations in India will likely promote this corporatisation process. Its military and cyber surveillance skills and equipment are in their own way being deployed to overcome opponents of such forced displacement. More reason then, to recognise patterns of similarities faced by so many Indian and Palestinians. Building these collective solidarities at home must take place and can give greater weight to the ongoing efforts to make links across countries with other Palestine solidarity groups and networks to exchange information as well as to forge common statements and programmes for action.

There is a lot to do and we must get on with it!

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Achin Vanaik is a TNI Fellow and Associate since 1987, a retired Professor of International Relations and former Head of the Department of Political Science at the University of Delhi, and a lifelong activist for nuclear disarmament. He is an active member of the Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace (India) and of the Indian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, pressing for Israel’s compliance with international law. He is also a founder of the Society for Marxist Studies (SMS), which organises two-week residential schools for post-graduate students and social activists from across India.