Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi
The enthusiasm with which much of India’s Hindutva ecosystem celebrates Israel’s assault upon Gaza cannot be explained by strategic partnership alone. It springs from ideological recognition: in the militarised ethnonationalism of the Israeli state, the Hindu Right sees an image of the country it wishes India to become. Israel offers a model of a religiously defined nation-state that combines electoral democracy for the dominant community with occupation and political exclusion for others. Gaza fascinates because it appears to show what a state can do once it has designated an entire population a security problem.
This admiration has translated into tangible policy. India has become the world’s top importer of Israeli weaponry, with Israeli drones and missiles reportedly deployed in operations against Pakistan. But the emulation goes deeper than arms. The Indian government has purchased ‘Blue Wolf‘ tracking software from Israel, a surveillance tool originally deployed in the West Bank to monitor Palestinians, and has reportedly installed it in Kashmir to track and control local voices. Israeli surveillance systems from companies like Cognyte and Septier have been installed on subsea cable landing stations across India, allowing security agencies to access the personal data and communications of 1.4 billion citizens. The Pegasus spyware scandal further revealed how Israeli technology was allegedly used to hack the phones of Indian journalists, opposition leaders and activists.
The occupation of Kashmir increasingly resembles Israel’s settler-colonial project in the West Bank, with both states applying brutal methods in occupied territories. Indian officials and academics have publicly stated that the Israeli ‘model’ should be replicated in Kashmir. This ideological kinship is reflected in policy: India has abandoned its earlier support for Palestine, abstaining from UN votes calling for investigations into Israeli atrocities and saying almost nothing about the genocide in Gaza. At home, the government has demolished hundreds of Muslim family homes in campaigns that human rights groups have likened to Zionist tactics, using bulldozers as weapons of collective punishment. The Citizenship Amendment Act and National Register of Citizens exemplify this ideological shift toward an ethnic state, systematically marginalising religious minorities.
The ideological affinity rests on a shared narrative of permanent siege, where a numerical majority imagines itself as a besieged minority, with victimhood mobilised to immunise contemporary power from moral scrutiny. In this political imagination, Gaza is a demonstration that a modern state need not apologise for using overwhelming force; the blockade becomes an example of population management, and the destruction of homes becomes counter-terrorism. The phrase “Israel-style response” conveys freedom from legal inhibition and humanitarian concern – the fantasy of a state that strikes first and treats criticism as collaboration with terrorism. Hindutva admirers of Israel repeat a simple script: Hamas attacked on 7 October 2023, so Israel possesses an unlimited right to continue destroying Gaza. Everything before that date – occupation, blockade, settlement expansion and the deliberate fragmentation of Palestinian politics – is erased.
The scale of Gaza’s destruction is now undeniable: residential districts, hospitals, schools and water systems have been reduced to rubble, with the Palestinian death toll above 70,000 by mid-2026. In September 2025, a UN Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israel had committed genocide; in June 2026, it stated that authorities continued to commit such crimes. Yet sections of Indian social media respond to each new image of death with celebration or denial. Gaza has become another vocabulary through which Indian Muslims are abused; anti-Muslim hate-speech incidents invoking the conflict rose sharply, with Palestinians and Indian Muslims merged into a single imagined enemy. Israeli flags appeared in anti-Muslim demonstrations, and calls for the destruction of Gaza were accompanied by warnings that Indian Muslims might face a similar future. The foreign war became a stage for domestic intimidation.
The attraction to Israel extends from the bomb to the database, admiring not only the capacity to destroy an enemy but to classify, monitor and immobilise one. This alignment represents a profound departure from India’s anti-colonial inheritance. India voted against the partition of Palestine in 1947, recognised the PLO in 1974 and supported Palestinian self-determination within its opposition to colonialism. Hindutva has reversed that moral lens, identifying not with the colonised but with the technologically superior occupying power. At the centre of both ideologies lies demographic anxiety – the fear of losing control makes birth rates and citizenship matters of national security. Both promise democracy while insisting the state must permanently belong to one community.
The Hindutva supporter loves Israel instrumentally, as the enemy of the enemy. The Palestinian becomes a substitute Indian Muslim; Gaza becomes an imaginary Kashmir. This is not solidarity with Israelis as human beings but with an apparatus of domination – the wall, the missile and the checkpoint. India can maintain relations with Israel while condemning occupation and collective punishment, but strategic cooperation does not require moral surrender. What India cannot do without diminishing itself is exchange its anti-colonial inheritance for applause from an embassy. For a temporary sense of military masculinity, it risks sacrificing moral authority accumulated across generations.
When the slogans have disappeared and the triumphant videos have been deleted, the record will remain: the names of the dead, the destroyed hospitals, the displaced children, and the people thousands of kilometres away who cheered. They were warned by international courts, by UN investigators, by Israeli dissidents. But the Zionist dream had given Hindutva a picture of its desired future, and it was too intoxicated by the spectacle of domination to notice that it was applauding not security, not patriotism, not civilisation, but the destruction of all three.
ASHA: Blast From The Past 