Benjamin Netanyahu and Narendra Modi shared a conspicuously heat embrace because the Indian prime minister stepped off Air India One at Israel’s Ben Gurion airport on Wednesday, a second that captured the political intimacy between the 2 leaders. Over the course of his two-day go to, the 2 sides are anticipated to signal a number of agreements, additional consolidating an already deepening partnership between Israel and India.
Modi has lengthy been a driving drive behind this closeness. His 2017 journey marked the primary go to to Israel by an Indian prime minister and signalled a decisive shift in bilateral relations. In an Instagram publish on Wednesday, he known as this journey a “historic visit”, later receiving a standing ovation at a reception on the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, the place Netanyahu declared, “This is true friendship, between two leaders, between two countries, and between two ancient nations.”
Of course, this friendship doesn’t simply hinge on the offers and agreements the 2 leaders are set to signal. While welcoming Modi on the tarmac at Ben Gurion airport, Sara Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister’s spouse, wore orange/saffron, the color of Hindutva. The Israeli prime minister additionally identified that her outfit matched the orange pocket sq. Modi was sporting.
The prominence of Hindutva’s signature color was tough to disregard and recommended a transparent ease with, and affirmation of, the ideological framework underpinning Modi’s politics. The ideological partnership between Netanyahu and Modi rests on a perception that each leaders stand as a bulwark in opposition to what they take into account an existential civilisational battle in opposition to Islam and Islamism. Bibi’s Israel is meant to function a haven for all Jews, whereas Modi’s India is meant to maintain Hindus safe.
But it is value asking, whose security is really assured in Israel and India?
The genocide in Gaza and the continued settler violence and annexation of Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank are solely the most recent reminders that Palestinians can not count on to be safe in the Holy Land. Palestinian residents of Israel, who make up about 19 p.c of the inhabitants, face numerous types of institutionalised discrimination and are, in reality, as Amnesty International put it, “lesser citizens” of Israel.
But not all Jewish residents of Israel are “safe” both. Racial discrimination in opposition to Mizrahi Jews has been a matter of official coverage, written into the very foundations of the state of Israel.
A definite antagonism in the direction of Mizrahi Jews’ Middle East roots was evident when Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founding father of Revisionist Zionism and the Zionist paramilitary group Irgun, mentioned, “We Jews have nothing in common with what is called the Orient, thank God. To the extent that our uneducated masses [i.e. Middle Eastern Jews] have ancient spiritual traditions and laws that call the Orient, they must be weaned away from them, and this is in fact what we are doing in every decent school, what life itself is doing with great success. We are going in Palestine, first for our national convenience, to sweep out thoroughly all traces of the Oriental soul.”
Declassified state paperwork present that hundreds of infants from Arab Jewish households arriving in Israel after its creation have been stolen by hospitals and clinics and handed over “to wealthy Jewish families in Israel and abroad”. Yemeni households suffered the “largest proportion of disappearances”. It is estimated that “one in eight children [from Yemeni families] under the age of four” had gone lacking by the point the State of Israel turned six.
Racial discrimination is not a matter of the previous, and this white supremacy is ever extra evident in the structural and on a regular basis racism confronted by Ethiopian Jews. Though accounting for under 2 p.c of the inhabitants, greater than half of Ethiopian Jewish residents dwell under the poverty line. Their neighbourhoods are chronically under-resourced, and Ethiopian Jewish youngsters and youth face substance abuse, violence, highschool dropout charges, in addition to an alarming improve in circumstances of melancholy and suicide.
Reflecting this expertise, one participant in a study printed by the Association for Jewish Studies mentioned, “No matter what we do, this is what we get. ‘These Ethiopians, these barbarians, they infiltrate Israel.’ Take police racism, for instance, they treat us like invaders, criminals, even though this is our home. And the strangest thing is, who knows the feeling of exclusion better than the Jewish people? We weren’t accepted in Europe because we were Jewish, and now you don’t accept us because we’re Black?! You were discriminated and now you discriminate us. You’re not accepting yourself! We are PART of you, can’t you SEE?”.
These realities present that Israel is not a spot of security for all Jews.
India is no totally different. Structural and on a regular basis discrimination confronted by the nation’s minority Muslim inhabitants is well documented throughout authorized, political and social spheres. Critics and oppositional voices stay beneath menace. But are all Hindus safe beneath a Hindu nationalist management?
Caste-based discrimination, whereas not an invention of this authorities, stays a central function of Indian society and has intensified beneath Modi’s rule.
In January, the University Grants Commission (UGC) launched the Promotion of Equity in Higher Education Institutions Regulations. The transfer adopted Supreme Court strain to deal with harassment and discrimination confronted by Dalit students. The rules “make heads of institutions directly responsible for preventing and responding to discrimination on the basis of caste, religion, gender or disability by students, teachers or non-teaching staff”. The measures confronted instant backlash, and the courtroom has since “stayed the new regulations”.
Behind these rules lies a tragic file of suicides amongst Dalit college students. This consists of the extremely publicised case of Dalit PhD candidate Rohith Vemula on the University of Hyderabad in 2016. Vemula was lively on campus, elevating the difficulty of caste discrimination, prompting complaints from the coed wing of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The matter reached Smriti Irani, the then-human useful resource improvement minister in the Modi authorities, who requested college management to analyze. Vemula’s fellowship was suspended, and he was compelled to vacate his dormitory.
He died by suicide on January 16, 2016, writing in his suicide notice that his “birth was his fatal accident”.
A 2021 Pew study reveals {that a} majority of Indians “do not see widespread discrimination against Scheduled Castes and Tribes”. Yet UGC knowledge from 2025 reveals caste-related complaints have risen sharply. Employment patterns additionally reproduce caste hierarchies, with 77 p.c of sewer and septic employees coming from Dalit communities. Research means that caste hierarchies are more and more reproduced in synthetic intelligence programs. The anti-affirmative motion activism of the Hindu nationalist diaspora additionally demonstrates that caste hierarchies prolong past nationwide boundaries.
What is the purpose of dredging up this file of exclusion, discrimination and hierarchy in mild of Modi’s bromance with Netanyahu? It actually doesn’t imply that if racism in Israeli society didn’t exist, or if casteism have been eradicated in India, their ideologies and political actions can be any extra acceptable. Rather, it is to focus on the expansive and multifaceted nature of the hierarchies and constructions of exclusion propagated by the 2 leaders. The essential targets of their discourse and insurance policies are Palestinians throughout Palestine and Israel, and Muslims in India. Yet the proponents of their politics are equally eager to weaponise this discourse and model of statecraft to focus on those that don’t match their hegemonic conception of life and politics.
That is to say, actually, nobody is safe in Israel and India.
The views expressed in this text are the creator’s personal and don’t essentially replicate Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
