Arabic → English transcript

This is a man who aspires for his country to be a homeland for Hindus

anywhere in the world. And this, we all know, is a country founded by force on

occupied land for Jews from every place in the world.

And these are the Muslims in India who are persecuted and killed.

And Gaza bears witness to the whole

world to how a country can be stolen completely with no accountability.

These then are two men whose closeness should not be surprising.

For they have implicitly agreed on establishing religious states for a single race,

a single people, a single religion, whatever the method. Historically,

India maintained strong relations with Palestine,

as it was the first non- Arab state to recognize it

after the Palestine Liberation Organization declared its establishment in

1988. In return, and out of fear of Indian Muslims and belief in the Arabs’ right

to Palestine, India kept its distance from Israel,

even after recognizing it diplomatically in 1992. But this distance completely

vanished with the election of Narendra Modi in 2014, as he drew so close to

Israel that he became the first prime minister An Indian visited Tel

Aviv in 2017,

which Benjamin Netanyahu reciprocated a year later with a similar visit to Delhi.

In a historic shift, Modi found in Israel a nature similar to his own country.

Israel gathers Jews on lands it occupies, surrounded on all sides by Muslim

Arab states. And India is a Hindu- majority state that claims to be secular,

bordered by Muslim countries,

and sharing its borders with the second- largest Muslim- majority country

in the world. Thus Israel and India see themselves in a region on fire,

surrounded by Muslim neighbors who, according to their logic,

pose a threat that must be stopped. But this is nothing new, so what has made

rapprochement possible now? This man, Modi,

is a right- wing Hindu who ideologically believes in what is known as Hindutva,

where every Hindu is Indian even if not born in India, just like Zionism,

which claims that everyone born to a Jewish mother is necessarily Israeli.

He differs from his predecessors

who founded India as a state Secularism and their fear of normalization

deals with the establishment of a religious state anywhere in the world,

led him to find in Israel a model of a national religious state that could be

built upon. Tel Aviv read the message, and from the very first

moment presented itself as a haven from everything India fears,

and it promoted to her a narrative that seems to have impressed Modi greatly.

In it, it linked the Kashmir attacks,

which India accuses Pakistan of being behind,

with Palestinian resistance operations against the Israeli occupation,

in an attempt to portray

the two sides as a common threat facing India and Israel.

Equally so.

This narrative

paved the way for an unprecedented military cooperation between the two sides,

making India the largest buyer of weapons from Israel,

along with the widest- ranging Israeli intelligence consulting in the war

against Pakistan. Unlike other deals, it helped Modi tighten his internal

security grip, most notably the deal for the Israeli spyware program Pegasus,

which sparked wide controversy inside India, after it was used by the

Indian government for spying on

journalists and human rights activists. Alongside military cooperation,

the volume of trade exchange between the two sides grew from 200 million dollars in

1992 to about 4 billion dollars in 2024.

making India the second- largest trading partner of Israel in Asia after China.

Amid all this warmth and rapprochement, where did Palestine end up in

Modi’s policy? In 2024, while Israel

was waging its war on Gaza,

Indian arms companies sold missiles and explosives to Israel, and the Indian

authorities arrested demonstrators who showed solidarity with Palestine,

and Indian volunteers took part in fighting alongside the occupation army during

the first weeks of the war. And Modi was

praying for those he called the innocent Israeli victims. This distancing was

not sudden, as it was preceded by years in which Modi dealt coldly with the

Palestinian cause, contrary to the historical

background for his country’s support of Palestine since the 1940s,

which was clearly evident in its abstention by India, time and again,

from voting for resolutions condemning Israel for its aggression against Gaza

since 2014, and in its remaining silent

in 2017 regarding the United States’ recognition of Jerusalem as the

capital of Israel,

a recognition that is supposedly in total contradiction with

India’s firmly held doctrine toward Palestine. Nevertheless,

India still officially adheres to

supporting a two- state solution through negotiations to establish an independent

and sovereign Palestinian state living side by side with Israel,

which it expressed in September 2024 when it voted in favor of a United Nations

resolution supporting the New York Declaration that endorses the two-

state solution. So here we have two men standing on a beach near Haifa,

as if they were old friends reliving their childhood memories,

while in the background the true owners of

the land are either killed or wounded or displaced, a scene Nehru and Gandhi

would never have imagined

when They were talking about the rights of oppressed peoples on earth.

Has the era of India’s historic support for the Palestinians come to an end?