Essa Azad - Hostile Homelands

Hostile Homelands

Todays Israel and Modis India are natural partners, sharing values of racist ethnocracy and illegal annexation, and, for Israel, offering a market for military and other advanced technology. This valuable study traces the complex evolution of their relationship from their independence to its recent blossoming as the societies and the international context changed, providing particularly rich insights into Indias development through this period.

Noam Chomsky

This is a brilliantly written book and a call for global solidarity. Essa reveals the mutual agenda of the unholy India-Israeli ethno-nationalistic alliance, showing just why both those states are a danger to progressive internationalism. In dealing with the rise of Zionism, along with Modis capture of state power in India, he deals with their ramifications on Kashmir and Palestine, on Indian diaspora and Israels role in Africa.

Ronnie Kasrils, former South African Intelligence Minister, author and activist

For decades, Indias leaders spoke in hushed tones about their relationship with Israel. Azad Essas thoroughly-researched and crisply-written Hostile Homelands reveals the long history of their alliance and shows how it is built on shared supremacist ideological projects whose devastating and inhumane consequences are borne by Palestinians and Kashmiris living under occupations. This is an essential, must-read book.

Mohamad Junaid, anthropologist and Kashmiri writer

Azad Essas brilliant and courageous book is the definitive treatment of the overlooked alliance between the far-right wing governments of India and Israel. This text is essential reading for the escalating neo-fascist forces in our turbulent times.

Cornel West

A necessary and urgent account.

Siddhartha Deb, author of The Beautiful and The Damned: New Life in India

Hostile Homelands is an authoritative study of the past and present of India-Israel relations. It reveals a troubling convergence of Hindu nationalist and Zionist worldviews. Equally, the book is a useful primer for thinking about how and why illiberal, authoritarian and Islamophobic forces are building alliances, globally.

Somdeep Sen, Associate Professor and Head of Studies, Global & Development Studies, Roskilde University, Denmark

A revealing expos of the complex history behind the current Israeli-Indian relationship. Hostile Homelands traces the current Zionist-Hindu Nationalism alliance throughout the years, deconstructing the relationship between Delhi and Tel Aviv starting from the time of seeming hostility and political expediency following Indias independence, to the gradual and, eventually, complete affinity between both countries. Essas book provides a critical reading of an involved and rarely covered subject that spans far-right nationalist ideologies, powerful financial and military interests, as well as human solidarity. This book is an essential read that challenges the typical understanding of Zionism as an exclusively European phenomenon and Hindu nationalism as a provisional Indian experience.

Ramzy Baroud, author of Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders & Intellectuals Speak Out

Hostile Homelands quest is formidable and timely. Azad Essa lays bare the historically malignant roots of an often overlooked and underestimated kinship between two ideologiesZionism and Hindutvahungry for land and hungrier for dominance.

Mohammed El-Kurd, author of Rifqa

In this volume, Essa forces us to confront the grotesque end-game of colonial violence Modis India and Zionist Israel. The enduring and shape-shifting connections between these ethnonationalist entities offer a profound wake-up call, a realization that today, the most vocal among the worlds purported democracies are, at their core, the most profoundly anti-democratic.

Nazia Kazi, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Anthropology, Stockton University, NJ

A meticulously researched and well-crafted book on the under-covered subject of the ever-evolving relationship between India and Israel. If there is any authority on the topic today, it is Azad Essa, who delivers a comprehensive and detailed account of a special relationship in need of examination and critique. As he takes readers through the history of the diplomatic, military and economic ties between India and Israel, Essa insightfully explores what happens when a nation negotiates the tension between principles and interests and what happens when, particularly under the ethnonationalism of Narendra Modi, they converge.

Laila Al-Arian, Al Jazeera English

This is the definitive book on Indian-Israel relations that we have been waiting for. Hostile Homelands is not only an intellectual tour de force; just as importantly it will also foster new solidarities and anti-imperialist organizing.

Jasbir Puar, author of The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Debility

The New Alliance Between India and Israel

Azad Essa

Foreword by Linah Alsaafin

First published 2023 by Pluto Press

New Wing, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 1LA and Pluto Press Inc.

1930 Village Center Circle, 3-834, Las Vegas, NV 89134

www.plutobooks.com

Copyright Azad Essa 2023

The right of Azad Essa to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 0 7453 4501 7 Paperback

ISBN 978 0 7453 4505 5 PDF

ISBN 978 0 7453 4503 1 EPUB

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.

Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England

Simultaneously printed in the United Kingdom and United States of America

For my Hafsa

We were mistaken when we thought the homeland was only the past... the homeland is the future.

Ghassan Kanafani, Palestines children:
returning to Haifa and other stories

Its been 10 years since Azad Essa visited Palestine. In the decade since, we struck a friendship that tipped into mentorship, and later onfor a brief period of timebecame colleagues working for the same media company. I met him in Ramallah, after my brotherwho couldnt come back to the occupied West Bank because unlike most of my family, he did not have a West Bank IDcalled to ask if I could show his friend around in order to avoid the trappings of conflict tourism. For a week, Azad and I traipsed around the different cities and villages in the West Bank, which is saturated with checkpoints, inaccessible Jewish-only settlements, and Israeli soldiers. Beyond that ugly facade, he was introduced to the rich history of Nablus and its shopkeepers, the alleyways and ancient churches of Bethlehem, and the gritty hardiness of Hebrons Old City.

At my insistence, since my Israeli military-issued ID restricts me to one territory, he visited Jerusalem and Yafaonce called the Bride of the Sea before 1948 but now a neglected southern suburb of Tel Aviv, a city that itself is built upon the remains of six ethnically cleansed Palestinian villages. Inevitably, his visit resulted in a determination on his part not just to study the cruelty meted out by a state against a colonized population, but a resolve for placing such power in relation to the support and facilitation awarded to it by other countries.