Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Prime Minister Narendra Modi shared a particularly warm embrace on Wednesday as the Indian Prime Minister disembarked from Air India One at Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport, a moment that demonstrated the political closeness of the two leaders. During the prime minister’s two-day visit, the two countries signed several agreements that are expected to further strengthen the already deepening partnership between Israel and India.
Prime Minister Modi has long been the driving force behind this closeness. His visit in 2017 was the first visit to Israel by an Indian prime minister and signaled a decisive shift in bilateral relations. In an Instagram post on Wednesday, Netanyahu called the trip a “historic visit” and later received a standing ovation at a reception in the Israeli Knesset, where he declared, “This is true friendship between two leaders, between two countries, between two ancient nations.”
Of course, this friendship does not only depend on the agreements and treaties that the two leaders plan to sign. The Israeli prime minister’s wife, Sara Netanyahu, wore orange and saffron, the colors of Hindutva, when she greeted Modi on the tarmac at Ben-Gurion Airport. The Israeli prime minister also pointed out that her attire matched the orange pocket square worn by PM Modi.
The prominence of Hindutva’s distinctive colors was difficult to ignore, suggesting a clear understanding and affirmation of the ideological framework that underpins Modi’s politics. The ideological partnership between Prime Minister Netanyahu and Prime Minister Modi is based on the belief that both leaders stand as a bulwark against what they see as an existential civilizational struggle against Islam and Islamism. Bibi’s Israel is meant to serve as a haven for all Jews, and Modi’s India is meant to keep Hindus safe.
But it is worth asking whose security is really guaranteed in Israel and India.
The genocide in Gaza and the ongoing settler violence and annexation of Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank are just the latest reminders that Palestinians cannot expect safety in their holy land. Israel’s Palestinian citizens, who make up about 19 percent of the population, face various forms of institutionalized discrimination and are, in fact, Israel’s “lower people,” as Amnesty International puts it.
But not all Jews in Israel are “safe,” either. Racism against Mizrahi Jews is a matter of official policy and is built into the very foundations of the Israeli state.
The clear hostility of Mizrahi Jews towards their Middle Eastern roots was such that Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founder of revisionist Zionism and the Zionist paramilitary organization Irgun, said, “Thank God, we Jews have nothing in common with the so-called Orient.” Insofar as our uneducated masses (i.e. Middle Eastern Jews) have ancient spiritual traditions and laws called the Orient, they must be separated from them. And this is what it really is. We are doing what life itself is doing with great success, in all proper schools. We will first go to Palestine, for the convenience of the nation, to thoroughly purge it of all traces of the Oriental soul. ”
Declassified state documents reveal that thousands of infants from Arab-Jewish families who arrived in Israel after the country’s founding were stolen by hospitals and clinics and handed over to “wealthy Jewish families in Israel and abroad.” Families in Yemen suffer the “highest proportion of disappearances.” It is estimated that by the time the state of Israel was six years old, “one in eight children under the age of four (in Yemeni families)” had gone missing.
Racism is not a problem of the past, and this white supremacy is increasingly evident in the structural and everyday racism faced by Ethiopian Jews. Although they make up only 2 percent of the population, more than half of Ethiopia’s Jewish population lives below the poverty line. With their neighborhoods chronically under-resourced, Ethiopian Jewish children and youth face alarming increases in drug abuse, violence, and high school dropout rates, as well as depression and suicide.
Reflecting on this experience, one participant in a study published by the Association for Jewish Studies said, “No matter what we do, this is the result: ‘These Ethiopians, these barbarians, they are infiltrating Israel.'” For example, consider police racism. Even though this is our home, they treat us like invaders and criminals. And strangest of all, who knows alienation better than Jews? We were not accepted in Europe because we were Jewish, now they won’t accept us because we are black? You have been discriminated against and now you are discriminating against us. I don’t accept myself! We’re part of you, can’t you see?”
These realities show that Israel is not a safe place for all Jews.
India is no exception. The structural and everyday discrimination faced by the country’s Muslim minority is well documented across legal, political, and social domains. Critics and opposition voices remain under threat. But are all Hindus safe under the leadership of Hindu nationalists?
Although caste-based discrimination was not invented by this government, it remains a core feature of Indian society and has been further reinforced under the Modi government.
In January, the University Grants Commission (UGC) introduced regulations on promoting equity in higher education institutions. The move follows pressure from the Supreme Court to address harassment and discrimination faced by Dalit students. The regulation “places direct responsibility on heads of educational institutions to prevent and respond to discrimination on the basis of caste, religion, sex, or disability by students, teachers, or non-teaching staff.” The measure faced immediate backlash, and the court has since “upheld the new regulations.”
Behind these regulations is the tragic record of suicides among Dalit students. This includes the highly publicized case of Rohith Vemula, a Dalit PhD candidate at the University of Hyderabad in 2016. Vemula has been active in raising the issue of caste discrimination on campus, sparking complaints from the student wing of Prime Minister Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The matter reached Smriti Irani, then the human resources development minister in the Modi government, who asked the university leadership to investigate. Vemula was suspended from the fellowship and forced to move out of the dormitory.
He died by suicide on January 16, 2016, with his suicide note stating that “birth was a fatal accident.”
A 2021 Pew survey found that a majority of Indians “do not perceive widespread discrimination against scheduled castes or tribes.” However, UGC data for 2025 shows that caste-related complaints are on the rise. Employment patterns also reproduce caste hierarchies, with 77 percent of sewer and septic tank workers coming from Dalit communities. Research shows that caste hierarchies are increasingly reproduced in artificial intelligence systems. The anti-aggressive actions of the Hindu nationalist diaspora also demonstrate that caste hierarchies extend beyond national borders.
Given the bromance between Prime Minister Modi and Prime Minister Netanyahu, what is the point in unearthing this record of exclusion, discrimination and hierarchy? Of course, even if racism did not exist in Israeli society, or even if casteism were abolished in India, this in no way means that their ideology and political behavior would become more acceptable. Rather, it is meant to highlight the extensive and multifaceted nature of the hierarchies and structures of exclusion propagated by both leaders. The main targets of their discourse and policies are Palestinians in Palestine and Israel, and Muslims in India. But supporters of their politics are equally eager to weaponize this discourse and state strategy to target those who do not fit into their hegemonic conceptions of life and politics.
So really, no one is safe in Israel and India.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.
