Israel’s war on Gaza has not disturbed the flow of Israeli weapons to India. The supply of radars and drone components — two key Israeli weapons exports to India — remained steady after October 2023.
During the last decade, Israel has been New Delhi’s fourth-largest weapons provider. Military cooperation between both countries has revolved around the production of missiles and drones, and there are indications some of the products manufactured in India have been used in Gaza.
The growing military-industrial ties between Israel and India have received increased scrutiny in recent years. A prominent example of this trend is the book Hostile Homelands: The New Alliance Between India and Israel by Azad Essa.
Now, a new volume puts the focus on Indian-Israeli interactions in the field of so-called “homeland security” following the 2008 Mumbai attacks, also known as the 26/11 attacks as they took place on November 26. The Pakistani terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba was responsible for this series of coordinated attacks that left 175 people dead, including 9 attackers.
In Fabricating Homeland Security: Police Entanglements across India and Palestine/Israel, Rhys Machold exposes how the Indian security model was partly constituted through its encounters with Israeli arms companies and public officials.
Machold is a senior lecturer at the University of Glasgow’s School of Social and Political Sciences. His book relies on a vast array of interviews and visits to homeland security trade shows in Palestine/Israel, India, and the UK Arms dealers, human rights activists, policemen, and journalists all make their appearances in this impressively researched book.
Following the 26/11 massacre, both the Indian central government and the authorities in the state of Maharashtra (where Mumbai is located) wanted to signal to the population that they were acting decisively to prevent another terrorist attack. Although India and Israel did not establish full diplomatic relations until 1992, they had conducted secret military cooperation in the previous decades.
By 2008, Israeli arms companies were well-established in India. The fear of damaging these economic interests in India contributed to moderate the harsh criticism initially expressed by Israeli authorities towards India’s handling of the 26/11 attacks. During the attacks, which went on for four days, five hostages (among them a rabbi) were killed in a Jewish centre.
The presence of Israeli arms companies in India alone would probably have been insufficient for Israeli actors to play such a prominent role following the 26/11 attacks. However, since the 9/11 attacks in 2001, Israel had begun “to articulate its experience repressing and dispossessing Palestinians as a precursor to the emerging war on terror”, writes Machold.
Thus, Israel was not only selling its policing technology but also offering its own historical experience as proof of expertise. This is a slight variation of the “battle-tested” credentials that help drive up the volume of Israeli weapons exports. In 2009, a delegation of Maharashtra police officials visited Israel to “study the systems put in place by Israel to counter-terrorism”, according to the official explanation.
Starting the same year, Mumbai and Maharashtra police officers received training from Israelis in India. Indian police units acquired pistol modifications and imaging systems from Israeli companies, which also provided anti-ramming bollards and security gates to protect some of Mumbai’s main commercial and private buildings.
Although this is not mentioned in the book, the years following the attack also saw the introduction of a Central Monitoring System (CMS) in India with the help of Israeli security firms. This system of mass surveillance, able to monitor private communications, was described by Human Rights Watch in 2013 as “chilling” considering the Indian government’s “reckless and irresponsible use of the sedition and Internet laws.”
The arrival of Israeli companies offering training and weapons to the Indian police forces was facilitated by the porous borders between Israel’s private sector and governmental agents. Israeli firms greatly profited from the work of the SIBAT, the International Defense Cooperation Directorate of the Israel Ministry of Defense. Directories at the Israeli consulates and the SIBAT often connected Indian clients with Israeli arms companies.
Machold’s research shows that what happened after 26/11 was far more complicated than the transfer of weapons and training from Israel to India. Israeli officials and businessmen, together with Indian English-language media, wanted India to learn from Israel’s approach to homeland security and then replicate it.
According to the Israeli narrative, the country’s national security model is both unique (Israel’s specific history supposedly gives the country incomparable insights) and universal (because other countries can profit from it).
While the first claim was relatively successful, Indian officials were less convinced about the replicability of the Israeli model. Machold explains the story of an Indian police officer who received training from Israeli experts. After being shown a video of a police operation in Tel Aviv, the officer remarked that this kind of police deployment would not work in Mumbai, where crowds are much larger.
The officer took one of the trainers to the CST railway station in Mumbai at rush hour. The Israeli trainer acknowledged that his teachings were of limited use in Mumbai. Machold finds that Maharashtra officials “never envisaged to displace or replace their own Indian models of policing.” Instead, they were interested in “borrowing certain ideas and elements of (Israeli) homeland security while leaving others behind to service the Indian nation.”
The Israelis did not always graciously accept that their homeland security model was not easily replicable in India, or the Indian officials’ interest in selective borrowing. Israeli officials and businessmen repeatedly resorted to Orientalist tropes to explain the difficulties of establishing durable partnerships. When Machold interviewed them, Indians were commonly described as unfamiliar with modern weaponry, greedy, or lacking the appropriate “mentality” or “attitude.”
As the author puts it, Israeli interlocutors “did their best to rationalize the struggles and limited success in India as evidence of Indian backwardness.” Many Israeli companies that sought to do business in India following 26/11 failed to secure sizeable contracts and withdrew from the market in the following years.
As we have seen, Machold describes how Indian-Israeli interactions in the field of so-called “homeland security” were frequently dominated by mutual incomprehension. However, Indian and Israeli officials sometimes discovered that they both shared a common enemy, the Muslim Other. If Indian authorities were fixated on the threat of Indian Muslims and Pakistan, Israel saw its homeland security model as a bulwark against Palestinians, usually imagined as Muslim despite the significant Christian Palestinian minority.
For the Mumbai police, the Muslim Other is not a distant one. Around 20% of the city’s inhabitants are Muslim. During the last decades, through a process of ghettoization, Muslims have concentrated in specific city districts. These quarters, explains Machold, are often referred to as “Pakistan”, with their residents being labelled as “Pakistanis” and “anti-nationals” and receiving fewer governmental resources. Discrimination fuels higher levels of poverty and crime which, in a vicious cycle, become a justification for more intensive policing in these areas.
According to data from 2015, the Mumbai police are far from representative of the city’s population. Less than 3% of the constables are Muslim. Communal tensions in India frequently result in collective punishment for Muslims. This could be observed in Mumbai in January 2024 after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated a temple on the site of a former mosque in Ayodhya, northern India. Following religious clashes in Mumbai over the inauguration of the temple, the city’s authorities applied so-called “bulldozer justice” and demolished dozens of shopfronts belonging to Muslims.
The use of bulldozers for collective punishment, which brings to mind Israel’s demolition of Palestinian houses in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, has been on the rise in recent years. The institutional discrimination of Indian Muslims is not new, but it gained strength after Modi became prime minister in 2014. Modi ascribes to Hindutva, a political ideology with fascist elements that defends the hegemony of Hinduism in India.
Although Modi has cultivated close relations with Israel, especially with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Indian premier does not want to copy Israel directly. His interest appears to lie in selectively borrowing from the country. This can be seen in the import of Israeli weapons or the use of Pegasus, a spyware created by the Israeli firm NSO Group, to spy on critical Indian journalists.
In the epilogue to his book, Machold notes that talk about the “Israelization” of India is probably exaggerated. Modi’s outreach to Israel has increased Tel Aviv’s footprint in India. Still, similar to how the Maharashtra and Mumbai police forces interacted with Israeli officials and businessmen, Modi will ultimately decide how ties to Israel help advance his own ultra-nationalist project.
Marc Martorell Junyent is a graduate of International Relations and holds an MA in Comparative and Middle East Politics and Society from the University of Tübingen (Germany). He has been published in , , , and
Follow him on X: @MarcMartorell3
