What India Buys Into When It Buys Israeli Arms

The Wire

08-08-2025

Books
Marcy Newman
The crimes we see happening in Gaza today are being replicated in the rest of Palestine and across the world, because nations buying these weapons will mimic Israel's behaviour. Antony Loewenstein's significant book documents how.
In the last several months, in Karnataka alone, India has put on display the ways in which it colludes with Israel's militaristic economy. In February, the Invest Karnataka meeting in Bengaluru, featured a panel titled 'Sky to Soil: How Indian-Israeli Cooperation in Drones, Agri-Tech, and Clean Energy is Driving Sustainable Innovation.' Just after the brief ceasefire took effect in late January, this meeting presented the ruse of military technology being used to support sustainable agriculture. This is Israel's agro-diplomacy and it's one of the many ways it dupes the Global South into collaborating on militarised agribusiness deals. One doesn't have to look much farther than Israel's scorched earth policy in Gaza, where farmers are met with empty fields and toxic soil, to know that sustainable agriculture is the farthest thing from their agenda.
In fact, in Narendra Modi's India, Israel doesn't have to camouflage its intentions at all. In Bengaluru's Aero India 2025 event, also held in February, the Embassy of Israel – Defense Section, along with its heaviest hitters, Elbit Systems, Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, and Israel Aerospace Industries, exhibited their wares which are responsible for massacring tens of thousands of Palestinians.
Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World, Antony Loewenstein, Verso, 2023.
It's alarming that Israel is allowed to do this in India on the heels of a genocide, and in the midst of a ceasefire that it has broken daily. But that's also the point of Antony Loewenstein's significant book and companion film airing on Al Jazeera, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World, which documents precisely how they use their knowledge from an apartheid regime to sell that to countries around the world – including the world's most authoritarian states.
Originally released in 2023, Loewenstein's updated edition, and recently published in India, comes with a new preface titled 'The Gaza Laboratory,' which brings readers up to speed in the context of Israel's recent genocide. He demonstrates how this live-streamed genocide has enabled its tools to be 'proudly displayed on social media for both a domestic and international audience as well as potential global buyers. Israel used artificial intelligence-enabled weapons striking non-military targets with unprecedented ferocity. It's a 'mass assassination factory'' (xvi).
That mass assassination factory is Brand Israel through and through. It's been something Israel's armament companies have long profited from. Dictatorships, repressive regimes, genocidal governments have been Israel's most willing customers from the beginning.
Loewenstein covers this historical trajectory, meticulously highlighting the hypocrisy of a Jewish state selling weapons to countries like Paraguay and Argentina which were, at the time, welcoming Nazis fleeing Europe with open arms. Throughout the twentieth century, Loewenstein reveals, Israel materially supported genocides in Indonesia, Guatemala, Rwanda, and Sudan.
More recently, Israel ignored the arms embargo against Myanmar, because of its genocide against the Rohingya minority, and allowed 'a secret delegation from Myanmar [to visit] Israel's defense industries and naval and air bases to negotiate deals for drones, a mobile phone-hacking system, rifles, military training, and warships'. In addition to its role in training and arming génocidaires, Israel has an even longer history of arming repressive regimes through weapons sales, more often than not as a cover for the United States.
It's a sick logic that finds Israel's so-called 'success' on the battlefield as encouragement to purchase their products of death.
Loewenstein notes:
'Israeli arms sales in 2021 were the highest on record, surging 55 percent over the previous two years to US$11.3 billion. Europe was the biggest recipient of these weapons… Rockets, aerial defense systems, missiles, cyberweapons and radars… The result is that Israel is now one of the top ten weapons dealers in the world, having sold a range of equipment to nations including India, Azerbaijan and Turkey, that worsened conflicts in their own regions. The Israeli government approved every defense deal brought to it since 2007' (9-10).
These nations, including India, are not merely buying military materiel. They're also buying into the brand of ethnonationalist supremacy Israel puts on full display for the world to see. How Israel traffics in genocide, flaunting every law placed in its way, is precisely what these countries hope to emulate.
Israel and India's relationship has grown dangerously enmeshed since 2014. As Loewenstein says:'The growing affection between Israel and India was not just ideological, a mutual embrace of ethnonationalism – the exchange of defense equipment helped enforce it.' (126). That bond has made India Israel's largest weapons export market. When India acquired the cyber-weapon, Pegasus, from Israel's NSO Group, the state compromised a huge swath of civil society.
Loewenstein profiles Nihalsing Rathod, a lawyer whose work on the Elgar Parishad case left him, and his entire network, vulnerable to being hacked: 'The role of NSO and cyber hacking actors [are] 'digital infections' that do not 'target civil society actors as individuals, but rather as networks of collaboration.'
Also read: In What Language, Under Total Surveillance, Does Truth Speak to a Tormented People?
The group found that in India, Mexico and Saudi Arabia, one person is initially hacked 'before their professional networks are targeted within a similar time period. In each of these examples the use of Pegasus occurs after or during periods where these civil society networks expose or confront controversial or criminal state policy'' (152). Regardless, there have been no repercussions and no oversight for NSO or the Indian government for introducing spyware into civil society. There's still a great deal we don't know about the damage it's done. Only a few months ago the Catalan government ruled that the NSO group's founders can be charged for hacking a Catalan lawyer's phone.
According to Loewenstein, Israel makes decisions about which nations to sell to based on 'espionage diplomacy.' It calculates that these nations will then support its efforts to gaslight the world about its apartheid and genocidal policies against the Palestinian people, as well as its encroachment of Lebanese and Syrian land. With the weapons deal comes an expectation of reciprocity (especially when they sell arms to countries no one else will sell to). One element of that reciprocity is that the buyer votes to shield Israel from accountability in the United Nations.
As Loewenstein's reporting painstakingly shows his readers, when a nation purchases Israeli missiles, spyware, drones, or any other military materiel, it has blood on its hands. It enables Israel to maintain and profit off of the world's largest open-air prison: 'Gaza is now the perfect laboratory for Israeli ingenuity in domination.…Today its population has been placed in a forced experiment of control where the latest technology and techniques are tested. However, what is happening in Gaza is increasingly occurring globally' (73).
The crimes we see happening in Gaza today are being replicated in the rest of Palestine and across the world, because nations buying these weapons will mimic Israel's behaviour. This is what India is entering into when it does business with Israel, for a drip-irrigation system or drones. The Palestine Laboratory is a book to pore over to gain a sense of what we are all buying into.
Watch episode one and two of The Palestine Laboratory here.
Marcy Newman is author of The Politics of Teaching Palestine to Americans. She is a member of Jewish Voice for Peace and the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network.
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