A major global turning point was the sudden end of the Cold War with its collapse of the Communist bloc and their transformation into capitalist countries having varying degrees of state control and guidance of the economy. From the 1990s onwards till the present we have seen more and more governments worldwide shift towards ever greater accommodation with Israel even as Tel Aviv has consistently betrayed, in letter and spirit, what it was supposed to do under the Oslo and later Accords. Gaza was turned into the world’s largest open-air prison; settlements expanded in the West Bank; the Fatah leadership and security structure of the PA turned into a subcontractor of the illegal Occupation and the PA’s economic reproduction made dependent on Western largesse.
Even member countries in the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) and certainly the countries of the Middle East and North Africa where dictatorships and monarchical rule of one kind or the other has survived longer than elsewhere, did little to disturb Israel’s ‘management’- an ugly euphemism for the brutal manner in which it has sustained its control of, and expansion in the occupied territories. Besides the Iran-led ‘axis of resistance’ the other counter-trend to this steady drift by governments towards more accommodation with Israel has been the rise of greater civil society support for the Palestinian cause especially in UK, Western Europe, North America as well as in parts of Latin America, Southeast Asia and Africa, especially South Africa which overcame its apartheid past.
What then is the story in India? As mentioned in the beginning of this text, civil society protests in India in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have been comparatively weaker than in other countries considered democratic. To move in a more positive direction and chart a way forward we need to understand why this has been the case, the better to be able to change it. One part of the story is repression and legal actions by the Hindutva government and by its vigilante groups who do nasty social trolling, register false cases with colluding police and lower courts, even on occasions physically attack Palestine supporters deemed ‘anti-national’ (Gungor 2024). The other part of the story lies with the socio-economic character of Indian society.
Though India’s current population is around 1.4 billion, the working population is around 640 million with over half being in the primary agricultural/fishing/mining sector. Only around seven percent work in the formal sector receiving regular wages, paid leave, social security benefits and job security. The rest are in the informal sector having none of the protections of the formal sector, are lower paid and do not have the formal right to have unions (Tehelka 2022). As it is, only an estimated three percent of the work force are in Trade Unions (TUs) and the overwhelming majority of these belong to larger Federations themselves under the control of different political parties and obedient to their respective political lines. The biggest such Federation today comes under the BJP, the next under the Congress and then come smaller ones under left wing and other regional parties. What this has long meant is that the vast majority of the public have been preoccupied with basic livelihood issues and with concerns relating to democratic freedoms and rights.
Yet this is also the reason why there are social movements that have emerged independent of political parties. These have focused on specific development policy concerns that have caused economic suffering, on violations of particular freedoms and on forms of discrimination, social and regional. For the general public, foreign policy issues have been seen as remote from weightier domestic preoccupations and problems. So, for the most part they go along with what the organisations they feel affiliated to say, be these political parties, TUs or the socio-religious bodies they identify with that provide emotional and some degree of material support.
The point is simple.
Until more recently, pro-Palestine protests and larger scale demos have over the years taken place very sporadically in the main metropolises of Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai, Hyderabad and occasionally extending to other urban centres. These mobilisations are invariably organised by the mainstream parliamentary left parties who rely on their trade union, and more so on their student wings, to achieve a reasonable turnout. Also willing to express their public solidarity on occasions are Muslim political parties, religious organisations and Muslim Student bodies though it is more the religious prism, rather than that of a universal humanism, through which they look at the Palestinian issue.12 Not surprisingly, one place where the majority Muslim community feels a particular affinity with the plight of Palestinians in the OTs is in the Kashmir Valley where for decades there has been a huge presence of Indian military armed personnel of all kinds. Shortly after 7 October 2023 in the face of the Israeli assault there were congregational prayers and protests across several mosques in Kashmir (Zargar 2023). Official authorities however subsequently imposed restrictions to bar all forms of solidarity for Palestine in Kashmir including warnings to Muslim clerics not to mention Palestine in sermons. Despite this there have been outbreaks of solidarity action, the more recent in March and June 2025 (Yusuf 2025; The Wire 2025).13
Until more recently, pro-Palestinian solidarity action by organisations that are both secular and independent from political control from above has, unlike in the West, not been a significant feature or presence. In Western liberal democracies it is the more comfortably placed middle class (income-wise) freer from worry about basic livelihood needs that has been more preoccupied with foreign policy issues and the stances taken by their respective governments. The problem with the so-called Indian middle class, which over the last two decades has been growing, is that on average its political orientation has been more reactionary than progressive, hence the growing support for the BJP and Hindutva more generally not just among the elite but also among the upper, middle and lower layers of what is termed the middle class.
Nevertheless, there are progressive sections within this middle class, and these have grown in numbers and because of social media have also become more aware of what is happening in the world and in Palestine in particular. It is this section, especially the youth, that has expanded the socio-political reservoir beyond the organised left parties, groups and group-lets (of which, given India’s continental size, there are many) for pursuing a host of progressive causes and for making commitments to and with the struggles of those more economically, politically and culturally deprived. There are now a variety of Palestine solidarity groups that have emerged up and down the country.
Some are connected to existing cultural, political or (Muslim) religious bodies. Others are more stand-alone solidarity groupings that are progressive and therefore more generally critical of Hindutva and the Modi government. These groups join in with the different actions organised by the big left parties and their affiliated women, student and union wings that mobilise numbers in the range of several hundred to several thousands.14 They also separately carry out their own actions individually or sometimes in collaboration with other such groups. They have provided information, analysis and videos on social media in English, Hindi and in regional languages. They have also carried out small scale street actions distributing leaflets, usually in states not ruled by the BJP. But even in those states these are frequently sudden ‘flash’ protests at a particular crowded market space or junction and then quickly moving away before the police arrive. Between May and mid-July this year, the outlets for McDonald’s and Domino’s Pizza have faced Boycott Disinvestment and Sanctions (BDS) protests. These have taken place in different cities such as Hyderabad, Pune, Delhi, Mumbai, Chandigarh and elsewhere. One must also mention the formation of the Indian Dancers for Gaza’s Children (IDGC) that through its performances raises money for humanitarian aid and connects to the Princess Basma Centre in Gaza for children with disabilities. All this is quite new and an expression of how Palestine has caught the imagination of a growing number of Indians particularly among the young.15 It is still an uphill battle against the Indian state, but advances are being made.
What then is the way forward? Almost all governments in their official positions say they are for a two-state solution to resolve the Israel-Palestine imbroglio. This has long been a convenient mask to cover-up these governments own failures, indeed their un-interestedness and unwillingness to do anything meaningful, whether individually or collectively, to help bring it about.
Leave aside Gaza, Israeli settlement expansion and armed interventions in the West Bank, often with the permission and sometimes collusion of Fatah, has effectively destroyed any chance of Palestinians getting at best anything more than a truncated and resource poor slice of territory-a Bantustan -if even that! Eradicating all the illegal Jewish settlements in what they call Judea and Samara is tantamount to asking Israel to risk nothing less than a civil war. In fact, the Hamas assault in 2023 has served as an excuse for openly advocating and for a systematic practical pursuit of what many on the political right and far-right, and even some centrists in Israel, consider their ‘Final Solution’.
This admittedly is a longer-term process but one which has now been put in motion. In Gaza it involves territorially taking over much or all of the north of the Gaza Strip. It means encouraging greater de-population through starvation, malnutrition, disease, military assaults and further displacement to even worse prison-like confinement in restricted parts of the South. The aim is to make life unliveable for most, if not all.
The latest plan is to keep the UN institutions out and disburse minimal aid at only a few distribution points. This plan is not at all intended to properly or fully address the basic food, health and shelter needs of Gazans but to assuage Israel’s allies who can then with a ‘better conscience’ keep quiet while the process of ethnic cleansing carries on. In this way the conditions will be created for more and more Palestinians in Gaza to opt for ‘voluntary transfer’ to other countries.
Here the Trump administration is playing its role of contacting various countries-Sudan, Somalia, Somaliland (a breakaway), Libya, Indonesia are apparently some-to whom financial and other offers may have been given. In the West Bank the illegal settlements will be expanded and control over Palestinians to be made ‘manageable’ through a stronger combination of repression and bribery for its leaders. There is also for Tel Aviv and Washington a particular version of the ‘Jordanian Option’ to consider. This would be to apply a similar strategy of sticks and carrots for its rulers to make Jordan, in large part or in its entirety, the Palestinian homeland, i.e., re-settling West Bank Palestinians there. However, both with respect to Gaza and the West Bank, there still remains for such Israeli ambitions a huge gap between intention and fulfilment.