Z

ionism is an ideology of demands. It operates with the assumption that its friends will absorb a measure of pain. Democratic states adopting its agenda have consistently shown identical, captive behaviour—most notably, a hostility to their own character. The CBFC’s blocking of Oscar-nominated The Voice of Hind Rajab—exactly fitting this pattern—confirms an unnerving suspicion: Narendra Modi, the first Indian recipient of the Grand Collar of Palestine, is leading India’s first Zionist government. 

The CBFC felt that greenlighting the film would “break up the India-Israel relationship”. The Voice of Hind Rajab—a docudrama on Israel’s execution of a six-year-old girl—attempts to humanise Palestinians killed in the ongoing genocide in Gaza. The government is using an Article 19 reasonable restriction which allows censorship to protect “friendly relations with foreign nations”.      

This exploits the constitution by entirely blinding it to India-Palesine relations. If Israel needs protection, should the same not apply to the ethnically cleansed? Will relations with Palestinians not degrade upon blocking a film about their extermination? Should the reasonable restriction not apply to the opposite: blocking zionist propaganda in support of allies under occupation? 

There is no official regulation on behalf of Palestinians. Alan Dershowitz’s brutally debunked A Case for Israel is freely available in India. Wonder Woman 1984, starring an ex-IDF soldier who supports mass killings in Gaza, was freely released all over India. Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, who once complained of being prevented from starving Palestinians, came to New Delhi without incident and signed a trade deal.           

This tolerance was not extended to The Voice of Hind Rajab, releasing which would, if anything, reflect both constitutional purpose and India’s anticolonial antecedents.   

To banish cinema for Israel is, however, unsurprising in light of the invariable trajectory of constitutional democracies—once they yield to zionism. While the genocide, beginning in 2023, uniquely amplified every crude posture liberal democracies adopt for Israel, the targeting of antizionist cinema has a longer history. 

Jenin Jenin, 5 Broken Cameras and Paradise Now, among others, faced dedicated pressure campaigns in previous decades. In the post-2023 reality, No Other Land, Palestinian Stories and Palestine 36 have suffered similar censorship. 

Last year, the Indian government blocked 19 films, many critical of Israel, from being screened at a Kerala film festival. India is scaling the documented and destructive graph of zionism—a colonial movement for the creation, preservation and expansion of a Jewish-majority state in Palestine. 

Escalating symptoms 

When a democracy becomes a “reliable partner” of Israel, governments demonstrate inward aggression. They begin to disregard the optics of justifying Israel’s war crimes—a fascinating abandonment of political Darwinism and self-interest. They adopt evasive, fantastical languages centred around the physical and emotional security of zionists. Even as they morally and politically wither before their media and societies, reliable partners stay loyal to the graph.      

Antiwar protests suffer violent crackdowns; critics of Israel in media, politics, arts and academia are persecuted; Israel’s enemies become one’s own, even if domestic. The killing of over 75,000 people, including by chemical weapons and forced starvation, is explained in terms of security.   

Such a prospect is inching closer. It offends India’s history and constitution in serious ways. A secular democracy with constitutional guarantees including freedom of expression (and of consuming free expression) seems theoretical. Materially, India is a polity which promotes The Kerala Story and bans The Voice of Hind Rajab.   

The government is depriving citizens of information about the execution of minors. A secular voice for decolonised nations is sheltering an officially communal settler colony. India seeks to project an enhanced image as a peace-brokering mediator while it helps make the weapons responsible for the largest group of pediatric amputees in history. It offers supportive rhetoric to Palestinians while learning desalination techniques from the occupiers of their water. It glorifies security forces then does them the indignity of getting trained by ethnic cleansers. 

The gravity cannot be overstated. Israel is diplomacy’s most radioactive entity and befriending it endorses a dark trifecta not observed since Nazi Germany: occupation, apartheid and genocide.

India is already here. Further up the graph lies a loose alliance of zionist pressure groups along the lines of AIPAC, Bat Shalom and ADL hunt dissent with impunity. Countries across Europe and the Americas have long been on this path, collapsing elementary logic trying to square their national ethos with support for Israel. 

Reliable partners

Europe’s postwar anti-Holocaust maxim of Never Again exists alongside abetment to genocide. It has publicly supported Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, who is wanted by the ICC. As major signatories to the Rome Statute, Britain, France and Germany are legally bound to arrest him. He has since freely flown over France. They are avoiding international law because they helped subvert it; they supplied weapons to the war criminals they are bound to apprehend.

This comes at a political, financial and reputational cost. Unfailingly, they disregard appearing pathetically leveraged and absorb the pain for Israel.

Germany formally sees Israel’s security as its staatsräson, or reason of state; it supports Israel unconditionally. What it considers atonement for its WWII crimes had led Berlin to be complicit in its second genocide in 80 years. It is uniquely tied to Israel and, much like Israel—but on the other end—exhibits a cruel and confused pathology shaped by the Holocaust. Fuelled by this pathology, it has made unserious arguments about Iran being a threat to its security; it has attacked antizionist Germans; it has both broken international law and openly called for its suspension.     

In 2024, hundreds of Maccabi Tel Aviv football hooligans—IDF reservists—descended upon Amsterdam. They attacked citizens and shouted slogans including “Death to Arabs!” and “Why is school out in Gaza? There are no children left there!” The Dutch establishment did not enforce hate speech laws. Instead, it invoked Kristallnacht, reaffirmed its commitment to fighting antisemitism and shielded the IDF reservists who were chanting about eliminating children nine months after the death of Hind Rajab.  

While the Netherlands protected hateful slogans, Queensland has done the inverse—to the same end. This month, it became the first Australian state to ban the phrase “From the river to the sea”. The contrast between banned and tolerated slogans illustrates the issue in its full, ugly scope.              

The US has extracted a passivity to Israel from most West Asian nations. Their populations overwhelmingly disapprove of the Israeli project. There is no popular support for the Abraham Accords, a US endeavour for Muslim nations to recognise Israel. Caving in to the accords may result in discord in Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Turkey and the precarious, US-pliant Gulf monarchies which risk dethronement over Israel. There are fatal precedents, too: former Egyptian President Anwar Sadat was assassinated in 1981 for normalising relations with Israel. 

None of this, however, rivals the damage zionism has caused the United States–home to dispensationalist Christian Zionism—which has a Jewish population roughly equal to Israel.   

The “special relationship” with Israel has near dismantled America’s democracy. Criticism of Israel in American political culture bears similarities to framing the Kashmir situation in any unconventional terms in India: you don’t do it if you want a career in politics. Political ambition in the US is deeply regulated by zionist donorship, which has coerced US politics into a remarkable place where the only consensus between bitter opponents is support for genocide.     

The first amendment of the US constitution is the strongest free speech guarantor in history. Yet, it has not proven resilient enough to survive Israel. Zionists have attacked the first amendment with the full apparatus of their financial and social capital. Pressure groups of every shade—from committees like AIPAC to thuggish circles like Beitar US—exist as protected entities. Pro-Israel donors cultivate democratic and republican senators in lifelong capacities by spending millions of dollars on their campaigns. Zionism, an extractive idea, expects grand returns.   

And it has received them. During the genocide, campus protests faced violent repression; teachers and students have been removed from universities. Individuals and groups have been hounded in systematic efforts to quell criticism. Politicians showing the mildest dissent have been condemned. 

This does nothing for the enforcers of the crackdown. In fact, it is opposed to their interests. The democrats’ culpability in the genocide proved disastrous for Kamala Harris’ failed presidential bid and helped elect Donald Trump. 

The US is the starkest example of disengagement with self-interest. Israel has stolen and distributed its military secrets; it has dragged it into needless wars; it has free healthcare while receiving hundreds of billions in aid from the US, which does not; it attacked the USS Liberty, killing 34 American personnel. Zionism in the US has only expanded.    

A new phenomenon, however, is threatening Israel, which relies on Washington for physical, diplomatic and financial security, bagging nearly $4 billion annually from its exchequer. Israel is increasingly losing the support of its most dependable asset, conservative America.

The Israeli shadow over the Epstein revelations has reacted wildly with the American right’s affinity for conspiracy theories; there is resentment over tax dollars servicing a foreign country which routinely erodes national image; questions still linger over the killing of popular conservative Charlie Kirk, who faced zionist pressures after he cautioned against attacking Iran and questioned Israel’s utility.   

From Murdoch-trained conservative mainstays to the Groyper Movement, conservatives are, for the first time, beginning to seriously question Israel. Significantly, some dissent is coming from a place of American Christianity.

The democratic party, too, is in mutation. Wrecked by voter alienation caused by the genocidal Biden-Harris government, it is changing to survive. Elizabeth Warren, Zohran Mamdani, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are openly taking antizionist stances. Democratic California governor Gavin Newsom, expected to run for president in 2028, is crossing invisible lines and publicly using words like “apartheid”. This reflects a new understanding of the younger democratic base.

If conservatives pivot away and accepting zionist donations becomes a generalised political liability in the US, Israel may not recover. Zionists see this and are already cultivating other nations.      

Zio Rashtra   

If zionism is able to properly unpack in India, corporate media could feel compelled to sift electoral candidates who indicate support for Israel from those do not. A failure to demonstrate fealty may result in smears, physical threats or windfalls for opponents. Media houses could be purchased and emptied of inconvenience.

More concerning than a zionist government is a zionism-addled state. State, because zionist influence is a resourced, multinodal and deeply motivated activity which outlasts parties and leaders. Zionism is not interested in governments. It seeks a direct connection with state power. It then creates sympathetic camps within public and private institutions while embedding itself within a state’s security apparatus. Rapports between governments and PMs are illusory. Zionism is courting the Indian state.  

For example, the government has allowed Israeli cybersecurity firms Check Point and Cyberark—firms with deep ties to Israeli intelligence—to heavily invest in India and handle sensitive government data. This incredibly compromising act can outlive a regime and weaken the state.    

Zionism demands self harm. It forces states to repress what they guarantee. The constitution—promising vast and equal freedoms—is having its restrictions weaponised against it.

It is unconstitutional to block Indians from knowing what Hyderabad-made Hermes 900 drones are being used for in Gaza. By actively preventing the public from watching The Voice of Hind Rajab, the government has exhibited the most definitive trait of zionist co-option: a bizarre willingness to appear constitutionally bankrupt to one’s own population—for a settler colonial ethnostate with no constitution.

It is important to create the political conditions required to exit the zionist graph. India is increasingly being seen as a moral rogue within Global South nations. It is losing its anticolonial moorings. It does not need another supremacist ideology to ravage its charter.

Zionist influence—public and private—needs ruthless institutional erasure. India’s interests require adopting the only reasonable position to ever exist in this affair: a clear demand to end the occupation and honour the Palestinians’ right of return.

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