India and Israel: Two Sides of the Same Occupying Coin

Two democracies. Two ancient civilizations. Two nations born amid conflict and shaped by security paranoia. India and Israel have long boasted of their strategic partnership—but in recent months, their actions have laid bare a disturbing convergence that goes far beyond shared technology or intelligence cooperation. It is a convergence rooted in aggression, occupation, and the systematic erosion of international norms.

When Israel carried out airstrikes deep into Iranian territory, targeting civilian infrastructure and nuclear energy sites, the world watched with alarm. The attack violated international law, endangered regional stability, and undermined the fragile architecture of diplomacy. But for those familiar with South Asia, the brazenness was eerily familiar. Just across the region, India has followed a similar script in its treatment of Pakistan—weaponizing air power, defying legal boundaries, and dressing aggression in the language of “preemptive security.”

India’s 2019 airstrike in Balakot set a dangerous precedent: a nuclear-armed nation justifying an incursion into another sovereign country’s territory without evidence, accountability, or remorse. That strike was cheered domestically, much like Israel’s actions often are. In both cases, nationalist fervor drowned out legal scrutiny. And in both cases, the targets were not advancing armies but symbolic outposts—meant more for political theater than actual military necessity.

This isn’t coincidence. It’s convergence.

India and Israel are two sides of the same coin—not because of their religious identities or democratic credentials, but because of a shared strategic ethos: assert dominance, claim victimhood, and deny culpability.

Both nations present themselves as victims of terrorism—while refusing to acknowledge the historical grievances and occupations that feed resistance. Both refuse to abide by UN resolutions—India on Kashmir, Israel on Palestine and the Golan Heights. Both court the West with promises of secularism and tech-savviness, while institutionalizing majoritarianism and suppressing dissent at home.

Their aggressive doctrines have become case studies in how to undermine the rules-based international order while claiming to uphold it. Israel’s decades-long occupation of Palestinian territories, its annexation of Syrian land, and now its attacks on Iranian soil, have been met with muted global responses. India, emboldened by its growing global stature, has replicated this impunity in Kashmir and along the Pakistan border—with preventive detentions, communication blackouts, and airspace violations becoming disturbingly routine.

What connects them is not just tactical mimicry—it’s a shared belief that force trumps law, and silence from allies means consent. Both countries enjoy close ties with Washington, receive sophisticated military hardware, and benefit from narratives that cast them as bulwarks against Islamic extremism. This framing absolves them of their own extremism, their own excesses, their own brutalities.

This alliance of aggression is particularly dangerous because it’s cloaked in the language of democracy. But democracies, if they are to mean anything, must be constrained by law, accountable to norms, and answerable to the global community. Neither India nor Israel, in their current trajectories, seems interested in those constraints.

What’s at stake here is more than regional peace. It’s the credibility of the international legal system. When powerful nations repeatedly violate the sovereignty of others and face no consequences, the signal to the rest of the world is clear: might makes right. The rules are optional.

If the world fails to confront this twin model of aggression—India’s in South Asia, Israel’s in the Middle East—it risks normalizing a new global order where borders are blurred, justice is selective, and occupation is rebranded as defense.

History has shown us the cost of appeasing powers that act with impunity. It’s time the world stops treating India and Israel as exceptions to international law—and starts holding them accountable as exemplars of what unchecked aggression looks like in the modern age.