Essa is perhaps the foremost voice decrying close relations between India and Israel. He deems them twin purveyors of “settler-colonialism, occupation and apartheid.”
Indeed, Hostile Homelands is just Essa’s latest effort. Since 2021, he ran a Substack newsletter titled “Militarists and Vegetarians” that critiques the India-Israel relationship. He writes columns for Qatari-government owned outlets such as Al Jazeera and Middle East Eye, his most recent employers, making the same argument. Point being, Essa is a single-minded zealot who focuses on one, very narrow, goal: to portray the India-Israel relationship as something distinctly sinister and dangerous.
Essa’s book has five topics: the partitions at the birth of both countries, military cooperation between the two, “Hindutva and Zionism,” Israeli and Indian diaspora lobbies in the United States, and a comparison of disputes over Kashmir and the Palestinian territories. Essa, an ethnic Indian Muslim born in South Africa, examines these issues from the hard left, more than that of Islam. He frequently uses words like “colonialism,” “imperialism,” and other buzzwords. He relies on quotation marks to indicate claims made by his opponents are pretextual, ridiculous, or otherwise not worthy of his time, i.e., Pakistani “aggression,” “Islamic terrorism,” Muslim “invasions” of India, and so on. He also describes normal things as frightening; the discussion of India-Israel military cooperation turning a thriving but normal military collaboration into something uniquely sinister.
Likewise, Essa disparages Indian and Israeli diaspora lobbying in the United States as beyond the pale, as well as this reviewer and the Middle East Forum,[1] all while lionizing mirror-image activities of groups like the Indian American Muslim Council, Jamaat-e-Islami’s Islamic Circle of North America, and Stand With Kashmir. Indeed, he singles out the latter for praise as an effective “grassroots advocacy group” - which is perhaps not surprising, as Essa is married to its co-founder, Hafsa Kanjwal, something he never mentions.
Hostile Homelands does not intend to persuade but to outrage those who already agree with its point of view. Essa dismisses any counterpoint as irrelevant, or a bad joke, and assumes the reader will agree with him.
[1] Essa also attacks several other MEF staff and fellows. We are writers of “hit pieces” and “rants” that promote “conspiracies,” and participate in the “Zionist Backlash Network.” He blames MEF for causing the Indian government to ban a website for an organization run by his wife.
