Indian activist and educator Shrishti Khanna has claimed in an interview with an international media outlet that some cafes in India catering to Israeli tourists are restricting entry to Indians and other travellers.
According to Khanna, Israelis started travelling to India for holidays after completing their military service in the 1980s and their presence in the country has increased over the decades.
She said that there have now been reports of “Israelis-only” cafes along what she described as the “Hummus Trail”, claiming that Indian customers were previously not allowed into some cafes, raves and parties.
“These ‘Israelis-only’ cafes, they are of course only allowing white people and as I said, it’s becoming more and more exclusionary. They’ve created almost a hierarchy of power where Indians are not allowed, other white people are not allowed,” Khanna said.
She claimed that the exclusion had become broader, saying that some of these spaces were now also turning away other white people and travellers.
“These ‘Israelis-only’ spaces were not allowing any Indians before, to begin with be it cafes or even raves and parties but now, they’re not even allowing other white people or other travelers to come to the cafes,” she said.
Khanna described the alleged restrictions as a form of colonisation, saying the practice had been taking place for decades.
She compared the alleged treatment of Indians in these spaces with Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, describing it as “Israeli apartheid”.
“So if you look at it in the larger context, it is a form of colonization and of course, a hierarchy of power. And it has been described as an Israeli apartheid that they’re creating here, because they follow different rules and Indians cannot intervene and Indians have to follow different rules which is exactly what they’re doing in Palestine,” Khanna said.
Khanna also attributed what she described as the tolerance of these spaces in India to closer ties between the Indian government and Israel.
“This is tolerated in India because of a deepening, a very deep affinity with the Modi regime in India, which has been ruling India for 12 years and Israel and Netanyahu and their Zionist regime,” she said.
She went on to compare Hindutva and Zionism, describing Hindutva as an ethno-nationalist ideology promoted by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and alleging similarities with what she called the Zionist regime’s aspirations for a “Greater Israel”.
Khanna further alleged that Israel was seeking to ethnically cleanse and commit genocide in Palestine, concluding that there was a “very deep pro-Israel sentiment in India”.
