An earlier version of this article was completed a day before the joint Israeli-American war against Iran. The gist of it examined the likely scenarios surrounding the effort to neutralize Iran, and Israel’s incessant obsession to draw the U.S. into yet another Israeli-designed foreign war. Since 1948, Israel has proven itself to be a destructive agent in the Middle East, leveraging American military, economic, and political power to reduce countries to failed states from Iraq and Syria to Libya and Sudan. Iran was simply next in that sequence. The next Israeli “fail state” target may hinge on the emerging Israeli-Indian axis, an alignment that could trigger seismic geopolitical shifts redrawing the map of the Arabian Peninsula.

Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Indira Gandhi were political giants who led India out of the long night of colonial domination and positioned it as a principled force in the Non-Aligned Movement. They built the modern Indian state from the ground up, investing in mass education, public health, scientific capacity, and domestic manufacturing, with sovereignty understood as something that must be built on strong foundations. 

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Under Narendra Modi, current prime minister, India has undergone a profound transformation. Generations of top-tier students and scientists owe their education to the leaders of independence and decades of secular governance. Today, the Bharatiya Janata Party brazenly hijacks that legacy, claiming structural progress as a gift of Hindu centric nationalism while systematically gutting out the old policies that educated poor Indians.

Watching Modi address the Israeli Knesset, describing Israel as the “father” and India as the “mother,” was deeply jarring, a version of India unrecognizable to the principled Indian National Congress that led the country through independence.

Watching Modi address the Israeli Knesset, describing Israel as the “father” and India as the “mother,” was deeply jarring, a version of India unrecognizable to the principled Indian National Congress that led the country through independence.

The India that once spoke the language of emancipation now bows before a settler-colonial state, forging an alliance rooted in ethnic-nationalist hatred. In his speech, Modi reduced two years of starvation and genocide in Gaza to Israelis killed on October 7. The new India–Israel alliance is not about trade, or arms sales. It is an ideological and strategic alliance between two religious-ethnic supremacist projects—Hindu majoritarianism and Jewish Zionism—snaking into a broader system of militarization, and regional destabilization. 

This alliance is an extension of an Israeli led plot—described as a “hexagon” or security network—designed to fracture the Arab and Muslim worlds, exploit U.S. militarism, and lock the region into permanent confrontation utilizing America’s gun, blood and money. At its core, a system of claws and dagger: external pressure tightening from multiple directions, combined with internal penetration that erodes cohesion across the Arab Gulf region.

India will be central in this scheme. Its population, military capacity, and symbolic status as a former leader of the Non-Aligned Movement lend legitimacy to a system that would be otherwise purely imperial. New Delhi is being repurposed from a post-colonial actor into an auxiliary pillar of Israeli-Western colonial hegemony, Israel’s arm of the claw poised to engulf the eastern rim of the Arabian Peninsula. 

Saudi Arabia is Israel’s next “fail state” target, and Iran is the bedrock to completing the clamp stretching from India through Tehran along the eastern flank of the Arabian Peninsula. Once the claw is completed, Saudi Arabia will be ready to be swallowed by the greater Israel project. The United Arab Emirates will be the new alliance’s dagger embedded in the side of the Peninsula.

Saudi Arabia is Israel’s next “fail state” target, and Iran is the bedrock to completing the clamp stretching from India through Tehran along the eastern flank of the Arabian Peninsula. Once the claw is completed, Saudi Arabia will be ready to be swallowed by the greater Israel project. The United Arab Emirates will be the new alliance’s dagger embedded in the side of the Peninsula.

Pakistan and Turkey are other obstacles. With Iran neutralized and the UAE gobbled within the India-Israel axis, Pakistan faces geographical isolation, economic vulnerability, and pressure from an India emboldened by Israeli backing. A Hindu-Jewish alliance extending claws across the region from Greece to India, with a dagger in the Arabian Peninsula. Through this, Israel achieves three objectives: contain Pakistan through India, fracture the oil-producing region, and set the stage to confront Turkey as the final act.

Should it fail, India’s pursuit of this alliance could come at a steep economic cost. Its trade with Iran and the Arab world vastly exceeds any possible economic exchanges with Israel. Ceding this broader economic interest for access to Israeli-stolen American technology, New Delhi signals that India seems to be more insatiable to divide the spoils of a fractured Arabian Peninsula with Israel than in maintaining the regional status quo. 

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This axis can still be derailed. Arab gulf states, particularly Saudi Arabia, wield leverage: millions of Indian workers sustain Gulf economies; Indian firms operate across the region; remittances underpin domestic stability. Should Gulf states remain passive, the claws and dagger will extend further, get tighter, conceivably annexing the UAE—Indian nationals are three times as large as UAE nationals—into a de facto Indian satellite state, and where the rest of the region falls quietly under Greater Israel.

As the Israeli-engineered claw slowly closes in, Arab leaders should draw hard lessons from the current war on Iran.

The United States ensured full protection of Israel’s skies using an Arab-financed, U.S.-run Integrated Air and Missile Defense system, IAMD. In contracts, Gulf states remained unprotected.

The United States ensured full protection of Israel’s skies using an Arab-financed, U.S.-run Integrated Air and Missile Defense system, IAMD. In contracts, Gulf states remained unprotected.

Arab money financed America’s IAMD; American taxpayers funded Israel’s Iron Dome, where both systems were dedicated to protect Israel alone. Spanning from northern Iraq to the southern Arabian Peninsula, IAMD functioned in this war, and in the previous 12-day war, as Israel’s outer shield, intercepting incoming threats long before they approach Israeli airspace, while leaving the Gulf’s skies as expendable buffer zones and secondary allies.

Considering the above and confronted with the emerging Israeli–Indian unholy alliance, Arab regimes must face this new reality, else, stand by, metaphorically, like chickens huddled in a cage, watching the butcher’s knife cut through their flock, comforting themselves with the hope that it will pass them by. It never does; it only waits until Greater Israel is established.

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