A review by Shir Hever: Rhys Machold, Fabricating Homeland Security: Police Entanglements across India and Palestine/Israel (Stanford University Press, 2024).
Rhys Machold, a professor at the University of Glasgow, provoked significant debate within the Palestinian solidarity movement with his 2018 article, “Reconsidering the Laboratory Thesis.” In it, he challenged the widely held notion of Palestine as a “laboratory” for Israeli weapons testing—the idea that Israel deliberately exploits Palestinians to test and market “battle-proven” technologies of repression. Machold argued that activists uncritically reproduce the rhetoric used by Israeli arms companies, thereby reinforcing the narratives it seeks to dismantle. His provocative claim was grounded in extensive fieldwork, including interviews with representatives of Israeli private military and security companies (PMSCs), offering a rare empirical perspective on the industry’s self-mythologizing.
In Fabricating Homeland Security, Machold expands this analysis by tracing how security practices migrate from Palestine to global contexts—particularly through a comparative study of India. He demonstrates that the technology of oppression is not limited to advanced weaponry or surveillance systems but is also embedded in discursive frameworks that recast racist policies as neutral “security measures” and systemic violence as legitimate “counterterrorism.”
Departing from the “laboratory” metaphor, Machold proposes the “factory” as a more apt conceptual model. Security, he contends, is not merely tested but actively manufactured—or, as the title suggests: fabricated. This term carries a double meaning: it denotes both production and deception, underscoring how the security-industrial complex generates not safety but illusions of it, obscuring its violence behind technical jargon and market logic.
In his fieldwork in India, Machold documents how the colonial-era rhetoric employed by Israeli “security experts” is echoed by Indian officers. What emerges is unexpected: the Indian security apparatus, while ostensibly decolonized, actively reproduces frameworks of domination rooted in British imperial governance, othering Muslims without acknowledging that Israeli colonial officers copied these systems of othering from the British. Machold’s genealogy of Israel’s security practices traces their institutionalization to the Second Intifada, yet this timeline warrants expansion. A deeper historical analysis would reveal that Israel’s “state of emergency” legislation and military orders in the Occupied Palestinian Territories directly adapt the emergency protocols of the British Mandate (1917–1948), exposing a longer arc of colonial continuity.
The alliance between Modi’s India and Netanyahu’s Israel, Machold argues, is not merely transactional but ideological, forged through shared investments in arms trading, Islamophobia, and securitization. The 2011 Mumbai attacks (colloquially termed “13/7”) served as a catalytic moment, mirroring the post-9/11 US response: just as the Patriot Act and the Department of Homeland Security emerged under the guise of counterterrorism, India leveraged the attacks to justify draconian surveillance measures and the erosion of civil liberties. By then, Israel had already positioned itself as a global leader in “homeland security,” with over nine hundred private companies specializing in the field—a lucrative export sector built on the commodification of racialized threat narratives.
Machold records Israeli security officials’ contempt for India’s handling of the Mumbai attacks, with many implying that Israeli expertise could have averted the crisis. Rather than rejecting the Israeli arrogance, the Indian state opportunistically embraced it, contracting Israeli firms to train its security forces. The result: Mumbai transposed Israeli practices—mass surveillance, preemptive arrests, and ethno-religious profiling—onto India’s domestic dissenters. What Machold exposes is not merely policy diffusion but the active collaboration of illiberal regimes in refining repression under the banner of “shared security.”
The Indo-Israeli relationship escalated beyond symbolism into a strategic partnership explicitly weaponized to legitimize authoritarian repression. This became unmistakably clear in 2017–2018, when reciprocal state visits by Modi and Netanyahu were accompanied by overt policy alignment. In 2018 Indian Consul to New York, Sandeep Chakravorty, openly advocated adopting the “Israeli model” in Kashmir—a suggestion materialized in 2019 through India’s revocation of Article 370, which dismantled Jammu and Kashmir’s autonomy in a move mirroring Israel’s de facto annexation of the West Bank. As Azad Essa meticulously details in Hostile Homelands (2023)—a work cited by Machold—this parallel reflects a transnational playbook of settler-colonial erasure under the guise of security.
While Fabricating Homeland Security excels in exposing the top-down mechanics of securitization, its analytical framework remains incomplete. Machold’s focus on state and corporate actors leaves the lived experiences of those subjected to these regimes only a secondary role. Machold’s research gives him the opportunity to ask how does the daily reality of a Palestinian detainee under military law compare to that of a Kashmiri activist facing India’s Public Safety Act, or an Indian labor organizer criminalized as a “terrorist”? A bottom-up perspective—grounded in testimonies or comparative ethnography—would have been a welcome addition to the book.
However, the book’s biggest limitation is its unfortunate timing. Published in 2024, it inadvertently captures the end of an era. Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza has rendered Machold’s central thesis—about the globalization of managed, surveillance-based domination—partially obsolete. The war has exposed a paradigm shift: where Israel once relied on racial profiling and “smart” repression (marketed globally as expertise), it now pursues indiscriminate annihilation, discarding even the pretense of counterterrorism logic. The marginalization of Israeli security theorists—whose models failed to predict or prevent 7 October—ushers in the era of religious fanatics as the architects of extermination.
This rupture demands a reevaluation of Machold’s factory metaphor. If security was once “fabricated” as a marketable illusion, Gaza lays bare the raw material beneath: an unmediated project of elimination that no longer requires discursive camouflage.
While Machold’s book could not incorporate the seismic shifts following 7 October 2023, his prescient examination of ZAKA—a semi-official Israeli religious organization specializing in victim identification—proves critically illuminating. Founded in 1989 by Orthodox volunteers responding to an attack on a bus in Jerusalem, ZAKA (Hebrew for “Disaster Victim Identification”) occupies a liminal space between forensic authority and religious ritual, blending halachic burial practices with state-sanctioned crisis response.
Machold highlights ZAKA’s 2011 deployment to Mumbai as a pivotal moment in the globalization of Israel’s security-religious complex. Tasked with recovering the remains of Israeli Jewish victims in Mumbai, ZAKA’s operatives—led by the since-disgraced Yehuda Meshi Zahav (who faced multiple sexual assault allegations before his 2021 suicide)—performed a dual function: their technical work legitimized their presence, while their theatrical piety (e.g., meticulous collection of blood and tissue for Jewish burial) staged trauma as a spectacle of national resilience. This performance deeply impressed Indian authorities, reinforcing the perceived symbiosis between militarized security and sacralized violence.
The 7 October aftermath revealed ZAKA’s darker utility as a vector for state disinformation. As an Al Jazeerainvestigation exposed, ZAKA members fabricated lurid claims of “40 beheaded babies” and “infants burned in ovens”—narratives amplified by Netanyahu, who publicly endorsed their testimony, and later echoed uncritically by US President Joe Biden, who claimed to have seen the beheaded babies “with my own eyes.” These lies were not mere propaganda but deliberate acts of dehumanization, weaponizing atrocity legends to justify Israel’s genocidal retaliation in Gaza.
Machold’s analysis of ZAKA thus uncovers a key mechanism of “fabrication”: the organization’s sacred-secular hybridity allows it to sanctify state violence while evading accountability. Where forensic science demands verifiable evidence, ZAKA’s religious framing privileges emotional “truth” over fact—a loophole exploited to catastrophic effect post-7 October.
While deception has always been a tool of war, Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza has weaponized disinformation with unprecedented intensity—not primarily targeting international audiences, but systematically manipulating its own populace. The Israeli public, immersed in a state of collective delusion, dismisses verified reports of atrocities as “AI-generated” fabrications. This epistemic rupture stems from a deliberate substitution of military professionalism with sacralized violence, exemplified by ZAKA’s ritualized forensics and the state’s embrace of genocidal biblical rhetoric. Where Israel once rationalized its violence through the cold calculus of “mowing the lawn” (periodic assaults on Gaza to weaken Hamas and terrorize the population), it now invokes Amalek—a scriptural mandate for annihilation.
Machold’s Fabricating Homeland Security inadvertently captures the twilight of this “professional” security paradigm. He exposes how security experts in Israel and India do not produce security but rather fabricate the illusion of security. Machold made a name for himself in the field of Palestine studies by criticizing the pseudo-scientific “laboratory” marketing of Israel’s security practices, and his book Fabricating Homeland Security comes at a time in which this pseudo-scientific veneer is eschewed in favor of mythology and messianic fervor.
The implications for India are dire. Machold’s parallels between Zionist and Hindutva ideologies—both of which fuse ethnonationalism with securitized governance—suggest that Modi’s India is a fertile ground for a similar trajectory. Just as Israel’s security apparatus devolved into theology-backed extermination, India’s own machinery of repression (already steeped in Islamophobic surveillance) risks escalating toward openly genocidal mobilization, if the veneer of rationality will be shed to expose the naked supremacist core beneath.