The growing dangers of Sri Lanka’s Israel nexus

By Tisaranee Gunasekara |

Mohamed Suhail, a 21-year-old student, was searching for lodgings in the Colombo suburb of Dehiwala on October 23, 2024, when a mobile police unit arrested him near Israeli consular premises. His supposed offence was not carrying his national identity card. A magistrate ordered his release after the document was produced.

After Suhail went home to Mawanella, a small town some 100 kilometres from Colombo, police arrested him again. This time, he was remanded under the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA). His new ‘crime’ – having anti-Israel posts on his social media – was a non-crime even under this draconian law. Yet Suhail was denied bail and remained in detention. 

Suhail’s ordeal came to light after Colombo police arrested another Sri Lankan Muslim for the ‘crime’ of being anti-Israel. This March, 22-year-old Mohamed Rushdi pasted a sticker saying ‘Fuck Israel’ in a mall. The police obtained a 90-day detention order for the act of ‘pasting a sticker with extremist views’ directly from the defence minister, Anura Kumara Dissanayake, also the president of Sri Lanka.

Rushdi’s arrest caused an uproar. Human rights activists, lawyers and opposition parliamentarians protested. The government was forced to back down in the face of public outrage and an impending European Union review of Sri Lanka’s compliance with GSP+ – a trade agreement granting preferential access to European markets, conditional on meeting set human rights standards, that has become an indispensable lifeline amid the country’s ongoing economic crisis. The police asked the courts to give Rushdi conditional bail, admitting they had found no evidence against him. In July, Suhail too received bail, with the police having failed to produce any evidence to substantiate the terrorism accusation against him. He had spent eight months and three weeks behind bars.

The day before Suhail was first arrested, on October 22, 2024, the US embassy in Colombo had posted a terror warning and travel advisory regarding an impending terrorist attack on tourists in Arugam Bay, a Muslim-majority coastal town in the Eastern Province, especially popular with Israelis. Israel’s National Security Headquarters repeated the warning, asking all Israeli citizens to leave immediately.

As other Western countries followed suit, it seemed as if Dissanayake, then still new to office, was caught napping. In 2019, another Sri Lankan government had ignored multiple warnings about an imminent attack by Islamist extremists. The Easter Sunday massacre that followed cost hundreds of lives and sent the economy into a tailspin, with tourism coming to a near-standstill. Dissanayake, remembering that avoidable cataclysm and with a parliamentary election due in weeks, acted quickly. Security was beefed up in Arugam Bay. Six people were arrested, including a Maldivian, though no weapons or explosives were found in their possession.

Police actions since the Arugam Bay terror warning indicate that they have been advised – if not ordered – to regard anti-Israeli Muslims as potential terrorists. Suhail and Rushdi were not the only ones to be targeted. A Muslim man in Eravur, in the Eastern Province, was questioned by the police for writing ‘Allah will protect Palestine’ in a poem. In Colombo, police searched the house of a Muslim organizer of an anti-Israel demonstration, looking for incriminating stickers. The opposition MP Mujibur Rahman, speaking in Parliament, said their questions to him included why Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, is being called a terrorist, and why Sri Lankans should concern themselves with murdered Palestinian children. According to a report in the Sinhala weekly ‘Anidda’, police intelligence officials have visited the home of Irshad Ismail, a Sri Lankan Muslim working in the Palestinian embassy in Colombo.

These developments come against the background of Israel’s genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza, which followed a horrific attack against Israel by the militant group Hamas on October 7, 2023. The ripple effects of these events have reached Sri Lankan shores, and not just with the targeting of Sri Lankan Muslims who oppose, or are so much as suspected of opposing, Israel’s actions. 

Israel’s Pivot to Asia policy

After the October 7 attack, Israel terminated a long-standing practice of employing Palestinian labour in the Israeli economy, cancelling at least 140,000 work permits. Sri Lanka is one of the countries it has turned to in order to fill the resulting labour gap. In the months after the attack, Sri Lanka was offered 20,000 farm-worker jobs, and Israel began talks with Sri Lanka about another 20,000 jobs in construction. Earnings from migrant labourers in Israel offer another financial boost to Sri Lanka as it struggles to recover from its economic collapse in 2022 and pay off its national debt.

In the mid-2000s, during an earlier stint as Israel’s prime minister, Netanyahu began implementing his Pivot to Asia policy. Israel’s close alliance with India since Narendra Modi took power in New Delhi in 2014 is undoubtedly the jewel in Netanyahu’s Asian-relations crown. The two countries now have a ‘strategic partnership’ in several areas, including defence, and Modi has moved India away from its wholehearted commitment to the Palestinian cause in the past.

Modi, with his Hindutva ideology, and Netanyahu, with his ultra-Zionism, are politico-ideological soulmates. Their nation-building projects – with their visions, respectively, of a Hindu Rashtra and Greater Israel – rest on identical pillars: majoritarian supremacism, enmity towards Muslims, blood-and-faith nationalism, and a reading of religious texts as sources of both history and destiny.

In its growing closeness with Sri Lanka, there are indications that Israel might be trying to propel another South Asian country down a similar path.

In Arugam Bay, the supposed terrorist target was an illegally constructed Chabad House – a religious space belonging to the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic Movement, founded in the 18th century among more conservative, non-assimilated Eastern European Jews. The movement supports the Greater Israel project and has also supported the war in Gaza.

In 2018, the Chabad-Lubavitch rabbi, Ronny Arad, came to Sri Lanka to work as a shlach – a divine agent or messenger. He soon set up two Chabad Houses – one in Hikkaduwa, on the country’s southwestern coast, and the other in Arugam Bay. Despite having no local Jewish population, Sri Lanka has five Chabad Houses, supposedly to cater to the religious and social needs of the more than 20,000 Israeli tourists who visit the island annually.

Independent Ceylon – later Sri Lanka – recognized Israel in 1950, just two years after the country’s founding in the wake of the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of many parts of historic Palestine. The Sri Lankan government, led by Sirimavo Bandaranaike, cut off diplomatic relations with Israel in 1970 and recognized the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1975. Bandaranaike’s successor, J. R. Jayewardene, allowed Israel to open an Interests Section in Colombo. But when Palestine declared independence in 1988, Sri Lanka – still under Jayewardene – became among the first countries to recognize the new state. In 1992, during the presidency of Ranasinghe Premadasa, the government closed down the Israeli Interests Section.

Sri Lanka re-established full diplomatic relations with Israel in 2000 under Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga, against the backdrop of the Oslo Accords signed between Israel and Palestine. Following decades of defence cooperation, including through the end of Sri Lanka’s brutal civil war, Israel’s footprint in the country expanded rapidly after Gotabaya Rajapaksa was elected president in November 2019. Three months later, Tel Aviv offered Colombo a technology-sharing agreement in agriculture, education, transportation and information technology. Rajapaksa accepted, recalling his three visits to Israel while he was secretary to the Ministry of Defence.

In 2021, his administration signed a controversial deal worth US$50 million with Israel Aerospace Industries to upgrade its ageing fleet of Kfir fighter jets. The next year, the Rajapaksa administration gave permission to Israel’s United Channel Movies to shoot its latest movie in Sri Lanka. ‘Arugam Bay’ was about three Israel Defence Forces (IDF) soldiers on a surfing holiday after serving a stint in Lebanon, and it would have helped popularize Arugam Bay as a destination for IDF soldiers.

ISSOM and Contorted History

The shadowy Israel Sri Lanka Solidarity Movement (ISSOM) has its office in a nondescript building in a tiny residential neighbourhood in Colombo. Founded in 2019, its objective is ‘to make Sri Lanka a loyal supporter of Israel in International Fora’, and to make Sri Lanka recognize ‘the inalienable right of Israel and the Jewish people to her Ancient Indivisible Capital of Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria’.

ISSOM’s objectives go well beyond upending Sri Lanka’s long-established support for Palestine. It seems intent on turning Sri Lanka into an Israeli client state and a mini version of Israel. This begins with giving the island nation a new history.

Sri Lanka’s officially accepted history is based on the Mahavamsa, a part-mythological Buddhist chronicle, and goes back 2500 years to the Buddha’s Parinirvana and the ‘arrival’ of the legendary Prince Vijaya from India. But in ISSOM’s Hebrew Bible-based version of history, the Lankan state and civilization are at least 3700 years old. The use of cinnamon in the making of ‘Shemen HaMishchah’, the Jewish holy ointment, as described in the Bible, and the presence of gems such as blue sapphires in the breastplate of the mythical high priest Aaron, given to him by the prophet Moses, are offered as evidence of this 3700-year-old connection between Sri Lanka and Israel. (Cinnamon and gemstones have long been prized Sri Lankan commodities and exports.) Reviving this ‘historical relationship’ is presented as a necessary precondition for Sri Lanka to become a ‘self-sufficient nation with advanced technology systems and beneficial methods followed according to the advice and training by the Israelis’.

ISSOM also wants Sri Lanka to study Israel’s education system and ‘integrate its points of excellence’ into the Sri Lankan system – a telling proposal given the role of Israel’s education system in promoting and justifying the systemic racism evident in Gaza and the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Another ISSOM proposal is for Sri Lanka to follow Israel’s example by introducing mandatory national service.

Israel’s cause has never been a popular one in Sri Lanka, especially among the country’s left and Muslims, and the livestreamed genocide in Gaza has only caused its public image to sink further. ISSOM and other pro-Israeli organizations – such as the Israel–Sri Lanka Friendship Development Organization, which held a meagrely attended pro-Israeli demonstration outside the United Nations office in Colombo this August – have tried to exacerbate and exploit existing ethno-religious faultlines to win new and more committed adherents to the Israeli cause.

Imagined Enemy

Israel is hoping to help Sri Lanka counter an imagined Muslim enemy – dovetailing neatly with increased public association of Muslims with terrorism since the 2019 Easter Sunday attacks. Consequently, it is but natural that it would turn to Sinhala Buddhist extremists in general, and hardline Buddhist monks in particular, in its search for allies.

The first warning about a (Muslim) terror attack in Arugam Bay targeting Israelis came in November 2023, a year before the 2024 American and Israeli warnings. The author of that warning was Sinhala Ravaya, a Sinhala Buddhist extremist organization with a long history of targeting Tamils, Christians and Muslims. Its national organizer, Madubashana Prabath Ranahansa, claimed that Muslims in Arugam Bay were threatening Israelis and trying to get them out of Sri Lanka over the Gaza war. (No report of any such incident involving Israeli tourists can be found.) He accused 224 out of the country’s 225 parliamentarians of being pro-Palestinian and told them not to “nurture extremism”, warning that this could lead to another incident like the Easter Sunday attacks.

For Sinhala Buddhist extremists dreaming of a majoritarian and Sinhala-supremacist Sri Lanka, Israel is a natural role model. As the national organizer of Sinhala Ravaya put it, “We must get together to create a Sinhala Buddhist state like Israel … We can build an exclusively Sinhala-Buddhist state where minorities can live freely like in Israel, which is a 100% Jewish state, a state for the Jewish people – where other religions live freely.”

Sinhala Ravaya’s history of violent activism makes its current alignment with Israeli interests a matter of concern. In 2011, in the wake of the civil war, the group settled several Sinhala Buddhist families in Navatkuli, in the Tamil stronghold of Jaffna. It demolished a mosque in Anuradhapura the same year. In 2013, in between torching a meat stall in the town of Tangalle and organizing a march from Kataragama – a rare religious site in Sri Lanka considered sacred by Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus and Christians – it manhandled a group of Christian missionaries. This August, Sinhala Ravaya organized a march themed ‘Stop weakening Buddhist power’. The marchers’ demands included: “Protect Buddhist heritage in the North and the East and prevent multi-ethnic, multi-religious ideology from destroying the country.” 

Sinhala Ravaya’s present cause is creating ‘susanyojanaya’ – a positive nexus – between Sri Lanka and Israel. It obviously sees Israel as an ally in its struggle to disempower Sri Lanka’s minorities in general and Muslims in particular. According to Sinhala Ravaya’s national organizer, Israel intends to provide 100,000 jobs exclusively to Sinhalese individuals. This, he has argued, will strengthen the “Sinhala economy” and weaken the “Muslim trade dominance”.

Finding Allies in Extremism

Pro-Israeli organizations like ISSOM are building alliances with other extremist monks as well. One example is Angunugalle Sri Jinananda, who helped pioneer Sri Lanka’s abuse of the International Covenant for Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) as effectively a blasphemy law and a means of persecuting Tamils, Muslims and dissenting Sinhalese. Last year, addressing a meeting organized by ISSOM to mark the first anniversary of Hamas’s October 7 attack, he hailed the “over-4000-year history of Lankan-Israeli diplomatic and trade ties”, proclaimed Israel and Sri Lanka to be ‘ekathmika’ – soulmates – and asked the president, Anura Kumara Dissanayake, “to immediately open doors to Israel in Sri Lanka”.

Another veteran of anti-Tamil and anti-Muslim campaigns, Senapathiye Ananda, the founder and head of the Sinhala Organization of the North and the East, held a media conference in 2024 under the self-explanatory banners of ‘Protect the Buddhist heritage of the East, No to Racism, Protect jobs in Israel’.

In these extremist organizations, the Israeli lobby has found an ideal instrument to push forward its interests and demands, starting with the depiction of solidarity with Palestine as appeasement and promotion of Islamist terrorism.

According to the national organizer of Sinhala Ravaya, those who support Palestine are part of a conspiracy to destroy the Sinhala Buddhist state, since such solidarity might deprive Sri Lanka of Israeli jobs and Israeli tourists. “If that happens,” he has warned, “the Sinhala Buddhist people of this country will begin giving a … strong answer to the government and Muslim extremists. Don’t push Sinhala Buddhists in this country into the position of giving that strong answer.”

Israeli tourists and IDF soldiers

Late this August, two Israeli tourists attacked a well-known local hotel owner and his female companion in Arugam Bay. Contrary to the claims of Israeli apologists, the victim was Sinhalese, and not Muslim. The two Israelis were arrested and bailed out the following day. Doubtless fearing Israeli reaction, the government planned to deport them rather than allow them to be tried.

Problems between Arugam Bay residents and Israeli tourists have been brewing for months, especially with the sudden influx of IDF soldiers on leave from the Gaza genocide. A Sri Lankan surfer was confronted by three IDF soldiers hurling Hebrew insults after he told one of them not to monopolize a wave. A long-time Australian resident of the area told the media that Israeli soldiers suspected of war crimes “exist with a group mentality”, and that with their presence, “I don’t feel safe for my family here”.

This combustive situation is manna for Israel’s Sinhala Buddhist supremacist allies. They are hard at work warning about Islamist terrorist attacks on peaceful Israeli tourists. Akmeemana Dayarathana, the monk who heads Sinhala Ravaya, said this July that “Israeli religious places are being threatened by extremists. They must be given protection immediately”.  The Sinhala Ravaya’s national organizer went one further, claiming Chabad Houses might come under attack from Hamas as well as Houthis and Hezbollah – all sworn enemies of Israel – and that such terror attacks will bring down the Sri Lankan economy. He also said that all children killed in Gaza are child soldiers trained by Hamas, Houthi and Hezbollah terrorists to attack Israel, and warned about the possibility of Muslim extremists training child soldiers in Sri Lanka. 

Israel has continued and stepped up efforts to expand its influence in Sri Lanka. This September, 16 Sri Lankan ‘journalists’ went to Israel on a ‘study tour’ organized by the Israeli embassy in India. A plan to set up a Sri Lanka-Israel Parliamentary Friendship Association collapsed when the MP behind it, Sujeewa Senasinghe of the opposition Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB), abandoned the effort, stating that his actions had resulted from “a genuine mistake”. (The Israeli parliamentarian Josh Reinstein had proposed setting up just such an association during an ISSOM-organized celebration of Israel’s 75th Independence Day in 2023.) Israel’s ambassador to India was reportedly already in Colombo for the association’s launch when the move was abandoned.

The national organizer of Sinhala Ravaya, who was among the ‘journalists’ on the Israel study tour, spoke to the media after his return to accuse the Sri Lankan government of “getting ready to create an unnecessary problem by bringing Palestinian refugees here”.  He also alleged that the government was “trying to artificially change the demographics of this country” – thus introducing to Sri Lanka, which does not have a migrant problem, the spurious theory of replacement by immigrants that is now rampant among far-right forces in the West. He warned the government “not to artificially change demographics by bringing these extremists and terrorists into the country, thereby creating clashes with the Sinhalese”.

A Government’s Precarious Balancing Act

Sri Lanka’s ruling government, under the left-wing National People’s Power (NPP) alliance, is trying to keep Israel happy while not departing too much from Sri Lanka’s traditional pro-Palestine stance. Even as a member of the Palestinian ambassador’s staff was questioned by the police, several NPP parliamentarians took part in an August demonstration in Colombo that called for a free Palestine. In September, when dozens of countries staged a mass walkout at the United Nations’ General Assembly before a speech by Netanyahu, a Sri Lankan diplomat remained.

Such balancing is not acceptable either to the Israeli lobby or to their Sinhala Buddhist supremacist allies. In the last few months, Sinhala Ravaya has upped its warnings about impending Muslim terror attacks, arguing that Sri Lankan Muslims are now approaching the “jihad state”. The Patriotic People’s Movement, another group led by hardline Buddhist monks, recently held a protest in Colombo decrying the proposed two-state solution to the Israel–Palestine conflict, which grants Palestinian statehood, and warning about “radical Muslims” trying to “create an atmosphere hostile to Israeli citizens and the state of Israel” in Sri Lanka.

This state of affairs is fraught with dangers. The most obvious risk is of a clash between unruly Israeli tourists and angry locals. A second danger is a new bout of anti-Muslim violence instigated by organizations such as Sinhala Ravaya, like what followed the Easter Sunday attacks. A third is Israeli or Sinhala Buddhist acts leading to a new wave of radicalization among a segment of young Sri Lankan Muslims. Another possibility – and potentially the most lethal – is a false-flag operation (such as Israel’s failed Operation Susannah in Egypt during the Suez crisis of 1956) aimed at creating a wave of anti-Muslim hysteria and, via it, a politico-electoral climate favourable to a political party willing to ally fully with Israel, making Sri Lanka a supplier of safe and pliant labour to Israel, a welcoming destination to Israeli tourists, and Israel’s uncritical supporter in the international arena. In short, Israel’s little brother in the Indian Ocean.

-Tisaranee Gunasekara is a political commentator based in Colombo, Sri Lanka and this  article was originally published on Middle East Eye