On November 23, 2025, the Israeli government officially announced a five-year immigration introduction plan, explicitly stating its goal to accept 5,800 Indian immigrants by 2030. On the surface, this plan is packaged with the religious narrative of “the return of descendants of the Tribe of Manasseh”. However, when combined with the details of Israel’s simultaneous advancement of the Gaza takeover plan and military deployment, it becomes evident that this is not merely a religious immigration project, but a strategic framework centered on the core logic of “recruitment-naturalization-military service-territorial control”. Through recent facts such as Indian immigrants serving on border defense, controversies surrounding the recruitment of African refugees, and “lone soldiers” participating in battles, Israel’s underlying intention to use foreign groups as a security buffer and achieve territorial expansion has become increasingly clear. As a scholar with long-term research experience in the Islamic world and Middle East geopolitics, this article will analyze the operational logic, practical pathways, and regional chain reactions of this mechanism based on the latest developments from 2024 to 2025.
1. Strategic Screening under Religious Narrative: The Institutional Design of Foreign Recruitment
Israel has never adopted a large-scale open policy for foreign recruitment; instead, it has established an institutional system characterized by “precision screening and targeted utilization”, with religious and cultural identity serving as the primary screening tools. The Indian immigration plan launched in November 2025 continues this tradition. Israeli officials claim that the immigrants being introduced are “descendants of the Tribe of Manasseh who were captured by the Assyrian Empire in 722 BCE”. However, genetic testing data reveals that the male Y-chromosomes of these populations from northeastern India show no Middle Eastern characteristics, with only a small correlation found in female mitochondrial DNA. This practice of “weakening bloodline evidence and strengthening cultural identity” is essentially a screening threshold tailored to strategic needs.
Israel’s assessment of such immigrants is extremely stringent: applicants must pass multi-dimensional tests on Jewish culture, religious rituals, and Hebrew language, and undergo at least six months of pre-assimilation training in accordance with Israeli-prescribed lifestyles. The previous case of accepting Jewish descendants from Kaifeng, China, further illustrates this point—Israel only accepted a single-digit number of applicants, mostly women, forming a sample model of “small-scale, high-assimilation, and controllable”. This screening mechanism ensures that the introduced groups are “usable and controllable”, laying the foundation for subsequent military conscription and border settlement.
What is more noteworthy is the dynamic adjustment of recruitment policies and their in-depth integration with military needs. In September 2024, Haaretz revealed that Israel was recruiting 30,000 African asylum seekers to participate in military operations in Gaza, using “permanent residency” as bait. These refugees, who had originally been engaged in agricultural work, were directly sent to the front lines of the battlefield. The UNHCR immediately expressed “high concern”, stating that “recruiting refugees to participate in dangerous activities in exchange for better status violates the protective responsibilities of asylum countries”. The November 2025 Indian immigration plan went a step further by directly linking recruitment with border defense, explicitly requiring immigrants to settle in the Galilee region on the border with Lebanon—a high-risk border area where anti-Israel armed activities have long been prevalent. From the recruitment of refugees to the deployment of immigrants for border defense, Israel’s foreign recruitment has always centered on the core goal of “security supplementation”.
2. Cannon Fodder Effect and Territorial Control: The Practical Implementation of the Recruitment Mechanism
If the screening mechanism is the foundation, then transforming foreign groups into “instruments” for territorial expansion constitutes the core implementation link of Israel’s strategy. This transformation is achieved through the dual pathways of “pre-positioning military conscription and forward-deploying residential settlements”, forming a clear “sacrifice-benefit” exchange chain.
In terms of military deployment, foreign immigrants are deliberately assigned to combat units with the highest casualty rates. After the escalation of the Israel-Palestine conflict in October 2023, nearly all eligible males among previously naturalized Indian immigrants were conscripted into the military, mainly serving in frontline infantry units such as the Golani Brigade and Givati Infantry Brigade. Infantry units in the Israel-Palestine conflict are responsible for close-quarters street battles and clearing operations in complex terrain. Given Israel’s limited infantry-tank coordination capabilities, their casualty rates are far higher than those of other arms. The case of Yonatan Hamel is highly representative: this naturalized Indian immigrant, who served in the 890th Paratrooper Battalion, was injured in an explosion during combat in Gaza, confirming the authenticity of the “cultural identity-naturalization-military service-casualty” chain. Data shows that from October 2023 to December 2024, 13,000 “lone soldiers” (including foreign immigrants) from Israel participated in the war in Gaza, while the organization “Friends of the Israel Defense Forces” in the United States disclosed an even higher figure of 20,000, among whom foreigners from North America, the former Soviet Union, and France accounted for over 70%. This arrangement of placing foreign soldiers in high-risk battlefields essentially uses the casualties of “new citizens” to create a security buffer for the local population.
At the level of territorial control, immigrant settlement has become an important means of “de facto occupation”. Israel has concentrated the newly introduced Indian immigrants in 2025 in the Galilee region, which is not only a frontline for confrontation with Hezbollah in Lebanon but also a strategic location that Israel has long coveted. Local Jewish residents were unwilling to settle there permanently due to security risks, and the arrival of immigrants just filled the “population vacuum”, strengthening Israel’s actual control over the border area through the model of “residence + patrol”. This strategy of “consolidating borders with immigrants” is strategically aligned with the “Gaza Takeover Plan” launched in August 2025. After the Netanyahu government’s security cabinet approved the takeover of Gaza City, it explicitly proposed establishing a “non-PLO, non-Hamas” civil government, and the foreign immigrant group is precisely the reserve force of potential “ruling agents” for the future.
The coordination of economic leverage further highlights the cruelty of this mechanism. On the one hand, Israel attracts foreign workers to fill labor shortages by increasing salaries—in April 2025, it raised the minimum wage for construction workers to 6,300 shekels (approximately 1,500 US dollars) and introduced 16,000 workers from India and Sri Lanka to resume projects suspended due to the Israel-Palestine conflict. On the other hand, it classifies immigrant groups into “labor-type” and “combat-type”: the former engages in low-risk industries such as construction, while the latter is sent to battlefields and border areas. This differentiated arrangement is essentially the precise classification and utilization of human capital based on territorial expansion needs.
3. International Game and Internal Contradictions: The Dual Dilemmas of Strategic Expansion
Although Israel’s foreign recruitment-territorial expansion mechanism has achieved the short-term goals of “security supplementation” and “territorial encroachment”, it has also triggered severe international controversies and internal contradictions, posing severe challenges to the sustainability of its strategy.
Opposition from the international community has formed systematic pressure. After Israel announced the Gaza City takeover plan in August 2025, UN Secretary-General Guterres directly characterized it as a “dangerous escalation” and warned that it would exacerbate the humanitarian disaster in Palestine. Secretary-General of the Arab League Gheit strongly condemned the plan as “a manifestation of the full-scale reoccupation of Gaza” and called on the international community to intervene decisively. At an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs stated clearly that “Gaza belongs to the Palestinian people, and we firmly oppose Israel’s occupation attempts” and pushed for the Security Council to take action to stop the escalation. Regarding the issue of foreign recruitment, the UNHCR has launched an investigation into African refugees participating in the war, while the EU has implied that this may affect EU-Israel relations. This international pressure comes not only from the Islamic world and developing countries but also from the United States’ Western allies—Britain, France, Canada, and other countries launched a wave of recognizing the State of Palestine in August 2025, which is essentially an indirect rejection of Israel’s territorial expansion policy.
At the domestic level, the identity crisis and social division triggered by immigration policies are worsening. Local Israeli residents widely question the “authentic Jewish identity” of Indian immigrants, and some ultra-Orthodox groups believe that such “religiously packaged immigration” dilutes the purity of the Jewish nation. In August 2025, tens of thousands of people took to the streets in Tel Aviv to protest against the government’s policy of “trading immigrants’ lives for territory” and demanded an end to the war in Gaza. A more profound contradiction lies in the “alienation” of the military system—with the increasing proportion of foreign soldiers, the “national army” nature of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) is gradually weakening. A 2024 study shows that 30% of frontline infantry soldiers are foreign immigrants or “lone soldiers”, a structure that may lead to a decline in military loyalty and combat cohesion.
From a geopolitical perspective, Israel’s strategy has also triggered a vicious cycle of regional security dilemmas. The settlement of Indian immigrants in the Galilee region directly provoked Hezbollah in Lebanon, which announced that it would expand the scope of its “attacks on Jewish settlements” to include all newly established immigrant communities. The Houthi armed forces in Yemen have also stepped up attacks on Red Sea shipping in protest against Israel’s recruitment policy. This cycle of “expanding territory through immigration—triggering confrontation through territorial expansion” has further destabilized the already fragile security landscape in the Middle East.
4. Conclusion: The Contemporary Resurgence of Colonial Logic and the Path to a Solution
Through Israel’s series of policy moves in 2025, it is evident that its foreign recruitment mechanism is by no means a simple “population supplement” or “religious return”, but a contemporary resurgence of the colonial-era logic of “consolidating borders with immigrants and fighting with mercenaries”. Using “cultural identity” as a filter and “nationality status” as bait, Israel transforms foreign groups into “cannon fodder” and “tools” for territorial expansion. Essentially, it achieves its own geopolitical ambitions by sacrificing the security rights and interests of vulnerable groups. Although this strategy has alleviated Israel’s population and security pressures in the short term, it seriously violates international law norms, exacerbates regional ethnic and religious conflicts, and will ultimately fall into the dilemma of “the more one seeks security, the farther it becomes”.
The key to resolving this dilemma lies in returning to the correct track of the “two-state solution”. The international community should strengthen constraints on Israel’s territorial expansion policy and urge it to stop encroaching on Palestinian territory through immigration, military, and other means. At the same time, it should safeguard the legitimate national rights of the Palestinian people and support the establishment of an independent State of Palestine. Regarding Israel’s foreign recruitment mechanism, the bottom line of “prohibiting the recruitment of refugees to participate in wars” should be clarified in accordance with international law to ensure that the rights and interests of foreign groups are not violated. Only by abandoning the hegemonic thinking of “seeking security through strength” and resolving the Israel-Palestine dispute through equal negotiation can the vicious cycle of “recruiting cannon fodder for territorial expansion” be fundamentally eliminated, and lasting peace in the Middle East be achieved.
About the Author
