Over 4,000 Indians have already been relocated to Israel under a state-backed program. Some settled in the West Bank and Gaza. The Indian government, which prosecutes “forced conversions” at home, has said nothing.
In April 2026, 240 people from Manipur and Mizoram landed at Ben Gurion Airport near Tel Aviv. They were received officially, photographed, and welcomed as returning members of what Israel calls the Bnei Menashe, a community it identifies as descendants of one of the ten lost tribes of ancient Israel. They are the first batch in a series. Approximately 600 more are expected in the coming weeks. By the end of 2026, around 1,200 additional members of this community are projected to arrive. By 2030, the full relocation of approximately 6,000 people from India’s northeast is planned under a government-approved Israeli scheme. This is not a humanitarian rescue operation. It is a demographically calculated settlement program. And it involves Indian citizens being relocated to illegally occupied Palestinian territory, with the full knowledge of the Israeli state, the financial backing of organizations funded to the tune of an estimated $27 million, and the complete silence of the Indian government that routinely frames any religious conversion on its own soil as a civilizational threat.
The Origin Story That Has No Evidence
The Bnei Menashe claim traces to a local leader in Mizoram in the mid-twentieth century who reported visions that his community descended from the biblical tribe of Manasseh, one of the lost tribes of Israel scattered after the Assyrian conquest around 722 BCE. This vision spread through parts of Mizoram and Manipur, mobilizing communities around the concept of the “right of return” to Israel.
There is no historical evidence supporting this claimed descent. There is no DNA evidence supporting it either. The communities in question were converted to Christianity by nineteenth-century British missionaries in the 1940s. They subsequently converted again, this time to Judaism, beginning in the 1950s, inspired by the tribal leader’s vision. Even after relocating to Israel, these individuals are not automatically accepted as Jewish. They must undergo a formal conversion process to obtain Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return.
India-based historian William Dalrymple noted on X that these are “Tibeto-Burmans from Mizoram in Northeast India who converted to Christianity in the 1940s then, inspired by a dream, began converting to Judaism in 1951.” His comment pointedly observed they have no more demonstrable ancient connection to the land of Israel than any other modern convert, while Palestinians carry DNA evidence of actual descent from Bronze Age Canaanites, the original inhabitants of the same geography.
What “Operation Wings of Dawn” Actually Is
The Israeli government approved the current relocation plan in November 2025 under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It is framed officially as family reunification and community integration. The framing is designed to make a settlement program sound like a social welfare initiative.
In practice, the operation functions as follows. Organizations like Shavei Israel, a state- linked body that identifies diaspora communities with claimed Jewish connections worldwide, conduct outreach in Manipur, Mizoram, and, reportedly, parts of Meghalaya. They provide religious training. Hebrew language instruction and conversion preparation. Identified individuals are processed through Israel’s immigration system and relocated. According to reporting by The Jerusalem Post, over 4,000 Indians have already completed this journey.
Some of the earliest groups to arrive under this program established their settlements not in Israel proper but in Hebron in the occupied West Bank and in illegal Israeli settlements in Gaza prior to 2005. These are locations that the United Nations, the International Court of Justice, and virtually every international legal body classify as illegal settlements on occupied Palestinian territory. Indians from Manipur and Mizoram are living in those settlements.
The Demographic Logic of Settler Colonialism
To understand why Israel is running this program, understand what is happening to its own population. Approximately 82,000 Israelis left the country in 2024. Over 69,000 departed in 2025. This reverse migration, accelerated by the Gaza genocide that has killed more than 72,000 Palestinians and wounded over 172,000 since October 2023, is creating a demographic problem for a state whose political project requires a Jewish majority in contested territory.
Settler colonialism as a system not only removes indigenous populations. It simultaneously imports replacement populations to consolidate territorial claims. Israel has been doing this since 1948, bringing millions of Jewish immigrants and converts from around the world to settle in historic Palestine while expelling or uprooting native Palestinians. The Bnei Menashe program is the latest iteration of that process, notable primarily because the people being imported this time are Tibeto-Burman Christians from India’s northeast who converted to a version of Judaism within living memory.
UN reports indicate Israeli illegal settlement expansion is at its highest level since 2017. Under the current Netanyahu government, settlements in the occupied West Bank including Occupied East Jerusalem, have risen by nearly 50 percent. Approximately 700,000 illegal settlers, almost 10 percent of Israel’s Jewish population, now reside in these settlements. The Bnei Menashe arrivals from India join that population.
The Conversion Hypocrisy India Will Not Name
Here is where the silence of the Indian government becomes not just politically convenient but morally indefensible.
Twelve Indian states maintain anti-conversion laws. Several have strengthened those laws in recent years, with Uttarakhand criminalizing digital speech about religion and Rajasthan introducing the possibility of life imprisonment for conducting religious conversions. The BJP and its affiliated organizations have spent years building a political and cultural movement around the threat of religious conversion, framing it as an attack on Hindu civilization, a tool of foreign interference, and in the case of interfaith marriage, as “love jihad.”
In this framework, a Christian missionary converting a tribal person in Chhattisgarh is a civilizational threat warranting arrest. A pastor conducting prayers in Odisha is worthy of mob attack. The conversion of Hindus to any other religion is framed as demographic warfare against the Indian nation.
But Shavei Israel, conducting systematic conversion outreach in Manipur and Mizoram, converting tribal communities to Judaism, and then relocating them to the occupied Palestinian territory to serve Israeli settlement policy, is apparently not a conversion concern at all. The Indian government has made no statement about this program. No BJP leader has described it as a threat to tribal communities or to India’s demographic integrity. No anti-conversion law has been invoked against the organizations running the outreach. The difference is not theological. It is geopolitical. Israel is a strategic partner. Its settlement program, therefore, does not disturb the civilizational alarm that a Chhattisgarh pastor’s prayer meeting apparently does.
What India’s Northeast Communities Deserve to Know
The people of Manipur and Mizoram who have participated in this program deserve honest information about what they are entering. They are not returning to an ancient homeland. There is no evidence of that homeland’s existence in their genetic or historical record. They are being recruited, trained, converted, and relocated to serve a demographic and territorial agenda that the International Court of Justice has described as part of an unlawful occupation.
Once in Israel, they do not receive automatic acceptance. They face a formal conversion process. They are settled in locations that international law classifies as illegal. They are part of a population replacement strategy in a territory where the people they are replacing did not leave voluntarily.
Manipur is simultaneously a state in active ethnic conflict, where two communities have been killing each other for over three years, where children were killed in their sleep by a rocket attack in April 2026, where the Indian government’s engagement has been minimal and its accountability nonexistent. The same central government that has not resolved Manipur’s internal ethnic war has raised no objection to Manipuri citizens being relocated to occupied Palestinian territory to serve Israeli settlement policy.
Conclusion
Operation Wings of Dawn is not a lost tribe finding its homeland. It is a state-backed relocation program using Indian citizens to demographically consolidate an illegal occupation. It involves conversion, recruitment, and settlement in territory that international law does not recognize as Israel’s to settle.
The Indian government prosecutes conversion at home and facilitates it abroad when the converting organization is Israeli and the destination is occupied Palestine. That contradiction does not require elaborate analysis. It requires only that someone name it clearly.
Six thousand Indians from Manipur and Mizoram are planned for relocation to Israel by 2030. Some will live in the West Bank. Some may live in Gaza, whose infrastructure has been 90 percent destroyed in a genocide that India has refused to condemn.
The question India must answer is not whether the Bnei Menashe are really a lost tribe. That question has a clear answer: they are not, and there is no evidence they are. The question is why India’s government, which treats religious conversion as an existential domestic threat, treats the conversion and relocation of Indian tribal citizens to occupied Palestinian territory as nobody’s business at all.
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