What Shapes India’s Israel Policy?

The recent conflict between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas, which controls Gaza, has once again put a spotlight on India’s artful West Asia policies at a time when supporters of the Narendra Modi government want it to decisively cast aside long-held foreign policy precepts about the region and its conflicts. At the same time, New Delhi’s tilt toward Israel has become a key highlight of Modi’s West Asia policies, with Modi becoming the first Indian prime minister to visit the Jewish state in 2018.

India’s delicate approach to the Israel-Palestine issue became visible once again when a May 16 statement from the Indian permanent representative to the United Nations in New York, reacting to the latest round of Israel-Hamas conflict, noted Israel’s military action as “retaliatory.” That said, it also expressed India’s “deep concern over violence in Jerusalem, especially on Haram Al Sharif/Temple Mount during the holy month of Ramadan, and about the possible eviction process in Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan neighborhood in East Jerusalem…” Much more pointedly, the statement closed with an expression of “strong support to the just Palestinian cause and its unwavering commitment to the two-State solution,” reiterating India’s traditional position on the matter.

These were not simply abstract, cost-free, statements on India’s part. A Hamas rocket attack on the Israeli city of Ashkelon killed a 30-year-old Indian woman on May 12.

While some commentators claimed India’s stated position on the conflict reflected its growing tilt toward Israel, the Israeli government itself soon after made it clear – in as diplomatic a way as possible under such circumstances – that India did not publicly support it, unlike a host of other countries. Meanwhile, and in stark contrast to India’s official position, on social media, Hindu nationalists expressed their unwavering support for Israel, including justifying the May 15 Israeli air strike on Gaza City that destroyed offices of the Associated Press and al-Jazeera.

The Stickiness of History

The Modi government, thus, finds itself in a curious position. In the eyes of Indian foreign policy traditionalists, it has swung too far in the direction of Israel, recklessly casting aside decades of foreign policy precepts. Viewed, however, from the perspective of its Hindu nationalist support base, this shift has been middling, and furnishes further evidence that New Delhi needlessly continues to walk a tightrope, out of habit.

The history of India-Israel relations has more or less been monochromatic. India’s traditional commitment to self-determination rights, its colonial past, Third World leadership, and a generally hectoring, activist foreign policy – not to mention being home to one of the world’s largest Muslim populations – all collectively meant that New Delhi would actively back the Palestinian cause whenever it got a chance to do so. Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leader Yasser Arafat was a frequent visitor to, and honored guest in, India during the Cold War, with a PLO office first established in India’s national capital in 1975.

Meanwhile, it was only in 1992 that India established full diplomatic relations with Israel, even though it had officially recognized the Israeli state in 1950. It would be only in 2003 that an Israeli head of state would visit India for the first time, with a different Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government at the helm in New Delhi.

Despite this officially cold stance toward Israel, India surreptitiously cooperated with Israel on security matters throughout the Cold War. Since the 1960s Indian intelligence services have maintained a working relationship with their Israeli counterparts, a covert liaison that assumed particular significance since the 1980s in the face of a deepening insurgency in India-administered Kashmir and the threat of Islamist terrorism in the mainland. As but one example of this behind-the-scenes relationship, it is now known that India’s principal external intelligence service provided housing for Mossad’s New Delhi station chief between 1989 and 1991 on property it purchased through shell companies.

The Potential of Power

While India’s relationship with Israel had acquired significant momentum by the time Modi assumed office in 2014, under his watch, the country has unabashedly cultivated its ties with Israel – and Israel has reciprocated. It is nevertheless important to keep in mind that this pronounced shift was as much a product of Modi’s bull-in-a-china-shop style of statecraft as it was dictated by fundamental structural shifts.

As scholars note, India’s turn toward Israel was motivated by the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union – up to that point, the country’s indispensable supplier of weapons and platforms – and the concomitant realization that New Delhi was best served by expanding its defense import relationships. A strong defense trade partnership with Israel became an extremely important component of that diversification strategy. But the calculations behind opening up to Israel went beyond defense. Some have argued New Delhi’s turn toward Israel could also have been motivated by India’s desire to improve ties with the United States, the sole remaining superpower, following the abrupt end of the Cold War.

But the end of the Cold War and India’s establishment of full ties with Israel also coincided with the onset of its economic liberalization program in 1991, which would, over the next three decades, dramatically increase India’s heft. That, in turn, slowly but surely, made way for much more robust foreign and security policies – and the need to cultivate multiple defense and security partners.

Power begets interests and forces difficult choices. India’s relationship with Israel was not immune to this logic.

What was exceedingly, and perhaps paradoxically, interesting about this dynamic is the extent to which it allowed India to keep its ties with Israel’s archrival Iran on an even keel. Between 2016 and 2020, India was the largest buyer of Israeli arms, accounting for 43 percent of all Israeli weapons exports. As a corollary, this buyer’s clout opened space for India to continue courting Iran on energy and infrastructure projects without risking angering Israel. At the same time, it was Iran’s nuclear ambitions that brought major Sunni powers, such as Saudi Arabia, closer to Israel, removing further obstacles for New Delhi in cultivating ties with Tel Aviv.

Aspirational State

All this, of course, is not to say that ideology was completely absent as a driver of India-Israel ties. The BJP’s precursor party – the Bharatiya Jan Sangh – was an early supporter of Israel, when official foreign policy ideology in New Delhi considered any direct overture to the Jewish state taboo. (As an aside, during the 1962 war with China, India received Israeli weapons, with Jawaharlal Nehru and David Ben Gurion regularly corresponding with each other throughout the crisis. The episode provides yet another data point that supports the claim that Indian foreign policy, despite official rhetoric, has been far more flexible than it is credited with.)

A strong, self-reliant nation that stares down enemies – especially those perceived to be hell-bent on impinging on its core identity, or even its right to exist – is an object of admiration for Hindu nationalists. Simply put, Israel fits the Hindu-nationalist ideal of what India ought to be. For the vast majority of the Hindu right, the Israel-Palestine conflict is fundamentally a religious one, where a proud, robust nation (Israel) has to battle Muslims on its periphery who are intent on obliterating it – not unlike, in their minds, Hindu majority India’s own travails with Muslim Pakistan.

Other parallels abound. Just like Israel has historically positioned itself as a Jewish homeland, welcoming Jewish migrants from across the world, India under Modi views itself in analogous terms. The controversial 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act – which effectively makes it easier for Hindu refugees from India’s neighborhood to obtain Indian citizenship – is the most concrete expression of that impulse yet.

To be fair, India’s position on the Israel-Palestine conflict (especially, when the Palestinian belligerents happen to be a known extremist group, Hamas) is intricately linked with its stance on terrorism and justifiably so. New Delhi can hardly afford to condone the violence Hamas perpetrates (whatever its root cause) when it battles terrorism in Kashmir and seeks to draw the world’s attention toward Pakistan’s sponsorship of Kashmiri extremists. But for Hindu nationalists, this equivalence – for diplomatic consistency, at the very least – is not the core issue. For them, both Kashmir and Gaza furnish examples of Muslim perfidy.

Modi’s Israel policy, all said and done, has been remarkably pragmatic. But it has failed to placate the zealots in Modi’s support base whose geopolitical imagination continue to be molded by bigotry.