Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi wrapped up a two-day state visit to Israel on Thursday that included a speech to Israel’s legislature, the signing of more than a dozen agreements, and an upgrade of the relationship to a “special strategic partnership.” Modi's close personal ties with his Israeli counterpart were also on full display, as he was greeted at the airport by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife. | The warm vibes underscore how much the bilateral relationship has been transformed over the past 12 years. India didn’t normalize relations with Israel until 1992, and for the subsequent two decades or so, Israeli officials spoke of the relationship being “held under the carpet.” As Tanvi Madan has written, they used a blunter metaphor in private settings, complaining that “India has treated Israel like a ‘mistress’—happy to engage intimately in private, but hesitant to acknowledge the relationship in public.” | That began to change when Modi took power in 2014 following that year’s landslide election victory for his right-wing, Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP. He had his first meeting with Netanyhau that year in New York, where they “agreed to break down the remaining walls between India and Israel,” the Israeli leader later recalled. In 2017, Modi became the first-ever Indian prime minister to visit Israel. | Commercial ties have expanded dramatically, with bilateral trade growing from $200 million in 1992 to a peak of more than $10 billion in 2023, according to the Indian Ministry of External Affairs. (Total trade has fallen back since then due to the war in Gaza and the resulting deterioration in the regional security situation.) | The two sides have much to offer each other. Israel’s strengths in high-tech industries like AI and cybersecurity, as well as agricultural and water technologies, offer promise to India as its seeks to modernize its economy. As Modi put it during his visit, “Technology is central to our future partnership.” | For Israel, India—its second-largest trading partner in Asia, after China—offers a market that the country can count on in the future despite its human rights abuses against Palestinians, which have prompted increased calls from voters in many Western countries to curtail economic ties with Israel. | The blossoming of ties would not have happened if not for Modi and the BJP. “Whereas a partnership existed, it was a lot more limited prior to Modi,” Azad Essa, a senior reporter at Middle East Eye and author of a 2023 book about India-Israel relations, told Al Jazeera. “Delhi has now emerged as Israel’s strongest non-Western ally, so much so that it is now considered a ‘special relationship,’ rooted in strategic cooperation and ideological convergence.” | Essa points out an important but often overlooked aspect of the relationship: Both India and Israel have in recent years witnessed hardline forces enter their respective political mainstreams. Modi himself presided over a vicious anti-Muslim pogrom in 2002 when he was chief minister of Gujarat that left as many as 2,000 people dead. In Israel, senior members of Netanyahu’s cabinet openly and repeatedly advocate for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, while violent gangs of ultra-orthodox settlers in the West Bank kill, burn and vandalize with impunity. | The parallel upsurge of religious extremist forces is especially notable considering that both countries “started out as formally democratic and economically left wing,” as the Indian author and public intellectual Pankaj Mishra put it in a 2017 essay. “Their cosmopolitan founding fathers – Nehru, Gandhi, Ben-Gurion, Weizmann – and egalitarian ideals helped give the new nation-states, both created within months of each other, their glow of heroic virtue.” | In a way, then, both India and Israel represent cautionary tales for modern democracy. Their story is one of two states that aspired toward democracy and pluralism but fell into a deep, dark hole of religious fanaticism and majoritarian oppression. The close relations that were exhibited during Modi’s trip to Israel stem as much from this convergence as they do from the countries’ commercial and strategic cooperation. |
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