How Modi and Bibi Built a Military Alliance

Today, the Indian-Israeli relationship is genuinely multifaceted. It extends from an annual influx of young Israeli tourists who come to India’s west coast beaches to unwind after their required military service to collaborations in drip agriculture to the sale of sophisticated weaponry. In the past several decades the relationship has significantly deepened and broadened, especially under the two right-of-center prime ministers, Narendra Modi and Benjamin Netanyahu.

This close partnership has significant ramifications for regional and global politics. The close bilateral relationship enables both parties to play a wider role in the Middle East, especially in the Persian Gulf. This is increasingly evident from their participation in the new quadrilateral arrangement, the I2U2, designed to limit China’s influence in the region and also to reassure allies of the enduring U.S. commitment to the region.

Historically, the Indian-Israeli relationship was far from close. The Indian nationalist movement was leery of supporting a state established on the basis of a particular religion—wary that it could provide legitimacy to rival Pakistan’s moral foundations. Furthermore, parts of India’s foreign-policy establishment had sympathies for the Arab world borne out of shared anti-colonial sentiments. The political leadership in New Delhi was also sensitive to India’s largest religious minority, Muslims, who were mostly ill-disposed toward Israel.

Today, the Indian-Israeli relationship is genuinely multifaceted. It extends from an annual influx of young Israeli tourists who come to India’s west coast beaches to unwind after their required military service to collaborations in drip agriculture to the sale of sophisticated weaponry. In the past several decades the relationship has significantly deepened and broadened, especially under the two right-of-center prime ministers, Narendra Modi and Benjamin Netanyahu.

This close partnership has significant ramifications for regional and global politics. The close bilateral relationship enables both parties to play a wider role in the Middle East, especially in the Persian Gulf. This is increasingly evident from their participation in the new quadrilateral arrangement, the I2U2, designed to limit China’s influence in the region and also to reassure allies of the enduring U.S. commitment to the region.

Hostile Homelands: The New Alliance Between India and Israel, Azad Essa, Pluto Press, 240 pp., $22.95, February 2023.

Historically, the Indian-Israeli relationship was far from close. The Indian nationalist movement was leery of supporting a state established on the basis of a particular religion—wary that it could provide legitimacy to rival Pakistan’s moral foundations. Furthermore, parts of India’s foreign-policy establishment had sympathies for the Arab world borne out of shared anti-colonial sentiments. The political leadership in New Delhi was also sensitive to India’s largest religious minority, Muslims, who were mostly ill-disposed toward Israel.

As a result, during much of the Cold War, following India’s independence in 1947, its relations with Israel were low-key, even clandestine. In 1947, India voted against the U.N. partition plan for the British Mandate of Palestine. After Israel declared independence in 1948, India again voted no on admitting the state of Israel to the United Nations General Assembly, and it only recognized the country in 1950. During the bulk of the Cold War, India, quite deliberately, maintained a studious public distance from Israel. It was only after the Cold War’s end and the Madrid Peace Conference that India normalized its relationship with Israel.

Journalist Azad Essa’s new book, Hostile Homelands: The New Alliance Between India and Israel, argues that India’s growing partnership with Israel is based upon a convergence of ethnonational ideological perspectives. It covers much of what is already known about the evolution of the relationship, and those familiar with the partnership may not find much that is especially novel. Essa nevertheless scours a range of academic and popular sources to construct his key arguments.

Essa wants to demonstrate in this book that the burgeoning strategic partnership between India and Israel involves the jettisoning of all moral scruples and is increasingly based upon a convergence of ideological proclivities as well as mutually beneficial material ties across a range of areas, from commerce to defense. His argument is only partially accurate, because the strengthening of Indian-Israeli ties had started before the rise of powerful ethnonationalist governments in the two countries.

Despite its reservations toward Israel, India allowed it to open a consulate in Mumbai (then known as Bombay) in 1953; it still showed no interest in having full diplomatic relations with the Jewish state. However, it did rely on Israel for military assistance, albeit in a covert fashion. Eager to break free from its diplomatic isolation in the Middle East, Israel provided critical military supplies to India, starting with the 1962 Sino-Indian border war, aiming to soften India’s diplomatic stance. Israel also came to India’s aid during its wars with Pakistan in 1965 and 1971, although it was kept secret.

While carrying out these surreptitious contacts, India mostly rebuffed closer ties with Israel in public. It was only after the Cold War came to an end—and after the 1991 Madrid Conference, designed to promote political rapprochement between Israel and key Arab states—that India and Israel established full diplomatic relations. Since then, the relationship has been on a steady upward trajectory, regardless of the government in power in New Delhi. But starting in the late 1990s, under right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-dominated governments, relations improved dramatically. Israel, of course, was keen on helping as India was a potentially lucrative market.

This transformation took place under the BJP because, unlike the Congress Party, it did not have the same ideological commitment to the Palestinian cause and the Arab world. Furthermore, it did not have the same concerns about the Muslim electorate in India.

Today, India enjoys a multifaceted relationship with Israel, from extensive tourism exchange to robust arms acquisitions. Since Modi came to power in 2014, India has become far less substantially supportive of the Palestinian cause, even while remaining publicly committed to it. For example, in 2015 and 2016, India abstained from voting on a United Nations resolution that would have referred Israel to the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes committed during the 2014 Gaza crisis.

Essa’s central argument is that the security partnership between India and Israel has really crystallized in the past decade, especially under Modi—and that it has become more salient because of the emergence of powerful ethnonationalist forces in both countries.

This argument, without question, is quite sound. In India, this trend is exemplified by the formation of the Hindutva (literally, “Hinduness”) phalanx under Modi and his coterie. A similar process has taken place in Israel, most recently with the willingness of Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party to share power with far-right parties, including the ultranationalist and anti-Arab Religious Zionism party.

What the Indian and Israeli governments have in common is their professed hostility toward minority populations: Muslims in India and predominantly Muslim Arabs in Israel. Essa correctly argues that despite making cursory nods toward the preservation of minority rights, both Modi and Netanyahu wish to transform their countries into ethnic democracies that privilege the majority community. This line of reasoning, as far as it goes, cannot really be questioned. As far as the two governments go, this commonality has certainly helped bolster the relationship.

However, there are a host of other claims in Essa’s book—historical and contemporary, large and small—that mar the quality of his analysis and turn the book into a polemic. These claims are not limited to either country, though his assertions about India are especially flawed.

One of the most blatant examples is Essa’s one-sided account of the accession of the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir to India in 1947. He does not mention Pakistan’s blatant complicity in supporting a rebellion against the last ruler of the state, Maharaja Hari Singh.

Instead, Essa trots out the tired Pakistani narrative that the state should have acceded to Pakistan because of its Muslim-majority population. This undermines his argument about the relationship with Israel because India had a fairly robust commitment to secularism in its early days as an independent state. Essa, however, suggests that despite its professed commitment to secularism during the Nehru era, already India had scant regard for the rights of Muslims.

Unfortunately, this is not Essa’s only misleading discussion. In November 2008, members of the Pakistan-based—and Pakistan-supported—Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) militant group launched terrorist attacks against several targets in Mumbai, killing more than 100 people. Yet Essa avoids referring to the members of the LeT as terrorists, preferring to use the term “attackers.”

Nor, for that matter, does he discuss Pakistan’s long-standing policy of using terrorist proxies with deadly effect against India. Essa highlights the 2008 Mumbai attacks to critique India’s decision to turn to Israel for counterterrorism assistance in the wake of its own botched response to the terrorist attack.

Finally, Essa’s book is laden with insinuations and innuendos that do not stand up under closer scrutiny. Rather than acknowledging that countries routinely acquire advanced weapons from any supplier that is willing to provide them at a reasonable cost, he suggests that the booming Indian-Israeli arms-transfer relationship has some sinister design.

Specifically, he focuses on the transfer of electronic sensors that can be deployed along a border to detect infiltrators. Given Israel’s considerable expertise in this area and India’s two-front border problems with Pakistan and China, New Delhi’s decision to acquire these technologies is hardly shocking. When both pragmatic considerations of national security and ideological affinity align, such arms deals become commonplace.

On the other hand, India’s purchase and deployment of domestic surveillance equipment from a private Israeli firm, Pegasus, which came to light in July 2021, does raise serious questions about the Modi government’s commitment to protect the privacy and civil liberties of dissidents and the political opposition in India. Essa briefly discusses this issue and underscores how the acquisition of this technology amounts to yet another example of the scant regard of both governments to civil liberties. Nevertheless, this was a commercial transaction and not a government-to-government technology transfer.

Essa also dwells at some length on pro-Hindutva groups in the United States and their ties to staunch pro-Israeli organizations. These links, no doubt, exist. However, it is far from clear that they are as influential in shaping and bolstering the Indian-Israeli strategic partnership as he suggests. Specifically, he contends that they have developed a cozy relationship of mutual convenience, with each group bolstering ties between right-wing governments in India and Israel.

There is little question that the arc of the Indian-Israeli partnership has undergone a significant transformation under the leadership of Modi and alongside the rise of Netanyahu. The two leaders’ common ethnonational projects have no doubt boosted the growing closeness between the states. It is a pity that Essa’s accurate core argument is diminished by factual elisions and polemical claims.