Why did Prime Minister Modi of India embark on a risky visit to Israel even as West Asia remains volatile? Is this renewed bonhomie independent of India’s ties with Palestine and Iran? What are the elements of strategic convergence involved in each of these bilaterals?
At a time when war clouds hover over West Asia, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi landed in Israel, a crucial defence partner of India. Modi was given a red-carpet welcome by his Israeli counterpart, Benjamin Netanyahu. Unlike his first visit nine years ago, Palestine was not part of the itinerary this time, and US-Iran tensions loomed large. Modi addressed the Israeli Knesset and offered condolences for the victims of the October 7 attack, and terrorism continues to be a common threat in both countries.
Batting for “just and durable peace”, Modi expressed his support for the Gaza Peace Initiative, and both sides signed more than a dozen agreements, with defence and technology being the core. The visit was marked by highly publicised optics of personal chemistry between Modi and Netanyahu and the invoking of shared history. India’s strategic pragmatism vis-à-vis Israel is rooted in the policy of dehyphenation, which allows for continued parallel engagement of both Palestine and Iran on the other side.
Theatrics aside, India’s support for Palestine still stands
Even though Modi proclaimed, “India stands with Israel firmly, with full conviction” and elevated ties to a ‘Special Strategic Partnership’, New Delhi’s position is far more nuanced, as it continues to support Palestinian statehood and the two-state solution, with its roots dating back to the anti-colonial struggle of the previous century. In September 2025, India was among the 142 nations that voted in favour of a UN General Assembly resolution that endorsed a peaceful settlement of the Palestine issue and implementation of a two-state solution. India reaffirmed the same commitment when Egypt’s Foreign Minister was in New Delhi in the following month.
Coming to 2026, India’s External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar met with his Palestinian counterpart, Varsen Aghabekian Shahin, in January, on the sidelines of the Second India-Arab Foreign Ministers’ Meeting hosted by India and they discussed the Gaza Peace Plan, among other regional developments. In February, India’s Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri stated that New Delhi is already implementing projects worth nearly $170 million for Palestine, reiterating India’s willingness to contribute to Gaza’s overall development.
India hosts the third-largest Muslim population in the world, behind Indonesia and Pakistan, and over 9 million Indian expats live in the Gulf – two facts India cannot ignore while recalibrating its West Asia policy. However, the Palestinian cause is now facing headwinds from within the Arab world itself in the aftermath of the Abraham Accords of 2020-21, which saw fellow Arab states, including the UAE and Bahrain, normalising ties with Israel. Egypt did so in 1979 itself, and Jordan in 1994. So, being rigid on Palestine even while Arab states are rethinking their long-held policies doesn’t make much strategic sense for India today.
Israel’s proven record in defence cooperation
Modi’s visit to Israel comes in the backdrop of deterioration in India-Pakistan ties following the 2025 Pahalgam attack in Jammu and Kashmir and the subsequent Indian retaliation of Operation Sindoor, which witnessed India deploying Israeli-origin weapon systems to target terror launchpads and training camps deep inside Pakistan, such as Harop and Harpy loitering munitions, Sky Striker and Heron UAVs, and the Barak-8 surface-to-air missile systems. India-Israel ties have now grown beyond just weapons purchase into joint R&D and co-production.
Almost three decades ago, Israel provided crucial support to India during the Kargil War of 1999 with Pakistan, when India was put under sanctions for its nuclear tests in the year before. This was just seven years after the establishment of full diplomatic ties between the two countries. Even under international pressure, Israel delivered emergency supplies of precision laser-guided ammunition, mortars, and UAVs for combat and surveillance, which proved decisive in India’s victory. Such proactive support built mutual trust and placed India-Israel ties on an upward trajectory. In the years that followed, Israel turned out to be one of India’s most reliable defence partners. Unlike Western powers, Israel’s willingness to share sensitive technologies addresses a long-standing gap in India’s access to advanced defence technology.
Today, India is the largest buyer of Israeli weapons, and Israel is India’s third-largest arms supplier. Israeli weapons integrate well with India’s foreign and indigenous systems, and Israel’s experience in integrating civilian innovation with battlefield applications offers India a viable model for its domestic innovation and manufacturing ecosystem, marked by dynamism and government facilitation of private players. India’s collaboration with Israel is now expanding into next-generation domains such as AI-enabled targeting, cybersecurity, precision agriculture technology and space.
Moreover, Prime Minister Modi’s Israel visit reaffirms New Delhi’s participation in regional connectivity frameworks involving Tel Aviv, such as the IMEC (India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor) and the I2U2 (India, Israel, USA, UAE) format, which are part of India’s broader ambition to diversify and de-risk trade routes and supply chains through viable alternatives. All these strategic imperatives clarify that even without the existence of the oft-cited Hindutva-Zionism nexus, India’s ties will Israel is still bound to flourish, irrespective of the predilections of the ruling dispensation in both countries.
Iran’s geostrategic value for India
India and Iran are civilizational neighbours and partners in non-Western power blocs such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and the BRICS. Following Israel’s strike on Iran in June 2025, India was in a tough position to make a stance. After initially dissociating itself from a strongly-worded SCO statement against Israeli military action, later that year, India signed a joint declaration during the grouping’s leaders’ summit in Tianjin, China, that strongly condemned the coordinated US-Israeli attack against Iran, a member state, calling the act a gross violation of international law and an infringement of Iran’s sovereignty.
Unlike several other Islamic countries, Shia-majority Iran has often avoided taking a hostile stance against India on the Kashmir issue. Notably, in 1994, Tehran played a critical role in preventing a Pakistani-backed OIC resolution against India on human rights violations in Kashmir from being passed, which would have otherwise proceeded to the UN Security Council. However, Tehran’s position has become more complex in recent times, particularly after India revoked the special constitutional status of Jammu and Kashmir in 2019.
However, the most cogent case for India to cultivate ties with Iran is geostrategic. Located at the crossroads of energy routes in the Persian Gulf with direct access to the Indian Ocean Region, Iran provides an alternative gateway for India to venture into the Eurasian interior. Moreover, Tehran continues to be New Delhi’s close partner in geopolitically significant regional connectivity projects, such as Chabahar Port on the Gulf of Oman and the International North-South Transport Corridor that offers an alternative route to Russia and Central Asia via Iran and Afghanistan.
Bureaucratic delays in operationalising Chabahar Port and its related infrastructure projects, combined with the effects of sanctions, have constrained its potential to grow into a game-changing enabler of trade and development. At the same time China-led projects such as the Gwadar Port, located only 60 miles away, and the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor is progressing faster. Coming to Afghanistan, where a variant of Persian called Dari is spoken, India cooperates with Iran for keeping Sunni extremism and drug-trafficking at bay.
Iran had also been a key crude oil supplier to India before 2008, with favourable credit terms and option for trade in national currencies. Unfortunately, that flow drastically came down following India’s civil nuclear deal with the U.S., which gathered steam after Donald Trump took office in 2017. Today, in the aftermath of the assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader, power equations in the region are changing unpredictably, and as Modi noted during his visit to Israel, peace and stability in West Asia are “directly linked” to India’s security.
Preserving manoeuvrability
The strategic underpinnings that define New Delhi’s de-hyphenated relations with Tel Aviv, Tehran and Ramallah are inherently different. Like any other country, India’s foreign policy contains elements of both change and continuity, which are recalibrated periodically. And there are grey areas to manoeuvre, such as engaging mutually adversarial powers at the same time, upholding national interests, and managing public perception at home and abroad.
By strengthening ties with Israel at this point in time, India risks being perceived as insensitive to humanitarian concerns by the developing world and the Global South. Meanwhile, building ties with Iran risks a negative perception in the West. However, Palestine’s case is different, as several Western countries have recognised the State of Palestine in 2025, including the UK and France. Israel’s maximalist military posture, unprovoked aggression against Iran, multiple ceasefire violations in Gaza, and expansion of control in the West Bank have attracted criticism from around the world, and public perception has largely shifted in favour of Gaza and its reconstruction efforts.
India’s expanding partnership with each of these actors has its own sui generis logic. New Delhi’s cherished strategic autonomy is taking shape of a vigorous dehyphenation, as seen with its contemporary equations with the Russia-US-EU and the China-Japan-ASEAN trios. Rather than choosing a rigid side, New Delhi is now well versed in engaging all sides, maximising national interests, while safeguarding manoeuvrability at its best. How sustainable this policy eventually turns out to be amid intensifying regional rivalries and conflicts will be a defining test of India’s foreign policy in the years ahead.
