THE BUSINESS OF FRIENDSHIP
WITH A HEAVY EMPHASIS ON BUSINESS, TECHNOLOGY AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP, PM MODI’S HISTORIC VISIT TO ISRAEL ATTEMPTS TO TAKE THE RELATIONSHIP TO THE NEXT LEVEL
Few foreign visits by an Indian head of government have been as loaded with symbolism as Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s three-day visit to Israel. This could be simply because the visit, the first by an Indian PM since diplomatic ties were established in 1992, was so long in the making. “We’ve been waiting 70 years,” Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu said after warm hugs and a rare red-carpet welcome on the tarmac of Ben Gurion airport. During his own speech, PM Modi referenced a lot of common ground between the two countries, from Haifa—a cavalry charge by Indian lancers during the First World War liberated that town—to recalling his host’s older brother, Colonel Jonathan Netanyahu, who died leading the 1976 commando rescue at Entebbe airport.
There was also an emotive meeting with Moshe Holtzberg, the 10-year-old boy who survived the slaughter at Chabad House during the 26/11 attacks in Mumbai nearly a decade ago. As chief minister of Gujarat, Modi had visited Mumbai while the attacks were on, presciently noting that it was the first time terrorists had attacked foreign nationals— Britons, Americans and Israelis—on Indian soil. An invitation extended by Prime Minister Netanyahu to the young Holtzberg to accompany him to a visit to Mumbai underlines how 26/11 is a common meeting ground. Both countries reiterated their resolve to fight terrorism in all its forms, but this was not the surprising highlight of the joint vision statement.
The statement identified six sectors—development, technology, innovation, entrepreneurship, defence and security—as growth areas for the partnership. “There seems to be very heavy emphasis on the first four—development, technology, innovation and entrepreneurship,” says former diplomat Debnath Shaw. “Nine of the 22 paragraphs in the statement were devoted to these sectors.” PM Modi clearly sees Israeli technology and innovation as a means for India to realise its development goals. Foreign secretary S. Jaishankar emphasised how Israeli technology would come in handy for the government’s goal to double incomes of Indian farmers by 2022. “Water and agriculture can have transformative possibilities,” he said.
Eyebrows were raised when PM Netanyahu called the Indo-Israeli relationship ‘a marriage made in heaven’. (He said the same thing in Beijing in March this year.) The reason for this is not hard to identify: Israel’s bilateral trade with China, at $11 billion, is more than double its trade with India. The joint vision statement attempts to offset this, in a sense, by deepening trade and investment flows between India and Israel. This broadbasing is possibly because the relationship has already stabilised in the areas of defence and security, which, with agriculture, form one of two pillars of the 25-year Indo-Israeli relationship.
Israel is India’s third largest supplier of defence hardware, with exports worth roughly $1 billion each year. Conversely, India is Israel’s largest defence market, accounting for nearly half of Tel Aviv’s military exports. The Jewish nation has sold cutting-edge technology to India, the kind other countries have been unwilling to sell. Over a decade ago, Israel sold India the ‘Swordfish’ phased array radar, the most critical sensory component of a home-grown antiballistic missile system. More recently, it agreed to sell India its ten-missile firing ‘Heron-TP’ drones for $400 million, after India became a signatory to the missile technology control regime last year. The joint statement also attempts to convert this transactional relationship into a more meaningful one—for India at least. The statement called for the joint development of military hardware, with transfer of technology, and with a special emphasis on the ‘Make in India’ initiative. This is a collaboration India thus far enjoys only with Russia, but it remains to be seen whether India can overcome Israel’s wariness on sharing critical knowhow.
The joint statement also elevated the bilateral relationship to a ‘strategic partnership’, making Israel one of more than a dozen countries, ranging from Russia to Rwanda, with whom India has this relationship. If that wasn’t enough, India and Israel also agreed to establish a second ‘strategic partnership’, in water and agriculture.
“There is a natural alliance that has been formalised by Prime Minister Modi’s visit,” says Colonel D.P.K. Pillay (retd) of the New Delhi-based Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses. “We need Israel, and they need our markets and space technology, besides recognition from a major democracy like India.” This natural alliance, however, did not come at the expense of India’s ties to the Arab world. In fact, the PM’s visit to Israel, more than halfway through his tenure, came after a massive outreach to important Gulf Cooperation Council countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE. West Asia, in the throes of one of its longest spells of conflict, received only passing mention in the joint statement: ‘It is India’s hope that peace, dialogue and restraint will prevail.’
India continues to recognise the two-nation theory, but has indicated its preference to deal with both the nations separately. India hosted Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in New Delhi in May this year, but PM Modi did not visit Ramallah, the capital of the Palestinian Authority, during his current visit—a stop that President Pranab Mukherjee made during his state visit last year. Clearly, a move toward a more pragmatic diplomacy.
ISRAEL IS INDIA’S THIRD LARGEST SUPPLIER
OF DEFENCE HARDWARE. INDIA IS ISRAEL’S LARGEST DEFENCE MARKET, ACCOUNTING FOR ALMOST HALF OF ITS MILITARY EXPORTS