Relations between New Delhi and Jerusalem have not always been as close as they are now.

India’s decision not to join the walkout of dozens of delegations that greeted Benjamin Netanyahu at the United Nations General Assembly in September threw the country’s tilt toward Israel into sharp relief. A country once outspoken in defending Palestinian rights now combines nominal verbal support for the moribund two-state solution with an increasingly intimate strategic partnership with Israel. Even Gaza’s devastation, the killing of 70,000 Palestinians, and the forced displacement of most of its inhabitants that UN officials have described as tantamount to ethnic cleansing have failed to affect that growing intimacy. 

During the first half of the 20th century, India opposed the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine. Indian nationalists viewed Palestinian dispossession through the lens of their own struggle against British rule. Israel’s emergence was viewed as another settler colonial project. Mahatma Gandhi expressed the Indian nationalist position in 1938 in the following words: “Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French.” His sympathy for persecuted Jews did not, he argued, justify forcing the Palestinians to pay for Europe’s mistreatment of its Jewish population. 

India voted against the UN Partition Plan for Palestine shortly after its own independence in 1947. Its opposition reflected more than solidarity with another colonized people. The Indian National Congress leaders had fervently opposed dividing India on religious lines, even though they ultimately accepted partition. Creating another state based on ethno-religious nationhood appeared to validate the principle underlying the division of India and the creation of Pakistan.

India recognized Israel in 1950 once it became clear that the Jewish state was there to stay, but diplomatic relations remained confined to an Israeli consulate in Bombay. India established full diplomatic relations, including an embassy in New Delhi, only in 1992, under a Congress government. The Soviet collapse, America’s unipolar moment, India’s economic opening, and the emerging Arab-Israeli peace process encouraged this reassessment.

This chronology matters. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) did not invent the relationship. It inherited a pragmatic opening and gave it ideological warmth and strategic substance. Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, cooperation with Israel became a publicly celebrated affinity, culminating in the elevation of relations to a special strategic partnership in February 2026 during Prime Minister Modi’s visit to Israel, a few days before the launch of the Iran War. Modi’s embrace of Prime Minister Netanyahu was heavily criticized in India since it appeared to endorse the US-Israeli attack on Iran.

Hindu nationalism, which lies at the core of the BJP’s ideology, and Zionism, the fundamental principle of the Israeli state, share a majoritarian understanding of nationhood: the state belongs principally to a historically defined, majority religious community. Their histories differ, but Israel offers Hindu nationalists an attractive example of military assertiveness conjoined with ethno-religious domination. What earlier Indian leaders regarded as a very troubling resemblance to Pakistan has become for the BJP government a model to emulate.

The perception of common enemies reinforces this affinity. Islamist militant organizations feature prominently in both countries’ security narratives, allowing distinct conflicts to be presented as a shared struggle. Terrorism is a real concern. But identifying adversaries chiefly through their Muslim identity obscures crucial differences. Kashmiri separatism supported by Pakistan-based terrorist organizations is vastly different from Palestinian nationalism, a product of dispossession and occupation.

Moreover, as India sought closer relations with the United States after the Cold War, friendship with Israel appeared capable of generating goodwill. But above all, the partnership rests on military and strategic factors. Israel offered sophisticated equipment when India’s access to comparable American systems was more restricted. It also supplied technologies adaptable to India’s existing arsenal. According to SIPRI, India received 29 percent of Israeli major arms exports in 2021–25, making it Israel’s largest customer of military hardware.

Indian acquisitions of Israeli weaponry include Heron surveillance drones, Phalcon airborne early-warning systems, and SPICE precision-guided weapons. These strengthen Indian reconnaissance, airspace monitoring, and strike capabilities. Military cooperation extends to joint weapons development as well. India’s Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) and Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) developed the MRSAM air-defense system, involving Indian manufacturers.

Intelligence cooperation has an older, quieter history, including reported contacts between India’s Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) and Mossad much before the normalization of diplomatic relations. However, operational details remain opaque. Public cooperation encompasses counterterrorism consultations, while the 2026 agenda adds cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, semiconductors, and joint research. These links create institutional interests that outlast individual governments.

There is therefore nothing mysterious about Israel’s attraction for India and vice versa. The moral question that many have raised in India is why strategic cooperation should mute India’s stance on Palestinian dispossession. Weapons procurement and intelligence sharing do not necessarily oblige India to dilute the principles that animated its own struggle for independence.

India and Israel are partners in several practical fields. But they remain strange bedfellows when measured against India’s founding promise of equal citizenship and opposition to colonialism. The relationship’s inherent contradiction lies in that tension: it reveals how far India’s governing conception of nationhood has traveled from what once made Palestine’s freedom inseparable from its own. Ideological affinity between the BJP and the Israeli Right has overridden any concerns that New Delhi may have had about Israel’s settler colonial project. 

About the Author: Mohammed Ayoob

​Mohammed Ayoob is a university distinguished professor emeritus of International Relations at Michigan State University. His books include The Many Faces of Political Islam (Second Edition, 2020), Will the Middle East Implode? (2014), and, most recently, From Regional Security to Global IR: An Intellectual Journey (2024). He was also the editor of Assessing the War on Terror (2013).

The post India and Israel: Natural Partners or Strange Bedfellows? appeared first on The National Interest.