“I served in many countries in the world, many friendly countries,” said Naor Gilon, Israel’s ambassador to India, in the aftermath of Hamas’s October 7 terror attacks on his home country. “This wide support, strong support is unprecedented. I am really moved and touched.”
Yet Gilon is not Israel’s envoy to America – traditionally the Jewish state’s staunchest ally in times of trouble. Now, in fact, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is on a fraught trip to Washington to repair a critical relationship severely tested by the war in Gaza.
Gilon, by contrast, is Israel’s chief diplomat in another, emerging, superpower: India. “The closeness between Israel and India is very emotional, very deep… it is something very unique,” he continued last October, overwhelmed by support from prime minister Narendra Modi down to ordinary Indians, so many of whom proposed taking up arms in Israel’s defence that, Gilon added: “I could have another Israeli Army with Indian volunteers.”
Gilon said that India’s outpouring of support for Israel was so visceral that it is “something I cannot even explain”. Yet the reality is that some reasons for this increasingly important strategic relationship are obvious.
Indeed, in a speech a couple of days after Gilon’s own, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, India’s external affairs minister, noted that India takes a strong position on terrorism “because we are big victims of terrorism”. On October 27 last year, for example, India abstained on the UN General Assembly resolution calling for a humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza, expressing disappointment the text did not condemn the Hamas assault. And a month later, on the 15th anniversary of the 2008 Mumbai attacks in which 166 people were killed while hundreds were injured, Israel listed the militant Islamist organisation behind them, Lashkar-e-Taiba, as a terror organisation.
It was a largely symbolic gesture, but significant nonetheless – part of a process that has, as Manjari Chatterjee Miller, a professor of international relations at Boston University, says, transformed the traditionally awkward relationship between India and Israel into what he calls “one of the world’s most unusual major-country partnerships”.
Strikingly similar attacks
Although larger, the Hamas attacks had striking parallels with those in Mumbai, stirring memories among Indians and prompting a groundswell of support for Israel, according to one senior diplomat speaking today.
Images from October 7 contained many chilling echoes of the Mumbai terrorist strike. Both involved sustained paramilitary-style attacks on civilians, generating shaky footage that circulated widely on social media and prompted anger that the authorities had been caught badly unprepared.
The 10 Mumbai attackers came ashore in the city’s south on inflatable speed boats and then split up heading towards four main targets: two hotels, including the five-star Taj Mahal Palace, a train station and a building housing a Jewish community centre.
In Israel, roughly 3,000 Hamas-led militants invaded at different points along the border with Gaza in pick-up trucks, motorcycles, speed boats and powered paragliders, targeting dozens of locations, including both civilian and military sites.
In both cases, there was a particular location that bore the brunt of the carnage. In Mumbai it was the station, where attackers opened fire on commuters, killing 58 and injuring 108; in Israel, it was the Nova music festival, at which 364 were murdered.
Witnesses in Mumbai said that the attackers were in their early 20s, wore black T-shirts and jeans and were smiling as they shot their victims. Reports following the attack suggested the terrorists were on steroids.
Videos of the Hamas attacks show that many of the militants who invaded Israel were similarly attired and also took apparent pleasure in their work. Some of the militants are said to have taken Captagon, a stimulant primarily manufactured in Syria and sometimes called the “Jihad drug”.
The Mumbai attackers were in communication with their handlers via satellite and mobile phones throughout their rampage. Reports suggest they were encouraged to kill all their hostages but also issue demands for their release through the media in order to sow confusion among the Indian authorities.
With communication monitoring having grown far more sophisticated in recent years, the Hamas-led fighters are said to have primarily communicated through fixed telephone lines running through extensive tunnel networks. The terrorists took 251 civilian and military personnel as hostages in an attempt to force Israel to exchange them for Palestinian prisoners.
The Mumbai terror attackers killed a rabbi and his pregnant wife along with four other hostages at the Chabad-Lubavitch Jewish centre in Colaba. Injuries on some of the bodies of Jewish victims in Mumbai indicated they may have been tortured before being killed. Israeli women were reportedly raped and assaulted by Hamas militants during the incursion, an allegation Hamas denies. There were also multiple claims that victims suffered mutilation and torture.
Naturally, there were differences between the two attacks, notably that 26/11 was not followed by a large-scale military conflict. Nevertheless, according to one senior Indian diplomat, while many countries sympathised with Israel following the attacks, few were able to fully understand its pain like India.
Such fellow feeling is new. It took more than four decades following India’s independence in 1947 and the establishment of the state of Israel the following year for the two countries to establish formal diplomatic relations. In 2003, Ariel Sharon became the first Israeli prime minister to visit India, while Modi became the first Indian leader to visit Israel as recently as 2017.
India’s early leaders were understandably anti-imperial and, as they sought to forge a nation that could be home to multitudes of people of varying faiths, established a constitution that was avowedly secular. India also relied on Arab nations for oil while the Gulf was home to a big chunk of the Indian diaspora. Today, for example, Indian expats comprise a full third of the UAE’s population.
Many Indian politicians took the view that Israel represented the polar opposite of their approach to nationhood and Zionism was both a colonial and religiously nationalistic project. Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of independent India, declined an invitation from Albert Einstein to support the creation of Israel, even describing Zionism as the “child of British imperialism”.
Israel, for its part, certainly didn’t see itself in those terms, and was far more pragmatic in its foreign relations and always keen to establish more cordial relations with India. At the end of the Cold War, India started buying arms from Israel and in 1999 Israel provided India with military help during the Kargil War with Pakistan.
Nevertheless, relations remained frosty. Of 266 relevant resolutions in the UN General Assembly between 1992 and 2012, India voted in favour of Israel just once. Indian politicians were wary of being seen to support Israel for fear of angering Muslims at home.
Manoj Joshi of the Observer Research Foundation, a think tank based in New Delhi, argues an important factor in the subsequent change in India-Israeli relations is the seismic shift in India’s domestic politics in recent years. There are some suggestions that Modi’s brand of Hindu nationalism has resulted in a rise in anti-Muslim chauvinism.
“It’s a far cry from when I was a student,” says Joshi (who is now aged 75). “For decades India has been very pro-Palestine. There would undoubtedly have been rallies out on the streets protesting against the plight of those in Gaza. The Left had more sway in those days and the ruling Congress party was courting the Muslim vote.”
By contrast, the supporters of Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) believe India and Israel are similarly threatened by Muslim-majority neighbours. Joshi says there is a “distinctly anti-Muslim edge” to some of the support for Israel and the lack of sympathy for Gazans on Indian social media. Some political observers have suggested there are similarities in the political and nationalist ideologies of India’s ruling BJP with Netanyahu’s Right-wing Likud and its alliance.
3D geo-political chess
Indeed, after October 7, India’s support for Israel was initially so pronounced that it resulted in intense criticism from other countries in the so-called “global South”, including China. New Delhi has since felt compelled to reaffirm its support for a two-state solution. In a mirror image of New Delhi’s response, Beijing failed to condemn the Hamas attack but has vehemently criticised Israel’s military response, which China’s foreign minister claimed went “beyond the scope of self-defence”.
China is key. The pieces on the 3D chessboard of Middle Eastern politics have shifted significantly in recent years. Saudi Arabia and the UAE have both softened their animosity to Israel. Meanwhile, all of India’s geopolitical manoeuvres must be viewed through the prism of its superpower rivalry with China.
Until recently, India enjoyed warm relations with Iran, Israel’s greatest rival, while Israel enjoyed strong ties to China. However, India stopped importing oil from Iran in mid-2019 following sanctions on the Persian Gulf nation by the Donald Trump administration. Equally, China has been developing closer ties with Iran and is now the main buyer of its oil. Israelis understandably view Beijing with greater suspicion and have started debating whether Chinese investment into their own country represents a security risk.
In 2021, India, Israel, the UAE, and the US established the I2U2 group, which is seen as a West Asian version of the Quad (which comprises Australia, India, Japan and the US). Both countries are also involved in the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor, which was established last year to bolster transportation and communication links between Europe and Asia and is seen as a counter to China’s “Belt and Road” initiative.
Both alliances are part of US-backed efforts to create a second economic centre of gravity to rival China in the Indo-Pacific region, efforts that may now gain added weight thanks to India’s strengthening support for Israel, a key US ally.
Israel, for its part, is enticed by India’s vast and growing market. India-Israel trade has doubled in the last five years. Most importantly, India is now the Israeli defence industry’s number one international customer.
Where could it all lead?
India’s support for Israel is not without question, particularly as hostilities in Gaza drag on. Yet some diplomatic experts believe that India’s historic pro-Palestine credentials (New Delhi is one of the few world capitals that houses a Palestinian embassy) – together with its more recent support for Israel – mean that it is one of the few world powers that could plausibly act as an “honest broker” in any future peace negotiations.
“India certainly could play that role,” says Joshi. “The government has made it very clear that it is in favour of a two-state solution.”
In the meantime, however, some fruits of “the world’s most unusual major-country partnerships” are already clear. In January, India unveiled its first intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance drone. It was built in partnership between the Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit and a company owned by billionaire businessman Gautam Adani.
Adani, by coincidence, was having dinner in the Taj hotel in Mumbai on the night it was attacked in 2008. He survived by hiding in the basem*nt.
