How Narendra Modi Shattered The Indian Foreign Policy Tradition During Visit To Israel

By Ashok Nilakantan Ayers

NEW YORK: When Narendra Modi walked into the Knesset and told Israel’s parliament during his visit to Israel on February 25-26, that “peace and stability in West Asia are directly linked to India’s security,” he was doing more than delivering a diplomatic courtesy. He was planting a flag.

India, under its most dominant leader in a generation — nearly twelve years and counting, governing 1.4 billion people through an electoral mandate his rivals still cannot explain — has chosen sides in the architecture of the 21st century. The question every capital from Washington to Beijing to Riyadh is now asking is: what exactly does that mean?

This was Modi’s second visit to Israel, the first since his historic 2017 trip that made him the first sitting Indian prime minister to set foot in the country. The context in 2026 is categorically different. Two and a half years of grinding conflict in Gaza, tens of thousands of Palestinian casualties, and a global humanitarian outcry have made any warm embrace of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government a freighted political act.

Modi delivered it anyway — seventeen formal pacts, 27 outcomes total, and a Knesset address that extended condolences for the October 7 Hamas attack while saying nothing about the civilian toll of Israel’s response. The silence spoke as loudly as the speeches.

Strip away the ceremony, and the visit’s deliverables are substantial. The agreements span defence technology, cybersecurity, semiconductor research, artificial intelligence, agriculture, water management, space cooperation, and a new Indo-Israel Cyber Centre of Excellence. Labor mobility pacts expand India’s skilled workforce access to Israeli markets. Israel is already among India’s top three defence suppliers; the new frameworks cement and deepen that dependency into genuinely reciprocal co-development.

“India is not just a partner; it is a strategic ally in shaping the 21st century.”

— Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

Beyond bilateral gains, the visit injected fresh momentum into two grand multilateral frameworks that Modi has staked considerable diplomatic capital on. The India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) — envisioned as a rail-port-energy-digital superhighway linking Mumbai to Rotterdam via the Gulf and Israel — is widely read in Washington as a direct strategic counterweight to China’s Belt and Road Initiative. The I2U2 mechanism, binding India, Israel, the UAE and the United States across food security, clean energy, and logistics, positions New Delhi as a pivot between the Gulf and the West that no other South Asian power can replicate.

For the United States and its European allies, Modi’s Jerusalem visit is, broadly, good news — even if it complicates messaging on Gaza. Washington has spent years cultivating India as a democratic counterweight to China in the Indo-Pacific, and every step New Delhi takes toward deep integration with Israel, the UAE, and Western-aligned connectivity corridors is a step away from the Beijing-Moscow axis. IMEC is an American-backed project; its revival in a Jerusalem communiqué is precisely the kind of signal the Biden and now Trump-era strategic community has sought from India.

European capitals are more conflicted. The EU is one of the largest donors to Palestinian humanitarian efforts, and its member states face intense domestic pressure over Gaza. A jubilant Modi-Netanyahu embrace — however strategically rational — makes it harder for Brussels to maintain a consistent narrative on international humanitarian law. The diplomatic benefit is real; the reputational complexity is equally real.

Here is where the visit’s arithmetic becomes genuinely uncomfortable. Gulf governments — the UAE above all, which has normalized ties with Israel through the Abraham Accords — maintained studied diplomatic silence rather than public criticism of Modi’s trip.

Their economic interests in IMEC are too substantial, and their own Israel relationships too invested, to register formal objection. But Arab public opinion is a different matter entirely. In a region where satellite channels still broadcast daily from Gaza, a visiting head of government who condemns the October 7 attack but says nothing about Palestinian civilian deaths is not perceived as neutral. He is perceived as complicit.

Iran was blunter. Tehran’s officials urged India to address Palestinian rights alongside bilateral cooperation — a pointed reminder that New Delhi’s energy relationship with Iran has not evaporated, and that the Islamic Republic retains both the interest and the platform to make Modi’s balancing act publicly uncomfortable. At an Arab-Islamic summit in 2025 that condemned Israel’s Gaza conduct and called for unified action, the region’s moral temperature was already scalding. Modi walked into that heat and said: strategic interests come first.

The unanswered question that haunts the Middle East is simple: can IMEC actually function as a corridor if the Palestinian question remains unresolved? The proposed route runs through territory whose political future is deeply contested. Infrastructure built on unstable political ground tends not to stay built.

Pakistan’s reaction was predictable and pointed: Islamabad condemned the visit as India aligning too closely with Israel during a humanitarian catastrophe, framing it as yet another dimension of New Delhi’s drift toward Western and Israeli security architecture at Pakistan’s diplomatic expense. For Islamabad, already watching India’s deepening U.S. and Quad partnerships with anxiety, the Jerusalem visit is confirmation of a strategic encirclement narrative it has cultivated domestically for years.

In Bangladesh, where a political transition has complicated the traditionally India-leaning foreign policy orientation, commentators framed the visit in moral terms — as evidence of India’s subordination of Islamic solidarity to transactional realpolitik. That framing resonates with significant segments of the public and political class across Muslim-majority South and Southeast Asian nations, from Malaysia to Indonesia, where Gaza has become a mobilizing issue and where India’s silence on Palestinian deaths is noted, tallied, and remembered.

Moscow and Beijing are watching this visit through a different lens — one of strategic triangulation. Russia, which has maintained complex ties with both Israel and Iran while fighting a war in Ukraine that India has conspicuously refused to condemn, views the Modi-Netanyahu deepening with cautious concern. India’s growing integration into Western-designed connectivity frameworks diminishes the multipolar space that Russia has historically occupied in Indian foreign policy calculations.

For China, the visit is more directly threatening. IMEC is not just an economic corridor; it is a China-containment instrument with ports, railways, and digital infrastructure specifically designed to offer an alternative to BRI-aligned routes. Every rupee and shekel invested in IMEC is, from Beijing’s perspective, a strategic choice against the Chinese-designed order. India’s willingness to champion that framework from the floor of the Knesset — with an American-aligned partner — is the clearest signal yet that New Delhi has made its continental wager.

The sharpest criticism of Modi’s Jerusalem visit did not come from Arab capitals or Pakistani press briefings. It came from within India itself. Opposition parties — Congress foremost among them — accused the Prime Minister of a moral abdication: visiting a government engaged in a military campaign that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, condemning terrorism without acknowledging the civilian toll of the response, and abandoning India’s decades-long tradition of championing Palestinian self-determination at the United Nations and in multilateral forums.

India’s Muslim community — some 200 million people, the world’s largest Muslim minority — watched the visit with unease that crossed political lines. Social media debates, demonstrations in several cities, and sharp commentary from civil society reflected a domestic fault line that the government cannot entirely ignore. The opposition argument is not simply ideological; it is historical. India was among the first nations to recognize the Palestine Liberation Organization. It voted consistently at the UN for Palestinian statehood. That legacy, critics argue, has been quietly traded away for semiconductors and cyber centres.

The government’s counter-argument is coherent if cold-blooded: India has sent humanitarian aid to Gaza, terrorism condemnation does not negate concern for civilians, and strategic interests — defence technology, connectivity infrastructure, investment partnerships — must be weighed against ideological postures that delivered India very little in the decades they were maintained. That argument may be correct in the calculus of power. It is a harder sell at the level of conscience.

Modi’s second journey to Jerusalem will be remembered not for the seventeen agreements — useful as they are — but for what it revealed about the kind of power India intends to be. New Delhi is no longer content to be a passive beneficiary of great-power competition. It wants to be an architect: of corridors, of alliances, of the terms on which the 21st-century order is built across Eurasia. The Jerusalem visit is a declaration of that ambition, delivered in the most politically charged city on earth.

Whether the ambition holds depends on questions that have no answers yet. Will IMEC move from blueprint to steel and fiber? Will the Gaza conflict end in a settlement that gives the corridor political legitimacy? Can India maintain credibility in Arab capitals while deepening Israeli ties? Can Modi sustain domestic consensus for a foreign policy that asks 200 million Indian Muslims to accept that their government’s strategic interests and their community’s moral sensibilities are, for now, on divergent tracks?

In Jerusalem, Modi planted a flag. The world is still deciding whether it marks a foundation — or a fault line. (IPA Service)

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