Contemporary India’s view of the Israeli — Palestinian question therefore has old roots. Our current policy is in line with United Nations Security Council resolutions 242 of 1967 and 338 of 1973, the Quartet Roadmap and the Arab Peace Initiative of Saudi King Abdullah. India supports a united, independent, viable, sovereign state of Palestine with East Jerusalem as its capital, living within secure and recognized borders side by side at peace with Israel. Despite India’s increasing closeness to Israel since 1991—underscored by the two countries’ security cooperation in the face of grave terrorist threats to each — India has not hesitated to express concern about the continuing expansion of Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian territories. India also supports Palestine in a variety of tangible ways, including the contribution of millions of dollars as budget support for the Palestine National Authority and assistance to Palestine in developing its human resources through India’s technical cooperation programme.
Such an attitude has nothing to do with prejudice, since Jews have lived in India, according to legend, since the destruction of their First Temple by the Babylonians in 586 BCE prompted several to cross the established trade routes across the Arabian Sea to the south-western coast of India. They were welcomed by the local ruler of Kodungallur in what is today Kerala without conditions, ‘as long as the world and moon exist’, in one recounting. A delightful anecdote that is part of Kerala’s oral history traditions recounts how, when St Thomas the Apostle landed on the coast of Kerala around 52 CE, he was welcomed on shore by a flute-playing Jewish girl. Other waves of Jewish migration created the Bene Israel of Maharashtra in the hinterland of Mumbai, who were accepted as yet another ‘Hindu’ sub-caste for centuries until a wandering rabbi identified their practices and beliefs as Jewish; and the so-called Baghdadi Jews, largely urban and educated elites from various Ottoman cities who migrated to India in the nineteenth century during the British Raj. None of India’s Jews experienced the slightest episode of anti-Semitism at Indian hands; indeed, the only time this diaspora suffered was when the Portuguese arrived in Kerala in the sixteenth century, found a thriving Jewish community and began to persecute it, leading the Jews to flee south to Kochi (Cochin), where they were given refuge and land, and where in the mid-sixteenth century they built one of the finest synagogues in the world. Today, the community known as the ‘White Jews of Cochin’ has dwindled to the point where it cannot assemble a quorum for a minyan, and their old neighbourhood, tactlessly known as ‘Jew Town’, has become a quaint curiosity shop for tourists. But their history, and that of the other two waves of Jewish migration, is one of India’s willing embrace of the Jewish people and their cultural (but not racial) assimilation into their surroundings — a process that has characterized India’s absorption of the many ethnicities that have infused themselves into the national gene pool.
Nonetheless, friendship and hospitality is one thing, political perspective another. Though the peace process in the region after 1977 made it possible for India to sustain its position on Palestine while upgrading and strengthening relations with Israel, the constraints on New Delhi in this area have been largely internal. An important element guiding India’s political stance towards Israel has undoubtedly been the strong feelings within the country of India’s own Muslim population, which has, perhaps inevitably, looked with suspicion if not hostility at Tel Aviv. The assumption on the part of most Indian political parties that overt friendship with Israel would cost its advocates dearly at the Indian ballot box remains a strong factor, especially when elections loom in states with a significant number of Muslim voters. It did not help that pro-Israeli stances were, in the early years, advocated only by the communally minded Hindu chauvinist party the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, which used support for Israel mainly as an additional stick to beat the Muslims with.
However, a significant change occurred at the end of the Cold War when India re-examined its entire geopolitical posture in the light of the disappearance of the Soviet Union and the subsequent expansion of India’s options. As part of a general reorientation of Indian foreign policy, which included changes in India’s relations with the United States and with Southeast Asia, the government of Prime Minister Narasimha Rao decided in 1992 to upgrade diplomatic relations with Israel to full ambassadorial level. The change was managed reasonably well, with the Arab world being assured that it would not affect India’s traditional position on Arab — Israel issues or the considerably greater priority accorded to India’s engagement with the Arab world. Nonetheless, the last two decades have witnessed a steady strengthening of the India — Israel partnership, particularly in the defence and security areas where the two countries’ shared concerns about Islamic extremism have offered common ground for cooperation. The period 1998–2004, when the Bharatiya Janata Party, the successor to the Jana Sangh, headed coalition governments in New Delhi, was particularly productive from the Israeli point of view, and included the only visit of an Israeli prime minister (Ariel Sharon) to India in 2003.
India is now Israel’s largest market for defence products and services (it is estimated that fully half of the country’s military equipment sales abroad go to India). Despite the huge advantage built up by Russia during the Cold War years as a military supplier to India, the much smaller Israel has, at some $10 billion, become India’s second largest defence supplier (and in some reckonings its largest). Israel is apparently willing to offer India equipment and technology unavailable from any other country, and to provide indigenously developed defence technologies that are therefore less vulnerable to third-party pressures. Israel is reportedly also helping with the modernization of some of India’s ageing Russian-made weapons systems. Surface-to-air missiles, unmanned surveillance aircraft, training simulators and other sophisticated Israeli defence products are now an indispensable part of India’s arsenal. Israel has provided India with vital ground-based missile defence components, but even more important, it has sold India the Phalcon airborne warning and control system (AWACS), which greatly enhances India’s early warning, command and coordination capabilities and could seriously alter the military balance with Pakistan in its favour.
In turn, the ISRO has launched at least one Israeli military satellite, and the two countries have intensified intelligence sharing, especially on Islamist threats to both nations. Cooperation in such areas as counterterrorism, border management and the joint training of security forces has grown. India’s armed forces have embarked on an intensive series of high-level exchanges, especially involving the two naval and air forces, which have deepened strategic understanding between the countries.
The cooperation has been assessed on both sides as excellent, even though for some years India has had a defence minister who is notably wary of Israel. Inevitably relations with Israel get a boost when tensions between India and Pakistan erupt; it is said that Pakistan’s unexpected incursion into Kargil in 1999, which thrust on India a war for which it was unprepared, was partly resisted thanks to an emergency infusion of artillery shells from Israel. At the same time, India is not ready to adopt Israeli methods to deal with terrorism in its own borderlands; it has consistently been critical of Israeli attacks on Gaza and Lebanon, and is unlikely to see Israel as a tutor for its own approaches to similar problems in its neighbourhood.