India-Israel Relations and the Palestine Question

India recognised Israel in 1950 and did not exchange ambassadors with it for forty-two years. It then built, inside three decades, one of its most technologically intimate partnerships anywhere. In the same period it kept a Palestine policy it has never formally revised. Explaining how one state holds all three of those positions at once — and what happened to that arrangement after October 2023 — is the whole subject.

The puzzle at the centre of the relationship

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• India’s Israel policy is the most studied anomaly in Indian foreign policy, because the gap between recognition and relations has no obvious parallel.
  • Recognition came on 17 September 1950, and was announced as the acceptance of an accomplished fact rather than as an endorsement.
  • Full diplomatic relations and resident embassies came only on 29 January 1992, under P. V. Narasimha Rao.
  • Nothing in the interval was a formal rupture. There was no severance, no expulsion, no recall — only a deliberate refusal to complete a relationship India had already begun.
• The relationship that followed 1992 moved faster than almost any other India has built. From roughly US$200 million of trade and no security content at all, it became a defence, agricultural, water, intelligence and technology partnership within twenty years.
• India’s Palestine position was never withdrawn. India still supports a negotiated two-State solution, still funds Palestinian refugees, still runs a mission in Ramallah, and voted in September 2025 for the most explicit General Assembly text on Palestinian statehood in decades.
• The policy word for holding all of this together is “de-hyphenation” — treating Israel and Palestine as two relationships rather than as one bargain. Whether that is a doctrine or a description written after the fact is one of the article’s central questions.

The asymmetries that structure everything else

The forty-two-year delay is not the puzzle. The puzzle is that India recognised Israel at all, and then behaved for four decades as if it had not.

How India’s position on Palestine was formed before 1947

• India’s Palestine policy predates Indian independence, which is why it survived every subsequent change of government.
  • The Indian National Congress treated Palestine through an anti-colonial lens from the 1920s: a Mandate territory whose population’s wishes had been overridden by an imperial power.
  • The Khilafat movement attached Indian Muslim political opinion to questions of the Ottoman successor lands, giving the issue a domestic constituency well before there was an Indian state.
  • Jawaharlal Nehru read the Balfour Declaration as a promise made by a colonial power over the heads of the inhabitants — the same objection he made to imperial arrangements everywhere.
• Gandhi set the moral register, and his formulation in Harijan in November 1938 remains the most quoted single passage in the whole subject.
  • He acknowledged the persecution of Jews in Europe directly, and in unusually strong terms for a writer so sparing with them.
  • He then refused to accept that the remedy could be another people’s dispossession.
  • He urged Jewish settlement in Palestine only with Arab consent, by “a change of Arab heart”, which is precisely the element the argument’s later users tend to omit.

“Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French.”

— Mahatma Gandhi

• Gandhi’s position was ideological and political at once, and it is worth saying so plainly rather than treating him as a pure moralist.
  • He was leading a movement that needed Hindu-Muslim unity and could not endorse a religiously defined state in Palestine while opposing one in India.
  • He was also resisting the argument that scripture or history could ground a territorial claim, which was the argument the Muslim League was beginning to make at home.

UNSCOP and the vote of 29 November 1947

• India was one of the eleven states on the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) in 1947 — a fact usually lost in the shorthand that “India opposed Israel”.
  • India’s representative was Sir Abdur Rahman, a judge of the Lahore High Court, with Venkata Viswanathan and H. Dayal as alternates.
  • UNSCOP split. The majority recommended partition into two states with an economic union; a minority of three — India, Iran and Yugoslavia — proposed an independent federal state.
• The Indian-sponsored federal plan was a serious constitutional design, not a delaying tactic, and understanding its content matters because India’s later positions descend from it.
  • A single independent Palestine after a transition of not more than three years.
  • A bicameral federal legislature — one chamber by proportional representation, the other with equal Arab and Jewish representation, so neither community could be outvoted on communal questions.
  • A federal court with a guaranteed minimum of Arab and Jewish judges.
  • Jerusalem as the shared federal capital, divided into Arab and Jewish municipalities, with the Holy Places under international supervision.
  • Jewish immigration limited by the absorptive capacity of the Jewish province as determined by an international commission.
• The General Assembly adopted the majority plan as Resolution 181 on 29 November 1947, and India voted against it, among thirteen states opposing.
  • The vote was not a vote against Jewish statehood as such but against partition as the method — the same objection India had just lived through at home.
  • India’s own partition three months earlier is the missing variable in most accounts: a government that had watched a religiously defined division produce mass killing was not going to certify another one.
• India also opposed Israel’s admission to the United Nations in May 1949, and then reversed course on recognition within sixteen months — the first of the inconsistencies that define this policy.

Recognition without relations, 1950 to 1992

• The recognition of 17 September 1950 was minimal by design.
  • Nehru presented it as the acknowledgement of an existing fact, and India’s public reasoning stressed that continued non-recognition would create friction between two members of the same organisation.
  • A Jewish Agency immigration office in Bombay was converted into a Trade Office and then a Consulate, opened in 1953 — the single institutional thread that ran through the whole four decades.
  • The Consulate’s functions were deliberately constrained: it was a consular and trade post, not a political mission, and its head was not accredited to New Delhi.
• Four explanations are offered for the delay. They are not equally strong, and the argument is improved by ranking them.

• The Suez moment deserves separate weight. When Israel joined Britain and France against Egypt in 1956, it confirmed for Nehru that Israel was an instrument of the retreating empires, and it bound India to Gamal Abdel Nasser at the founding moment of non-alignment.
• P. R. Kumaraswamy’s account is the corrective to all four explanations, and it is the one an argument should be built on.
  • His central finding is a persistent divergence between India’s public position and its private conduct — the state that would not receive an Israeli ambassador nonetheless sought Israeli agricultural expertise, military assistance and intelligence.
  • He treats the domestic-Muslim explanation as an assumption rather than a demonstrated constraint, made by governments that never put it to the test and then cited its untested existence as a reason for inaction.
  • He documents inconsistency across leaders rather than a single doctrine: Nehru’s refusal of political relations alongside functional contact; Indira Gandhi’s hardening of the public line while quiet channels survived; Rajiv Gandhi’s significant conciliatory openings towards Israel in the late 1980s.
• The covert record is the evidence.
  • Israel supplied ammunition to India during the 1962 war with China and again in 1971, at moments when the public relationship was at its coldest.
  • Moshe Dayan, then Israel’s Foreign Minister, flew secretly to Delhi on 14 August 1977 under a false name, and met Prime Minister Morarji Desai and Foreign Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Desai refused normalisation, saying it could follow only regional peace, and declined even to permit an Israeli consulate beyond Bombay. The Foreign Secretary was not told the visit had happened.
  • Rajiv Gandhi met Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres in New York in 1985, the first meeting of its kind, and in 1988 the restrictions on the Bombay Consulate began to be relaxed.
• The political economy of the silence is the honest summary. The relationship was managed as a covert asset and a public liability, and every government preferred the asset without paying for the liability.

India did not lack a relationship with Israel between 1950 and 1992. It lacked the willingness to admit to one.

What India built with Palestine in the same decades

• India’s Palestine relationship was not rhetorical. It was institutionalised at every stage the Palestinian national movement itself reached.
  • 1974: India became the first non-Arab state to recognise the Palestine Liberation Organisation as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.
  • 1975: a PLO office opened in New Delhi, and in March 1980 it was accorded full diplomatic status.
  • 1988: India recognised the State of Palestine immediately after its declaration of independence on 18 November, and Yasser Arafat was thereafter received in India as a head of state.
  • 25 June 1996: India opened a Representative Office in Gaza, relocated to Ramallah in 2003, which remains India’s mission to the Palestinian Authority.
• India’s positions at the United Nations tracked the same line.
  • India co-sponsored General Assembly texts on the Palestinian right to self-determination.
  • India condemned Israel as the aggressor in the wars of 1967 and 1973.
  • India was among the states supporting the 1975 resolution equating Zionism with racism — a position that became an embarrassment and whose repeal in 1991 removed one obstacle to normalisation.
• The development relationship is the part that has outlasted the rhetoric.
  • Budgetary support to the Palestinian Authority, project assistance, and ITEC training slots for Palestinian officials.
  • A Government of India-funded Palestinian Institute of Diplomacy, linked to India’s own Sushma Swaraj Foreign Service Institute.
  • Annual contributions to UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestine refugees, now at the level of US$5 million a year.
  • Arafat visited India repeatedly; Mahmoud Abbas visited in 2005, 2008, 2010, 2012 and 2017, with assistance pledges attached to several of those visits.

1992: weighing the causes

The standard list of reasons for normalisation is accurate and analytically useless, because it treats five very different kinds of cause as interchangeable. Some of them removed obstacles; only one of them supplied a motive. Separating the permissive from the efficient causes is what turns a list into an argument.

• The permissive causes — what stopped blocking the decision.
  • The Madrid Conference of October 1991 put Israel and its Arab neighbours, and Palestinian representatives, at the same table. Once the Arab states were talking to Israel, India’s abstention protected no one.
  • The General Assembly repealed the “Zionism is racism” resolution on 16 December 1991, removing the formal international stigma India had helped attach.
  • China established relations with Israel in January 1992. India’s last cover — that a large Asian non-aligned state could not do this — vanished.
  • The Soviet Union dissolved in December 1991, and with it the bloc discipline that had made distance from Israel a marker of alignment.
  • Egypt had already made peace with Israel: the Camp David Accords of September 1978 were followed by the Egypt-Israel peace treaty of 26 March 1979. The largest Arab state had normalised thirteen years before India did.
• The efficient causes — what supplied the motive.
  • The collapse of the Soviet arms guarantee. India’s inventory, spares pipeline and rupee-payment arrangements all ran through a state that no longer existed. Israel was the one supplier able to service, upgrade and substitute Soviet-origin equipment, and it had no political conditions to attach.
  • The 1991 balance-of-payments crisis and liberalisation. A government devaluing the rupee and dismantling import controls could not simultaneously justify refusing a technology partner on ideological grounds.
  • Access to the United States. Rao’s government read relations with Israel as part of the price of a working relationship with Washington after the Cold War — a calculation that belongs with the India-US relationship and is not reopened here.
• The domestic political change is real but secondary. Rao led a minority government with limited room, and he took the decision quickly and without a public campaign — evidence that the constraint had always been perceived rather than structural.

From normalisation to the first prime ministerial visit

• The two decades after 1992 were spent building substance without publicity, and the milestones are political as much as commercial.
  • Ezer Weizman became the first Israeli President to visit India in 1997, and the relationship acquired its first ceremonial layer.
  • Kargil in 1999 made Israel a supplier of last resort, and the warmth between Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Benjamin Netanyahu gave that supply a political frame.
  • L. K. Advani became the first Indian minister to visit Israel in 2000, followed the same year by Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh; formal counter-terrorism cooperation dates from those visits.
  • Ariel Sharon visited India in September 2003, the first by an Israeli Prime Minister, and it drew parliamentary protest of a kind no later visit has.
  • Under the United Progressive Alliance between 2004 and 2014 the balancing was deliberate: defence procurement expanded while Mahmoud Abbas was received in 2005, 2008, 2010 and 2012, and the political relationship with Israel was kept below the visible line.
  • Three agreements signed in February 2014 on legal assistance, homeland security and classified material completed the legal architecture just before the change of government that would make the relationship public.
• The sequencing is the proof. India moved five days after China, five weeks after the Soviet Union ceased to exist, and three months after Madrid. The decision was not a change of conviction; it was the removal of every reason not to act, at the moment India acquired a reason to.

Defence: the pillar that carries the relationship

• The defence relationship is the reason the partnership survives every political embarrassment, and its founding episode is the Kargil conflict of 1999, not the embassy exchange of 1992.
  • When Indian forces found themselves fighting at altitude against dug-in positions, the immediate shortfalls were artillery and mortar ammunition and precision air-delivered munitions.
  • Israel supplied mortar ammunition and laser-guided bombs and targeting kits for the Mirage 2000H, which converted an air force that was missing its targets into one that could hit bunkers on ridgelines.
  • Israel also accelerated deliveries of surveillance drones already on order — Searcher and Heron systems for high-altitude observation.
  • The political content mattered as much as the hardware: Israel supplied without preconditions and without an embargo, at a moment when several Western suppliers were still applying post-1998 nuclear sanctions.
• Kargil converted a supplier into a strategic partner because it exposed exactly the capability gaps Israel specialised in — surveillance, precision strike and air defence.

What India actually acquired

• The institutional architecture grew around the hardware.
  • A Joint Working Group on defence cooperation, whose seventeenth meeting was held in Tel Aviv on 4 November 2025 and signed a new Memorandum of Understanding on Defence Cooperation covering training, industrial cooperation, research, artificial intelligence, cyber security and co-development and co-production.
  • The first talks at defence-minister level took place on 3 March 2023, which is late for a relationship of this size and is itself a comment on how much of it ran through officials rather than politicians.
  • A separate Joint Working Group on Counter-Terrorism, and three agreements signed in February 2014 on mutual legal assistance in criminal matters, homeland security cooperation and the protection of classified material — the legal plumbing that lets intelligence actually move.
• The 2021 Bilateral Innovation Agreement between DRDO and Israel’s Directorate of Defence Research and Development changed the model.
  • It funds joint development rather than sale in drones, robotics, artificial intelligence and quantum technologies.
  • Costs are shared between the two agencies, and both sides may use whatever is developed — which is what distinguishes it from an offset arrangement.
• Production in India is now the substance of “Make in India” in this relationship, not a slogan attached to imports.
  • Kalyani Rafael Advanced Systems in Hyderabad for Spike missiles and remote weapon stations.
  • The Adani-Elbit unmanned aircraft complex in Hyderabad, which has exported Hermes airframes.
  • Bharat Electronics and Israel Aerospace Industries on the MRSAM production chain, with a substantial Indian content share.

The honest ledger

• The claim that Israel is India’s second-largest arms supplier is out of date, and correcting it strengthens rather than weakens the argument.
  • On SIPRI’s 2021-25 figures, Russia supplied about 40% of Indian arms imports, France about 29% and Israel about 15% — Israel is third.
  • India took 8.2% of global arms imports in that window and remained the world’s second-largest importer, with total volumes about 4% below 2016-20.
  • Russia’s share has fallen from roughly 70% in 2011-15, and the space it vacated has been taken mainly by France, not Israel.
• The correct statement of Israel’s position is therefore narrower and more interesting: Israel is not India’s largest supplier, but India is Israel’s largest customer, and Israel dominates specific niches — loitering munitions, tactical drones, electro-optics, radar seekers and air-defence interceptors — where substitution is slow and expensive.
• Two structural limits deserve to be stated.
  • Israel’s own war demand competes with Indian orders. Deliveries slowed after October 2023 as Israeli industry prioritised domestic requirements.
  • Israeli technology is frequently American-enabled, so end-use and re-transfer questions travel with it, which caps how far co-development can go without Washington’s acquiescence.

Counter-terrorism, intelligence and internal security

• The intelligence relationship is older than the diplomatic one and remains the least documented part of it.
  • Liaison between the Research and Analysis Wing and Mossad dates from the 1960s and was maintained through the years of public estrangement.
  • Cooperation now runs through the Joint Working Group on Counter-Terrorism, real-time exchange on groups and financing, and comparison of operational experience on border security, recruitment patterns and radicalisation online.
• The 2014 legal agreements matter more than they appear to: intelligence cooperation without a mutual legal assistance framework cannot be used in prosecutions.
• Indian IPS probationers have trained at the Israel National Police Academy since 2015, and Israeli practice has shaped Indian thinking on crowd control, VIP protection, airport security and urban counter-terrorism.
• The relationship has an emotional register created by shared victimhood.
  • The 26 November 2008 Mumbai attacks included the deliberate targeting of the Nariman House Chabad centre, in which Israeli nationals were murdered — the one episode that made the two countries’ terrorism problems literally the same event.
  • After the Pahalgam attack of April 2025, Israel publicly backed India’s right to self-defence and its envoy in Delhi framed the two countries as facing the same phenomenon.
• The limits are worth stating with equal clarity. Israel offers India capability and sympathy, not commitment. It has no stake in South Asian deterrence, has never been asked to take a position that would cost it anything on Pakistan, and its own regional priorities are set by Iran.

Agriculture, water and the domestically legible partnership

• Agriculture is the pillar that produces no diplomatic cost, which is why it has grown steadily through every crisis in the political relationship.
  • Cooperation is framed by an agreement of 1993, renewed in April 2025, and implemented through Israel’s MASHAV and its agricultural development arm CINADCO with India’s agriculture ministry.
  • Work is programmed through rolling three-year Work Plans; the current one is the sixth, running 2024-2026.
• The Indo-Israel Centres of Excellence are the visible output and the numbers have moved well past what most accounts still carry.
  • Forty-three Centres of Excellence have been approved and thirty-five are operational, spread across states and specialised by crop — vegetables, fruits, flowers and beekeeping.
  • Each centre is a demonstration farm plus a training facility: protected cultivation, high-density orchards, nursery and canopy management, mechanised horticulture and post-harvest handling.
  • More than a million Indian farmers have been trained through them, which is the metric that makes this politically valuable in a way no defence contract can be.
  • A Villages of Excellence programme extends the model outward from each centre into clusters of surrounding villages, so that the technology leaves the demonstration plot.
• Water is the second half of the same offer, and for India it is arguably the more important half.
  • Israeli drip and micro-irrigation is now standard equipment in Indian horticulture; Jain Irrigation’s acquisition of the Israeli manufacturer NaanDan in 2012 brought the manufacturing base into Indian ownership.
  • Desalination, wastewater treatment and the reuse of treated effluent in agriculture are the technologies India lacks at scale and Israel has built its water security on.
  • State-level MoUs give the cooperation a federal texture — Haryana in June 2022 and Rajasthan in December 2024 with MASHAV on integrated water management.
  • Centres of Excellence in water technology were established at IIT Madras and IIT Roorkee in May 2023, moving the relationship from equipment transfer to research.
• The February 2026 visit added an India-Israel Innovation Centre for Agriculture, with twenty joint fellowships for agricultural research, and a separate MoU on fisheries and aquaculture signed after an Indian ministerial visit in January 2026.
• The analytical point is that this pillar is domestically legible. A farmer trained at a centre in Maharashtra is a constituency for the relationship; a radar seeker is not.

Technology, space, cyber and finance

• The science relationship rests on a Joint Committee on Science and Technology created under a 1993 agreement, and the February 2026 visit raised that committee to ministerial level — a small procedural change that determines how quickly money moves.
• The India-Israel Industrial R&D and Innovation Fund (I4F), agreed during the 2017 visit, funds joint company-to-company product development and has been renewed for 2023-27.
  • Joint research calls were raised from US$1 million to US$1.5 million each in 2026.
  • A Joint Research Programme on artificial intelligence applications in agriculture and climate was launched in 2023.
• Artificial intelligence became the headline of the 2026 visit rather than defence, which is itself the story.
  • An MoU on artificial intelligence, and a separate MoU on AI-integrated pedagogy in education.
  • A Tech-Gateway Initiative and a Critical and Emerging Technologies Initiative to route start-ups and research consortia between the two innovation systems.
  • A Letter of Intent for an India-Israel Cyber Centre of Excellence, with a multi-year cyber roadmap attached.
  • A Declaration of Intent on horizon scanning — joint identification of technologies before they mature, which is the least glamorous and most consequential item on the list.
• Space cooperation is older and narrower than the rhetoric suggests.
  • A cooperation agreement in 2002 between ISRO and the Israel Space Agency, followed by three further agreements in July 2017 covering atomic clocks, electric propulsion and small satellites.
  • ISRO’s PSLV launched Israel’s TecSAR radar-imaging satellite in 2008, and India’s own RISAT-2, built on an Israeli platform, was launched in 2009 after the Mumbai attacks exposed a gap in all-weather surveillance.
• Finance and payments were the surprise of 2026.
  • India’s UPI was linked with Israel’s MASAV system, extending India’s digital public infrastructure diplomacy into a high-income market.
  • Cooperation agreements between the International Financial Services Centres Authority and the Israel Securities Authority, and a Bilateral Investment Agreement discussed during the Israeli finance minister’s visit in September 2025.
  • Over 300 Israeli investments are recorded in India, concentrated in high technology, agriculture and water.

Trade: the pillar that broke

Most accounts of this relationship stop at the peak, and the peak is now three years old. Merchandise trade excluding defence rose from almost nothing in 1992 to a record in 2022-23 and then fell by nearly two-thirds in two years. The fall is the single most important economic fact about the relationship today, and it is more instructive than the rise, because it shows what the trade was actually made of.

• Reading the series correctly matters more than reciting it.
  • The peak was not a structural achievement. It was a commodity-arbitrage spike layered on a diamond trade, and both components were vulnerable to exactly the disruption that arrived.
  • The floor is the durable part. Diamonds, chemicals, machinery, pharmaceuticals and agricultural technology are what the relationship trades when nothing unusual is happening.
  • The composition has begun to diversify into electronics, communications equipment and medical devices — slowly, and from a small base.
• Ron Malka, a former Israeli ambassador to India, argued that the two economies complete rather than compete with one another — and the composition of the trade broadly bears him out, since almost nothing India sells Israel competes with what Israel sells India.
• Two asymmetries define the commercial relationship.
  • India is Israel’s second-largest merchandise partner in Asia. Israel is not among India’s top forty partners. The relationship matters far more to Jerusalem than to Delhi in trade terms, and that is the leverage India has never fully used.
  • Defence is excluded from these figures. Once it is added, the direction of the balance and the political salience of the trade both change.
• Investment is small and lopsided but strategically placed.
  • Indian outbound investment into Israel of about US$443 million between April 2000 and April 2025, and Israeli FDI into India of about US$334.26 million between April 2000 and March 2025.
  • Adani Ports and Israel’s Gadot Group won the privatisation of Haifa port in 2022, with the acquisition valued at about US$1.18 billion and a concession running three decades. This is the largest Indian commercial position in Israel and the one with strategic content — a port at the Mediterranean end of any land bridge from the Gulf to Europe.
  • Indian corporate presence includes TCS, Infosys, Wipro, Tech Mahindra, State Bank of India, Sun Pharma — which holds a controlling stake in Taro Pharmaceutical Industries — and the Lohia and Adani groups.
• The Free Trade Agreement is the policy response to the collapse, and its timing is not coincidental.
  • Terms of Reference were signed during the Indian commerce minister’s visit to Israel in November 2025.
  • Negotiations were formally launched in February 2026, with the first round held in New Delhi from 23 to 26 February 2026 covering goods, services, rules of origin, sanitary and phytosanitary measures, technical barriers, customs, intellectual property and digital trade.
  • The second round was scheduled for Israel in May 2026, with virtual sessions in between.
  • The obvious sticking point is intellectual property: Israeli firms have long argued that India’s patent regime limits what technology they will transfer, and India has defended that regime as the basis of its generic pharmaceutical industry.

People, communities and the new labour relationship

• The human relationship is the oldest layer and the one most often reduced to a sentence.
  • The Bene Israel of the Konkan coast and Maharashtra, historically Marathi-speaking, form the largest Indian Jewish community and the largest Indian-origin group in Israel.
  • The Cochin or Malabar Jews of Kerala, with a documented presence going back many centuries and a Judeo-Malayalam liturgical tradition; most emigrated after 1948, settling heavily in agricultural moshavim.
  • The Baghdadi Jews of Bombay and Calcutta, a nineteenth-century trading community whose philanthropy — schools, hospitals, synagogues and libraries — is still physically present in both cities.
  • The Bnei Menashe of Mizoram and Manipur, whose migration to Israel is recent and continuing.
• India’s claim that it is one of the few societies with no history of state or popular persecution of Jews is historically defensible, and it is the moral capital the relationship draws on at ceremonial moments. It is also the reason the relationship has an emotional register that a purely transactional one would not.
• The present numbers have moved sharply and the older figures should be discarded.
  • Over 100,000 Israeli citizens are Jews of Indian origin.
  • Over 42,000 Indian citizens live in Israel, and about 1,000 Indian students are in Israeli institutions, mostly in doctoral and post-doctoral science.
  • An annual national convention of Indian-origin Jews in Israel draws around five thousand people, and several members of the community have received the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman.
• The labour relationship changed character after October 2023, and this is the most sensitive development in the whole bilateral.
  • Indian workers in Israel were historically caregivers, diamond traders and IT professionals — a small, specialised presence.
  • After the war began, Israel barred Palestinian workers from entering from the West Bank and Gaza, and its construction sector stopped. Israel then recruited heavily in India; roughly sixteen thousand Indian workers arrived in the first year, mostly in construction.
  • The February 2026 visit signed three implementation protocols — for commerce and services, manufacturing, and restaurants — providing for up to 50,000 additional Indian workers over five years.
  • The criticism is straightforward and India has not answered it: that Indian labour is filling posts vacated by Palestinians barred on security grounds, converting an Indian workforce into a component of the occupation’s labour economy. The counter-argument is that the jobs are legal, contracted and comparatively well paid, and that refusing them would help no Palestinian back into work. Both propositions can be true.
• Cultural and educational infrastructure has thickened.
  • An Indian Cultural Centre has operated in Tel Aviv since January 2020.
  • The first ICCR-Tel Aviv University India Chair was established in December 2025, funding a visiting Indian scholar annually.
  • India courses run at Tel Aviv, Hebrew and Haifa universities; Israel offers post-doctoral fellowships to Indian students and India offers ICCR scholarships in return.
  • Israeli tourist arrivals in India substantially exceed Indian arrivals in Israel — India is a mass-market destination for young Israelis after military service, while Israel is a pilgrimage and business destination for Indians. Direct flights link both Delhi and Mumbai with Tel Aviv.

The two prime ministerial visits

• The 2017 visit was a declaration of normality: it ended the practice of transacting with Israel while pretending not to, and the omission of Ramallah was the point being made. The 2018 Ramallah visit was the necessary second half of the same argument — by visiting each separately, India asserted that neither visit was a statement about the other.
• The 2026 visit is harder to read because of what followed it. The elevation, the free trade agreement and the technology agenda are substantial; but its proximity to the opening of the Iran war meant that its reception in India was dominated by the question of what India knew and when.
• The 2026 joint statement’s language on Palestine is the tell. It welcomed the American plan to end the Gaza conflict and spoke of a just and durable peace; it did not restate the two-State formula in the terms India uses at the United Nations. India says one thing in Jerusalem and a fuller thing in New York, and does not regard this as a contradiction.

India’s Palestine policy and what de-hyphenation actually means

The conflict India is taking a position on

• The dispute India has been legislating for since 1947 has a short structural history, and Indian policy tracks its stages rather than its incidents.
  • Britain held Palestine under a League of Nations Mandate after the Ottoman defeat in the First World War, having already promised a national home for the Jewish people there while the population was overwhelmingly Arab.
  • Jewish immigration rose sharply through the 1920s and 1930s, driven by European persecution and then by the Holocaust, and communal violence rose with it.
  • Partition was voted in 1947 and never implemented. Britain withdrew, Israel was declared in 1948, neighbouring Arab armies intervened, and by the 1949 armistice Israel held most of the territory. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were expelled in what Palestinians call the Nakba.
  • Jordan held the West Bank and Egypt held Gaza until 1967, when Israel took both, along with East Jerusalem, the Sinai and the Golan Heights. That occupation is the fact every subsequent negotiation has been about.
  • Israeli settlement in the occupied territories has continued since, and now involves several hundred thousand settlers, which is what makes the territorial basis of a two-State outcome progressively harder to assemble.
  • The Oslo process of the 1990s produced a Palestinian Authority with limited self-rule and no state, and collapsed without resolving the four questions that remain open: refugees, settlements, the status of Jerusalem, and statehood itself.
  • Gaza has been governed by Hamas since 2007 and blockaded by Israel and Egypt since, which is the immediate background to the war of 2023.
• India’s positions map onto that structure precisely: opposition to partition in 1947, condemnation of the occupation after 1967, recognition of the PLO and then of the State of Palestine, support for Oslo’s premise, and a two-State formula that presupposes borders which settlement has been steadily eroding.

The declaratory position and how it is worded

• India’s declaratory position has been stable for decades and is worth setting out in the exact terms India uses, because the drafting changes carry the policy.
  • India supports a negotiated two-State solution producing a sovereign, independent, viable and united State of Palestine within secure and recognised borders, living side by side at peace with Israel.
  • Until 2017 the formulation routinely added “with East Jerusalem as its capital”. That clause has quietly disappeared from official language since, and its disappearance was never announced or explained.
  • The Ministry of External Affairs’ standing note still opens by describing support for the Palestinian cause as an integral part of India’s foreign policy, which is a phrase India has kept precisely because it costs nothing and signals continuity.
• Two episodes before 2023 show the doctrine working under pressure.
  • When the American administration released its “Peace to Prosperity” plan in 2020 — after moving its embassy to Jerusalem, recognising Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, closing the Palestinian mission in Washington and cutting funding to Palestinian refugees — Israel welcomed it and the Palestinian leadership rejected it outright. India neither endorsed nor rejected it, urging the two sides to engage directly and find a mutually acceptable two-State outcome.
  • During the eleven days of fighting in May 2021, following evictions in East Jerusalem and clashes at the Haram al-Sharif / Temple Mount, India’s Permanent Representative T. S. Tirumurti told the Security Council on 16 May 2021 that India condemned both the indiscriminate rocket fire from Gaza and the retaliatory strikes into it, called for immediate de-escalation and restraint, opposed any unilateral change to the status quo at the holy sites, and restated India’s support for the Palestinian cause and the two-State solution. Condemning both sides in a single statement is the operational signature of the policy.
• De-hyphenation is a claim about method, not about sympathy. It asserts that India’s relationship with Israel and its relationship with Palestine are separate files, each pursued on its merits, neither held hostage to the other.
  • Applied to Israel, it means India buys weapons, technology and water systems without treating the purchase as a verdict on the occupation.
  • Applied to Palestine, it means India keeps a mission in Ramallah, funds UNRWA and votes for Palestinian participation at the UN without treating those acts as hostile to Israel.
  • Applied to the region as a whole, it is the same technique India uses to hold Israel, the Gulf monarchies and Iran simultaneously.
• The dating of de-hyphenation is contested and the contest is substantive.
  • The conventional dating is 2014-2018, from the change of government to the pair of separate visits, and this is when the term entered official usage.
  • A stronger argument dates it to 1992, when India first held an embassy in Tel Aviv and a full relationship with the PLO at the same time; everything since has been a matter of degree.
  • A third reading treats it as retrospective vocabulary — a word supplied to describe a drift that was already happening, so that a series of individually deniable choices could be presented as a policy.
• Three tests separate the readings, and the evidence is genuinely mixed.
  • Does India still pay costs for Palestine? It does — the UNRWA contribution, the medical consignments, the Ramallah mission, the September 2025 vote. But none of these costs anything with Israel.
  • Has India ever chosen Palestine over Israel where the two conflicted? Rarely, and never on anything material. The UNHRC abstention of 2015, reversing India’s earlier votes for inquiry mechanisms, is the clearest evidence that when a vote had consequences for Israel, India moved.
  • Has India been able to avoid choosing? Mostly — which is the strongest argument that de-hyphenation is a real capability and not a slogan. A policy that lets a state arm itself from Israel, employ its citizens in the Gulf, buy oil from Iran’s neighbours and still be voted onto UN bodies with African and Arab support is doing work.

De-hyphenation is not neutrality. It is the claim that India may be partisan on the bilateral and impartial on the conflict, and that no one is entitled to make it choose.

The Israel-Hamas war and India’s response, 2023-2026

This is the episode that tests every claim made above, and it is where the argument about continuity and change has to be settled. India’s conduct since October 2023 moves through four stages: an initial alignment with Israel that went further than any previous Indian statement; a two-year pattern of calibrated abstention; a visible shift in September 2025 that broke the abstention run without abandoning the bilateral; and a cautious engagement with the ceasefire architecture that followed.

Phase one: October 2023 and the statement that went furthest

• Within hours of the attacks of 7 October 2023, the Prime Minister expressed solidarity with Israel and condemned what he called terrorist attacks — with no reference to occupation, to Palestinian statehood or to the two-State solution.
  • This was the first time an Indian leader had framed an episode of the conflict purely as terrorism, and it was read internationally as a decisive alignment.
  • It also matched India’s own long campaign to have terrorism treated as a category admitting no political qualification, which is the strongest defence of the wording.
• Five days later, on 12 October 2023, the Ministry of External Affairs restored the missing half. Its spokesperson confirmed that the attack was terrorism, and then reaffirmed India’s support for a sovereign, independent and viable State of Palestine within secure and recognised borders.
  • The five-day gap is the most revealing fact in the entire record. The political leadership spoke first and the foreign ministry corrected the balance afterwards, which is exactly what a de-hyphenated policy looks like when it is under stress.
• Operation Ajay evacuated Indian nationals from Israel between 13 and 22 October 2023 — about 1,346 people on six chartered flights, including around twenty Nepali citizens brought out alongside Indians, from an Indian community then estimated at eighteen thousand in the affected areas.

Phase two: the voting record

India’s votes are the spine of the policy, and they must be read as a sequence rather than as isolated acts.

• The pattern is not random and it is not incoherent. India voted for texts that named Hamas, that dealt with humanitarian access, or that concerned Palestine’s standing at the United Nations. It abstained on texts that assigned legal responsibility to Israel, demanded withdrawal, or constrained arms transfers.
• India’s explanations of vote were consistent in their reasoning, whatever one thinks of the outcome.
  • In October 2023, Deputy Permanent Representative Yojna Patel said India abstained because the text omitted a condemnation of the 7 October attacks, while restating the settled position.

“India has always supported a negotiated Two-State solution to the Israel-Palestine issue.”

— Yojna Patel

• In September 2024, Permanent Representative P. Harish framed India’s abstention as a preference for negotiation over adjudication.

“There are no winners in conflicts. The cost of conflict is human lives and destruction.”

— P. Harish

• In June 2025 he added that continuing accusation and argument hinder rather than help the path to peace — the clearest single statement of the doctrine that India will not vote for texts it regards as one-sided, however popular.
• The domestic political cost was real. Opposition parties attacked the October 2023 abstention and the June 2025 abstention in strong terms, and the criticism was that India had abandoned a position of principle for a supplier relationship.

The parallel humanitarian track

• India has kept a separate humanitarian track running throughout, which is the practical content of de-hyphenation.
  • About US$12.5 million to UNRWA over the two years of the war, against a standing annual commitment of US$5 million disbursed in tranches, with India describing itself as one of the agency’s leading emerging donors.
  • About 135 metric tonnes of relief material, of which roughly 81.5 tonnes were medicines and medical supplies, sent in successive tranches, alongside food, tents, sanitation material and emergency kits.
  • Anti-cancer drugs, artificial-limb camps and a field hospital deployment were among the specific commitments discussed with Palestinian ministers in 2026.
• In July 2026, at the Palestine Donor Group meeting in Brussels, the External Affairs Minister announced three new Indian projects in Palestine — a specialty hospital, an artificial limb fitment centre and a vocational training institute — while India launched its candidacy for a non-permanent seat on the Security Council.

“This is in line with our longstanding support for a two-State solution.”

— S. Jaishankar

• In August 2026 a senior Indian official visited Ramallah and reviewed the development partnership across health, education, skills, support to UNRWA’s health services, and the Indian-funded Palestinian Institute of Diplomacy.

Phase three: the September 2025 pivot

• India’s vote for the New York Declaration on 12 September 2025 broke a run of abstentions, and is the single most important recent fact in this policy.
  • The French-sponsored text endorsed a two-State outcome, demanded an end to violence against Palestinians, called for a halt to settlement and annexation, and insisted that Gaza be treated as an integral part of a unified Palestinian state free of occupation, blockade and forced displacement.
  • It passed 142-10-12, with Israel and the United States among those opposed.
• Two proximate causes are usually given, and both are supported by India’s own conduct.
  • The Israeli strike on Doha on 9 September 2025. India condemned it as a violation of Qatar’s sovereignty — the first time India had criticised an Israeli military action in this war — and the Prime Minister raised it directly with the Emir. A war that had reached a Gulf capital hosting a large Indian community was no longer a Palestinian question.
  • The scale of casualties in Gaza, by then reported in the tens of thousands and contested in their exact composition, had made continued abstention costly with the Global South constituency India was actively courting.
• A third cause is structural and less discussed. India had by then decided to seek a Security Council seat, and a candidate soliciting African, Arab and Latin American votes cannot be the outlier on the defining moral question of the period.

Phase four: the ceasefire architecture and where it stands

• A ceasefire in Gaza took effect on 10 October 2025, with a cessation of hostilities, humanitarian access and an Israeli pull-back to an agreed line.
• India was represented at the Sharm el-Sheikh peace summit of October 2025 by a Minister of State, not by the Prime Minister — a choice criticised at home as under-representation at a moment India had claimed to care about, and defended as appropriate restraint given India’s marginal role in the negotiation.
• UN Security Council Resolution 2803 was adopted on 17 November 2025, by 13 votes to none with China and Russia abstaining.
  • It authorised a Board of Peace as a transitional governing authority for Gaza and an International Stabilization Force, with a mandate running two years.
  • Its treatment of Palestinian self-determination and statehood was contested during drafting and remains the resolution’s most criticised feature, since the pathway it describes is conditional and unenforced.
• The Board of Peace was formally constituted in January 2026, chaired by the American President with a founding executive board led by Tony Blair, and a Palestinian technocratic committee took over day-to-day civil administration.
• On 31 July 2026 the Board of Peace announced a disarmament agreement.
  • A weapons inventory within fourteen days of formal acceptance, with extensions permitted by the verification commission.
  • A Palestinian National Committee as the only body entitled to hold or store weapons in Gaza, with no transfer of weapons to Israel or to non-Palestinian parties.
  • Priority to heavy weapons, production sites, depots and the tunnel network, verified by an independent international commission.
  • Implementation alongside an International Stabilization Force of about 5,000 personnel under an American commander, working with a new Palestinian police force.
  • An estimated 200 to 300 days for the demilitarisation component.
  • Hamas conditioned its compliance on Israeli performance, and Israel had not publicly confirmed acceptance of the roadmap when the agreement was announced. Both facts have to be stated; the agreement is an announced framework, not an implemented settlement.

Continuity and change, stated directly

• The honest summary is that India’s Palestine policy has changed in emphasis, sequence and tone, and not in content. It supports the same outcome it supported in 1988, funds the same institutions, and has stopped leading on the question. What changed is that India no longer pays a price with Israel for anything it says about Palestine — and, as September 2025 showed, it will still pay a price with Israel when the alternative is a price with the Arab world.

The balancing problem: Israel against the Arab world, and Israel against Iran

• The Arab world is not a sentimental attachment for India; it is a material interest of a different order of magnitude from Israel. The structural relationship with the Gulf — energy, labour, remittances, investment and the free-trade negotiation — belongs to the wider West Asia question; what matters here is only its weight as a constraint on the Israel relationship.
  • India-GCC trade was about US$178.56 billion in FY2024-25, against a bilateral figure with Israel of US$3.75 billion — a ratio of nearly fifty to one.
  • Nine to ten million Indian nationals work in the Gulf, and roughly 38% of India’s remittance inflows originate there.
  • India therefore cannot treat Israel as an ally in the sense Israel would prefer, because the cost of doing so falls on a relationship worth fifty times as much.
• The balance has held better than it should have, for reasons that are largely not India’s doing.
  • The Abraham Accords of September 2020 removed the Arab veto. Once the UAE and Bahrain normalised with Israel, an Indian government could not be criticised in Abu Dhabi for doing what Abu Dhabi had done.
  • The Gulf monarchies’ own priorities — investment, technology, security guarantees, Iran — leave little room for making India’s Israel policy an issue.
  • India’s Palestine position is consistent and inexpensive, which allows Arab governments to point to it when domestic opinion demands a response.
  • The I2U2 grouping with Israel, the UAE and the United States was possible only because of that convergence, and its dormancy since the Gaza war shows how quickly the convergence can evaporate.
• The costs of the balance are visible at exactly the moments the balance is tested.
  • India’s condemnation of the strike on Qatar and its vote for the New York Declaration were the price of standing with the Gulf, and they were paid in the one currency Israel notices.
  • Conversely, India’s abstentions between 2023 and 2025 were the price of the bilateral, paid in standing with the Global South constituency India spends heavily to cultivate.
• Iran is the harder half of the problem, and it became acute in 2026.
  • Israel regards Iran as an existential adversary; India regards Iran as a route — to Afghanistan, to Central Asia, and as a supplier when sanctions permit. The India-Iran bilateral, Chabahar and the crisis in the strait belong to the Iran question; only the Israeli dimension of it is taken here.
  • The Prime Minister visited Israel on 25-26 February 2026. Coordinated American and Israeli strikes on Iran began on 28 February 2026. The proximity dominated Indian domestic debate and produced an opposition charge that the visit was, at best, badly timed and, at worst, a signal of alignment.
  • India’s official response was constructed to avoid naming Iran as either aggrieved party or aggressor. It called for a ceasefire among all parties, condemned attacks on sovereignty in general terms, and condemned strikes on American bases without naming who had struck them.
  • India was among the states Iran named as permitted to transit the Strait of Hormuz during the closure — the strongest available evidence that non-alignment in this conflict bought India something concrete.
  • The domestic criticism went further than diplomacy. The government’s decision in March 2026 to block a documentary on a Palestinian child killed in Gaza, on the stated ground that it could damage relations with Israel, was attacked as the point at which a foreign relationship began to shape domestic expression.

Debates and assessments

• The “natural ally” argument is associated with C. Raja Mohan, and it is stronger than its slogan.
  • Israel is critical to both conventional and unconventional Indian security, offering capabilities India cannot buy elsewhere at comparable speed or price.
  • Israel possessed the rare ability to service and upgrade Soviet-origin equipment, which made it indispensable exactly when the Soviet supply chain failed.
  • Israel has operational expertise in cross-border terrorism and border management that maps onto India’s problem more closely than any Western partner’s does.
  • Israel is important for Indian food and water security, through climate-resilient and water-efficient agriculture.
  • The deeper claim is political: two democracies in hostile neighbourhoods, neither able to rely on regional solidarity, both suspicious of the international institutions that judge them.
• The counter-argument is associated with Nicolas Blarel, whose study of India’s Israel policy is the standard scholarly account.
  • He argues the strategic partnership is substantially rhetorical. The two states occupy different security environments and do not share an adversary — Israel’s is Iran, India’s is Pakistan and China — and neither would fight for the other.
  • He identifies obvious structural constraints: India’s Arab and Iranian interests will always prevent it from adopting Israeli positions, so the relationship has a ceiling that is set outside it.
  • His historical argument is more interesting than the rebuttal. He treats India’s Israel policy as a case of incremental, compromised change over ninety years, in which domestic ideational obstacles — aversion to religiously defined states, anti-colonial commitment, concern for the Muslim minority — were gradually eroded rather than overthrown, and in which the decisive shift occurred between 1984 and 1992, before any government that now claims credit for it.
• P. R. Kumaraswamy supplies the third position, and it dissolves the first two.
  • If the public and private relationships diverged for forty years, then neither “natural ally” nor “rhetorical partnership” describes it. The relationship was always functional and always deniable.
  • His myth-debunking is the analytically useful part: the Muslim-vote constraint was assumed rather than tested; the Arab return on India’s Palestine position was small; and no Indian leader’s record on Israel was internally consistent.
• Harsh V. Pant locates the relationship’s centre of gravity in arms transfers, arguing that defence supply is the bedrock on which everything else — agriculture, water, technology — has been built, and that the partnership’s resilience through political shocks is a function of how difficult those supplies are to replace.
• Talmiz Ahmad represents the professional diplomatic objection. His argument is that India has overestimated what Israel can deliver and underestimated the durability of Arab and Iranian interests, and that de-hyphenation is a euphemism for the abandonment of a position India had built over decades. The standard rejoinder is that the Arab states themselves moved first, and that a policy calibrated to a 1970s West Asia would serve India badly in the present one.
• The Israel-China variable, once treated as the main brake on the relationship, has reversed.
  • Israel’s economic opening to China after 2015 — including port and infrastructure contracts — was read in Delhi as evidence that Israel would not privilege India.
  • American pressure produced an Israeli foreign-investment screening board in 2020, after which Chinese firms effectively stopped winning Israeli infrastructure tenders. The Haifa port privatisation went to an Indian consortium, not a Chinese one — which is as clean an illustration of the reversal as exists.
• The critique from the Global South is the one India has answered least well. It holds that a state claiming to speak for the formerly colonised cannot simultaneously be the largest customer of the arms industry of an occupying power, and that India’s abstentions between 2023 and 2025 cost it credibility it had spent seventy years accumulating. India’s implicit answer — that credibility is a means and capability is an end — is a defensible realist position, and it should be defended as one rather than denied.

Conclusion

India’s Israel policy has never been one policy. It has been a functional relationship that governments declined to acknowledge, then a strategic partnership that governments declined to explain, and now a special strategic partnership announced in the middle of a war whose politics India will not endorse. What holds the sequence together is not doctrine but a persistent Indian preference for keeping every file open. The forty-two-year delay and the February 2026 elevation are products of the same instinct, applied under different conditions.

• The relationship’s durable content is narrow and deep: defence niches India cannot easily replace, agricultural and water technology that reaches Indian farmers directly, and an intelligence channel older than the embassies.
• Its commercial content is thin and volatile, and the trade series proves it — a peak built on temporary arbitrage, a collapse driven by war, and a free trade agreement now being negotiated to build what the numbers never contained.
• India’s Palestine policy has not been reversed; it has been demoted from a cause to a commitment. The recognition, the mission, the money and the formula all survive. The leadership does not.
• The limiting condition is unchanged since 1950. India’s interests in the Arab world and in Iran are larger than its interests in Israel, and any Indian government that forgets this will be reminded by an event it did not choose — a strike on a Gulf capital, a closed strait, a war that begins two days after a state visit.
• The question the next decade will settle is whether de-hyphenation is a capability or a window of opportunity — whether India can hold all these relationships because it has learned how, or only because the region has not yet forced the choice.