India’s position vis-a-vis Israel-Palestine conflict

India’s position on the Israel-Palestine issue has come into focus following the devastating attacks by Hamas that left more than 1,200 Israelis dead, with New Delhi expressing solidarity with Tel Aviv while maintaining silence on other aspects of the long-drawn conflict.

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The only official reaction so far has come from Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the first Indian premier to visit Israel, who expressed shock at the “terrorist attacks” and conveyed a message of solidarity to his Israeli counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu in a phone conversation on Tuesday. Many in diplomatic circles have noted the external affairs ministry’s silence on the matter.

A note on India-Palestine relations on the ministry’s website describes the country’s support for the Palestinian cause as “an integral part of the nation’s foreign policy”, and lists milestones such as India being the first non-Arab state to recognise the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people in 1974, and India being one of the first countries to recognise the state of Palestine in 1988.

Over the decades, however, India’s position on Palestine and Israel has been closely linked to domestic politics and global geopolitical equations. This has ranged from Mahatma Gandhi’s opposition, in the pre-independence era, to the creation of a Jewish state on the basis of religion and “under the shadow of the British gun”, to a more open embrace of Israel as a key strategic and security partner in West Asia in recent years.

India’s links with Arab states and Muslim-majority countries in the decades after independence, including through the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), and its own sensitivities related to Pakistan often influenced New Delhi’s decisions on key matters related to Israel at the United Nations.

This explains India’s move to join 12 other countries, including Pakistan, Cuba and Saudi Arabia, to vote against the UN plan to partition Palestine into separate Arab and Jewish states in November 1947 and to vote against Israel’s admission to the UN in May 1949. It was only after Muslim-majority countries such as Iran and Turkey recognised Israel that India too accepted the Jewish state in September 1950. However, it would take India another 42 years to establish full diplomatic relations with Israel.

A number of other factors were behind India’s position in the period from the 1950s to the 1980s — fears that recognising Israel could prompt Arab states to back Pakistan’s position on Kashmir, the near complete reliance on crude imports from West Asia, the overall mood within NAM, and Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leader Yasser Arafat’s relations with prime minister Indira Gandhi as well as her son, Rajiv Gandhi.

Under Indira Gandhi, India granted full diplomatic status to the PLO’s official representative in New Delhi in January 1975, a time when some in the West saw Arafat as a “terrorist”. Again, under Indira Gandhi’s leadership, the PLO office was upgraded to an embassy in March 1980.

The NAM Summit hosted by India in March 1983 resulted in a declaration that contended a durable peace could not be established in the Middle East without the “total and unconditional withdrawal of Israel from all Palestinian and other Arab territories occupied by it since 1967”, and reaffirmed the PLO as the sole “legitimate representative of the Palestinian people”.

Some experts attribute these developments to the close relationship between Indira Gandhi and Arafat. Rajiv Gandhi continued with India’s support for the Palestinian cause after his mother’s death, and Arafat attended the funeral of both Indian leaders after their assassinations.

Despite the public support for the Palestinian cause, India’s leaders displayed pragmatism in quietly cultivating contacts with Israel, mainly for security purposes. Documents in Israeli and Indian archives have shown that prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru was in touch with his Israeli counterpart David Ben-Gurion during the confrontation with China in 1962, when the Indian side received some weapons from Israel, and that Israel again supplied arms to India through Liechtenstein months before the 1971 war with Pakistan.

But it was under the PV Narasimha Rao government that things moved into higher gear with the establishment of full diplomatic ties in 1992. Experts have said several geopolitical factors were behind this move — India’s move to balance its ties with the US and the West following the break-up of the Soviet Union, the beginning of a peace process between Israel and the PLO, and China’s decision to have diplomatic ties with Israel.

India-Israel ties advanced further under the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), whose predecessor, the Jana Sangh, had been wary about New Delhi’s support for the Palestinian cause. The first breakthroughs were made under the BJP government led by Atal Bihari Vajpayee in the area of defence and Israel soon emerged as one of the leading suppliers of hi-tech weapons such as precision munitions and missiles and avionics.

This cooperation was on display during the 1999 Kargil border conflict with Pakistan, when the Indian Air Force used Israeli kits to drop bombs with deadly accuracy on positions occupied by Pakistani infiltrators. This was followed by back-to-back visits to Israel by then Union home minister LK Advani and then external affairs minister Jaswant Singh in the summer of 2000.

Recent years

Modi’s visit to Israel in 2017 marked another break from the past, as he skipped the tradition of Indian leaders also making a stopover in Palestine, though he became the first Indian premier to travel to the West Bank city of Ramallah in 2018.

More than other governments in recent years, the current BJP administration has sought to achieve a careful balance between its relations with Arab states and Israel, and more of this tight rope walking will be on display as India negotiates the fallout of the new conflict that has added to the complexities of the landscape of West Asia, which New Delhi describes as part of the country’s “extended neighbourhood”.

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