Modi's Israel Stake

It was an announcement which was expected from the day Prime Minister Narendra Modi took office. It has always been a question of when, and not if, Modi would visit Israel. And, yet, the announcement of the Prime Minister’s trip to Israel later this year comes at a time when it makes the least diplomatic sense and when the costs may well be high. For a Prime Minister who wears his “realism” on his sleeve, this appears to be a deeply ideological move driven by his and his party’s solidarity with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the State of Israel. For Modi, this will be his second visit to Israel; he had gone there earlier as the Chief Minister of Gujarat.

It is ironical that at the very moment that Israel, under the leadership of Netanyahu, faces the greatest international isolation in its existence, Prime Minister Modi has decided to expend political capital on Israel. Given this reality, it is really difficult, despite the contortions of India’s foreign policy experts to do so, to explain this decision without accounting for Modi and Netanyahu’s shared “common enemy.”