Israel-India Alliance Based on Strategic Interests and Mutual Concerns

Posted: March 30th, 2017

By Shalom Salomon Wald

Dr. Wald is Senior Fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute in Jerusalem. He works on the history of Jewish Civilization and the links between the Jewish People/Israel and China and India. Wald is born in Italy, graduated at the University of Basel in economics, sociology and history and had a long career at the Paris-based OECD, the West's leading think tank. He specialized in science and technology policy and retired in 2001 as Head of the Biotechnology Unit.

Contacts between India and the Jewish people, whether in ancient Israel, in India itself, or in the Diaspora, go back to remote antiquity. But it was only in the 20^th century, when both India (1947) and Israel (1948) achieved independence that these contacts became geopolitically relevant. Today, there are four dimensions to the links between India and Israel: a political-diplomatic dimension, which is the most visible of the four; a military dimension, which is by far the most important, but also the most discrete; an economic dimension, which is growing slowly but remains unimpressive; and a cultural and intellectual dimension which is the weakest.

Political contacts began in the 1920s, when Israeli leaders were looking for understanding and support from a rising India, but to no avail. Effective lobbying by Palestinian leaders and rising nationalism in the Arab Middle East profoundly influenced India’s policies for 80 years.

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