Why did Narendra Modi fly to Jerusalem and upgrade India-Israel ties to a “Special Strategic Partnership for Peace, Innovation and Prosperity” just 48 hours before the US and Israel launched their war on Iran? Indians — and the world — have been asking that question ever since. The answer, as with most things in the age of Modi, is not one thing but several: strategic calculation layered over ideological affinity, economic ambition woven through domestic politics, and the cold arithmetic of great-power alignment dressed in the warm language of civilisational kinship. It is the question that won’t go away — because the consequences of the answer are still unfolding, in fire and in smoke, from Tehran to the Strait of Hormuz.
When the Indian prime minister stepped off his aircraft at Ben Gurion Airport on the afternoon of February 25, 2026, he was greeted by Benjamin Netanyahu on a red carpet, to the sound of trumpets. “Welcome, my friend,” Netanyahu said, embracing him in footage broadcast around the world. “This is a bond, a real friendship.” Within hours, Modi stood before the Knesset — the first Indian prime minister ever to address Israel’s parliament — and brought the chamber to its feet. “India stands with Israel,” he told lawmakers, “firmly, with full conviction, in this moment and beyond.” The ovation lasted a full minute.
Forty-eight hours later, on February 28, the skies over Tehran erupted.
The Visit That Changed Everything
The optics of Modi’s arrival in Jerusalem were, even by the theatrical standards of modern summitry, extraordinary. Netanyahu had invited him with the pomp reserved for heads of state who have demonstrated, in the language diplomats use carefully, “unconditional strategic friendship.” India’s ambassador to Israel had told state radio in the days before that the two countries “don’t compete, we complement each other.” That complementarity was on spectacular display across two packed days of diplomacy.
The joint communiqué announced 27 bilateral outcomes in total: 16 agreements and 11 joint initiatives spanning critical and emerging technologies, labour mobility, agriculture, culture and education. The two sides also announced an Indo-Israel Cyber Centre of Excellence to be established in India, and a joint initiative in emerging technologies to be led by their respective national security advisors. A free trade agreement, the first between the two countries, appeared tantalisingly close. Modi told the media that a deal would be finalised “soon,” after announcing that the first round of FTA negotiations had concluded successfully in New Delhi, with a second round scheduled for May.
The centrepiece, however, was the elevation of the relationship. From 2017’s “Strategic Partnership,” the two governments leapt to a “Special Strategic Partnership for Peace, Innovation and Prosperity” — language freighted with intent. Under Modi, India has become Israel’s top arms customer, spending $20.5 billion on Israeli weapons between 2020 and 2024. The new designation formalised what has been obvious to observers for years: that Modi’s India is Israel’s most consequential non-Western ally.
Then came the medal. Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana awarded Modi the newly created Medal of the Knesset, a decoration established specifically to honour the Indian prime minister for strengthening ties between the two nations and deepening strategic cooperation. “This is a historic moment for the Knesset and for the State of Israel as a whole,” Ohana said, describing Modi’s commitment to Israel as “courageous, consistent, and sincere.”
In his Knesset address — the first by any Indian head of government — Modi called Israel “a protective wall against barbarism,” and declared: “The massacre of October 7 made it absolutely clear: either the jihadist axis of evil will break us, or we will break it. And we are breaking it — and will break it.” He said this without apparent awareness — or perhaps with full awareness — that within two days, Israel and the United States would launch an attack on Iran so sweeping it would kill that country’s supreme leader, lay waste to military infrastructure across Tehran, and ignite a regional conflagration still burning as these words are written.
The Indian government has insisted the visit was planned months in advance and that New Delhi was not briefed on the timing of Operation Epic Fury, the name the US military gave to its strikes. That may well be true. But in geopolitics, proximity is meaning, and timing is argument. At the very least, Modi’s presence in Jerusalem handed Netanyahu an invaluable gift: the sight of the prime minister of the world’s most populous democracy standing in the Knesset and declaring solidarity with Israel, in the final hours before a war that would reshape the Middle East.
Domestic Payoffs — Why Israel Matters More Than Ever to Modi
To understand why Modi made this visit at this moment, it helps to understand what Israel has come to represent in the internal politics of Hindu nationalism. The ideological sympathy runs deeper than most Western analysis acknowledges.
Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party has roots in Hindutva — a philosophy that seeks to transform India into a Hindu nation and a natural homeland for Hindus anywhere in the world, echoing Israel’s self-image as a Jewish state. Both countries frame Islamic terrorism as a core threat, a label critics argue is used to justify wider anti-Muslim policies. In this frame, the Israel relationship is not merely transactional — it is civilisational. Modi told the Knesset he was “a representative of one ancient civilisation addressing another,” and the BJP’s core constituency responded with precisely the enthusiasm that line was designed to produce.
There is also the matter of the Indian diaspora. Several million Indians of Hindu background reside in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia — communities that have grown increasingly sympathetic to Israel’s narrative since October 7, 2023. A prime minister photographed embracing Netanyahu, walking through Yad Vashem, and receiving a specially minted Knesset medal plays extraordinarily well to that audience. Modi’s foreign policy has always been partly domestic theatre, and the Jerusalem stage was among the grandest he has ever commanded.
Defence manufacturing, too, is a central piece of the puzzle. Modi’s “Make in India” ambitions depend critically on technology transfer, and a November 2025 memorandum of understanding between the two countries provides for the joint development and joint production of military equipment, with an emphasis on the transfer of advanced technology. Israel is the world’s most battle-tested laboratory for the kind of next-generation systems — drone swarms, AI-guided missiles, cyber-warfare platforms, active defence systems — that India needs to remain competitive in an era of high-tech conflict with both Pakistan and China. No other country offers India that combination of willingness and capability. The Americans share technology selectively and with conditions; the Russians are diminished; the French are expensive; the Israelis are eager.
The two sides also agreed to facilitate employment of over 50,000 Indian workers in Israel over the next five years — a gesture that is both economically meaningful and politically shrewd. With India’s youth unemployment a persistent concern, the promise of skilled overseas employment in a high-income economy carries real electoral currency.
Modi-Netanyahu 2026, in short, is not a diplomatic accident. It is a calculated convergence of ideology, economics, and domestic politics — a relationship that has grown steadily since Modi’s first visit to Israel in 2006, as the Chief Minister of Gujarat, and that has now reached a qualitatively new level. The question is whether that convergence comes at a price India can afford.
The Iran Calculus — Energy, Chabahar and Strategic Autonomy
Here is what makes Modi’s choice genuinely consequential, and not merely controversial: Iran is not peripheral to Indian interests. It is central to them.
India imports over 40 percent of its crude oil through the Strait of Hormuz — a waterway that Iran has now threatened to close and into which it has already launched the strikes that, as of this writing, continue to disrupt tanker traffic. Three Indian nationals have already been confirmed killed in the conflict zone near the strait, according to the Wikipedia compilation of verified casualty data, a figure that may rise as the fog of war lifts. Every barrel of oil that passes through Hormuz is, in a very direct sense, a hostage to the outcome of this war.
More symbolically, and perhaps more painfully, India’s investment in the Chabahar port in Iran is now at acute risk. India signed a long-term agreement in 2024 to operate the strategic port — a maritime gateway that bypasses Pakistan and connects India to Afghanistan and Central Asia. The port is the centrepiece of India’s connectivity strategy for the region: a counter to China’s Gwadar, a node in the International North-South Transport Corridor, and a means of projecting soft power into landlocked Central Asian republics. India has invested over one billion dollars in Chabahar, betting that Iran would remain a reliable partner. With Iran now viewing India as aligned with its enemies, these projects hang by a thread.
Earlier in 2026, India had already stepped back from Chabahar after facing American pressure to limit engagement with Iran. One analysis described this as “not a retreat from Chabahar, but a strategic withdrawal from exposure to sanctions from Trump.” That preemptive scaling-back looks, in hindsight, like preparation for exactly the scenario that has now unfolded — though whether it represents prudent risk management or the abandonment of a sovereign asset to placate Washington depends on which end of Delhi’s political spectrum one inhabits.
Iran has, for decades, been a partner India engaged carefully but consistently. The two countries coordinated on Afghanistan — particularly during the period of Taliban ascendancy — sharing intelligence and working toward parallel goals of regional stability. As Asia Group’s Malik has noted, “Iran is an important factor in Indian regional and security policy. We have coordinated with Iran on various issues, including Afghanistan, for decades. We have a working relationship with Iran — we coordinate on security and intelligence.” That relationship does not simply evaporate because of a Knesset speech. But it is now operating under conditions of extreme strain, with a new Iranian leadership — whatever form it takes after the killing of Khamenei — likely to scrutinise every agreement signed with a country perceived as having endorsed its enemies on the eve of war.
Global Realignment — India in the New Middle East Order
To place Modi’s gamble in its widest context, it is necessary to understand what the India-Israel Special Strategic Partnership signals about India’s broader positioning in a world that is rapidly separating into blocs.
For decades, Indian foreign policy operated under the doctrine of “strategic autonomy” — the successor ideology to Nehruvian non-alignment, updated for the post-Cold War era. The principle was elegant: India would buy Russian weapons and American technology; cultivate Israeli intelligence partnerships and Iranian energy routes; sit on the UN Security Council fence with careful abstentions; and leverage its position as the indispensable swing state to extract maximum benefit from all sides. Modi himself articulated this in his first term as “multi-alignment.”
That doctrine is now under its most severe stress test. Experts agree that Modi’s calculus seems geared to joining the US-Israel axis in the Middle East, even at the expense of India’s long-held stance of strategic autonomy. The decision is not arbitrary: the logic of the US-India partnership — institutionalised through the Quad, deepened through defence technology sharing, and politically reinforced by the warmth between Modi and Trump — has been pulling New Delhi steadily in this direction. A senior MEA official, speaking privately, described the calculus this way: the centre of global economic and technological gravity remains the transatlantic world and its Pacific allies. China is the defining strategic challenge. Russia is weakened. Iran is a middle power in turmoil. The question is not whether India can afford to back Israel; it is whether India can afford not to consolidate its position in the US-led order before that order calcifies around those who are already inside it.
Since India took over as chair of BRICS, the normally outspoken grouping has appeared more cautious — a telling signal that New Delhi is quietly using its chairmanship to moderate rather than amplify the anti-Western voices in the bloc. India appears to be hedging its BRICS membership while deepening its Quad commitments, a dual manoeuvre that requires considerable diplomatic agility but which carries the risk of satisfying nobody.
The de-hyphenation of India’s Israel policy — first from Palestine, now from Iran — is the most significant structural shift in Indian foreign policy since Manmohan Singh signed the nuclear deal with George W. Bush in 2005. In 2017, Modi became the first Indian prime minister to visit Israel without also visiting Palestine. In 2026, he became the first to stand in the Knesset and declare solidarity with Israel at a moment when that solidarity had unmistakably geopolitical consequences. Each step has been incremental; the cumulative distance travelled is vast.
The Backlash at Home and the Cost of Choosing Sides
The domestic response to Modi’s Jerusalem visit, and to the war that followed it, has split along predictable but nonetheless important lines.
The Congress party, India’s main opposition, moved swiftly and sharply. Congress party spokesman Jairam Ramesh described the government’s response as “a betrayal of India’s values, principles, concerns, and interests,” while Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi called the assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei “despicable.” The party issued a formal statement accusing Modi of “partisan alignment and tacit endorsement” of the strikes. Former Indian ambassador K. C. Singh, speaking on IndiaToday, said the visit “was wrongly timed and has completely ripped India off its neutrality on the subject.”
Rahul Gandhi, the Leader of the Opposition, struck a particularly resonant chord when he pointed to the vulnerability of India’s nearly ten million citizens living and working across the Gulf region. Referring to the sinking of the Iranian warship IRIS Dena near Sri Lanka, Gandhi said “the conflict has reached our backyard, with an Iranian warship sunk in the Indian Ocean. Yet the Prime Minister has said nothing. At a moment like this, we need a steady hand at the wheel.” He warned that India’s oil imports — over 40 percent of which transit the Strait of Hormuz — faced acute danger.
Sonia Gandhi, the Congress Parliamentary Party chairperson, went further still. She wrote that the Modi government’s silence on the targeted assassination of Ayatollah Khamenei “is not neutral but an abdication,” adding that it “raises serious doubts about the direction and credibility of India’s foreign policy.” The phrase “silence is not neutrality” became, within days, a rallying cry for opposition voices ranging from the Communist Party to the Aam Aadmi Party.
The government’s own eventual response was measured to the point of ambiguity. Modi, under mounting pressure, did eventually call for “peace and stability” in the Middle East and telephoned leaders of Gulf nations — while conspicuously condemning Iranian retaliatory strikes without condemning the original US-Israeli attack. The Ministry of External Affairs acknowledged that Indian nationals had been killed and that trade and energy supply chains were under threat, urging all parties toward de-escalation. It was language that managed to say almost everything while committing to almost nothing — which is, in fairness, precisely what the doctrine of strategic autonomy has always required.
The BJP’s defenders argued that India’s silence was responsible statesmanship: a recognition that a country with nine million workers in the Gulf, vast energy dependencies, and aspirations to be a global swing power cannot afford the luxury of loud moral pronouncements in the middle of a war it did not start and cannot stop. Senior BJP leader Amit Malviya described it as “prudent and responsible diplomacy.” Israel’s Netanyahu had himself called Modi “more than a friend — a brother,” suggesting that personal chemistry, not calculation, drove the intimacy of the relationship. The BJP faithful were, in any case, not overly troubled: the Knesset images of Modi receiving his medal, of Netanyahu embracing him as a brother before the world, were precisely the statesmanship optics that play on prime-time Indian television.
What is harder to dismiss is the strategic cost. As one pointed analysis noted: “India offers a prime minister who visited Israel on the eve of war and cannot bring himself to utter even a word about Iranian schoolgirl innocents killed by US-Israeli bombs.” That silence has a price in the Arab world, where nine million Indians work and remit money that is a material pillar of the Indian economy. It has a price in Tehran, where the new leadership that will eventually emerge from the convulsion of Khamenei’s assassination will be deciding which foreign investments to honour and which to renegotiate. And it has a price in the Global South, where India’s claim to be the voice of developing nations depends on something more than attendance at the right summits.
What This Means for India’s Multi-Alignment Doctrine — And Beyond
The most consequential question raised by Narendra Modi’s Jerusalem visit is not whether he knew what was coming. It is whether, knowing or not knowing, India has now permanently exited the middle ground.
History rarely offers clean answers to questions like this. India’s foreign policy has always been more pragmatic than its ideological framings suggest — the Non-Aligned Movement was never truly non-aligned, and strategic autonomy was always a management of dependencies rather than independence from them. The shift represented by the Special Strategic Partnership, and the Knesset speech that accompanied it, is therefore better understood as the acceleration of a trajectory than as a rupture. Modi has been moving India in this direction for a decade; the war simply made the direction visible.
What changes in the aftermath of the war is the cost-benefit structure of those choices. If the US-Israel operation achieves its stated objectives — the destruction of Iran’s missile and nuclear programmes, a political transition in Tehran toward something more accommodating of Western interests — then India’s early positioning will look prescient. Indian conglomerates with deep Israel ties — in infrastructure, logistics, defence — will be well placed to participate in any post-conflict reconstruction or investment opportunity in a transformed Iran. India’s major conglomerates, already deeply embedded in infrastructure, logistics and defence partnerships with Israel, may find themselves well placed to capitalise on the economic opportunities that would follow a change of circumstances in Iran. Chabahar could, under this scenario, be reactivated under new and more favourable conditions.
But if the war drags on — if Iranian retaliation proves more sustained than Washington’s “four weeks or less” projection, if oil prices spike beyond what Indian consumers can absorb, if Gulf remittances are disrupted, if the new Iranian leadership decides to treat India as an adversary rather than a cautious bystander — then Modi’s gamble will look considerably more costly. The Knesset medal will not buy discounted oil. The Special Strategic Partnership will not replace the Chabahar corridor. And the silence that Washington calls responsible diplomacy will, in the mosques and markets of the Gulf, carry a different name.
India has spent seventy-five years building a foreign policy reputation as a country that speaks for the dispossessed, mediates between blocs, and refuses to be defined by any single alliance. That reputation has been, for all its occasional hypocrisy, genuinely valuable — a source of soft power, of access, of moral authority that no amount of defence MoUs can fully replace. Whether Modi’s bet is that this reputation is now worth less than the benefits of unambiguous alignment with the world’s most powerful military alliance — or whether he believes he can preserve some version of it even after Jerusalem — will define Indian diplomacy for years to come.
In the end, the question that haunts the subcontinent is not merely political. It is civilisational — the kind Modi himself invoked in the Knesset. India has always seen itself as the teacher of nations, the land of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, the world as one family. Can a country that aspires to that role stand in the parliament of a state engaged in a war — and say nothing about the schoolchildren buried in the rubble of southern Iran?
That question, unlike the medal in Modi’s hand, does not have an easy answer. And the world, for better or worse, is waiting for India to find one.
