The Modi-Bibi Bloc

President Narendra Modi’s second visit to Jerusalem is the ultimate send up to an “Israel alone” meme. It was popularized in the aftermath of the October 7, 2023, Hamas atrocities that launched a region-wide Middle East war. Starting on Wednesday, the leader of the world’s most populous country is scheduled to spend two days in tiny Israel. He’ll speak to the Knesset. Security, agricultural, and tech deals will be signed, but there’s more. Previewing the visit, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu unfolded during a Sunday cabinet meeting a “vision” that would unite allies in a front to counter Islamist extremists in the Middle East and beyond. It will be a “kind of a hexagonal strategic alliance across the Mediterranean and the Middle East,” the Israeli premier said. Abraham Accords members, African allies, and Europeans like Greece and Cyprus are key — and crucially, so is India. Mr. Modi has reversed decades of Indian antipathy to the Jewish state, borne of India’s traditional leadership of the anti-Western “non-aligned” movement. India had diplomatic ties with Israel, but relations were icy. In 2017, the Indian premier changed all that with a three-day visit. It was seared in memory with an extraordinary video of Mr. Modi and Bibi intimately walking barefoot at Olga Beach, near the Israeli premier’s Caesarea home. Currently Delhi sees its relations with Jerusalem as “irreplaceable,” an India researcher at Bar Ilan university, Lauren Dagan Amoss, tells our Benny Avni. India maintains amicable relations with some of Israel’s enemies, including the Islamic Republic. It is also friendly with Saudi Arabia, which recently signed a mutual defense treaty with India’s neighbor and nemesis, Pakistan. Yet Mr. Modi seems to be well aware of which side Israel is on. In Operation Sindoor, which in May nearly led to an all out war between the two nuclear armed countries, India relied on Israeli drones. It deployed the Barak 8 air defense system, modeled after Israel’s Iron Dome, which the two countries developed together. “Israel is a leader in anti-ballistic missile systems,” the Hindustan Times newspaper noted. Now Mr. Modi is reportedly coming with a shopping list of various Israeli arms.Beyond weapon systems, “there will be a lot of discussion in AI, a lot of discussion in cyber security and quantum” and “how to bring the ecosystems, Israel ecosystem and Indian ecosystem, together,” Delhi’s ambassador to Israel, J.P. Singh, told All India Radio News. India is deepening economic ties in other ways. In 2023 its Adani group beat out a Communist Chinese vendor, and it now co-owns the key Israeli port at Haifa with Israel’s Gadot group.The port deal is seen as a major step toward realizing the Delhi-initiated project known as the India-Middle East-Europe Corridor. It would ship Asian goods from Mumbai to Dubai, and from there via rail through Saudi Arabia and Jordan to Haifa, and by ships to Piraeus, Greece, and the rest of Europe. The Saudis are now pitching a different, more expensive route that would favor Turkey over Israel. America could help lean on Riyadh to stick with the original AMEC route. That mega-project could become the heart of Mr. Netanyahu’s vision of tying like-minded Asian, Mideasterners, and Europeans in a large pro-American alliance, countering the Islamists favored by Beijing and Moscow. Israel and India stand to benefit, and the Western Europeans that increasingly scoff at the Jewish state could profit, too. Call it the Modi-Bibi bloc.

The Modi-Bibi Bloc

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