Indian PM recently completed his 3 days visit to Israel.
What is the significance of the visit?
India opened diplomatic relations with Israel in 1992.
But for the last 25 years, India has always insisted on keeping its ties low-key.
This is the first visit by an Indian Prime Minister to Israel.
PM also broke the traditional pattern of jointly traveling to Tel Aviv and Ramallah.
This is a deliberate effort to broadcast that India is de-hyphenating its relations with Israel and Palestine i.e dealing them as separate entities with separate interest.
For India, the benefits of the trip are long term.
Chinese are ahead of us in bilateral trade.
Their companies are investing heavily in Israel’s cutting-edge start-ups.
Excluding defence, bilateral trade between India and Israel is just around $5 billion. Most of it is in the diamond trade.
Israel has become one of India’s most important weapons suppliers, after Russia and the US.
Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) recently signed a $2-billion deal to supply missile systems to the Indian navy and $630-million agreement to sell air defence systems.
But the seven deals signed suggest that India mainly hopes to leverage Israel’s skills in science and technology.
Indian companies like Sun Pharma and ATG, a specialty tyre-maker, have big interests in Israel.
Why Israel is interested?
Trade and defence ties have developed between the two in spite of the fluctuations of political events.
India is also Israel’s biggest arms market, with an average of $1 billion of defense sales per year.
Israel wants to consolidate these.
Israel also wants to increase its contact with global super powers to break the pattern of years of isolation.
What should be done?
Though India’s defence ties deepen with Israel, India has to tread carefully with the Arab States.
It is because India is still dependent on it for a bulk of its energy requirements has millions of emigrants there.
