India and Israel: Natural Partners or Strange Bedfellows?

National Interest | Mohammed Ayoob

India elevated its relationship with Israel to a special strategic partnership in February 2026, cementing a major geopolitical shift. This growing intimacy persisted despite the devastation in Gaza and New Delhi's historic support for Palestinian statehood. Historically, Indian leaders opposed a Jewish state, viewing Zionism through the lens of anti-colonialism and fearing it validated the ethno-religious partition that created Pakistan.

Pragmatism eventually drove a diplomatic reassessment. Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party aligned ideologically with the Israeli Right, viewing military assertiveness as a model. Consequently, New Delhi became Jerusalem's largest defense customer, accounting for 29 percent of Israeli major arms exports between 2021 and 2025. This defense cooperation includes acquiring Heron drones, Phalcon systems, and SPICE weapons, alongside joint development of the MRSAM air-defense system by the DRDO and Israel Aerospace Industries. Bilateral cooperation has now expanded into cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, and semiconductors, establishing deep institutional links that transcend individual governments.

Comment

The integration of Israeli subsystems has fundamentally altered the technological trajectory of India's aerospace and air-defence architectures. By incorporating the Phalcon airborne early-warning system and Heron surveillance platforms, the Indian Air Force bypassed prolonged domestic development cycles to establish immediate, high-end reconnaissance capabilities. This technological infusion provided the critical sensor-to-shooter links necessary to employ SPICE precision-guided munitions effectively during regional contingencies.

The mechanism of this technological transition relies on co-development frameworks rather than simple off-the-shelf procurement. The joint development of the MRSAM air-defence system by the Defence Research and Development Organisation and Israel Aerospace Industries illustrates this collaborative model, which embeds Israeli active electronically scanned array radar and seeker technologies directly into Indian-manufactured missile hulls. This integration establishes a deep, hardware-level dependency that binds India's long-term air-defence modernisation to Israeli proprietary software and component supply chains.

Strategic Question for Discussion

How does the hardware-level dependency created by the joint DRDO-IAI development of the MRSAM system affect New Delhi's ability to maintain strategic autonomy during wider Middle Eastern conflicts?

The trajectory indicates that while co-development of the MRSAM system secures critical technology transfers, it simultaneously locks India into Israeli supply chains for proprietary components like seeker heads and radar modules. Consequently, New Delhi's strategic autonomy is constrained by the reality that any significant diplomatic rupture with Jerusalem would immediately jeopardise the operational readiness and sustainment of its primary air-defence network. This dependency suggests that India will continue to adopt a cautious, non-confrontational diplomatic posture toward Israel to safeguard its military-technical interests.

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