Time for India to reset Middle East policy

That Prime Minister Narendra Modi had no use for his predecessors’ apparent reluctance, even resistance, to be openly seen associating with Israel became clear when he met his Israeli counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu in New York during his first visit as PM to the UN General Assembly in 2014.

Modi’s visit to Israel in 2017 and the warm welcome extended to the Israeli Prime Minister’s return visit to New Delhi this week seems to have finally broken for good the quite silly diplomatic taboo that Indian politicians had placed upon themselves in relation to Israel.

But while Modi has consigned to the rubbish bin the unstated but quite obvious policy of Indian politicians avoiding being seen in the company of the Israeli leadership, his government has continued with the policy of reflexively voting against Israel in all international forums – the latest being the UN General Assembly vote against the US decision to shift its embassy to Jerusalem.

Except for once in 2015 when India abstained in the UN Human Rights Council vote, it has consistently voted against Israel. Clearly, in light of the new realities sweeping through the region, for India to stick to its 70-year-old Middle East policy, which is heavily tilted against Israel and in favour of the Palestinians, is neither sensible nor tenable.

Not only does India’s Pavlovian voting pattern against Israel not advance its interests, it actually harms India’s interests by restricting and constricting the available diplomatic space which can be used to extract diplomatic, political, strategic and economic benefits that are otherwise not on offer. The time has therefore come for India to revisit, re-examine, re-evaluate and reset its entire Middle East policy.

Clearly, sticking to a straightjacketed foreign policy with default positions which are a legacy of a time long past cannot serve India’s interest in a world that has not only changed but continues to change.

While India no longer needs to carry on its shoulders the burden of lost causes (third world solidarity, Non-Aligned Movement, etc.), it should also avoid poking its nose unnecessarily in issues which don’t concern it or affect its interest directly. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one such issue.

For far too long, India has been in the vanguard of pushing the Palestinian cause with very little give from the other side on India’s core concerns. It is almost as though the Indian stand is taken for granted by the Arab world.

This is understandable because after all, if supporting the Palestinians has for long been one of the pillars of Indian foreign policy, almost an article of faith, then as far as the Arabs are concerned, India is only doing what it believes in; on the other hand, since backing India on its core concerns has never been a policy imperative for most of the Arab states, they feel they have no obligation to support India on things like Kashmir or Pakistan-sponsored terrorism.

This dichotomy has now run its course. Whatever compulsions or convictions India had in the past to support the Palestinians no longer hold true, even less so given that major Arab states such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia are recalibrating their policy on Israel, including on something as sensitive as Jerusalem. While the Arab states are compelled by the Arab street to keep their changing policy on Israel under the wraps, India has no such compulsion.

For India to forge its Middle East policy on the basis of domestic political considerations – the Muslim vote – is really to attribute extra-territorial loyalties to the Indian Muslims. In other words, unless the thinking is that the Indian Muslim attaches a higher priority to the fate of Muslims in faraway lands over his own country’s national interest (which basically amounts to doubting their loyalty to their own country) there is no reason to believe that rebalancing India’s Middle-East policy will cause disquiet among Indian citizens who happen to be Muslims.

To be sure, there would be some Muslims in India who will support the Palestinian cause for purely religious reasons. There would be others who like their compatriots from other faiths back the Palestinians for conscientious reasons. But in diplomacy and international politics, morality and principles are at best tools to further interests.

It cannot become the basis of foreign policy. And while every country claims and pretends that it follows a principled foreign policy – India has been a past master in pontificating and hectoring the rest of the world – the truth is that foreign policy is based almost entirely on national interests that seldom conform to the lofty principles that countries espouse.

In the Levant, the morality argument runs thin because no one can really claim the moral high ground. If the Palestinians have genuine grievances, so do the Israelis; if there is obduracy on the Israeli side, it is also there on the Palestinian side whose maximalist stance has made them refuse some really good peace deals; if the Palestinians have legitimate concerns about denial of nationhood, the Israelis too have genuine concerns about their security and even existence; if the Palestinians complain of disproportionate use of force by Israel, the Israelis justifiably point to the unremitting acts of terror, including rockets fired on civilian targets. And as far as the issue of Jerusalem is concerned, there is really no special claim that the Arabs have on that “eternal city”.

For years, the Palestinian question has unfortunately been conflated with India’s relations with the rest of the Arab world. Even if this conflation was true in the past, it isn’t today.

Despite the fact that the Arab states publicly have a fixed stand on the Palestinian issue, their relations with India no longer hinge on what position India takes on the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.

The Arab world and India share a mutually beneficial, even inter-dependent, relationship that cannot be jeopardised, much less broken, by any one issue, even if that issue is Palestine or Jerusalem. There are bound to be differences between India and the Arabs on many issues, just as there are going to be a range of issues on which their interests converge.

While Palestine is still not an area of divergence, it could become one if India decides to shake off the shackles of the past and votes in international forums in a way that furthers its interests rather than the interests of others. That such a move will certainly cause some heartburn in the Arab and rest of the Islamic world is undeniable. But perhaps the time has come for India to demand quid pro quo on matters of core interest to it.

The old Arab excuse that OIC resolutions against India are meaningless and toothless isn’t good enough. If they seek our support on Palestine, then there must be some give to India on Kashmir and Pakistan. And just as India cannot expect other countries to break ties with Pakistan for India’s sake, they cannot expect India to keep Israel at an arm’s length for their sake.

Diplomacy in the world of today, especially for a country like India with ambitions of playing a bigger role in the global arena, involves managing contradictory and conflicting relations. The comfortable world of yore when you picked one or the other no longer exists.

This means that even as India builds its relations with Israel, it will not be at the cost of its relations with Israel’s bete noire, Iran; relations with Iran will not preclude relations with the Saudis or other Arabs who detest Iran, and so on and so forth.

If this makes diplomacy a lot more complicated and complex, then this is precisely what professional diplomats are supposed to manage to advance and protect their country’s interests.