Guarding the Skies - Israeli Spyder Missile Defence System has been put to use by the Indian Army
With Prime Minister Narendra Modi coming to power in May 2014, the bilateral relationship between India and Israel as gone into overdrive. Two major defence deals have been signed in the past two months as both countries are moving ahead with a commercial and political relationship that is no longer burdened by the unease felt by the previous UPA government over the reaction of the country’s Muslim minority. The BJP has no such qualms.
At the U.N. General Assembly in New York last September, Modi set aside time for a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the first meeting between the two heads of government in over a decade.
That same month the NDA government cleared a long-delayed purchase of Israeli missiles for the Indian Navy. Then in October, India closed a $520 million deal to buy Israeli anti-tank missiles. And last week, a jointly developed aerial defence system passed a major trial, which India called a "milestone".
A strategic shift is clearly visible in India’s relations with Israel. For the first time since Independence, a government in power at the Centre has not uttered a single word of commiseration with the Palestinians trapped in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank during an Israeli-Palestinian conflagration. Even if India’s sympathy has been seen as deceptive and mealy-mouthed, and it often has, given our clandestine military and obvious interstatal civil connections with Israel, India’s avowed policy in the Southern Levant has always been pro-Palestinian. Palestine is the only international conflict that was seen as too ethically significant to be tied down by the command strictures of non-alignment, and the global diplomatic policy vis-a-vis Israel of Fernheit, or “remote awareness”, was carried forward right up to the end of UPA-2.
The Narendra Modi government’s silence on the current upsurge in the Hamās-Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) hostilities, including a one-sided ceasefire offer by Israel and its obdurate rejection by Hamās, is all the more deafening given the historical non-negotiability of India’s pro-Palestine policy. On the surface, India’s reticence seems to be non-partisan: It could be argued — and it is being argued, that the Indian government has not come out in open support of Israel, either. What is interesting, though, is the quietly frenetic revalidation of Israel in the corridors of power, both by the Modi regime in New Delhi and in Binyamin Netanyahu’s Memshelet Yisrael in Jerusalem. However, this paradigm is about to change when PM Modi will visit Israel in the coming month.
The conflict between a foreign-relations custom and the exigencies of practicality, which punched an increasingly larger hole through the Congress’ Nehruvian equanimity as the years went by, didn’t end even with the targeting of Jewishry during 26/11 in Mumbai by Pakistani Islamic terrorists, when Chabad House, the ‘court’ of a tightly-knit Orthodox Jewish community, was attacked and its respected rebbe and his wife butchered. It was a provocation from Pakistani Islamists that sent the Congress’atmashakti into a tailspin, but, eventually, didn’t lead to an evident redefinition of its policy towards Israel. Israel offered to share with India the Mossad’s famedtachbūlōt (strategems, ruses, tricks), but, for the most part, kept its own counsel, despite that the outrage was, in its eyes, extreme: The Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidim is one of Israel’s most beloved Eastern European Orthodox denominations, because the Chabad Hasids came back, literally, from the dead after having been wiped out almost entirely during the Holocaust. Except that Israel’s diffidence and the Congress’ refusal to publicly change its policy were tachbūlōt (deception in Hebrew).
Even as India banned Israel Military Industries (IMI, or Taas) for 10 years in 2012 over bribery allegations, which followed the replacement of the venerable Uzi with Belgian firearms in late 2008 by the Special Protection Group, which protects the prime minister, former prime ministers and their families, the Indian Army’s paracommandos were being rapidly but quietly outfitted with Micro-Uzis.
IMI Micro UZI 4 Sub Machine Gun
And there’s the rub: The IMI, an 80-year-old company with strikingly deep influence worldwide is pretty much back in favour because the response from the Indian Army to its Micro-Uzi has been remarkably supportive. In 2008, the year the original Uzi was taken off the Indian security forces’ inventory, IMI’s turnover was $650 million, of which 60 percent, or $390 million, was from exports. It was one of IMI’s highest turnover fiscals, which essentially means that its exports to India, then its second-largest customer, were affected probably marginally, if at all.
If anything, the year that IMI’s Uzi tanked, Indian arms purchases from Israel accounted for roughly a third, or $1.71 billion, of Israel’s $5.2 billion in arms exports. That year, India bought about $3.3 billion worth of Israeli arms.
According to an Aviation Week report (5 August 2013), in FY2013 (2012), “Countries in Asia continue to be the Israeli defence industries’ leading market with 50 percent of sales, or $3.7 billion, concentrated there. India is the leading customer.” This included, but was not limited to, the $1.4 billion Barak-8 naval air and missile defence system contract with the Israel Aerospace Industries [IAI].”
According to a report in the Israeli daily Haaretz (Sisters in arms: The burgeoning defence trade between Israel and India, 22 February), “India is now the No. 1 export target of Israel’s defence industries. Both India and Israel avoid revealing details about the scale and nature of their security trade… India’s share of that is probably between $1 billion and $1.5 billion. And the potential for growth exists.”
Following the midair downing of almost 90 percent of Hamās’ rockets by Israel’s Iron Dome antimissile system, a feeler has been put out to the IAI and Rafael through the offices of the Israeli government to examine whether the Iron Dome system, but massively upscaled, could be designed for India. It is difficult. “But,” says a source in Israel, “the question is not if Israel could design and perhaps supply through ToT (transfer of technology) an Iron Dome to India: The question is if Israel can train military technicians to oversee the missile tracking and antimissile launching.”
Contrary to common perception, the Iron Dome is not automated: Its antimissile rockets are finally activated by very young IDF soldiers trained to distinguish between Hamās’ rockets and small aircraft, and to make decisions that can have serious international consequences.
Two Asian nations are actively seeking some form of security intervention through customised Iron Domes, Singapore, which is currently being outfitted (but whose active operational prognosis is a zealously-kept secret); and India, whose Ministry of Defence, under the Congress, first began to send out feelers — very cautiously and ready to beat it, in late 2013.
The Israeli Bullpup Assault Rifle TAVOR being used by India's Special Frontier Force (SFF)
While the US is also considering asking Israel for design aid in developing its own aerial active-defence canopy, it is not hamstrung by having nothing to offer the Israelis. If not for virtual gifts of non-returnable cash from the US, Israel would not have an Iron Dome. (There are eight pillars of the Iron Dome in operation.) India, on the other hand, really does have nothing to offer the Israelis except hard cash and technological fealty.
The problem is that Israel, which has been haemorrhaging money into the IDF for decades, could do with Indian money, scads of which is free-floating around various defence factories around the world. India has, in fact, been so chronically disorganised and dilatory in its arms purchases that its security superstructure is widely considered as lacking coherence. It is a patchwork of obsolete, scabby weaponry and state-of-the-art poultices, which is why the feelers for a vastly-upscaled version of the Iron Dome left Israel feeling a bit bewildered. How would Israel, which has an antimissile missile canopy covering just 20,770 sq km, divided into four relatively flat regions: the coastal plain, the central hills, the Jordan Rift Valley, and the Negev Desert, design a defence fractal-upscale for India, which has an area of 3,287,590 sq km, or 158 times the size of Israel, and with a topography that includes anything that nature can throw at it?
Safety Net - India has already sent feelers for acquiring the Iron Dome BMD technology
The Iron Dome comprises a mix of transport erector launchers and multiple rocket launchers, all truck-towed and highly mobile. The anti-missile rockets are designed to counter very short-range rockets (5- 70 km), such as the Hamās uses predominantly, although it has been reported to have very occasionally used more sophisticated long range rockets, and 155mm shells. It is a quick-deployment, high-camouflage system that can only be taken out by satellite-aided targeting, and neither Hamās nor Israel’s ring of Arab States have anything remotely close to counter such precision and rapidity.
Israel considers India a topographic and weather nightmare, and Pakistan, against whom an Indian Iron Dome would be deployed, has satellite facilities. In spades. The daddy of Iron Domes for India is a dream, a designing and financial dream for Israel, and a strategic dream for India. But, so far, it’s a dream. But, with the bottomless pit of money in the promissory gift box, it’s a dream worth pursuing.
Keeping a fine Balance
India has always enjoyed good relations with Palestine, thanks to the misplaced & inutile Nehruvian foreign policies which go back to the Pre-Independence days. However, the past two decades have witnessed India embark on a strategic partnership with Israel after nearly four decades of diplomatic estrangement. For most of its pre-and post-Independence history, India saw the Israel- Palestine conflict through an ideological prism, pursued a foreign policy antagonistic towards the Jewish State, and refused to grant Israel full diplomatic recognition until 1992, the last major non-Muslim country to do so.
Change in Indian policy
After more than four decades of hostility, a host of developments, especially the end of the Cold War, forced New Delhi to change its stance towards Israel. India’s cherished & policy of nonalignment lost its validity following the end of the Cold War and with it, New Delhi’s ideological justification for its staunchly pro-Palestinian and anti- Israeli position. Additionally, the 1991 Madrid Peace Process prompted India to conclude that if the Arab world and the Palestine Liberation Organisation were now willing to negotiate with Israel, New Delhi had no reason to maintain status quo. India also realised that its support for the Palestinians brought nothing for New Delhi with regard to the Kashmir issue or any other dispute involving Pakistan for that matter.
A New Beginning
India finally extended full diplomatic recognition to Israel in 1992. Ties between the two countries have flourished since then. The formation of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) neglected the sentiments of Indian Muslims and Pakistan’s decision to block India from joining the OIC is considered to be the cause for this diplomatic shift. According to an Israeli foreign ministry report, India is the most pro-Israel nation, ahead of even the US. The two natural allies have made counter-terrorism and military cooperation a part of their bilateral relations. New Delhi has benefited from Israel’s expertise in counter-terrorism training and border security, while Israel has emerged as one of India’s most important sources of sophisticated military equipment and weapons systems. Bilateral economic cooperation as well as collaboration in the fields of space research, trade, science and technology and education are thriving. This close bilateral development of relationship was on account of very important and several major diplomatic initiatives since 1997.
Bilateral Trade to Scale New Peaks
Bilateral trade between India and Israel jumped from $2 billion in 2001 to $4.1 billion in 2009 and $5.43 billion in 2014. India continues to be a major focus of Israel as a future trading partner. According to reliable sources, Israel is planning more commercial activities with India and Tel Aviv is eying the trade volume to reach $15 billion in the next five years
