By the autumn of 2025 the list of countries where Bezalel Smotrich could set foot was getting shorter. The United Kingdom, France, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Norway had already shut him out. Israel’s far-right finance minister had called for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza and for the annexation of the occupied West Bank, and he has since called for the same treatment for the West Bank. The European Union was preparing bloc-wide sanctions against him and his ally Itamar Ben-Gvir, and it announced them late that September.

India, as Yashraj Sharma reports for Al Jazeera, welcomed him with garlands.

The tour

It was a tour of several cities. In New Delhi he signed a bilateral investment agreement with Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, on September 8, according to All India Radio. In Mumbai he visited the stock exchange. In Gujarat, Narendra Modi’s home state, he was taken to a new investment hub. On the days he was in India, Israeli strikes were killing dozens of people in Gaza. In India, rights groups, activists and academics signed a letter asking the government to withdraw from the treaty.

Here is one reflection, offered as nothing more: a government shows what it values less by whom it praises than by whom it lets in after others have shut their doors.

A brother in Jerusalem

In February this year Modi went to Israel himself. By then Benjamin Netanyahu faced an International Criminal Court arrest warrant over war crimes in Gaza and was increasingly isolated abroad. Both men spoke to the Knesset, and Al Jazeera reported that Modi was the first Indian leader to address it. Netanyahu told him:

You are a great friend of Israel. You are more than a friend. You are a brother.

Modi replied in the same spirit. “India stands with Israel firmly, with full conviction, in this moment and beyond,” he said. He called the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023 “barbaric” and said “no cause can justify the murder of civilians.” Within hours of that attack he had condemned the “terrorist attack” and said he was “deeply shocked”. In Jerusalem he recalled Mumbai in 2008, when Pakistani fighters carried out attacks that New Delhi blames on the Pakistani government: “Like you, we have a consistent and uncompromising policy of zero tolerance for terrorism with no double standards.”

The visit came just before the joint US-Israeli attacks on Iran. Max Rodenbeck, Israel/Palestine programme director at the Washington-based International Crisis Group, told Al Jazeera it looked “as almost a personal favour to Netanyahu by boosting his image as an international statesman just as Israeli election campaigning is getting under way”.

Meanwhile, in Gaza, three years of Israeli attacks have killed at least 74,000 Palestinians, including at least 21,000 children. That is about one person in every 30, or 3 percent of the population before the war.

The road others took

Some of Israel’s oldest friends have since moved from words to action. At least 11 European countries and Canada have imposed trade measures on goods from illegal settlements. Many have sanctioned settlers and networks accused of pogroms against Palestinians in the West Bank, as well as ministers such as Smotrich and Ben-Gvir. Even Donald Trump has threatened to cut off support for Israel’s bombing of Lebanon, though he has also signed off on huge weapons sales to Israel.

New Delhi has offered little beyond homilies and mild objections. It still supports a two-state solution and calls for aid access and peace. For years it has said that war solves nothing, whether in Ukraine, between the US and Iran, or in Palestine. Yet investigations by Al Jazeera and other reporting have found that India exported weapons to Israel during the war, and under Modi it has become Israel’s largest weapons buyer.

Navdeep Suri, a former Indian ambassador to Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, said India “should be able to take more principled positions on these things”. From his own time in office, though, he described “such a close alignment at the political levels between the governments in Israel and India that there is a reluctance [in India] to criticise Israel.” He listed what that reluctance looks like: “The refusal to criticise the settlers’ attacks; refusal to criticise the brutal use of force in Gaza; refusal to criticise the attack on Iran and point out violation of international norms.”

The old map

For a long time India stood elsewhere. In 1948 it opposed the creation of Israel. In 1975 it backed the UN General Assembly resolution calling Zionism a form of racism. It was the first non-Arab nation to recognise the Palestine Liberation Organization and among the first in the world to recognise Palestinian statehood. It kept quiet ties with Israel from at least the 1970s but established diplomatic relations only in 1992. Modi was the first Indian prime minister to visit Israel. Al Jazeera dates that visit to 2016, but Netanyahu, in his Knesset speech, recalled it as 2017, when the two leaders waded into the Mediterranean at Haifa.

Suri says the shift started before Gaza. “Under PM Modi, a relationship that was largely covert or under the carpet has become a much more open relationship,” he said. Israel is seen in Delhi as “a very strong defence and intelligence partner”, and “there’s a genuine convergence when it comes to the perceptions on security.” He also pointed to a section of Indian society with “strong admiration for the muscular policy that Israel adopts”. Voices on the Indian right have repeatedly urged Modi to follow Israel’s example, from crackdowns in Indian-administered Kashmir to attacks on Pakistan.

The mirror at home

The New Delhi political analyst Rasheed Kidwai sees Modi’s Israel policy as an extension of his politics at home. For decades, he said, much of the BJP’s politics “has hovered around Islamist expansionism or Islamic terrorism”. “Take this relationship as an extension of the domestic narrative that one sees in India.” Since October 7, he added, “the anti-Muslim sentiments fill in that block in India,” alongside “pragmatism in New Delhi because Israel is a potent international player”. Analysts note that the Hindu right has long admired Zionism. Hindutva, the BJP’s founding ideology, wants India to become a Hindu nation and a homeland for Hindus everywhere, much as Israel sees itself as the Jewish homeland. Kidwai said India’s current leaders “lack that kind of dynamic thinking and are rather far more dogmatic” than Western ones.

The Congress party, which governed India for most of the years after independence, saw its support for Palestine as an asset with Muslim voters. Only Indonesia and Pakistan have more Muslims than India. Modi’s Hindu-first politics depends instead on treating India’s Muslims as outsiders.

“Modi’s party believes it stands to gain nothing from a pro-Palestine posture,” Kidwai said. “Instead, Modi has sought to link the attack on Israel with the so-called reign of terror and Islamic extremism and make a case against Muslims – and within those realms lies the justification of everything.”