India's Balancing Act in the Israel-Palestine Conflict: Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract

The Israel-Palestine conflict has long served as a litmus test for how non-Western states navigate the
uneasy terrain between normative commitments and strategic necessity. India's engagement with this conflict
offers a particularly instructive case. Since independence, New Delhi has maintained formal solidarity with
the Palestinian cause — rooted in its anti-colonial ideological inheritance and its role within the Non-Aligned
Movement — while simultaneously cultivating, from 1992 onward, an increasingly substantive bilateral
partnership with Israel spanning defence procurement, agricultural technology, cybersecurity, and industrial
research. This paper examines how India has managed that apparent contradiction through what it terms a dehyphenation strategy: the deliberate treatment of its Israeli and Palestinian relationships as independent
diplomatic tracks, insulated from one another rather than rendered mutually exclusive. Drawing on qualitative
analysis of diplomatic records, multilateral voting behaviour, and the secondary scholarly literature on Indian
foreign policy and Middle East politics, the study identifies the principal structural pressures that bear on this
posture — geopolitical expectations from major powers, the domestic political salience of a large Muslim
electorate, energy supply vulnerabilities, and the credibility risks inherent in principled equidistance —
alongside the strategic opportunities the approach generates, including expanded defence-technology
collaboration, a credible mediatory role in West Asian diplomacy, and enhanced soft power through cultural
and academic exchange. The paper's central argument is that India's approach is analytically coherent rather
than merely opportunistic, though its long-term viability depends on diplomatic conditions that cannot be
assumed as the conflict intensifies.