In recent years, a dramatic and surprising shift has taken place in India’s foreign relations. A country once regarded as one of the most prominent defenders of the Palestinian narrative on the international stage has become a key strategic ally of Israel across a range of fields, from technology and critical infrastructure to extensive defense cooperation.
The India of Prime Minister Narendra Modi is no longer content with traditional diplomacy. It has adopted a pragmatic, nationalist approach that views Israel as a natural partner.
Defense ties have reached new heights through major arms deals and the joint development of military technologies. At the same time, the involvement of leading Indian corporations in Israeli national projects has reinforced the perception that Jerusalem and New Delhi are increasingly intertwined along global trade corridors such as the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor, known as IMEC.
The warmth of the relationship was evident last week when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was quick to salute Smit Machchhar, the Indian captain of a flydubai flight who was stabbed in the cockpit yet helped save the passengers on their way to Tel Aviv.
Faced with this geopolitical reality, Palestinian diplomacy and advocacy efforts are displaying growing frustration. Recognizing that they cannot directly halt arms deals or economic corridors, they are seeking instead to undermine the moral and historical justification for the alliance. At the center of the latest battle is “Haifa Day.”
Every year on Sept. 23, the Indian military commemorates the 1918 Battle of Haifa, in which Indian cavalry from the Jodhpur, Mysore and Hyderabad units captured the city from the Ottoman Empire.
Haifa was the scene of a direct clash between Indian cavalrymen armed with swords and lances and entrenched Ottoman, German and Austro-Hungarian forces equipped with artillery and machine guns.
Against the odds, the Indian cavalry achieved a remarkable military victory in what has been remembered as one of the last successful major cavalry charges in military history.
In 2010, following a renewed discovery of the episode’s significance, the Society for the Heritage of World War I in Israel, the Haifa History Association and Haifa Municipality launched an initiative to mark “Haifa Day” in honor of the Indian soldiers. Since then, diplomatic representatives of both countries have commemorated the event annually.
In January 2018, during Netanyahu’s historic visit to India, Haifa was even added to the name of a major square in New Delhi, Teen Murti Haifa Chowk, in memory of the Indian soldiers who fell in the campaign. For years, Haifa Day commemorations attracted little controversy. But the surge in India-Israel relations, in stark contrast to efforts to isolate Israel in other parts of the world, has become a growing irritant for the Palestinian Authority.
Over the past year, PLO Ambassador to India Abdullah Mohammad Abu Shawesh has launched a carefully organized public diplomacy campaign. Drawing on extensive legal and historical research, the Palestinian mission sent the Indian government a five-page official letter in June in which the ambassador expressed “deep concern” over what he described as Israeli attempts to rewrite, distort and politicize the historical record of “Palestine.” The mission has also briefed Indian journalists and members of parliament.
Abu Shawesh’s main objection concerns the use of the term “liberation” and the attempt to weave a battle fought some 30 years before the establishment of the State of Israel into a shared Israeli-Indian history. The ambassador objects to the very framing of the episode, stressing that the Indian soldiers were not acting independently but under the command of the British Empire, which had sent them to the front.
Heritage, sacrifice and courage
One might wonder why India so warmly embraces soldiers who fell while serving the British Empire, the very power against which it later waged a prolonged struggle for independence.
Behind the gesture, however, lies a more complex outlook, one perhaps unfamiliar in Middle Eastern discourse: India’s ability to distinguish between the injustices of colonial rule and the heritage, sacrifice and courage of individual soldiers on the battlefield.
Under Modi, India has undergone a profound shift in its approach to its military history, which has become part of a new national narrative. A major milestone in that process was the inauguration of the National War Memorial in New Delhi in 2019. For roughly seven decades after independence, India had no single central memorial commemorating all those who had fallen in its wars since independence.
At the same time, soldiers who served in the British Indian Army have been restored to a place of honor, in contrast to previous governments that tended to play down their legacy.
Modi has thus transformed the commemoration of soldiers into a source of national pride and a central element of India’s “soft power” as a global power that contributed the blood of its soldiers to shaping the modern world. The ambassador goes on to argue that if the Indian government’s own logic is accepted, India’s historical connection is intertwined with that of the Palestinians, rather than with the State of Israel.
According to the official figures he cites, 491 Indian war dead are recorded at the Ramla War Cemetery, 109 at the Gaza and Deir al-Balah war cemeteries and 47 at the Haifa Indian Cemetery, with many others commemorated in cemeteries and memorials throughout the Land of Israel.
In Abu Shawesh’s words, elevating the Battle of Haifa and reframing it as evidence of a historic bond between India and Israel risks becoming “a desperate attempt by the Israeli side to court India through an artificial, exaggerated and historically unjustified narrative, while diminishing the broader sacrifice of Indian soldiers across the region.”
Today’s India long ago abandoned an apologetic approach and is no longer an automatic mouthpiece for the Palestinian narrative that reflexively lines up against Israel in U.N. votes.
Originally published by Israel Hayom.
