IndiaScope: The Middle East Muddle in a Multipolar World
India’s current embrace of Israel is a remarkable turnaround from the Congress era. In the 1970s, India became the first non-Arab nation to recognize the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as the sole and legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.
This year has unfolded like textbook chapters in my International Relations class. For some countries like India, it has highlighted successes in multilateral diplomacy as with its leadership of G20 and its balancing act with the U.S. and Russia. Others like China have been rocked on their heels with economic woes and a lack of traction in assuming global leadership. The Ukraine war grinds on seemingly to its bitter end, which will come unceremoniously when the U.S. ceases to send support and weapons. But for all of us now, the conflict in Gaza has captured our horrified attention as we watch helplessly at the brutal Hamas attacks of an unsuspecting Israel and the subsequent Israeli unleashing of a nightmare on Gaza.
The Gaza war has highlighted some continuities and some change in world politics. From the U.S., Israel’s firmest ally, there is unconditional support, even as the death count of Palestinian women and children reaches upwards into the thousands and the land is reduced to an apocalyptic hellscape. But even here, there is a twist. Whereas Israeli operations in this region would have received little resistance in past decades in the U.S. and the West, now there are huge demonstrations of support for Palestine in most Western capitals as demographic changes have allowed for large and vocal minorities to voice their opinions and anguish.
In the U.S., Joe Biden flew to Israel in the wake of the Hamas attacks and stood shoulder to shoulder with Netanyahu and other leaders, quite literally, while the first scenes of destruction started appearing on news screens. This underlined continuity in American foreign policy. But Biden’s support has declined among Arab Americans and others in the anti-war lobby, and his approval within the Democratic Party is down by over 10 points. This is new and unforeseen—and could be a game-changer in future U.S.-Israel relations.
Also new is the fact that TV channels like Al Jazeera are bringing the painful devastation of the war on Gaza nonstop to screens worldwide. While their reporters are on the ground in the rubble in Gaza—amidst blownup neighborhoods and the bodies of dead children, and amidst the losses suffered by their staff and families— the U.S. news channels reporting from the relative safety of Israel are showing little of this live footage. This would not have happened a decade ago, but now non-Western and independent news channels have broken the monopoly of Western news organizations and therefore the dominant Western narrative.
In the case of India, foreign policy change is of a different nature, moving from extreme aversion to Israel—with Indian passports, until the 1980s, forbidding travel to the country—to growing support of Israel, united around the shared experience of terrorist attacks and other strategic imperatives. PM Modi himself was quick to robustly condemn the Hamas attacks. It was only after retaliatory bombs started falling on Gaza that he came out with a statement underlining India’s continued support of a Palestinian homeland.
The biggest surprise, however, was that India was one of the few abstentions on a U.N. General Assembly resolution that asked for a “humanitarian truce,” repeating the U.S. stance that any resolution that did not first condemn the Hamas terrorist attacks could not be supported. The U.S., of course, voted no. The old India, along with much of the Global South, would have wholeheartedly supported the resolution, as written. Indeed, fault lines within Indian politics quickly opened, with the Congress Party taking on the old pro- Palestinian positions but the administration carving out a new and more assertive support of Israel.
As with everything now, the conflict continues to play out on social media, with support for Israel or Palestine routinely trending on X, for instance. Much of India’s vast social media army seemed to respond heartily to the opening bombing of Gaza as a deserved answer to terrorism, although traditional Indian support for Palestine has now broken through. In the U.S., early support for Israel has now given way to media warriors for both sides. The political fallout continues to pile up, with each side attempting to “cancel” the other. The world is in a new multilateral age, and the old hegemonic coalitions that were used to calling all the global shots are facing pushback everywhere.
Tinaz Pavri is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Asian Studies Program at Spelman College, Atlanta. A recipient of the Donald Wells Award from the Georgia Political Science Association, she’s the author of the memoir Bombay in the Age of Disco: City, Community, Life.
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