Former UN USG Shashi Tharoor recently published a provocative piece titled "India's Israel Envy" exploring the seemingly unlikely sympathy for Israel from India -

Shashi Tharoor

As Israeli planes and tanks exact a heavy toll on Gaza, India's leaders and strategic thinkers have been watching with an unusual degree of interest - and some empathy.

India's government has, no surprise, joined the rest of the world in calling for an end to the military action, but its criticism of Israel has been muted...

Both countries face terrorists launching attacks from neighboring, ostensibly sovereign territory and both suspect that authorities lend different shades of support to the behavior. With Israel biting the bullet and invading Gaza to (hopefully) curtail the rocket downpour, India might be tempted to do something similar to Pakistan. However, Tharoor argues, India has far more effective international leverage to bring down upon its misbehaving neighbor than the Israeli's do and hence could / should make use of that avenue first.

Perhaps due to his UN heritage, I think Tharoor overly focuses on geopolitics as the source of the "empathy" - e.g. both India and Israel are in similar transnational situations. I've done some work in Israel over the years and have personally noted a far more broadbased alignment between Israel and India. One response to Tharoor tracks this shift over the last 50 yrs-

Jan. 15 (Bloomberg) -- Israel hasn't won much praise for invading the Gaza Strip. This unpopularity abides even though Israel is bombing Gaza to stop Qassam rockets from hitting its own towns. Still, Israel has at least some supporters in what might seem an unlikely place: India. Not official support, mind you.

...Still, a growing mutual admiration between India and Israel is showing up at levels both commonplace and lofty...This Israel-India link is a change. Born at the same time, the two nations at first stood out for their differences...Over the next decades, a shift commenced. India discerned that it had little to gain by keeping Israel at a distance, since Arab nations would surely back Pakistan over India regardless of the latter's policy on Jerusalem.

My assertion is that beyond the strategic relationship to Islamic states, both countries have also become surprisingly socio-politically aligned internally and thus the "envy" runs far deeper than the current situation.

How so?


One of my favorite political science books of all time remains Francis Fukuyama's End of History. While many meaty chunks of the book are routinely criticized, other parts are nevertheless quite prescriptive. In particular, Fukuyama does a great job of crisply enumerating the 3 factors that together define the (arguably) best socio-political model "History" has come up with so far. Its 3 pillars are -









  • Francis Fukuyama

    Liberalism     -- In the "Classical Liberal" or "Liberty" sense -- e.g. what "inalienable rights" do you have that a government or majority of voters can't take away. How "safe" are ethnic / religious / political minorities? How much "due process" is afforded the average citizen? These rights are both formal in the legal sense (for ex., cops & courts defending Free Speech) and informal in a cultural sense (do your neighbors try to kill you for heresy?).
  • Democracy -- Does a government get its legitimacy because it's the product of popular vote or does it instead claim legitimacy due to heredity (monarchy), religion (theocracy) or simple, brute military power? Is power transferred peacefully between parties with a monopoly on force maintained by the government? Are both the winners and losers gracious after the election? Are public servants ranging from the lowly post office up to the Prime Minister generally honest & trying to push the country forward or they trying to make a quick buck while they've got the reigns of power?
  • Capitalism - Is the primary source of wealth the potent combo of market capitalism + technology? Or is it allocated via the organs of political power? Is Horatio Alger a naïve, misleading myth or an inspirational, "pull yourself up" parable?

Now I'll be the first to acknowledge that there's a lot of criticism (particularly from the Post Modern left) of these 3 ideals; certainly even the folks who profess them often operationally fall far short of 'em.... But as with many messy situations, the questions here are relative rather than absolute. And relatively speaking, on all 3 of these fronts - L, D & C - India and Israel are the leading lights in their respective neighborhoods -



  • Liberalism - for all the criticism of Israel, an openly practicing Shia Muslim is likely less safe in Hamas-ruled Gaza than a Muslim of any stripe in either Israel or India. And an openly gay person in Gaza? Fuggedaboutit. Israel's home grown, "not in my name" liberal newspapers routinely criticize their government's military excursion into Gaza while one suspects that the life of a Qassam-criticizing, "not in my name" newspaper in Gaza would be relatively nasty, brutish, and short. As bad as it might be to be a Palestinian in Israeli custody, the reverse is almost certainly worse. While Liberalism in India still has a way to go by Western standards, even the harshest critics would concede that India is a relative oasis of "live & let live" liberalism on the subcontinent.






  • India-Israel Bhai Bhai!?!?

    Democracy     - both Israel and India are active Democracies marked by a portfolio of relatively well organized political parties, smooth power transition, and effective government control of the instruments of force (I can't emphasize the word "relatively" enough ). By contrast, reverb from the last real election(s) in Gaza / West Bank can still be felt in the low grade civil war between Hamas and Fatah with the Hamas Militia maintaining an entirely separate chain of command from the Palestinian National Authority. With no monopoly of force by the Palestinian government, any 3rd party negotiations intrinsically fail. On the governance & corruption front, one egregious example is that Arafat's leadership of the Palestinian Authority probably netted him $1B - a figure that would likely make even the most corrupt Indian politician blush, particularly when you adjust for the relative size/wealth of Palestine vs. India.
  • Capitalism - If there's any one place where Israel and India have most dramatically converged, it's in the effective implementation of, and forward-looking faith in modern, sci/tech-charged capitalism. In Silicon Valley, emigres from both countries routinely punch way above their weight. Israel's $200B GDP / $28K per person is nearly 10x neighboring Jordan's and 4x Egypt's (interestingly, US Aid to Israel for 2007 was $2B not far from the $1.7B given to Egypt ). A Bloomberg OpEd notes -
    India isn't especially rich in oil and minerals; Israel is a non-oil nation in a decidedly oily region. To grow, both countries therefore have had to become more entrepreneurial, to generate non- commodity wealth -- in short, to innovate.







    Prob not for a while...

    In Israel in the 1980s and 1990s, newly arrived Soviet Jews led the transition from the kibbutz and factory to high-tech ventures. With the end of the old bureaucratic system known as "license raj," India, too, placed new faith in tech and services.

    Led by Prime Minister Singh -- at that time finance minister -- India began to invent and create. Innovating Israel and innovating India were similar in a way that agricultural Israel and agricultural India had not been.

    In a phone interview this week, Tharoor recalled that India became so comfortable with its trading profile that it unilaterally granted most-favored-nation status to Pakistan. Pakistan didn't reciprocate, creating "the only instance of a non-reciprocal free trade agreement one can think of," Tharoor says.

    This example is particularly telling - for India Free Trade is becoming an unalloyed good while in Pakistan, petty political points still reign more important.

It's important to emphasize the "socio-" part of Fukuyama's "socio-political model". As Tocqueville famously observed, ultimately, "the people get the government they deserve". Despite being a terrorist organization, Hamas was elected to power so clearly, there's more to the puzzle than a one-time democratic vote. "L, D, & C" is also about what a people and culture embrace in a broad way beyond just the government. It's one thing to ensure a minority's right to Free Speech at arms length, it's another to work shoulder-to-shoulder engaged in productive commerce - something that's quite emphatically a work-in-progress in LD&C nations world-wide. Thankfully, however, these 3 ideals *are* currently weaving their way through Indian society and thus, I argue, empathy with Israel becomes more and more natural.









A Path For The Future?

Through this lens, what's my advice to the Palestinians? Put more energy into these fronts, less into ramshackle rockets & suicide bombers, and I believe even the most die hard voting block of LD&C'ers on the planet - middle America - will grow more empathetic towards your broader plight.