Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s scheduled visit to Israel this week arrives at a moment of acute geopolitical volatility across West Asia and at a point when India’s foreign policy bandwidth is strained by overlapping security dependencies, economic vulnerabilities and diplomatic balancing acts. The visit – announced prematurely by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself at a public forum – and coming soon after Netanyahu abruptly cancelled his own scheduled trip to New Delhi, underscores how the power asymmetry within the partnership increasingly manifests in optics that New Delhi does not fully control.New Delhi is no longer setting the agenda but is instead responding to the whims of a chaotic and aggressive Israeli leadership. Netanyahu has repeatedly postponed trips to India, three times in 2025 alone, due to security concerns and domestic instability, underlining how bilateral diplomacy has become hostage to Israel’s internal turbulence. PM Modi’s visit is coming at a moment when the Israeli government faces unprecedented international legal scrutiny which makes an Indian leader’s presence a significant moral and diplomatic liability. The long-term cost of this visit will likely be measured in lost influence in the Global South and a diminished relationship with a besieged Iran.1) Threat of regional conflictThe visit unfolds amid renewed US-Iran tensions, when President Donald Trump has deployed a “massive armada,” including carrier strike groups, to West Asia, threatening military action against Iran if a new diplomatic deal is not reached. One Trump advisor estimated a “90% chance” of military action, fuelling fears of a wider war in which Israeli and American operational theatres could rapidly merge. Iran, for its part, is preparing counterproposals in nuclear discussions even as Washington signals readiness for limited strikes, with targeting plans reportedly at an advanced stage. These escalations have already had cascading effects across the region, with armed groups anticipating the possibility of full‑spectrum confrontation. Hezbollah, for instance, is reportedly preparing for a US-Iran war, illustrating how a localised conflict could widen into a multi‑actor chain reaction engulfing the region where around nine million Indian citizens live and work.2) Netanyahu’s hexagon of alliancesNetanyahu has recently deployed a sophisticated campaign of flattery by describing India as a central pillar of his proposed Hexagon of Alliances which seeks to unite Israel with India and Greece, Cyprus, and select Arab and Mediterranean states. This casts India not merely as a bilateral partner but as a pillar in a regional architecture designed to counter “radical adversaries” like Iran and marginalise Palestinian statehood. Netanyahu is asking India to provide the legitimacy and perhaps the eventual security guarantees for his new Middle Eastern order that is fundamentally unstable. For a leader like Modi who is obsessed with the domestic optics of international validation, this flattery serves as a powerful tool of entrapment because it encourages India to overextend itself in a region where it has limited strategic reach. If Modi accepts this role, he will be effectively signing away India’s long held principle of strategic autonomy and tethering India’s future to a volatile and widely condemned military occupation by Israel.It could hurt the safety of the massive Indian expatriate workforce in the region who could become immediate targets for asymmetric retaliation. 3) Israel’s domestic politics Despite the grand rhetoric of a special relationship between global powers, the domestic political landscape in Israel reveals a much more fractured reality. Several prominent Israeli legislators and opposition figures have threatened to boycott Modi’s address to the Knesset unless the Supreme Court President is formally invited, as per convention. This fractious moment in Israeli politics risks transforming what is typically a ceremonial address into a stage for Israel’s internal power struggle. It exposes the myth that India’s relationship is with the Israeli state rather than a specific and increasingly isolated political faction. By providing Netanyahu with a high-profile diplomatic stage, Modi is signalling to everyone that he is willing to overlook global and domestic Israeli opposition to support a beleaguered leader. For the Indian public, the optics of their prime minister addressing a partially empty chamber or one filled only with hardline extremists should be a sobering reminder of the reputational cost of this visit.4) Embracing a war criminalThe ongoing genocide in Gaza has turned the tide of international opinion so decisively that India’s silence is increasingly viewed as complicity. By embracing a leader who has been designated a war criminal by the International Criminal Court, PM Modi is placing India on the wrong side of an evidentiary mountain that can isolate it from the broader Global South, particularly at a time when it chairs BRICS. India only belatedly joined more than 100 nations in criticising Israel’s expansion in the occupied West Bank, after its absence from the list of original signatories elicited domestic and international scrutiny of New Delhi’s shifting posture on Palestine. The Ministry of External Affairs refused requests for a comment on the government’s decisions, first to stay away from the joint appearance at the United Nations and then to sign the statement.5) Trump’s Israel policyThe geopolitical backdrop of this visit is further darkened by the return of a Trump administration which contends that ‘Two-State Solution’ is a dead phrase. The recent interview given by Mike Huckabee to Tucker Carlson has sent shockwaves through the region as it explicitly stated an endorsement of Israeli annexation and the total dismantling of Palestinian statehood. This shift in Washington D.C. aligns perfectly with the agenda of Trump’s Board of Peace which views Gaza not as a humanitarian catastrophe caused by Israel but as a real estate and security problem to be managed through force and displacement.India attended the first Board of peace meeting held in Washington D.C. on February 19 “as an observer”. The Indian external affairs ministry said that India supports the Gaza Peace Plan initiative of President Trump.With the US threatening a direct military strike on Iran, India’s previous policy of some balancing between Jerusalem and Tehran has become entirely unsustainable. New Delhi’s decision to effectively abandon the Chabahar Port project in Iran on Trump’s demand has already left India without any leverage in Tehran. PM Modi’s hastily arranged trip to Israel suggests that India has already chosen its side in the coming conflict, even though any war in the Persian Gulf would lead to an energy price shock that could derail the Indian economy for years.Also read: ‘Driven by Racism and Malice’: Indian Workers Beaten up in Israel’s Ashkelon6) Defence and surveillance technologyThe most concrete driver of this relationship remains India’s increasing dependency on Israeli military technology which has only intensified under the Modi government. From missile defence systems to advanced drones, the Indian military is now structurally reliant on Israeli maintenance and upgrades which gives Tel Aviv significant leverage over New Delhi. Just days before Modi’s departure, India and Israel signed a fresh MoU deepening defence ties and accelerating joint production programmes, reinforcing that defence remains the spine of bilateral relations.This dependency extends into the domestic sphere where the Pegasus spyware scandal revealed the extent to which the Modi government used Israeli cyber tools to monitor its own citizens, journalists, activists and political opponents. The massive increase in the Intelligence Bureau budget this year has fuelled speculation that the Modi government is planning a further expansion of this surveillance infrastructure. PM Modi’s previous trip to Israel in July 2017, the first-ever by an Indian Prime Minister to that country, had resulted in the contract for Pegasus spyware being signed with Israel.7) IMEC in limboIndia’s push for the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor remains a major component of its connectivity ambitions. Recent agreements, including a MoU between Adani Ports and the Port of Marseille Fos, have bolstered IMEC’s institutional framework and extended its logistical reach into Europe. But IMEC’s broader progress has stalled due to regional instability along the Jordan–Israel stretch and friction between India and the US over tariffs. Modi’s Israel visit may hope to navigate bilateral security considerations around IMEC but has little chance to restart the connectivity project whose viability depends heavily on regional calm that does not currently exist.To conclude, this visit places India in the middle of a fractious political season in Israel, growing international scrutiny over the genocide in Gaza and a volatile US-Iran dynamic. It also occurs while India faces internal questions about its longstanding position on Palestine and its increasing dependence on Israeli defence and surveillance technologies.As PM Modi prepares for his public displays of camaraderie with Netanyahu in Tel Aviv, the long-term risks to India are becoming increasingly visible to everyone except the decision-makers in New Delhi. While both governments will emphasise continuity and cooperation, the strategic terrain surrounding this visit is unstable enough that even carefully choreographed diplomacy may not insulate New Delhi from reputational and geopolitical consequences.