Is an Indian-Israeli-Russian Entente Being Formed?

Henry Srebrnik, [Toronto] Jewish Tribune

Is it too far-fetched to imagine an Israeli-Indian-Russian alliance some day?

If one were to take seriously political scientist Samuel Huntington’s famous “clash of civilizations” theory of international relations -- that people’s cultural and religious identities will be the primary source of conflict in the 21st century -- then clearly, given how Israel is surrounded by a mostly hostile Islamic world, its “natural” allies would be those countries whose interests also collide with the Muslim world.

Of these, the major ones are India and Russia.

Orthodox Christian Russia lies north of the Islamic civilization in the Caucasus and central Asia. It has already retreated from the five Muslim states of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Russia has fought two bloody wars to maintain control of Chechnya. Terrorism remains a constant there and in neighbouring Dagestan and Ingushetia.

The Indian subcontinent has been the scene of Hindu-Muslim clashes for more than a millennium, and even its partition into the two states of India and Pakistan in 1947 has not ended the enmity.

They have gone to war three times and came close to engaging in major hostilities many times more. The Muslim-majority but Indian-ruled state of Kashmir remains a major bone of contention. Tens of thousands of people have been killed there in the years of strife.

(China, too, faces an independence movement, by the Muslim Uighur people in Xinjiang, but it is too far removed from the Middle East to matter.)

Since the 1960s, Israel’s main ally has been the United States. During much of that period, a Communist Russia and a left-leaning India supported the Arab world against Israel. But the end of the Cold War terminated most of those ideologically-based alliances.

The United States remains Israel’s most important friend, founded on a common Judeo-Christian affinity, true. (It also helps that there is an influential Jewish diaspora in America.)

But it has often been said that states have no permanent friends or allies, they only have permanent interests. Geopolitically the U.S. is far away from the Middle East and has fewer fundamental disputes with the Muslim world. One might say that its support for Israel is “voluntary” and not based on national interest or realpolitik -- in fact the U.S. would be much better off, from that point of view, in abandoning the Jewish state.

After all, it causes America complications it would otherwise not have when dealing with the vast arc of Islamic states that stretches from Morocco in the west to Indonesia in the east. The Islamic world encompasses more than 50 countries and makes up over 23 per cent of the world’s population.

Israel can’t depend forever on an America that wouldn’t suffer politically, and indeed might gain, by abandoning it -- whereas India and Russia, even if they didn’t really care about Israel, are in the same political boat with it.

Again, applying Huntington’s formulation, Jewish civilization is distinct and so Israel has no “natural” allies -- the way Scandinavians or Latin Americans may feel some affinity towards each other. And in fact the Zionist movement sought support from various countries in the past -- Germany before the First World War, Great Britain in the 1920s and 1930s, France after the Second World War, and the United States since the late 1960s. So this may shift yet again.

Given all of this, it is interesting to observe that Russian President Vladimir Putin visited Israel in late June. (President Barack Obama has yet to visit Israel.)

Russians have long suffered from terrorism and extremism at the hands of Islamists in the northern Caucasus. Zvi Magen, a former Israeli ambassador to Russia, recently told the BBC that President Putin fears the events of the Arab Spring “might inspire similar developments in Russia’s soft belly -- the Caucasus.”

This may be spreading. Recently, assassins attacked two prominent Muslim opponents of religious extremism, in Kazan, a city on the Volga River that is the capital of Tatarstan, far from the Caucasus. It has been a center of Islamic culture since the 10th century.

In 2010, during a meeting of Russian Defence Minister Anatoly Serdyukov and his Israeli counterpart Ehud Barak in Moscow, an agreement was signed to boost military ties between the two nations, to help them fight common threats, such as terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

Putin attended the inauguration in Netanya of a new monument commemorating Red Army soldiers who fought against Nazi Germany in the Second World War. For the Russian soldiers who liberated the Nazi concentration camps, Israeli President Shimon Peres told Putin, “the Jewish people owe a historical ‘thank you’ to the Russians.”

India, too, has strengthened ties with Israel. It formally established relations in January 1992 and ties between the two nations have flourished since, primarily due to common strategic interests and security threats. Indian foreign minister S. M. Krishna visited Israel last January and called for increasing counter-terror and economic cooperation between the two countries.

A study conducted a few years ago by an international market research company, found 58 per cent of Indian respondents showed sympathy to the Jewish state.

It’s possible we might be witnessing the beginnings of an informal triple entente.