The Growing Independence of India’s Defense Industry Will Strengthen the Israel-India Alliance

In recent years, the government of Narendra Modi has been trying to build up India’s own defense industry, so that the country can become less reliant on imports. While it may seem counterintuitive, this move will only enhance the already robust cooperation between New Delhi and Jerusalem in the area of military technology, since Israeli companies can help India learn to make advanced equipment by itself. Moreover, the two can work together to develop new technology. Such collaboration is part and parcel of the growing bond between the two nations, writes Alvite Ningthoujam:

For the last good five years, India has remained the second largest importer of arms in the world. . . . As it is, Israel’s share in India’s defense market began to increase significantly from 2014 on. During the period past five years, India’s arms imports from Israel increased by 175 percent, making the latter New Delhi’s second largest supplier of major arms.

It is evident, [however] that the growing strategic partnership between India and Israel increasingly involves long-term co-development and defense-production programs as well as technical support. These aspects are crucial from the standpoint of India’s current military-modernization initiatives and the drive for localized production of armaments. Both countries consider the collaboration between Indian and Israeli defense firms on sophisticated defense technologies to be a success.

The strengthening of ties in this specific domain has come at this juncture when the two countries are facing both traditional and non-traditional security threats. Increasing demand for defense items due to these emerging security challenges, the quest for technological advancement in defense industries, and Israel’s readiness to meet some of the requirements of India, will lead to further expansion of defense cooperation. As Israel continues to design and develop a wide range of state-of-the-art weapons systems, it will remain an important source of defense equipment and technology for India. And Israel’s technological expertise is sure to be a key source in India’s drive to develop a self-reliant defense industry.

Read more at Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security

More about: India, Israel diplomacy, Israel-India relations, Israeli technology

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society