India’s Growing Presence in the Middle East

After the recent earthquake in Turkey and Syria, New Delhi rushed to send aid, which included a mobile field hospital fully supplied with medications, equipment, and staff. This response, explain Husain Haqqani and Aparna Pande, signifies not just humanitarian considerations but a desire to become more involved in the Middle East—made evident by a variety of diplomatic moves, among them warming relations with Israel:

India’s objective is to make sure that its interests are not left unguarded because of the vacuum created in the Middle East by Washington’s focus on peer competition with China and on Russia’s actions in Eurasia. The Middle East is a critical source of investment, energy, and remittances for India. The region also shares India’s security concerns, especially about Islamist extremism and terrorism. India wants to be ready to for any fallout from U.S. withdrawal from the greater Middle East.

Around 8.9 million Indians reside in the Gulf, with around 3.4 million in the United Arab Emirates and 2.5 million in Saudi Arabia. Fifty percent of India’s over $80 billion in remittances annually come from the Gulf countries. Trade and investment between India and Middle Eastern countries have grown exponentially over the last decade.

The United Arab Emirates is India’s third-largest global trading partner. Since the signing in 2022 of a Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA), India’s trade with the UAE has increased by over 38 percent to $88 billion. India’s strategic partnership with the UAE is at the heart of I2U2, [a group that also includes the U.S. and Israel].

India has managed good relations with not just the Arab Gulf countries but also with Israel, Turkey, and Iran. Israel is one of the top three suppliers of defense equipment to India, with 43 percent of Israel’s arms exports being sold to India. At the same time, India has been careful not to disrupt its relations with Iran, despite geopolitical challenges.

Read more at Diplomat

More about: India, Israel-India relations, Middle East, United Arab Emirates

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