TABLET MAG
by Yair Rosenberg
September 30, 2014

It was meeting Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi

Yesterday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the United Nations. Like every year, the event was covered assiduously by both the American and Israeli media, who carefully parsed each element of the Israeli leader’s speech. But in fact, the addresses at the annual U.N. General Assembly are usually just window dressing that obscures the main event: high-level meetings between heads of state that take place on the sidelines of the New York confab. This was especially true for Israel, for whom the most important development this year was not a predictable speech in which Netanyahu likened Hamas to ISIS, but a little-heralded handshake with recently elected Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The two leaders met on Sunday, in what was the first meeting between an Indian prime minister and his Israeli counterpart in 11 years. It was also Bibi’s first scheduled stop when he arrived in New York. “We are two old peoples, some of the oldest of the nations on earth, but we’re also two democracies,” Netanyahu said at a press appearance with Modi. “We’re proud of our rich traditions but we’re also eager to seize the future.” The Indian leader, who met earlier that day with American Jewish leaders, reciprocated in kind, noting “India is the only country where anti-Semitism has never been allowed to come up, and where Jews have … lived as an integral part of our society,” and that “there was a time in the city of Mumbai that Hebrew was officially taught in the university and even one of the mayors of Mumbai city was from a Jewish family.” But the meeting wasn’t simply an exchange of pleasantries.

Netanyahu invited Modi to visit Israel, something the Indian leader had done as a local governor in 2006, but would be historic for an Indian prime minister. And according to the Hindustan Times, the Israeli leader proposed a joint cyber-defense initiative between the Jewish state and India, laying the groundwork for closer intelligence and technological ties. Notably, while Modi went on to meet with other world leaders, he did not meet with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas……

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