Modi in Jerusalem: 70 Years in the Making |
I want to begin with a small detail that almost nobody covered when Narendra Modi landed in Tel Aviv on July 4, 2017. Among the first things on his itinerary were not a defense summit or a state dinner. It was a flower farm.
At the Danziger Flower Farm outside Tel Aviv, Israel’s leading flower genetics company had developed a new white chrysanthemum variety for the occasion and named it “MODI.” It was a gesture so specific, so personal, that it communicated something a joint press statement never could: this visit was not a routine diplomatic exchange. It was the closing of a long and complicated chapter.
For 67 years, no Indian prime minister had set foot in Israel on a bilateral visit. Modi was the first. That fact alone deserves more examination than it usually gets.
The Man Who Came Before the Prime Minister
What most accounts of the 2017 visit miss is that Modi had been to Israel before, eleven years earlier, as chief minister of Gujarat.
In May 2006, he traveled to Tel Aviv for Agritech-2006, Israel’s premier international agricultural technology exhibition. He was part of an Indian delegation that included other chief ministers and senior agricultural officials. At the India-Israel Business Forum, he presented Gujarat’s agricultural vision under a slogan he had coined himself: “Per Drop More Crop.” The presentation, according to Gujarat’s internal delegation report, received maximum applause from an audience of over a thousand international delegates.
That slogan, born at an Israeli agricultural fair in 2006, later became the official motto of the Pradhan Mantri Krishi Sinchai Yojana, India’s national micro-irrigation program. Modi also met with officials from Netafim, the Israeli drip irrigation company that had already partnered with a Gujarat government subsidiary, discussing specific proposals for Gujarat’s drought-prone districts and the Narmada Canal water network.
When he returned as prime minister in 2017, the agricultural cooperation agenda was therefore not assembled by officials preparing for a state visit. It had been in formation since that May afternoon in Tel Aviv more than a decade earlier. The 3-year work program in agriculture signed during the 2017 visit was the formal institutionalization of what he had personally initiated as a chief minister. India had the scale, the farmland, and the need. Israel had turned constraint into technique. The two fit together almost exactly.
This detail matters because it reframes the visit. Modi did not go to Israel in 2017 as a politician making a strategic calculation. He went as someone who had already decided, eleven years before, what this relationship could become.
The 70 Years That Came Before
To understand why the 2017 visit was significant, you have to understand why it took so........