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Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s scheduled visit to Israel this week arrives at a moment of acute geopolitical volatility across West Asia and at a point when India’s foreign policy bandwidth is strained by overlapping security dependencies, economic vulnerabilities and diplomatic balancing acts. The visit – announced prematurely by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself at a public forum – and coming soon after Netanyahu abruptly cancelled his own scheduled trip to New Delhi, underscores how the power asymmetry within the partnership increasingly manifests in optics that New Delhi does not fully control.

New Delhi is no longer setting the agenda but is instead responding to the whims of a chaotic and aggressive Israeli leadership. Netanyahu has repeatedly postponed trips to India, three times in 2025 alone, due to security concerns and domestic instability, underlining how bilateral diplomacy has become hostage to Israel’s internal turbulence. 

PM Modi’s visit is coming at a moment when the Israeli government faces unprecedented international legal scrutiny which makes an Indian leader’s presence a significant moral and diplomatic liability. The long-term cost of this visit will likely be measured in lost influence in the Global South and a diminished relationship with a besieged Iran.

1) Threat of regional conflict

The visit unfolds amid renewed US-Iran tensions, when President Donald Trump has deployed a “massive armada,” including carrier strike groups, to West Asia, threatening military action against Iran if a new diplomatic deal is not reached. One Trump advisor estimated a “90% chance” of military action, fuelling fears of a wider war in which Israeli and American operational theatres could rapidly merge.  

Iran, for its part, is preparing counterproposals in nuclear discussions even as Washington signals readiness for limited strikes, with targeting plans reportedly at an advanced stage. These escalations have already had cascading effects across the region, with armed groups anticipating the possibility of full‑spectrum confrontation. Hezbollah, for instance, is reportedly preparing for a US-Iran war, illustrating how a localised conflict could widen into a multi‑actor chain reaction engulfing the region where around nine million Indian citizens live and work.

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