Netanyahu Warns a Future US President Could Turn Hostile, and Points to India as the Hedge

Prime Minister Netanyahu told an audience in Jerusalem on 19 October, while presenting what he called a security doctrine nine days before the 27 October election, that a president, man or woman, could come to power in Washington who is very hostile to Israel within the next two years. He argued Israel needs to use the remaining years of the Trump presidency to strengthen alliances that do not depend on any single ally, naming India and the countries of Latin America as the places to build them.

India is not a small country, and there are many others, Netanyahu said, a line he has used before to describe the same idea: that Israel's security cannot rest entirely on Washington's goodwill from one administration to the next. He had already called the relationship with India unique back in May, and the substance behind that word is concrete rather than sentimental. India buys more Israeli weapons than any other country, sending billions of dollars a year into Israel's defence industry, and recent talks between Netanyahu and Prime Minister Modi have covered defence and security alongside trade, technology and agriculture.

Gadi Eisenkot, Netanyahu's main challenger and the frontrunner in most polls, dismissed the presentation as short on the substantive policy Israel's actual security challenges require, a response that did not engage with the India argument so much as question why a diversification strategy was the headline nine days before voters decide who gets to carry it out.

The timing is the part worth separating from the content. A warning about an unnamed future American president serves Netanyahu's campaign by reminding voters of his decades of foreign relationships, India chief among them, right as he asks them for another term to manage those relationships himself. Whether India can actually substitute for the kind of backing only Washington has provided is a separate question from whether raising it nine days before an election was about security policy or about the ballot.