by Jose Alberto Nino, The Unz Review:
From secret airbases to letter bombs and aborted airstrikes, the untold story of a decades-long shadow war that shaped the nuclear balance of power across the Muslim world.
On February 25, 2026, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrived in Israel for a two-day state visit at the invitation of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Standing before the Knesset, Modi declared: “We feel your pain. India stands with Israel firmly, with full conviction, in this moment and beyond. Nothing justifies killing civilians.” The Israeli parliament gave him a standing ovation, and Knesset Speaker Ohana placed the first-ever Knesset Medal on the Indian leader.
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Netanyahu, calling Modi “more than a friend, a brother,” used the occasion to announce a “hexagon of alliances” that would include India in a strategic bloc committed to standing against what he termed “radical axes.” The visit was preceded by an intense flurry of bilateral engagements: the first-ever round of India-Israel Free Trade Agreement negotiations, the 10th Joint Working Group on Counter-Terrorism, and a defense industry seminar pairing 30 Indian and 26 Israeli defense companies. India is now Israel’s largest arms customer, accounting for 46% of Israeli weapons exports, with discussions reportedly including technology transfer for the Iron Dome missile defense system and Israel’s new Iron Beam high-energy laser weapon.
The corporate media depicted this as a story about trade deals and diplomatic optics. What went almost entirely unmentioned was the far darker foundation on which this alliance rests: a history of covert military planning, sabotage, assassination, and an aborted joint operation that nearly brought India, Israel, and Pakistan to the brink of nuclear war.
From Pariahs to Partners: The Roots of an Unlikely Alliance (1948 to 1980)
India’s relationship with Israel began inauspiciously. Although India recognized Israel in 1950, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru declined to establish full diplomatic relations, aligning India with the Non-Aligned Movement and the broader cause of Palestinian self-determination. For decades, New Delhi kept Jerusalem at arm’s length in public.
In private, the calculus was different. Even before establishing full diplomatic relations, Israel quietly supplied weapons to India during the 1962 war with China, as well as during the 1965 and 1971 wars with Pakistan. By 1968, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had instructed RAW chief R.N. Kao to establish contact with Mossad, forging an intelligence liaison that would deepen over the following decades. The relationship was transactional, ideologically awkward, and entirely covert. At the time, both nations were nuclear-threshold states that existed outside the Western security architecture, and each saw in the other a partner that could be useful precisely because the partnership was deniable.
The real catalyst for acceleration came not from shared values but from shared enemies. India fought three wars with Pakistan in its first quarter century of independence. Israel, surrounded by hostile states, saw in Pakistan’s nuclear ambitions a threat that extended far beyond the subcontinent. When Pakistani leaders began openly framing their nuclear program as an “Islamic Bomb“ available to the broader Muslim world, the interests of New Delhi and Jerusalem converged with an urgency that no amount of diplomatic caution could contain.
“Mortal Danger”: Menachem Begin and the Fear of the Islamic Bomb
Israeli anxiety about Pakistan’s nuclear program did not begin with intelligence briefings or satellite imagery. It began with a phrase that haunted Israeli strategists from the moment it entered public discourse: the “Islamic Bomb.”
On May 17, 1979, Prime Minister Menachem Begin wrote to newly installed British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, warning that Pakistan’s nuclear program posed a “mortal danger” to Israel. Begin cautioned Thatcher about what he described as dangerous collaboration between Pakistan and Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, writing that nuclear weapons could fall “into the hands of an absolute ruler like Colonel Qaddafi.” He sent similar letters to the leaders of France and West Germany as part of a broader lobbying campaign to get Western nations to clamp down on Pakistan’s nuclear development.
