There is a particular kind of silence that surrounds inconvenient economic facts. Not the silence of ignorance, but the silence of strategic calculation. For decades, India has publicly championed Palestinian self-determination, voted repeatedly at the United Nations in support of Palestinian statehood and maintained the formal position that Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Golan Heights are illegal under international law. Yet a careful examination of corporate structures, government contracts and labour agreements reveals a more complicated story. Indian entities, both private and, through partnership arrangements, public, have an economic presence in precisely those territories that New Delhi’s official statements condemn.
This is not a simple story of hypocrisy. It is a story about how modern states manage contradictions, how corporations operate in legally contested spaces, and how the gap between foreign policy rhetoric and economic reality can widen, quietly, over years. It is also a story that cuts across political parties. This economic entanglement did not begin with any one government. It began under the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance and has deepened steadily since.
How 1967 created the contested geography
To understand why any economic activity in these territories carries legal and political weight, it is necessary to go back to June 1967. In six days of warfare between June 5 and June 10 that year, Israel fought simultaneously against Egypt, Jordan and Syria. By the time the guns fell silent, Israel had captured the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip from Egypt, the West Bank including East Jerusalem from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria. The war fundamentally redrew the map of the Middle East.
The West Bank, a territory of approximately 5,655 square kilometres with a predominantly Palestinian Arab population, had been under Jordanian administration since 1948. The Golan Heights, a strategically elevated plateau of approximately 1,800 square kilometres overlooking northern Israel and southern Syria, had been Syrian sovereign territory. Both came under Israeli military administration after 1967. Israel formally annexed the Golan Heights in 1981, a move recognised by virtually no other country until the United States under President Donald Trump issued a proclamation recognising Israeli sovereignty in March 2019.
The West Bank has never been formally annexed, though Israeli settlements, now home to more than 700,000 Israeli citizens, have expanded continuously since 1967. The international community, including India, has consistently held that both territories remain occupied under international law and that Israeli civilian settlement in them violates the Fourth Geneva Convention. It is in this legally contested geography, born of a war fought nearly six decades ago, that Indian corporate and labour interests have quietly taken root.
The drip irrigation company that changed the picture
The clearest and most documented Indian corporate presence in Israeli settlements involves NaanDanJain, an Israel-based irrigation technology company that became a wholly owned subsidiary of Jain Irrigation Systems, the large Indian agri-business multinational headquartered in Jalgaon, Maharashtra.
The timeline matters here, and it matters politically. In June 2007, during the first term of the UPA government under Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Jain Irrigation acquired a 50.001 per cent stake in the then NaanDan company. This was not a minor transaction. It was celebrated at the time as a landmark in India-Israel commercial relations, described by Jain’s own management as strengthening ties between the two countries. Jain completed full ownership in May 2012, again during the UPA’s second term, paying approximately Rs. 189 crore (around 35 million US dollars) for the remaining 50 per cent. The combined entity, NaanDanJain, became one of the world’s leading drip irrigation companies with operations across more than 120 countries and an annual revenue of approximately Rs. 2,490 crore at its peak.
The problem is what NaanDanJain did on the ground in the occupied territories. According to documentation compiled by the Israeli research organisation Who Profits, which tracks corporate involvement in the occupation economy, NaanDanJain carried out irrigation projects in the occupied West Bank and the Syrian Golan Heights. Company signage was documented at an organic plantation in the settlement of Tomer in the Jordan Valley in 2009, two years after the UPA-era acquisition, and in a vineyard at the settlement of Ein Zivan in the Golan in 2018, well into the BJP government’s tenure. The company also provided irrigation services to the settlements of Carmel, Ma’on and Yatir in the Mount Hebron area and maintained distributors in the Syrian Golan and the Jordan Valley.
These are not abstract supply chain connections. This is direct, on-site provision of agricultural infrastructure to communities that the United Nations, the International Court of Justice and India’s own government consider to be in violation of international humanitarian law. The roots of this presence lie in a business decision taken in 2007 under a Congress prime minister who simultaneously maintained India’s formal commitment to Palestinian statehood at every multilateral forum he attended. In 2022, Jain Irrigation merged part of its global operations, including elements connected to NaanDanJain, with Rivulis, a company owned by FIMI, the First Israel Mezzanine Investors fund, which has reported links to Israel’s defence and prison industries. This deepened the corporate web considerably.
The water company and the state government partnerships
The second strand of India’s economic entanglement involves Mekorot, Israel’s state-owned national water company, founded in 1937 and responsible for supplying approximately 80 per cent of Israel’s drinking water. Mekorot’s India engagement is not a footnote. In Haryana, a formal cooperation framework was signed in 2022 under which Mekorot was engaged to assist in restructuring the state’s water distribution network, a project covering bulk water supply to several districts. Karnataka entered a similar institutional dialogue around water efficiency and pipeline management. These are state government contracts, funded through public budgets, with an entity whose conduct in the occupied territories has drawn sustained international scrutiny.
Amnesty International has documented Mekorot cutting water supply to Palestinian West Bank communities by as much as 50 per cent during summer months, while maintaining uninterrupted supply to nearby Israeli settlements drawing from the same aquifer system. The value of Mekorot’s West Bank infrastructure, built on land that international law regards as occupied, runs into hundreds of millions of shekels. The Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine has formally called on governments worldwide to terminate contracts with the company. The Brazilian state of Bahia did so in April 2016. Argentina, Greece and Italy have seen similar civil society campaigns. Indian state governments have received no such directive from New Delhi and no such pressure has been applied domestically. The partnerships continue.
Indian workers and the settlement construction economy
A third dimension is less about corporations and more about people. After October 7, 2023, Israel suspended work permits for Palestinian labourers, approximately 80,000 of whom had been employed in Israel’s construction sector. This created a severe labour shortage and Israel turned to India to fill part of the gap. By the end of 2024, around 16,000 Indian workers were active in Israel’s construction sector, drawn by wages sometimes reaching Rs. 1,50,000 or more per month, often three times higher than comparable work at home. Workers from Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and Telangana travelled to construction sites across Israel.
The difficult question is this: some construction activity in Israel directly serves settlement expansion in the West Bank. The degree to which individual Indian workers were deployed specifically on settlement projects is difficult to verify from publicly available data. But the structural argument is uncomfortable. Indian labour filled an economic gap created by the exclusion of Palestinian workers, which was itself a direct consequence of a conflict rooted in the settlement enterprise. There is no clean boundary between Israel’s domestic economy and its settlement economy.
A pattern that predates de-hyphenation
Since 2014, the BJP government has pursued a de-hyphenation policy in the Middle East, maintaining independent relationships with Israel and Palestine rather than treating them as a linked package. Critics have pointed to this as evidence of a shift away from India’s traditional solidarity with the Palestinian cause. That criticism is fair as far as it goes.
But the economic entanglement examined in this article predates 2014 by several years. TCS started operations in Israel in 2005 under the UPA. The State Bank of India opened a branch in Tel Aviv in 2007, also under the UPA. Jain Irrigation’s first Israeli acquisition happened in 2007 under Manmohan Singh. The full NaanDanJain acquisition was completed in 2012, again under the UPA. Indian corporate engagement with Israeli entities that operate in the occupied territories has been a bipartisan phenomenon, proceeding quietly under governments that publicly maintained very different rhetorical positions on Palestine. The political temptation to assign ownership of this story to one party or the other is understandable. The reality is considerably less convenient.
The legal dimension
The Fourth Geneva Convention, which India has ratified, prohibits an occupying power from transferring its civilian population into occupied territory. The International Court of Justice, in its landmark advisory opinion of July 2024, found Israel’s occupation to be illegal and stated that this unlawful presence should be ended as rapidly as possible. The ICJ further concluded that settlement expansion was based on the confiscation of land in violation of the Hague Regulations.
By this framework, supplying drip irrigation systems to West Bank settlements is not simply a commercial transaction. It is, arguably, material support for an activity that international law considers illegal. The legal exposure for Indian companies operating in this space is real, even if no prosecution has been initiated. The European Union has since 2013 required that all agreements with Israel explicitly exclude entities and activities in the occupied territories. India has no comparable domestic policy and no legal mechanism that restricts its companies from doing business in settlements.
What the Indian government has not said
No Indian government, Congress or BJP, has introduced any policy to discourage Indian corporate presence in settlement economies. No government has updated procurement guidelines to exclude Israeli entities with settlement exposure. The September 2025 report by the Centre for Financial Accountability, titled Profit and Genocide, named Adani, TCS, Infosys and Reliance Jio alongside Jain Irrigation in its analysis of Indian corporate ties to Israel’s war and occupation economy. The Indian government has not responded formally to the report’s findings. Neither have most of the companies named.
This silence is itself a policy choice. And silence, when maintained long enough, tends to become the policy itself.
India’s stated ambitions at the multilateral level and its economic footprint in the occupied territories exist in unresolved tension. New Delhi seeks a permanent seat at the UN Security Council, positions itself as a leading voice of the Global South, and regularly invokes international law in its own territorial disputes, on the Line of Actual Control and in the Indo-Pacific.
At the same time, its corporations, its state governments and its labour export policies maintain active economic links with a territorial arrangement that the same international legal architecture regards as unlawful. How India manages that tension, or chooses not to, will become an increasingly visible question in the years ahead. The business case for engagement with Israel is real and the strategic logic is understandable. But the economic footprint in the occupied territories is documented, it is bipartisan in origin, and the gap between stated positions and ground realities has a way of narrowing, usually at a moment not of a government’s choosing.
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