Nine years after their iconic beach stroll, two of the world's most dominant political figures meet again amid global turbulence, Epstein fallout, and shared authoritarian critiques.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is set to host Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Israel this week, marking their first face-to-face summit since a now-famous beachside stroll along the Mediterranean coast in 2017. That tranquil seaside moment stood in sharp contrast to the storms that would soon follow — Trump's first presidency, a global pandemic, war in Europe, and cascading conflict across the Middle East.
According to a detailed profile published by Haaretz, the two leaders share more than a warm bilateral relationship — they mirror each other in striking and sometimes troubling ways. Both have harnessed nationalism as a political weapon, faced corruption scandals and judicial confrontations, and watched their countries' founding political parties fade into near irrelevance. Most notably, both have thrived in the era of intensely personal diplomacy ushered in by Donald Trump, where the governing ethos has become: the state is me.
Modi, who was born in 1950 in the western state of Gujarat and rose through the ranks of the Hindu nationalist RSS movement, has transformed India's political landscape since becoming prime minister in 2014. He has pursued an agenda mixing aggressive economic development — aiming to make India the world's third-largest economy by its centenary of independence in 2047 — with a markedly nationalist cultural program. Key moves in his second term included revoking the autonomy of Kashmir and passing a citizenship law widely criticised as discriminatory against Muslims. Two military operations against Pakistan reinforced his strongman image.
Analysts describe Modi as a rare political talent. Milan Vaishnav of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace characterises him as combining the rhetorical gifts of Barack Obama with the retail political instincts of Bill Clinton — an unusual pairing that has helped him dominate Indian politics for over a decade. Unlike many of his allies, Modi has never personally been charged in corruption cases, a fact that has bolstered his image as incorruptible despite scandals swirling around his inner circle, including billionaire associate Anil Ambani.
That Ambani connection has now taken on a new dimension. Documents recently revealed that Ambani emailed convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to help facilitate Modi's 2017 Israel visit, prompting calls for a criminal investigation. Yet, as has consistently been the case, the political storm passed over Modi without touching him personally.
Modi has also reshaped India's longstanding doctrine of non-alignment. Since 2014, India has joined a range of multilateral groupings — the Quad, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, BRICS, and the I2U2 forum that includes Israel, the US, and the UAE — in what Modi calls "multi-alignment." Critics note that the approach still avoids taking sides in conflicts such as Gaza or Ukraine, much like classical non-alignment did.
Domestically, Modi's centralisation of power has been compared to that of Indira Gandhi, who declared a state of emergency in 1975. He has leveraged India's vast welfare apparatus — distributing food, banking access, and cash to hundreds of millions — while branding these programmes as personal gifts, with his image now appearing on government rice sacks distributed to over 800 million citizens. The strategy blends genuine welfare delivery with what scholars call patrimonialism: the state's resources presented as the ruler's personal largesse.
The 2024 elections, however, marked a turning point: the BJP failed to secure an outright parliamentary majority for the first time under Modi's leadership, forcing him into coalition governance. Whether this signals the beginning of a political ebbing — or merely a temporary correction — will be tested at this week's summit, where Modi arrives not as a regional power visiting a niche ally, but as the leader of the world's fourth-largest economy and a figure of genuine global weight.
Source reporting: Haaretz / Yishai Halper. Additional context from Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.