CFI Honorary
President CBE and founding Chairman
of CF India today met with Israeli
Ambassador H.E. Mark Regev and Indian High Commissioner H.E. Y.K.
Sinha to celebrate trilateral ties between the UK, Israel and
India as Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visits Israel this
week.
In their meeting,
the peers and diplomats welcomed Prime Minister Modi’s landmark
visit, the first to Israel by an Indian Prime Minister, and
discussed how to deepen the already extensive cooperation between
the three countries in sectors including trade, defence, health
and technology.
The strong
relationship between the two countries in recent years has led to
Prime Minister Modi’s administration not supporting a number of
anti-Israel resolutions in the United Nations, joining the UK
which has expressed “enduring disappointment” with the UN Human
Rights Council’s “bias against Israel”.
In light of the
visit, and have co-authored an op-ed
to be published in the Jewish News this week, where they hail
Prime Minister Modi’s visit to Israel as a “celebration of
democracy” and praise the “strong bond” between Hindu and Jewish
communities in the UK.
The Conservative
peers write that both Israel and India stand to make “huge
strides” by deepening bilateral ties, with India’s utilisation of
Israeli tech to improve its farming methods, and Israel’s gains
as India’s second largest defence supplier.
Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warmly welcomed the Indian Prime
Minister to Israel yesterday, underlining the “close cooperation
and deepest friendship” between the two countries and describing
the “bond of democracy and creativity… deep respect for the past
and a boundless optimism for the future” shared by the two
“sister democracies”.
In the first day of
Prime Minister Modi’s visit, the Indian leader laid a wreath at
the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial and paid his respects at the
grave of Theodor Herzl, the founding father of
Zionism.
This morning, the
Indian Prime Minister met with President Reuven Rivlin and Prime
Minister Netanyahu this morning and will meet a Jewish victim of
a terror attack as part of his packed three-day
itinerary.
