Jerusalem is a mess. Usually, the Knesset is where political careers go to die in a hail of shouting matches and fragile, crumbling coalitions. It’s loud. It’s petty. It’s exhausting. But drop Narendra Modi into the center of the frame, and suddenly, the room goes quiet. Everyone remembers how to play nice.

It’s not some grand meeting of minds. It isn’t about shared values or the "spirit of democracy," regardless of what the press releases say. It’s about the hardware. When the Indian Prime Minister rolls into town, the divided factions of Israeli politics realize they have a shared interest that outweighs their mutual loathing: selling stuff. Lots of stuff.

India is the world’s largest buyer of Israeli defense tech. We aren’t talking about small-bore equipment. This is the heavy lifting of modern warfare—drones, missiles, and the kind of surveillance tech that makes privacy advocates wake up in a cold sweat. The math is simple. Israel has the proprietary tech; India has the scale and the checkbook.

The unity on display is a performance. You’ve got the hard-liners and the centrists standing shoulder-to-shoulder, grinning for the cameras like they haven't spent the last six months trying to gut each other’s ministries. It’s a temporary truce fueled by the cold reality of the global market. They know that a snub to New Delhi is a snub to a multibillion-dollar pipeline.

Take the Haifa Port deal. The Adani Group, a massive Indian conglomerate with deep ties to the Prime Minister's office, dropped $1.2 billion to take over one of Israel’s most strategic maritime hubs. That’s a lot of shekels. It’s a deal that secures a foothold for India in the Mediterranean and gives Israel a massive cash injection. In the halls of power, money doesn't just talk; it screams. Even the most vocal opposition members find it hard to complain about a billion-dollar wire transfer.

Then there’s the elephant in the room: Pegasus. The NSO Group’s infamous spyware has been the center of a dozen scandals, but in this bilateral "bromance," it’s barely a footnote. New Delhi wants the edge that Israeli cyber-intelligence provides. Tel Aviv wants the revenue and the diplomatic cover. It’s a trade-off. They exchange lines of code for geopolitical relevance. The moral friction is just a cost of doing business, a line item on a balance sheet that nobody bothers to read out loud.

The tech industry in Tel Aviv—the "Silicon Wadi"—depends on this relationship. It’s a beta test for the rest of the world. If you can sell a missile defense system or a facial recognition suite to a country with 1.4 billion people, you’ve hit the jackpot. The Israeli political class knows this. They might hate each other's guts when it comes to domestic policy, but they won't let a little thing like internal collapse get in the way of a high-value export license.

It’s a cynical sort of harmony. We’re watching a masterclass in transactional diplomacy. Modi gets to look like a global statesman, and the Israeli government gets to pretend it’s stable for forty-eight hours. The friction between the parties hasn't vanished. It’s just been paused, held in place by the weight of defense contracts and shipping containers.

Don’t expect it to last. Once the plane leaves the tarmac and the red carpet is rolled back up, the shouting will start again. The lawsuits will resume. The coalitions will start to fray at the edges. But for now, the optics are perfect. Everyone is smiling because everyone is getting paid.

In the end, it’s not the shared history or the cultural ties that brought these rivals together. It’s the realization that while they can’t agree on who should run the country, they can definitely agree on who should buy the drones.

How long can you hold a smile before your face starts to ache?