JTA — About a month before the October 7, 2023, massacres, the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor, or IMEC, was unveiled at the G20 summit in New Delhi. Envisioned as a network of ports, railways, energy infrastructure, fiber-optic cables and logistics links connecting India to Europe through the Gulf and Israel, particularly Haifa, it was widely seen as the democratic world’s answer to China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

The original vision was elegantly simple. Goods would move from India across the Arabian Peninsula, through Saudi Arabia and Jordan, into Israel and onward through Haifa to Europe, bypassing both dangerous maritime bottlenecks and unstable countries such as Iraq, Syria and Lebanon – and building a wide-ranging tech ecosystem around the corridor.

For Israel, IMEC has the potential to become the country’s most consequential strategic-economic project in decades – but the deal might be stillborn if Israel can’t engage in smart diplomacy and long-term thinking. “The question right now is whether Israel can be bypassed,” says former Knesset member Doron Avital, the former commander of the elite Sayeret Matkal unit who has become one of the initiative’s leading advocates.

Countries that become indispensable trade junctions attract investment precisely because businesses want to locate where capital, infrastructure and talent converge. If IMEC succeeds with Israel at its center, Haifa could evolve into the eastern Mediterranean’s principal logistics hub, while Israel’s strengths in artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, semiconductors, desalination and energy technology would become integrated into supply chains stretching from Bangalore to Berlin. The corridor would export not only goods through Israel, but Israeli services, innovation and capital outward.

The wars that have since consumed the Middle East have put the project essentially on ice – but the disruption to maritime trade in the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea has, if anything, also made it more urgently needed by all parties.

The logic is indisputable. India is emerging as the world’s principal engine of economic growth. Europe, increasingly wary of its reliance on Russia since it invaded Ukraine in 2022, is trying to diversify critical economic and energy relationships. And governments increasingly view supply chains not merely as instruments of commerce, but as matters........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)