Caroline Haïat
The India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor was conceived in 2023 as one of the most ambitious connectivity projects of the new geopolitical era: a multimodal network linking India to Europe through the Arabian Peninsula, with railways, ports, energy infrastructure and digital connectivity at its core.
Three years later, however, the corridor faces a fundamental contradiction. Its economic logic has arguably become stronger as regional supply chains have been disrupted by war, attacks on shipping and uncertainty around the Strait of Hormuz. Yet the political conditions required to make its Israeli segment operational have become considerably more difficult.
This does not necessarily mean that the broader idea of connecting India, the Gulf and Israel is disappearing. Instead, the region may be moving toward a different model: one in which technology, data, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and advanced manufacturing develop faster than the physical corridor itself.
In that sense, the most consequential part of IMEC may ultimately not be the railway.
The original IMEC concept depends on a chain of political and infrastructure links running from India through the Gulf, Saudi Arabia and Jordan to Israel and then onward to Europe. Saudi Arabia is therefore not simply another stop along the route. It is a structural component of the corridor. But the wars in Gaza and Iran have altered the political environment in which the project was conceived.
Saudi-Israeli normalization, widely viewed as an important political condition for the original architecture of IMEC, has moved down Riyadh’s immediate agenda. Saudi Arabia continues to pursue regional economic integration and diversification, but its leadership has repeatedly tied normalization with Israel to the Palestinian issue.
Public opinion presents an additional constraint. A Washington Institute survey published in August 2025 found that support for normalization with Israel had fallen sharply amid the Gaza war, while the report described normalization as being effectively on hold.
For Israel, meanwhile, the strategic priorities of the past three years have been dominated by war and national security. The political incentives to make major concessions in order to accelerate a long-term infrastructure project have consequently weakened.
This creates an unusual situation: the economic rationale for a corridor connecting India with the Gulf and the Mediterranean has increased, while the political conditions for completing its Israeli leg have deteriorated.
That gap may prove more important than the construction timetable itself. Even without the political obstacles, IMEC faces a physical bottleneck on the eastern Mediterranean.
An Atlantic Council assessment published in 2025 estimated that a fully operational single-stack rail system connecting Gulf ports to Haifa through Jordan could initially move around 1.5 million TEUs annually. With double-stack rail and an additional connection to Ashdod, capacity could eventually rise to around 3 million TEUs.
Haifa is strategically positioned as Israel’s Mediterranean gateway, but it is considerably smaller in container throughput than the Gulf’s major ports. The scale of Jebel Ali in Dubai, in particular, means that the Gulf side of the corridor operates on an entirely different logistical magnitude.
Israel has nevertheless been expanding its port infrastructure. An Atlantic Council analysis published in July 2026 estimated that Israel’s combined port capacity across Haifa and Ashdod is roughly five million TEUs annually, with expansion plans potentially doubling that figure.
The problem is therefore not simply whether Israel has a port. It is whether the entire network can provide sufficient capacity, redundancy and political reliability to compete with established maritime routes.
And there is another complication: infrastructure itself has become a strategic issue.
The concentration of critical logistics infrastructure in a country directly exposed to regional conflict creates a risk that IMEC was partly designed to reduce. A corridor intended to provide greater supply-chain resilience cannot depend on a single vulnerable node.
The answer may therefore be less a single corridor than a network of alternative corridors.
Indeed, an Atlantic Council analysis published in June 2026 argued that an expanded IMEC network incorporating additional nodes in Oman, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and potentially Syria could provide greater resilience against disruptions to regional chokepoints.
That suggests an important evolution in the concept: from a fixed route to a distributed regional network.
Israel and India already possess complementary strengths that do not depend on a railway crossing Jordan.
Israel has built internationally recognized capabilities in cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, water technologies, defence technology, agriculture and deep tech. India brings scale: a huge domestic market, a rapidly expanding digital economy, a large technical workforce and increasingly ambitious manufacturing capabilities.
The two governments explicitly identified this complementarity during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s February 2026 visit to Israel.
Their joint statement called for deeper cooperation in artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, semiconductors, quantum computing, biotechnology, agriculture, water management, defence and space. The two sides also agreed to deepen AI cooperation, establish an Indo-Israel Cyber Centre of Excellence in India and explore mechanisms to facilitate joint research, technology validation and pilot projects.
AI, cybersecurity, semiconductors and quantum computing are increasingly treated as strategic infrastructure. They determine not only commercial competitiveness but also national resilience, military capabilities and technological sovereignty.
India is simultaneously investing heavily in its own technological ecosystem. Its IndiaAI Mission is expanding domestic compute capacity, while the country’s semiconductor strategy is designed to build capabilities across chip design, manufacturing, packaging and related infrastructure. In September 2026, the Indian government announced the next phase of its semiconductor programme, with an allocation of ₹1.275 trillion for Semicon 2.0.
Israel can contribute research-intensive technologies, startups, intellectual property and specialized expertise. India can provide manufacturing capacity, engineering talent, market access and the scale required to commercialize technologies.
Saudi Arabia and the UAE add a third dimension.
The Gulf has capital, energy, logistics infrastructure and increasingly sophisticated ambitions in artificial intelligence and advanced technology. The UAE, in particular, has positioned Abu Dhabi and Dubai as regional hubs for data centres, AI investment, cloud infrastructure and international business.
This creates the possibility of a triangular ecosystem.
Israel contributes technological specialization. India contributes scale and manufacturing. The Gulf contributes capital, infrastructure, energy and access to international markets.
Such a model does not require every element of IMEC to be operational.
Digital connectivity does not require political borders to disappear in the same way physical infrastructure does. Nor does it require the same level of public visibility. Cloud infrastructure, data centres, cybersecurity services, AI research partnerships and semiconductor supply chains can expand incrementally, even while diplomatic normalization remains politically difficult.
The India-Israel relationship already illustrates this possibility. In February 2026, Israeli and Indian officials highlighted cooperation ranging from AI and cybersecurity to quantum technologies, water management, agricultural technology and space.
The two countries are also institutionalizing their cooperation rather than relying exclusively on individual commercial agreements. Their bilateral framework includes joint research programmes, industrial R&D mechanisms and new initiatives intended to connect researchers, companies and technology ecosystems.
The result is a form of connectivity that is less visible than a railway but potentially more scalable.
A genuine India–Middle East–Europe corridor through Israel still requires political stability across the route. Saudi Arabia remains indispensable to the geography of the project, and the Palestinian issue remains central to Riyadh’s calculations.
The Washington Institute’s polling illustrates the difficulty. Its 2025 survey found that Saudi attitudes toward normalization had deteriorated significantly, even though some openness to business relationships with Israel remained.
Companies can cooperate before governments establish full diplomatic relations. Capital can move through international financial centres. Technology partnerships can operate through third countries. Research collaborations can continue even when political relations are frozen.
This creates space for a gradual, commercially driven integration that does not depend on an immediate political breakthrough.
But it also means that the original vision of IMEC may have to be separated into two timelines.
The strategic logic behind IMEC has arguably become stronger since 2023.
The attacks on Red Sea shipping, repeated regional conflicts and the disruption surrounding the Strait of Hormuz have demonstrated the vulnerability of concentrated trade routes. An alternative network connecting India, the Gulf and the Mediterranean would provide additional options for moving goods, energy and data. The Atlantic Council has argued that a more diversified corridor network could serve precisely this resilience function.
Yet the same instability that strengthens the economic argument for IMEC has weakened the political conditions for its realization.
Rather than disappearing, IMEC could gradually become less about a single railway and more about a regional architecture of connectivity: ports, railways, energy networks, fibre-optic infrastructure, data centres, investment platforms and technology partnerships.
The question is no longer simply whether these three strengths can be connected by a railway. It is whether they can become part of the same technological and economic ecosystem before geopolitics allows the physical corridor to be completed. If that happens, the Middle East’s next major connectivity project may already be taking shape — not on a map of rail lines, but across the infrastructure of the digital economy.