Pakistan’s quiet abandonment of Palestine
Officially, Pakistan remains amongst the few remaining oddities after the Abrahamic Accords within the Ummah (Islamic world) that does not recognise the State of Israel. Genealogically and fundamentally, the only country in the world to be created in the name of a religion, ie, Pakistan, cannot make common cause with Israel, which is seen as having usurped the Arab land of Palestine. Historically, it maintained intransigence on the issue of Palestine, with the purported supply of weaponry as far back as 1948, when the recently independent Pakistan had barely stood on its own feet. Later, elements of the Pakistani Armed Forces were to participate in the Arab-Israel wars of 1967 and 1973. Over fifty Pakistani volunteers fighting on the side of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) were believed to have been captured by the Israelis in the 1982 Lebanon War.
However, the gradual setting in of insincerity, amorality and duplicitousness, which were to become patent trademarks of Pakistani diplomacy, sullied its commitments to the Palestinian cause as well. It was a consistent pattern of supposedly saying one thing and doing just the opposite — as it manifested in Pakistan’s equations with ‘brother Muslim countries’ like Iran and Afghanistan. Over time, both Tehran and Kabul were to realise that Pakistan’s rather grandiloquent stand was always motivated by its own agenda, as opposed to being rooted in the larger good of the Ummah, as often claimed. The double-speak of Islamabad has become so discredited that, let alone the “Western” world, even Islamabad’s own creation of the Taliban is mired in a bloody war of attrition with its progenitor, Pakistan. More people have died in the recent standoff between the Pakistani military and the Afghan Taliban forces than the sum total of all fatalities in the multiple Indo-Pak wars since 1947. Basically, Pakistan has had no compunction in completely reneging on its condescending and platitudinous stand of supporting its “fraternal/brotherly relations” with Afghans. It is that same pattern of amorality and deceit that afflicts Pakistan’s relations with its neighbour to the west, ie, Iran.
Today, the Gaza Strip has been reduced to veritable rubble, with over 70,000 recorded deaths, 10,000 missing, and over 170,000 reportedly injured. Starvation (or conditions approaching famine), malnutrition, mass displacement and widespread homelessness are documented realities.
Well over 100,000 tons of explosives and relentless Israeli military action have continued since October 2023. Despite deep and unheeded criticism by the United Nations and most other countries, Israel has been able to continue its disproportionate and often misdirected purge owing to the singular and invaluable support of the Donald Trump administration. The United States of America has been steadfast in bailing out Benjamin Netanyahu and adding insult by talking about the ‘takeover’ and ‘owning’ of the Gaza Strip permanently.
Trump has willy-nilly normalised forced displacement by suggesting that Palestinians ‘shouldn’t go back’ and cruelly alluded to the future redevelopment of the Gaza Strip as the ‘Riviera of the Middle East’! Basically, the wind in the sails of Benjamin Netanyahu’s continuing plunder of the Gaza Strip has been, singularly, Donald Trump.
Now, that same Pakistan that had historically sung hosannas in favour of Palestine’s independence has been amongst the first to sign Donald Trump’s Board of Peace, with much fanfare at Davos.
That this proposed Board of Peace initiative seeks to replace the mandate of the United Nations and has literally no Palestinian consent or representation matters little to the Pakistanis.
The Pakistanis do not even share the Palestinian fears that it eerily resembles ethnic cleansing rhetoric, and it emphasises security ‘cleansing’ before sanctioning any civilian or humanitarian relief. The Pakistanis see no irony in the fact that the occupier of the land, ie, Israel, will determine future governance, thereby violating the principles of self-determination and the path to Palestinian statehood. Pakistan also sees no hypocrisy in championing ‘self-determination’ and brandishing international law (alluding to cherry-picked passages of United Nations commentary) when it comes to the Indian State of Kashmir, but readily supporting an externally imposed ‘peace’ framework that locals, ie, Palestinians, themselves reject. Clearly, like Kashmir is a bargaining and transactional cause (as opposed to a genuine or morality-based issue) for the Pakistanis, so are, unsurprisingly, other causes like Palestine.
In 1971, Bengalis in then East Pakistan recognised the moral vacuity and emptiness in the “two-nation theory” as they realised, to their horror, that co-religiosity can never be a sustainable logic for valorisation and support. It is a personality trait of the Pakistani leadership instinct that the much more guarded Afghans have known for decades, even though they tactically accepted Pakistani help in ousting the Russians and, later, the US. The Pakistani Prime Minister hit a new low of incredulous obsequiousness when he hailed Trump’s moves on the Gaza Strip as a ‘momentous and historic day for peace in the Gaza Strip’ and went on to hail Donald Trump as a ‘man of peace’ who deserved the Nobel Prize. Pakistan’s tone-deaf insensitivity on Palestine is born out of its own realpolitik, and the betrayal of the Palestinian cause is seemingly a small price to continue playing its duplicitous game with gay abandon.Significantly, secular India, which frames Palestine as a moral and human issue and not a religious cause, refused to sign the Board of Peace.
The writer, a military veteran, is a former Lt Governor of Andaman & Nicobar Islands and Puducherry ; views are personal
