Pakistan's unacknowledged compatibility with Israel stretches back to mutual origins
Jun 16, 2022
Islamabad [Pakistan], June 16 : Pakistan's unacknowledged compatibility with Israel stretches back to their mutual origins, within a year of one another, as states carved out by colonial powers on a confessional basis.
What's more, despite diplomatic overtures from the Soviet Union, both of the new nations decided at their incipience to attach themselves to the US, studiously ignoring the post-colonial momentum towards non-alignment during the Cold War, reported Dawn.
All the same, the creation of both Pakistan and Israel involved a vast degree of displacement, frequently accompanied by violence. And both have been faced with fissiparous tendencies in the intervening decades.
However, recent overtures by Pakistan show that Islamabad is toying with the idea of rapprochement with Tel Aviv. The recent visit of 15 members of a Pakistani American delegation to Israel is a case in point.
In a comment titled 'Pakistan's recognition of Israel is now inevitable', published last week in the liberal Israeli daily Haaretz, Kunwar Khuldune Shahid suggests that the pressure from "the godfathers of normalisation with Israel, namely Saudi Arabia and the United States" is becoming harder to resist.
There have been occasions over the decades where Islamabad toyed with the idea of succumbing to it. Ziaul Haq, if memory serves, was the first head honcho to publicly point out the affinities between Pakistan and Israel. And Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri, the foreign minister under Pervez Musharraf, enjoyed a tete-a-tete with his Israeli counterpart in Turkey in 2005, reported Dawn.
Perhaps it is no coincidence that Israel's formal rapprochement with the Gulf region came after it had ripped off its hypocritical mask. The two-state 'solution' was never really an option for the Zionists, and Benjamin Netanyahu deserves credit for making this patently obvious -- as he does for persuading the likes of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, in collusion with the Trump administration, to discard their respective masks.
It could be argued that Pakistan is at a similar stage of discarding the illusion of a military-civilian divide. Embracing a fascism-inclined nation would neither be a surprise nor a travesty. Many would say just do it, reported Dawn.
