DESPITE the growth of anti-Israeli sentiment in Pakistan, Israel and Pakistan have quite a bit in common in terms of their pasts, their presents and possibly their futures.

In 1947, when both were still territories of the British Empire, a decision was made to partition them along ostensibly religious lines. Pakistan became the world’s first Islamic state on Aug 14, 1947, and Israel the world’s first Jewish state on May 14, 1948. Both were multi-religious societies and the partitions caused massive dislocations and horrifying violence. In Israel over 700,000 Palestinians became refugees; in South Asia approximately 1.5 million people crossed the newly defined borders dividing India and Pakistan.

The Indian and Pakistani governments quickly passed evacuee-property and displaced-persons laws that allowed them to claim land left behind by outgoing refugees and redistribute it to those who were coming in. In 1949, Israel based its appropriation of Palestinian refugee property squarely on the Pakistani legislation. However, there was one substantial difference: while India received refugees fleeing from Pakistan, the Palestinians had no state to run to. After more than six decades, hundreds of thousands of them remain in refugee camps.

Since their inception, Israel and Pakistan have sustained what appear to be unending military conflicts with their neighbours. Pakistan has fought four wars with India, at great expense to its people. Israel has fought three wars with its neighbours and crushed two major uprisings in the past two decades, to say nothing of the human rights abuses perpetrated against Palestinians in Israel and in the occupied territories.

The massive security apparatuses developed by Israel and Pakistan, both nuclear powers, have a common source: US aid, of which both countries are currently among the top five recipients. In 1954 Pakistan signed a defence agreement with the US.

Over the next decade, Pakistan received $2.5bn in economic development and $700m in military aid from its new ally.

Billions more poured in over the ensuing decades, especially after Gen Pervez Musharraf signed up as a partner in the ‘war on terror’.

Until the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Israel had cumulatively received the most US foreign aid of any country in the world.

Today Israel annually receives a $3bn no-strings-attached aid package, despite the fact that it is, according to the United Nations Development Programme, the 15th most developed country on earth. (To put this in perspective, the UNDP ranks Israel’s former colonial master, the UK, 26th.) With this aid, Israel has created one of the world’s strongest military forces.

Security is the defining mantra of Israeli politics.

In his recent speech before American lawmakers, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu identified Israel as the sole democracy in the Middle East and described the Arab Spring as an “epic battle … between tyranny and freedom”, cleverly eliding the fact that since 1948, hundreds of UN resolutions have condemned the illegality of Israel’s occupation and settlement policies. Arab citizens of Israel are denied full citizenship rights and Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza suffer the social, economic and political deprivations of an occupation that is more than four decades old.

Penned in by the ‘security wall’ that the Israelis began building in 2002 with US aid and support, Palestinians refer to it as an ‘apartheid wall’. During a recent trip to the West Bank, I learned from colleagues at Palestinian universities that they cannot even structure their college courses with standard syllabi because that they don’t know when and if students will be prevented from coming to class by arbitrary blockades set up by Israeli security forces.

In 2005 Palestinians launched the ‘boycott, divestment and sanctions’ (BDS) campaign, which calls upon the international community to impose sanctions and embargoes against Israel similar to those applied to apartheid South Africa. Were the US to heed the moral and legal demands posed by BDS, Israel would be forced to change its military mindset.

The security states in Israel and Pakistan would have collapsed long ago were it not for their special relationships with the US. However, these relationships come at a great cost to the security and well-being of the people of both countries. As Pakistanis watch India emerge as an economic powerhouse of the 21st century, there appears to be no way out of the cycle of debt, poverty and underdevelopment in which Pakistan is trapped — at least not as long as it remains a US client state that spends almost 1 of every 7 federal dollars on defence.

Israelis, on the other hand, suffer largely in moral and existential terms. The aggressive behaviour of the Israeli government reminds one of J. M. Coetzee’s brilliant parable of empire, Waiting for the Barbarians. In Coetzee’s novel, colonial forces do the unimaginable — torture, murder, pillage — all while waiting for “barbarians” to attack. Of course, the barbarians never do come and what the protagonist is left to deal with is the horror of his own deeds. Similarly, ordinary, intelligent and otherwise open-minded Israelis support the occupation, the wall and the offence-as-defence approach for fear of what their own imagined barbarians — the Palestinians — might do to them. Rarely do they consider how Israel’s own existence could be secured by tending to the well-being of the Palestinians and extending to them the full privileges of citizenship.

So here’s a thought: when it comes to US foreign aid, Israel and Pakistan should just say no. While there is much to be lost in dollar terms, there might be more gained from a peace dividend that would allow all people in both regions greater opportunity, an end to war and the possibility of living without fear.

The writer is associate professor of history at Villanova University and author of Colonial Justice in British India: White Violence and the Rule of Law.