“Behind every terrorist stand dozens of men and women, without whom he could not engage in terrorism. They are all enemy combatants, and their blood shall be on all their heads. Now this also includes the mothers of the martyrs, who send them to hell with flowers and kisses. They should follow their sons, nothing would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there.”

IT doesn’t take much intelligence or courage to spout hate, which is why so many powerful people around the world do so on such a regular basis. Evidently, espousing a politics of hate can even be a short cut to power. As is the case in Israel.

The quotation above is from barely two weeks ago; the words belong to Ayelet Shaked, a far-right lawmaker in the Israeli Knesset. Clearly her exhortations have had a positive effect: warplanes continue to wreak havoc on Gaza and its people, accountable to no one.

We in Pakistan, as much as in any other Muslim-majority country, like to point to the crimes of the Israeli state (and often its people too) against a hapless Palestinian population as evidence of how the rest of the world is aligned against the forces of Islam.

It is often said that Israel and Pakistan are alike.

We would do well to remember that Palestine is the birthplace of Christianity, and there are still tens of thousands of Christians in the occupied territories today. More importantly, those in glass houses should not throw stones.

It is said often, but dwelt on far too little: Pakistan and Israel are more alike than any other two states in the world. As might be expected of countries created in the name of religion, to be a genuine rights-bearing citizen requires one to be Muslim or Jewish respectively. The state practises institutionalised discrimination against those who do not hail from the privileged confessional group, and justifies everything else it does in the name of the community of the righteous.

Why, then, do we have such wildly differing attitudes towards the Israeli state as compared to our own? The religious right’s duplicity is to be taken for granted, but Pakistani liberals are just as culpable, happy to endorse state excess if and when the brunt is borne by ‘illiberal’ social and political actors.

Even now liberal ideologues in many Muslim societies, as well as those posing as ‘experts’ in Western countries, are busy heaping all the blame for the carnage in Gaza on the Palestinians, and more specifically, Hamas. In effect, they are echoing the language of the Israeli state; that all the Palestinians being killed and maimed by the Israeli Defence Forces are either terrorists or almost as bad because they are aiding and abetting terrorism.

This sounds eerily similar to what we hear about re-establishing the ‘writ of the state’ in this country nowadays. The more measured supporters express concern for the ‘collateral damage’ caused by the ‘absolutely necessary’ use of force against the evil enemy, while the less politically correct simply say everyone affected deserves what they are getting.

Let us not forget that the British claimed to be the harbingers of liberalism, but ended up establishing what the Indian thinker Partha Chatterjee has called the ‘rule of colonial difference’, which meant simply that the colonial state enjoyed absolute power to both enfranchise and enslave on the basis of arbitrary distinction.

Of course, the Israeli and Pakistani states have taken the ‘rule of colonial difference’ to its logical extreme. Simply invoking liberal values to justify state actions, as happens regularly in Israel and Pakistan alike, does not whitewash the brute reality of supremacist ideology and the systematic violence that typically accompanies it.

Sadly, those who purport to resist power are also known to resort to the politics of hate, as, for example, certain Sindhi and Mohajr nationalists are doing at the present time by whipping up a frenzy against refugees seeking to enter Sindh from war-devastated North Waziristan. Their logic is essentially no different from that of the state; that the Taliban disguised as refugees will end up waging violence against the rightful sons of Sindh’s soil.

While there may be a legitimate argument that can be made by progressive Sindhis against non-Sindhis coming into Sindh and further upsetting what is already a skewed demographic balance as a result of decades of migration, both orchestrated (as at partition) and otherwise, the racist depths to which some ethnic-nationalists have descended is inexcusable.

It is thus that a wide cross-section of political forces in this country are breeding hate, just like their counterparts in the Israel that so many of us love to hate. One might even be tempted to laugh at the irony but for how grotesque it all is.

The writer teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.

Published in Dawn, July 25th , 2014