PAKISTAN is a nation founded solely on its Muslim identity. As such it is bound to be deeply sympathetic to all Islamic causes. The Pakistani people have had a strong emotional attachment to the Palestinian struggle for self-determination. Geopolitics however, is anything but an emotional exercise. Rather it is the art of skillfully pursuing one’s national interest.

Our commitment to Palestine is a principled one that predates Pakistan itself. The 1940 Pakistan resolution adopted in Lahore saw the same session also unanimously adopt a resolution on Palestine.

It recorded: “The considered opinion, in clear and unequivocal language, that no arrangements of a piecemeal character should be made in Palestine which are contrary in spirit and opposed to the pledges given to the Muslim world.” The resolution further warned against the danger of “using force in the Holy Land to overawe the Arabs … into submission”.

At a demonstration in Lahore, Allama Iqbal said that the problem of Palestine did not concern Palestine alone but would have wide repercussions in the entire Muslim world.

After the emergence of Pakistan in 1947, Quaid-i-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah warned that the partition of Palestine would entail “the gravest danger and unprecedented conflict and that the entire Muslim world will revolt against such a decision which cannot be supported historically, politically and morally”. Soon afterwards, Pakistan said at the United Nations that all the Holy Land was being nailed and stretched on the cross. These prophetic words still hold true.

In May-June 1950 Pakistan’s first Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan visited the U,S and American leaders of trade and industry met him. At the meeting they promised all military and economic assistance in case Pakistan recognised Israel. Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan replied: “Gentlemen! Our soul is not for sale.”

Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto said in his keynote address to the Second Islamic Summit held in Lahore in February 1974 “Pakistan’s stand (on Palestine) was neither emotional nor ephemeral, it was based on sound principles in history, law and international legality. The stand can be betrayed. It can never be faulted”.

The right arrogated to itself by Western colonialism enabled one Western nation to promise to a section of another people (Jews) the land and country of a third, the Arabs. It needs to be reiterated that it is this uprooting of a people from their homeland and planting alien population on it that evokes the resentment of the entire Muslim world.

Syed Tahir Rashdi

Shahdadpur

Published in Dawn, August 24th, 2020