In the wake of the response to the ongoing massacre in Gaza, leftists, liberals and ethno-nationalists of Pakistan have raised some important concerns about the nature and moral legitimacy of mainstream Pakistani support for Gaza.

Pakistan, it is said, has its own Gazas — an array of excesses committed by state and non-state actors against ethnic and religious minorities. These routinely go ignored by much of society.

On the global level, Muslim societies are criticised for ignoring the brutal transgressions of militant Islamists (like ISIS) and Muslim dictators (like Assad), while frothing on about Israel’s actions in Gaza.

There is considerable merit in these arguments, and particularly so in the case of Pakistan. As many others have pointed out, Pakistan embodies strains of religio-fascist violence remarkably similar to Israel’s.

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The examples are numerous: collective silence over the disappearances of students and activists in Balochistan; denial of the widespread slaughtering of Shias; societal navel-gazing and theological justification every time mobs attack Ahmadis and Christians for ‘blasphemy’; dehumanisation of Pakhtuns for misguided strategic designs; and the popular trend of labelling any local religion-inspired violence a 'foreign conspiracy'. The list could go on, still.

In all cases, there is evidence of widespread denial within Pakistani society about the reality and magnitude of injustices within our borders.

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Many Pakistanis simply find it easier to be outraged over the crimes of religious ‘others’ like Israel than reflect on the barbarity displayed by their very own 'self'.

There is, however, a perverse distinctiveness to the occupation in Gaza that deserves particular consideration and necessitates the internationalism of the response to it.

The situation in Gaza is one of the last instances of violent settler colonialism in the entire world. The forms of systematic domination and control applied to the people of Gaza, find their most direct precedents in the bloody history of Asian, African and Latin American colonialism.

The physical, economic and military blockade of the Gazan people reminds of the ugliest of colonial excesses. Not too long ago, colonising powers would trap, starve and eliminate entire populations to satisfy the economic and strategic whims of their racial and civilisational ‘superiors’.

Much like the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz, Gaza is a physical embodiment of what Italian philosopher Gorgio Agamben called the ‘state of exception’ — a state where lives are deemed unworthy of living, kept deprived of political recognition and at the constant risk of violation and elimination at the whims of the overwhelmingly ascendant sovereign power.

The nature of the Israeli occupation is all the more distinct because of its ethno-racial underpinnings. The Palestinian people are kept occupied, stateless and structurally segregated because they are Arab and not ethnically Jewish. Most remain without the right of return to the land they were displaced from, because their ethnicity precludes them from returning to their homes, according to the laws of the Zionist state project.

In almost all other parts of the world, such forms of racially-determined exclusion from citizenship have been rightly confined to the dustbins of history. In Gaza and Palestine, they are forcibly kept in place by the might of the sole superpower and its allies.

The closest historical example for such systematic ethno-racial dispossession and exclusion is, as many have pointed out, South African apartheid.

The popular dismantling of apartheid in South Africa was not just a hard-won victory for the country’s black population. It was a global victory which effected a worldwide consensus that institutional segregation based on race or skin colour would no longer be acceptable, much less on the state level.

When a just settlement in Palestine puts an end to this colonial enterprise and state of exception, it will serve a similarly demonstrative purpose. It will signify the dismantling of a colonial structure established through violence by the global centres of power, and held in place with imperialist might underpinned by racist assumptions of civilisational superiority. It will mark the end of the principles of exclusion, collective punishment and mass deprivation on disenfranchised populations by colonisers purporting to serve the interests of democracy and freedom.

Its potential effect on resistance movements around the world, on the weakening of the imperialist authoritarian apparatus, and on the undermining of the logic of violent fundamentalism, including in Pakistan, cannot be overstated.

None of this is to suggest that the struggles for justice in Pakistan (and elsewhere in the Muslim world) are less important. On the contrary, the hegemonic excesses occurring inside our own country need to be at the centre of the Pakistani society’s otherwise conservative political consciousness.

'Across the Muslim world, there needs to be a reckoning about the internal roots of its conflicts, and serious self-reflection about the all-too-familiar political, moral and intellectual crises most of it is faced with. In particular, the constant vaccillation between violent, exclusionary and misogynist fundamentalism, and repressive state authoritarianism has to be intellectually and politically dealt with. Crucially, there needs to be concerted political engagement by progressives in Muslim society to mobilize the structurally de-politicized working masses in the Muslim world on these issues of justice and inclusion.

But none of this needs to distract from the struggles of Gaza and Palestine. What is needed is to retrieve the language of resistance from the exclusionary, millenarian and anti-semitic foundations of the religious right, and reclaim once more the global struggle for Palestine in the terms of humanity and justice that emphasize its undeniable universality. For a struggle so humanly fundamental, the forging of a concerted humanist and internationalist solidarity can be the only apt response.

For Agamben, the concentration camp of Auschwitz was the pinnacle of the logic of state sovereignty: it illustrated the logical conclusion of the state’s combination of biopower (power over peoples’ bodies) and sovereignty (an exclusive political community).

Aushwitz marked the point of no return, revealing the excess of state power for what it really is. It thus marked the starting point of a new politics.

When it achieves justice, Palestine will do the same.