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A scathing critique of what the writer dubs ‘Islamic NATO’, exposing how Muslim unity is simulated to manage public rage over Gaza while collaboration with Zionist power deepens.
By PROFESSOR JUNAID S. AHMAD
Every empire perfects a favourite trick: persuading its victims that participation is influence and obedience is maturity. The latest refinement is the so-called ‘Islamic NATO’ — a Sunni Axis of Resistance designed chiefly to reassure Western capitals that Muslim anger can be processed, outsourced, and safely neutralised. It is unity without risk, resistance without cost, and sovereignty performed entirely in quotation marks.
Let us dispense with illusions. If such an axis existed in any meaningful sense, Gaza would not look the way it does.
Israel’s destruction of Gaza was not subtle. It was televised, livestreamed, meticulously documented — atrocity administered with the calm professionalism of a bureaucracy trained to convert horror into routine. Hospitals flattened. Universities erased. Starvation weaponised. Children shredded with industrial efficiency. This was no accident or misjudgement; it was a moral audit conducted in public — and every regime now parading under the Islamic NATO banner failed it with such uniformity that one almost admires the discipline. Almost.
Not one of these states — Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkiye, Pakistan — was willing to impose sustained, structural cost on Israel and its patrons. Turkiye did sever diplomatic relations; it also exposed the limits of symbolic rupture when deeper architectures of trade, security coordination, and Western leverage remained intact. Others substituted statements for sanctions, rhetoric for rupture, televised grief for consequence. Red lines were not merely crossed; they were designed to be erasable. Palestine was mourned as spectacle, not defended as obligation.
And yet, having collaborated through inaction — or perfected action that changes nothing — these same regimes insist they will tame colonial violence by joining Trump’s grotesquely named ‘Board of Peace’. This is not naïveté. It is insult: the political equivalent of watching an arsonist strike a match and being told the fire brigade has arrived because his associates now supervise the ashes.
The Islamic NATO’s real function is not resisting Zionism; it is disciplining Muslim populations. It is a containment strategy for oligarchies and monarchies that fear their own streets more than they fear Tel Aviv.
The Board of Peace is not a neutral forum awaiting virtuous participants. It is structurally colonial — engineered to bypass international law, neutralise resistance, and convert genocide into governance. To imagine authoritarian clients of Washington can reform this machinery from within is to believe prison guards become abolitionists by attending sentencing hearings — or that adding ‘ethics’ to an app description changes what the code was written to do. Spain declined participation. These regimes did not. That alone ends the argument.
Why the charade? Because the Islamic NATO’s real function is not resisting Zionism; it is disciplining Muslim populations. It is a containment strategy for oligarchies and monarchies that fear their own streets more than they fear Tel Aviv. It tells angry publics: relax, your rulers are ‘inside the room’. Translation: remain passive while we manage your outrage on behalf of those killing your co-religionists. Consent by sedation. Solidarity by delegation. Politics as customer service.
Israel sits atop this architecture like a parasite that has convinced the host it is an organ. Zionism’s contemporary brilliance lies less in conquest than in converting atrocity into inevitability: kill first, negotiate later; destroy, then administer; exterminate, then demand applause for ‘stabilisation’. Resistance becomes pathology; submission becomes realism. Gaza is not an exception. It is a prototype.
The United Arab Emirates grasped this logic early and enthusiastically. Where others hesitated, Abu Dhabi normalised. Where others whispered, it invested. The UAE’s Axis of Secessionists — ports, islands, mercenaries, surveillance nodes — functions as Zionism’s offshore service provider. Israel supplies ideology and technology; the UAE supplies geography and deniability. Colonialism franchised: modular, exportable, and content to burn states into ‘opportunities’ so long as leverage compounds.
Yet as dangerous as this overt alignment is, the covert Zionism of the Islamic NATO is worse. Overt Zionism provokes backlash; covert Zionism produces compliance. It pacifies resistance without triggering the immune system. It offers Muslim faces to imperial projects. It replaces opposition with ‘engagement’, betrayal with ‘pragmatism’, surrender with ‘responsible leadership’. This is Zionism without Hebrew — less theatrical, more efficient, and therefore more lethal.
Pakistan’s role is especially grotesque. A nuclear-armed Muslim state with overwhelming popular support for Palestine has been reduced to a subcontractor of imperial optics. Its rulers sit on the Board of Peace while jailing lawyers, abducting activists, and sentencing dissenters under digital sedition laws. Repression at home, collaboration abroad — a symmetry too consistent to be accidental. Foreign policy becomes the domestic security state translated into another language: obedience as strategy, coercion as governance, silence as virtue.
This is why Imran Khan remains disruptive even from prison. His refusal to normalise Israel — overtly, covertly, or via backchannel theatre — violated the imperial operating system. His insistence on unconditional Palestinian solidarity, and his linkage of Kashmir and Gaza as moral questions rather than bargaining chips, threatened the premise that Muslim publics can be managed indefinitely through symbolism. So he was removed.
The April 2022 regime change was not merely domestic engineering; it was regional discipline. The Epstein email labelling Khan ‘dangerous’ was not gossip but a memo. Zionism does not tolerate charismatic defiance from the Global South. It demands examples. It demands that sovereignty be punished until it becomes unfashionable.
And yet the punishment misfired. Pakistan’s rulers assumed fatigue and produced fury. The refusal of Khan’s supporters to perform liberal appeasement rituals is not cultishness. It is clarity.
Revolution is measured by context. In a country where sovereignty is auctioned, dissent criminalised, and foreign approval elevated above popular will, insisting on dignity is revolutionary enough.
Meanwhile, the Islamic NATO postures nervously against regime change in Iran — not from principle but from fear. A war would detonate the Gulf’s hydrocarbon economy and expose regime fragility. Their opposition is actuarial: they fear instability, not injustice.
Trumpism merely clarifies what liberal empire once obscured — loyalty over law, deals over rights, strongmen over people. ICE terror at home mirrors pacification abroad. Gaza and American streets share a doctrine: security as supremacy, order as violence.
And so the terminal irony: the Islamic NATO presents itself as Muslim unity, yet it has never been weaker. It could have killed the Board of Peace through collective refusal. It chose participation. It could have imposed costs for genocide. It chose statements. It could have stood with its people. It chose Washington — and demanded applause for maturity.
History will not be kind. Israel will continue to kill and call it defence. The UAE will monetise and call it modernisation. The United States will discard and call it leadership. Pakistan’s rulers will repress and call it stability. The Islamic NATO will issue communiqués, mistaking motion for movement.
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But beneath this architecture of betrayal, something else is forming: the recognition that sovereignty cannot be subcontracted, solidarity cannot be simulated, and peace administered after annihilation is merely violence with better lighting.
Empires fall when their lies stop anaesthetising. When ‘peace’ is heard as domination, and participation as submission. The Islamic NATO was built to manage rage, not answer it — and that machinery is cracking. What follows will not be negotiated. It will be reckoning.
Prof. Junaid S. Ahmad teaches Law, Religion, and Global Politics and is the Director of the Center for the Study of Islam and Decolonization (CSID), Islamabad, Pakistan. He is a member of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST – https://just-international.org/), Movement for Liberation from Nakba (MLN – https://nakbaliberation.com/), and Saving Humanity and Planet Earth (SHAPE – https://www.theshapeproject.com/).
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