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Pakistan officially refuses to recognise Israel, but does that amount to genuine anti-Zionism?
Professor JUNAID S AHMAD explores the gap between rhetoric and reality.
There is a species of Islamabad analysis that should be served on expensive hotel stationery, with diplomatic coffee, complimentary ambiguity, and a small warning at the bottom: may contain traces of reality. The recent Middle East Eye piece, ‘Why Pakistan will likely refuse to join the Abraham Accords’, belongs gloriously to this genre:
It mistakes elite choreography for the country’s actual politics, passport inscriptions for anti-imperialism, and conversations conducted somewhere between GHQ, the Prime Minister’s House, and the Serena Hotel lobby for the pulse of a country of 240 million people.
This is not analysis. It is elite gossip dressed up as geopolitical insight.
The passport is not a revolution
Yes, Pakistani passports exclude Israel. Yes, Pakistan has not formally recognised the Zionist state. Yes, this matters. But to inflate this into evidence of Pakistan’s unique moral exceptionalism is not erudition; it is travel-document mysticism.
Roughly 40 other Muslim-majority states also do not recognise Israel. Pakistan is not some solitary anti-Zionist lighthouse standing heroically against a sea of Arab betrayal. It is one state among many whose formal non-recognition coexists with deep entanglement in the imperial architecture that protects Israel.
The relevant question is not whether Islamabad hosts an Israeli embassy. The question is whether Pakistan’s ruling order materially opposes the regional system that makes Zionist supremacy possible: American military power, Gulf authoritarianism, surveillance cooperation, debt dependency, comprador elites, and the systematic suffocation of popular politics. On that test, the state’s record is not ‘principled refusal’. It is polished hypocrisy with a foreign-office seal.
Civil society, apparently sighted near the buffet
The Middle East Eye article’s most charming hallucination is its portrait of Pakistan’s ‘vibrant and contested’ political landscape restraining normalisation. One admires the optimism. One also wonders whether the author has recently tried to wave a Palestinian flag, organise a Gaza protest, defend Imran Khan, criticise the military establishment, or say anything remotely honest about Pakistan’s foreign policy without being treated as an aspiring insurgent.
Small Palestine protests have been policed with the solemn panic usually reserved for armed rebellions. Senator Mushtaq Ahmad Khan, one of Pakistan’s most consistent and courageous Palestine solidarity figures, has displayed more moral clarity than entire conference halls of credentialed analysts. Yet somehow we are invited to believe that Pakistan is a flourishing democratic bazaar in which parliament, media, civil society and public opinion all majestically shape foreign policy.
If this is vibrancy, paralysis deserves an apology.
The elite is not the people
The Pakistani people have never needed tutorials in anti-Zionism. They have opposed Palestine’s occupation instinctively, morally, religiously and politically for generations. They have also opposed authoritarian rule at home with the same instinct. That is precisely the connection establishment-friendly analysis works so hard to sever.
Pakistan’s ruling elite invokes Palestine as poetry and abandons it as policy. It mourns Gaza in speeches while preserving the relationships that make Gaza’s destruction diplomatically manageable. It condemns Israel while depending on Washington, Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, and the broader imperial circuit for money, recognition, weapons, loans, employment pipelines and regime survival.
This is not anti-Zionism. It is anti-Zionist branding. It is Palestine as decorative upholstery for a state that fears its own people more than it fears empire.
The Imran Khan exception
Any serious discussion of Pakistan and normalisation must confront the fact the Middle East Eye piece politely tiptoes around: what happened in 2020. Imran Khan faced immense pressure from the military establishment, Washington and Gulf capitals to move Pakistan towards recognition or normalisation with Israel. He refused.
More importantly, he understood where his real strength lay: not in Rawalpindi’s permission, not in Washington’s approval, not in Gulf patronage, but in the overwhelming moral sentiment of the Pakistani people.
That refusal was not a footnote. It was the central political fact. Khan’s position made clear that Palestine in Pakistan is not merely a foreign-policy file. It is a popular moral boundary. His imprisonment today makes the contradiction even sharper: the man who resisted normalisation sits in a cell, while the system that wanted flexibility with Zionism now recites Palestine in the sacred vocabulary of state hypocrisy.
The prison down the road tells us more about Pakistan’s Palestine policy than any anonymous official quoted over coffee.
The Abraham Accords as political cosmetics
Trump’s demand that Pakistan and others join the Abraham Accords should not be mistaken for strategic genius. Trumpism is not doctrine; it is imperial impulse dressed up as deal-making and shouted through a campaign microphone.
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One day it gestures towards a deal. The next day it throws a rhetorical steak to the Zionist lobby by demanding Muslim accession to normalisation.
The demand often functions less as a realistic expectation than as political theatre: Muslim regimes refuse theatrically, harvest cheap domestic legitimacy, and continue serving the same imperial order through other channels.
This is the oldest trick in regional politics: reject the symbol, preserve the structure. Refuse the embassy, maintain the dependency. Denounce Tel Aviv, obey Washington. Speak of Palestine, discipline Pakistanis. Wave the flag abroad, break the citizen at home.
Anti-Zionism without democracy is theatre
The fatal weakness of the Middle East Eye article is that it treats Pakistan’s refusal to recognise Israel as evidence of political virtue rather than as the opening sentence of a much darker inquiry. Pakistan cannot meaningfully oppose Zionism while reproducing the same grammar of domination at home: securitisation, repression, elite impunity, managed media, jailed opponents, disappeared activists, and fear of popular agency.
Zionism fears Palestinian political agency. Pakistan’s establishment fears Pakistani political agency. The contexts differ, but the instinct rhymes with disturbing elegance: control the population, criminalise resistance, monopolise legitimacy, call dissent disorder, and market the whole arrangement as stability.
So yes, Pakistan will likely refuse to join the Abraham Accords. But not because its rulers are heroic guardians of Palestine. They will refuse because recognition remains politically radioactive. The people have made it so.
The tragedy is that the same people who defend Palestine are denied sovereignty in their own republic. That is why the Serena Hotel theory of anti-Zionism collapses. It hears the state and calls it society. It interviews power and mistakes the echo for the street. It sees Pakistan’s passport and misses Pakistan’s prison. It notices formal non-recognition and misses structural collaboration.
Pakistan’s people have chosen Palestine. Its rulers have chosen management, dependency and fear.
And until the state stops treating its own citizens as a security problem to be contained, every official performance of anti-Zionism will remain what it has too often been: a flag waved from behind prison bars, a sermon delivered by jailers, a declaration of solidarity issued from inside the architecture of submission.
The issue, then, is not whether Pakistan will recognise Israel.
The deeper question is whether Pakistan will ever recognise its own people.
Prof Junaid S Ahmad teaches Law, Religion, and Global Politics and is 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/).
