It took a whole year of Palestinians suffering shocking mass violence to move the government of Pakistan to finally hold an all-parties conference (APC) on October 7, 2024 to assert our principled solidarity and commitment to Palestine.
Aired live, the speeches were informed and brave and the demands were proportionate. But sadly, the resulting 15-point resolution is just more diplomatic waffle. At stake are actual Palestinian lives, lives that matter, and our principled state policy.
While the APC Resolution calls for “an immediate and unconditional ceasefire” (Point 3), “the establishment of a viable, secure, contiguous, and sovereign State of Palestine, with Al-Quds Al-Sharif as its capital” (Point 12) and “Affirms Pakistan’s determination to redouble its efforts for all possible political, diplomatic, moral and humanitarian support for the brotherly people of Palestine” (Point 10), Pakistan must not toe the same redundant line as our other brotherly countries, or defer to defunct organisations that are, like the UN, in the words of UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese “crumbling under the weight of shame” over Gaza and urgently need to be reformed.
So how does the APC Resolution measure up to Jinnah’s commitment? Are we really doing what is necessary to support the Palestinians? What are we doing that is not more of the same?
A year of all-round diplomatic posturing has cost Palestine dearly. We have daily witnessed hideous and indescribable savagery in real-time. About 90 per cent of Gaza’s 2.3 million population has been displaced, dispossessed and disconnected from their families.
The Lancet, applying “a conservative estimate” revealed that over 186,000 deaths may be attributable to the ethnic cleansing. According to Prof Nick Maynard of Oxford University Hospital, more children have been killed in Gaza in the past 11 months than in the entire world over the last five years. Many more lay under the 40 plus million tons of rubble that Gaza has been reduced to by an unprecedented 75,000 plus tons of bombs, others lay buried in locations that are inaccessible or are so badly mutilated that they cannot be identified, others are missing and therefore not be counted.
The Zionist genocide in Gaza has exposed both the so-called champions of the ‘free world’ for their viciousness, double-standards and terror financing, and the 57-state Muslim community for its dithering and in some cases active complicity. We continue to perform the diplomatic dance as the US, EU and UK claim to pursue peace and yet ensure ‘unwavering’ military, political, diplomatic and media support to Israel, and supply sophisticated lethal supplies to enable their Zionist proxy to continue with a genocide.
The crucial question Pakistanis are asking is: If the West insists with its brazen perfidy, forcing this poisonous dagger in the heart of the Arab and Muslim worlds, why can’t the ‘allied’ Muslim states remove Western military bases from their territories and take steps to establish a new security framework? If a new, fairer and inclusive world order does not emerge from this holocaust, it is because ‘allied’ Muslim states are supporting this US-led order and its obscene barbarity.
On the other side, Israel and its accomplices have never hidden their ‘Eretz Yisrael’ or Greater Israel ambition set out by Theodor Herzel (1860-1904), the father of Zionism. As Netanyahu shows off maps of a ‘New Middle East’, Zionist soldiers proudly display a badge on their shoulders outlining its borders stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates, taking in whole or parts of present-day Lebanon, Egypt, Turkey, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.
As the Muslim world plays deaf, dumb and blind behind the cover of US-sponsored normalisation, bribed by aid and profit, Israel has strategically expanded its territory as a multi-generational project. According to the Middle East Political & Economic Institute’s Ecatorina Matoi, “There is no long term, core concept identified in analysed publications that hint at a possible restraint of Israel from expanding its territory”. Tomorrow’s Palestinians are already in the crosshairs.
The Zionist genocide in Gaza is one of the gravest challenges to humanity, rights and international obligations in our lifetimes. Inconsequential resolutions have already let Palestine become a mass graveyard, expanding into the West Bank, Lebanon and Syria. With each day, many more are killed and maimed with the intention to destroy Palestinian leadership and to cripple any prospect of future resistance and thereby Palestine.
If this acquiescence continues, Prof Devi Sridhar of Edinburgh University has estimated (using The Lancet’s methodology) that by the end of the year, 335,500 Palestinians will have been killed and significant numbers in other countries too. Again, this is a conservative estimate. As the ICC prosecutor, Karim Khan, insisted at the 2024 Nuremberg Forum, this cannot be the price for business, economic advantage or strategic interests.
We have our share of the responsibility for this situation, and Pakistan must “redouble its efforts”. We must muster the moral courage and leadership to rise to our international, historical and brotherly responsibilities to make a real difference.
We must put our weight and resources behind a brave strategic response. We must frame this genocide as it is, a rogue US-led colonial settler project. We must emphatically reject Western dehumanisation by an uncompromising insistence that Palestinian blood, hurt and lives matter as much as any American, European or other.
We must uncompromisingly insist on the legitimacy of their cause by recognising Hamas as the legitimate elected representative of Gaza. We must assert the Palestinians’ rights to self defence and resistance that international law grants them by committing to support the Palestinians with military and other aid to defend their person and property -as the West does for Israel.
To borrow a phrase from the law, we must try to ensure a sufficient ‘equality of arms’ so that the Palestinians can counter this slaughter and that their case is heard fairly in places that matter. We must support economic, oil/gas, trade and other sanctions to counter Zionist atrocities; and apply legal, medical, media, civil society and other resources to support the Palestinians. While calling out the West for terror financing, we must move to hold Israel and its collaborators criminally accountable for their genocidal acts, and call for reparations and financial compensation. We must immediately implement the commitments made with the Save Gaza Campaign.
Anything less will mean that we are complicit by not doing what is necessary to stand with the Palestinians and other victims. Step up Pakistan, concrete action is required. Every life matters!
The writer is a former
secretary of the Law & Justice Commission of Pakistan.
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