In comparing the creation of Pakistan to Israel, I would argue that the similarities are in fact superficial when we consider the nature of their respective nationalisms and the critical differences between the nature of the partitions of India and Palestine. Where there is greater similarity is understanding how Muslim nationalism in India and Zionism in Europe was shaped by a sense of vulnerability that was rooted in being a minority in the age of nationalism.
Preamble
A key figure in the Zionist movement, Chaim Weizmann, wrote to the last viceroy of India, Louis Mountbatten in June 1947:
“There is great similarity, as you may have gathered, between the Indian problem and our problem here [in Palestine]. In comparison with India the Palestine problem may seem as a storm in a tea-cup, but I venture to say that the repercussions of the Palestine problem are, and are likely to continue to be, very serious indeed. . . . I believe that a Palestinian Pakistan would be a rational way-out.”
Israel is called here, in striking words, “Palestinian Pakistan.”
Compare this with the thoughts of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, a key figure in the Indian Nationalist movement. He rejected the “analogy of the Jewish demand for a national home” in April 1946:
“One can sympathize with the aspiration of the Jews for such a national home, as they are scattered all over the world and cannot in any region have any effective voice in the administration. The condition of Indian Muslims is quite otherwise. Over 90 millions in number they are in quantity and quality a sufficiently important element in Indian life to influence decisively all questions of administration and policy. Nature has further helped them by concentrating them in certain areas.”
Nationalism
The argument that Pakistan and Israel are kindred spirits rests in part in the feeling that they represented a distinctive form of nationalism that was abstract rather than anchored to a sense of history and geography. However, while this argument has some purchase in the case of Muslim nationalism in India, it is far more tenuous when we consider Zionism.
For Muhammad Iqbal, Muslim nationalism rested on spiritual unity and was unrelated to notions of blood and soil. He wrote: “The membership of Islam as a community is not determined by birth, locality or naturalisation; it consists in the identity of belief. The expression ‘Indian Muhammadan’, however convenient it may be, is a contradiction in terms, since Islam in its essence is above all conditions of time and space. Nationality with us is a pure idea; it has no geographical basis.”
Liaquat Ali Khan, addressing the All-India Muslim Educational Conference in 1945, stated “the principle of territorial nationalism is opposed to the Muslim view of nationalism which is based on a philosophy of society and outlook on life rather than allegiance to a piece of territory.”
Blood and soil could not be the basis of Muslim unity in India.
Theodor Herzl, in the case of Zionism, had also said “We recognize ourselves as a nation through our faith.” But in the case of Zionism, blood and soil notions were far more central to Jewish nationalism.
Many Jews - no matter how mythical in reality - considered themselves as descendants of biblical Jews and Israelites. Ian McGonigle, an anthropologist, has perceptively noted: “in Israel, the stakes of the debate over Jewish origins are high, because the founding narrative of the Israeli state is based on exilic ‘return’. If European Jews have descended from converts, the Zionist project can be pejoratively categorised as ‘settler colonialism’ pursued under false assumptions, playing into the hands of Israel’s critics and fueling the indignation of the displaced and stateless Palestinian people. The politics of “Jewish genetics” is consequently fierce.”
For Muslims the territory of Pakistan was not sacred or special, it was only important insofar as it was the territory in which Muslims were a majority. But for Zionists, the land in Palestine was considered to be holy and rich with ‘historic’ memory. Elizeir Schweid, an Israeli scholar, wrote:“The uniqueness of the Land of Israel is thus ‘geo-theological’ and not merely climatic. This is the land which faces the entrance of the spiritual world, that sphere of existence that lies beyond the physical world known to us through our senses. This is the key to the land’s unique status with regard to prophecy and prayer, and also with regard to the commandments.”
It is therefore follows that both states have a radically different view on the issue of the ‘right of return’. It occupies a central place in Zionist thinking and the very term ‘right of return’ implies the importance of lineage. There is no such notion in Pakistan. Section 4 of the Pakistan Citizenship Act of 1951 is clear and remains to this day: “Every person born in Pakistan after the commencement of this Act shall be a citizen of Pakistan by birth …” This is the concept of jus soli rather than citizenship defined by descent as in the case of Israel and certainly Muslims outside of Pakistan do not have an automatic right to Pakistani citizenship.
Partition
If the content of the nationalism was different, what about comparing the arguments for partition?
Here I turn to Zafarullah Khan, Pakistan’s articulate UN representative who was eloquent in his defence of Palestinian interests. In November 1948 he made three key points when comparing the partition of India and the partition of Palestine. (A summary of his comments at the General Assembly on 30 Nov. 1948, can be accessed here: https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/774025?ln=en&v=pdf).
Firstly, in India the major parties had consented to partition. In the case of Palestine, partition was imposed upon the Palestinians. The result of the United Nations proposed partition plan was hardly equitable by any measure: the Jewish state would get 55 per cent of Mandatory Palestine comprising 500,000 Jews and 400,000 Arabs; the remaining land would be a Palestinian state, made up of 725,000 Arabs and 10,000 Jews. Jerusalem would be placed under international control.
Secondly, a majority of Muslims - indeed millions and millions of Muslims - already lived in the areas that eventually made up Pakistan. They were not settlers or colonisers in any respect. Although ‘settler-colonial’ is controversial in pro-Israel quarters, before the word attained negative connotations, many Zionists freely used the word ‘colonisation’. The Zionist leader Leo Motzkin for instance: “Our thought is that the colonisation of Palestine has to go in two directions: Jewish settlement in Eretz Israel and the resettlement of the Arabs of Eretz Israel in areas outside the country.”
Thirdly, the basis of partition was different. In India, division was generally at a sub-district level - tehsil and even the level of thana. The historian, Joya Chatterji, writes that “Radcliffe also conceded the Congress argument that thanas (police stations), as the smallest units for which census figures had been published, were the most acceptable units of Partition.” If the same basis was applied in the case of Palestine, the Jewish state would have been very small indeed: the Jewish community was only a majority in one of the sixteen sub-districts - Jaffa.
Expulsion
We might pause to consider one of the implications of these different trajectories through the founding fathers of the new state. When many Hindus left Pakistan from Sindh, Jinnah lamented the exodus. He said this “was part of a well-organized plan to cripple Pakistan.” As historian A. Dirk Moses writes, "These are hardly the sorts of sentiments one would have heard from David Ben-Gurion regarding Palestinian Arabs.”
Indeed, note Israeli historian, Anita Shapira on Ben-Gurion:
“A brief uprising by the residents of Lydda (Lod) exposed the danger inherent in leaving a large bloc containing a hostile population behind the advancing army, midway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The commanders Allon and Yitzhak Rabin, who were considering a large-scale population evacuation, went to consult with Ben-Gurion. Ben-Gurion listened to them and did not react; he had an uncanny ability to keep silent when he needed to. It was only at the end of the discussion, as the commanders were about to leave for the battlefield, that, according to Rabin, Ben-Gurion waved his hand and said: “Expel them.” . . . like most of his ministers, he saw the Arabs’ exodus as a great miracle, one of the most important in that year of miracles, since the presence of a hostile population constituting some forty percent of the new state’s total populace did not augur well for the future.”
For Ben-Gurion it was a case of as many Jews and as few Arabs as possible in the state of Israel.
Minority
If a comparison falls down when considering the plans for partition and the nature of their nationalisms, a comparison can be made in terms of how Muslim separatism and Zionism grew in strength in the inter-war period in the context of, I) the uncertainties that confronted minorities (not restricted to Jews and Indian Muslims) in the age of nationalism; ii) the feeling that law was insufficient as a guarantor of minority rights and that power was required.
What needs to be emphasised is how unsettling the rise of nationalism and representative institutions were to minorities. As Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper remind us in their book on Empire: “Throughout history, most people have lived in political units that did not pretend to represent a single people. Making state conform with nation is a recent phenomenon.”
Empires were of course hierarchical and exclusionary, but loyalty in the final analysis was owed to the ruler and the dynasty and not to an ethnicity. Whereas a state under empire “declares the non-equivalence of multiple populations,” the nation-state by contrast “proclaims the commonality of its people.”
Nationalists - in pursuit of assimilation and homogeneity - often displayed a discomfort with difference.
Sholomo Avineri, an Israeli political scientist and a biographer of Theodor Herzl, said in an interview: “In a way, when the Austro-Hungarian empire broke up after the First World War and new nation states were established, Herzl’s dire prophecy was vindicated. With the exception of Czechoslovakia, which was relatively liberal, all the successor states of the Austro-Hungarian empire—Romania, Hungary, Austria itself, Poland—were very nationalistic places in which the Jews had the status of a national minority in a nation state. That wasn’t the case in Austria-Hungary, where they were a minority in an empire made up of minorities.”
Avineri went on to say: “There is no doubt that it is. European nationalism in the 19th century made Jews strangers or foreigners for the first time. Whatever you say about the Middle Ages, Jews then were viewed as the “other”, but not as alien. Modern European nationalism therefore created a different identity for the Jews. And when Jewish nationalism developed, it was very much a mirror image of European nationalism.”
Mark Mazower in his brilliant book - The Dark Continent - demonstrates that the victors of World War I sought to deal with the problem of minorities through the force of international law and the League of Nations minority system. The idea was to keep minorities were they were, backed by legal guarantees and overseen by the League of Nations. The rise of Nazism and its obsession with biological racism put paid to this.
The League of Nations and its international law based approach to the minority problem had unravelled. This is the context for understanding the increasing anxiousness of minorities.
Adeel Hussain has argued that although we tend to view Jinnah as the consummate constitutional lawyer, in fact Jinnah during the 1930s turned away from the belief that the framework of law and legal guarantees could secure protection for the Muslim minority. In his Presidential Address at Lucknow in October 1937, he appealed not to law and justice but to power as the ultimate source of protection for a community:
“Honourable settlement can only be achieved between equals, and unless the two parties learn to respect and fear each other, there is no solid ground for any settlement. Offers of peace by the weaker party always mean confession of weakness, and an invitation to aggression. Appeals to patriotism, justice, and fair play, and for good will, fall flat. It does not require political wisdom to realise that all safeguards and settlements would be a scrap of paper, unless they are backed up by power. Politics means power, and not relying only on cries of justice or fair play or good will. Look at the nations of the world, and look at what is happening every day. See what has happened to Abyssinia; look at what is happening to China and Spain--and not to say of the tragedy of Palestine…”
Conclusion
Power is indeed what mattered. Mazower argues that what replaced the League of Nations approach to collective rights was an emphasis on individual human rights:
“As the post-war settlement in Europe would show, the main interest of the major powers was in limiting their obligations to minor states, and this meant that they too were happy to bury the League’s approach to collective rights. The result was that the United Nations’ eventual commitment to individual human rights was as much an expression of passivity as of resolve by the Allies. It was a means of avoiding problems, not of solving them. This fact helps us understand why so few of the wartime hopes for a reinvigoration of international law were to be realized.”
Therefore, while there are superficial arguments made about the similarity of Pakistan and Israel, a deeper examination would suggest some critical differences need to be acknowledged when considering the arguments for their creation. If similarities are to be sought, it is more fruitful to find these through the prism of minority politics and minority concerns in the age of nationalism.
Preamble
A key figure in the Zionist movement, Chaim Weizmann, wrote to the last viceroy of India, Louis Mountbatten in June 1947:
“There is great similarity, as you may have gathered, between the Indian problem and our problem here [in Palestine]. In comparison with India the Palestine problem may seem as a storm in a tea-cup, but I venture to say that the repercussions of the Palestine problem are, and are likely to continue to be, very serious indeed. . . . I believe that a Palestinian Pakistan would be a rational way-out.”
Israel is called here, in striking words, “Palestinian Pakistan.”
Compare this with the thoughts of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, a key figure in the Indian Nationalist movement. He rejected the “analogy of the Jewish demand for a national home” in April 1946:
“One can sympathize with the aspiration of the Jews for such a national home, as they are scattered all over the world and cannot in any region have any effective voice in the administration. The condition of Indian Muslims is quite otherwise. Over 90 millions in number they are in quantity and quality a sufficiently important element in Indian life to influence decisively all questions of administration and policy. Nature has further helped them by concentrating them in certain areas.”
Nationalism
The argument that Pakistan and Israel are kindred spirits rests in part in the feeling that they represented a distinctive form of nationalism that was abstract rather than anchored to a sense of history and geography. However, while this argument has some purchase in the case of Muslim nationalism in India, it is far more tenuous when we consider Zionism.
For Muhammad Iqbal, Muslim nationalism rested on spiritual unity and was unrelated to notions of blood and soil. He wrote: “The membership of Islam as a community is not determined by birth, locality or naturalisation; it consists in the identity of belief. The expression ‘Indian Muhammadan’, however convenient it may be, is a contradiction in terms, since Islam in its essence is above all conditions of time and space. Nationality with us is a pure idea; it has no geographical basis.”
Liaquat Ali Khan, addressing the All-India Muslim Educational Conference in 1945, stated “the principle of territorial nationalism is opposed to the Muslim view of nationalism which is based on a philosophy of society and outlook on life rather than allegiance to a piece of territory.”
Blood and soil could not be the basis of Muslim unity in India.
Theodor Herzl, in the case of Zionism, had also said “We recognize ourselves as a nation through our faith.” But in the case of Zionism, blood and soil notions were far more central to Jewish nationalism.
Many Jews - no matter how mythical in reality - considered themselves as descendants of biblical Jews and Israelites. Ian McGonigle, an anthropologist, has perceptively noted: “in Israel, the stakes of the debate over Jewish origins are high, because the founding narrative of the Israeli state is based on exilic ‘return’. If European Jews have descended from converts, the Zionist project can be pejoratively categorised as ‘settler colonialism’ pursued under false assumptions, playing into the hands of Israel’s critics and fueling the indignation of the displaced and stateless Palestinian people. The politics of “Jewish genetics” is consequently fierce.”
For Muslims the territory of Pakistan was not sacred or special, it was only important insofar as it was the territory in which Muslims were a majority. But for Zionists, the land in Palestine was considered to be holy and rich with ‘historic’ memory. Elizeir Schweid, an Israeli scholar, wrote:“The uniqueness of the Land of Israel is thus ‘geo-theological’ and not merely climatic. This is the land which faces the entrance of the spiritual world, that sphere of existence that lies beyond the physical world known to us through our senses. This is the key to the land’s unique status with regard to prophecy and prayer, and also with regard to the commandments.”
It is therefore follows that both states have a radically different view on the issue of the ‘right of return’. It occupies a central place in Zionist thinking and the very term ‘right of return’ implies the importance of lineage. There is no such notion in Pakistan. Section 4 of the Pakistan Citizenship Act of 1951 is clear and remains to this day: “Every person born in Pakistan after the commencement of this Act shall be a citizen of Pakistan by birth …” This is the concept of jus soli rather than citizenship defined by descent as in the case of Israel and certainly Muslims outside of Pakistan do not have an automatic right to Pakistani citizenship.
Partition
If the content of the nationalism was different, what about comparing the arguments for partition?
Here I turn to Zafarullah Khan, Pakistan’s articulate UN representative who was eloquent in his defence of Palestinian interests. In November 1948 he made three key points when comparing the partition of India and the partition of Palestine. (A summary of his comments at the General Assembly on 30 Nov. 1948, can be accessed here: https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/774025?ln=en&v=pdf).
Firstly, in India the major parties had consented to partition. In the case of Palestine, partition was imposed upon the Palestinians. The result of the United Nations proposed partition plan was hardly equitable by any measure: the Jewish state would get 55 per cent of Mandatory Palestine comprising 500,000 Jews and 400,000 Arabs; the remaining land would be a Palestinian state, made up of 725,000 Arabs and 10,000 Jews. Jerusalem would be placed under international control.
Secondly, a majority of Muslims - indeed millions and millions of Muslims - already lived in the areas that eventually made up Pakistan. They were not settlers or colonisers in any respect. Although ‘settler-colonial’ is controversial in pro-Israel quarters, before the word attained negative connotations, many Zionists freely used the word ‘colonisation’. The Zionist leader Leo Motzkin for instance: “Our thought is that the colonisation of Palestine has to go in two directions: Jewish settlement in Eretz Israel and the resettlement of the Arabs of Eretz Israel in areas outside the country.”
Thirdly, the basis of partition was different. In India, division was generally at a sub-district level - tehsil and even the level of thana. The historian, Joya Chatterji, writes that “Radcliffe also conceded the Congress argument that thanas (police stations), as the smallest units for which census figures had been published, were the most acceptable units of Partition.” If the same basis was applied in the case of Palestine, the Jewish state would have been very small indeed: the Jewish community was only a majority in one of the sixteen sub-districts - Jaffa.
Expulsion
We might pause to consider one of the implications of these different trajectories through the founding fathers of the new state. When many Hindus left Pakistan from Sindh, Jinnah lamented the exodus. He said this “was part of a well-organized plan to cripple Pakistan.” As historian A. Dirk Moses writes, "These are hardly the sorts of sentiments one would have heard from David Ben-Gurion regarding Palestinian Arabs.”
Indeed, note Israeli historian, Anita Shapira on Ben-Gurion:
“A brief uprising by the residents of Lydda (Lod) exposed the danger inherent in leaving a large bloc containing a hostile population behind the advancing army, midway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The commanders Allon and Yitzhak Rabin, who were considering a large-scale population evacuation, went to consult with Ben-Gurion. Ben-Gurion listened to them and did not react; he had an uncanny ability to keep silent when he needed to. It was only at the end of the discussion, as the commanders were about to leave for the battlefield, that, according to Rabin, Ben-Gurion waved his hand and said: “Expel them.” . . . like most of his ministers, he saw the Arabs’ exodus as a great miracle, one of the most important in that year of miracles, since the presence of a hostile population constituting some forty percent of the new state’s total populace did not augur well for the future.”
For Ben-Gurion it was a case of as many Jews and as few Arabs as possible in the state of Israel.
Minority
If a comparison falls down when considering the plans for partition and the nature of their nationalisms, a comparison can be made in terms of how Muslim separatism and Zionism grew in strength in the inter-war period in the context of, I) the uncertainties that confronted minorities (not restricted to Jews and Indian Muslims) in the age of nationalism; ii) the feeling that law was insufficient as a guarantor of minority rights and that power was required.
What needs to be emphasised is how unsettling the rise of nationalism and representative institutions were to minorities. As Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper remind us in their book on Empire: “Throughout history, most people have lived in political units that did not pretend to represent a single people. Making state conform with nation is a recent phenomenon.”
Empires were of course hierarchical and exclusionary, but loyalty in the final analysis was owed to the ruler and the dynasty and not to an ethnicity. Whereas a state under empire “declares the non-equivalence of multiple populations,” the nation-state by contrast “proclaims the commonality of its people.”
Nationalists - in pursuit of assimilation and homogeneity - often displayed a discomfort with difference.
Sholomo Avineri, an Israeli political scientist and a biographer of Theodor Herzl, said in an interview: “In a way, when the Austro-Hungarian empire broke up after the First World War and new nation states were established, Herzl’s dire prophecy was vindicated. With the exception of Czechoslovakia, which was relatively liberal, all the successor states of the Austro-Hungarian empire—Romania, Hungary, Austria itself, Poland—were very nationalistic places in which the Jews had the status of a national minority in a nation state. That wasn’t the case in Austria-Hungary, where they were a minority in an empire made up of minorities.”
Avineri went on to say: “There is no doubt that it is. European nationalism in the 19th century made Jews strangers or foreigners for the first time. Whatever you say about the Middle Ages, Jews then were viewed as the “other”, but not as alien. Modern European nationalism therefore created a different identity for the Jews. And when Jewish nationalism developed, it was very much a mirror image of European nationalism.”
Mark Mazower in his brilliant book - The Dark Continent - demonstrates that the victors of World War I sought to deal with the problem of minorities through the force of international law and the League of Nations minority system. The idea was to keep minorities were they were, backed by legal guarantees and overseen by the League of Nations. The rise of Nazism and its obsession with biological racism put paid to this.
The League of Nations and its international law based approach to the minority problem had unravelled. This is the context for understanding the increasing anxiousness of minorities.
Adeel Hussain has argued that although we tend to view Jinnah as the consummate constitutional lawyer, in fact Jinnah during the 1930s turned away from the belief that the framework of law and legal guarantees could secure protection for the Muslim minority. In his Presidential Address at Lucknow in October 1937, he appealed not to law and justice but to power as the ultimate source of protection for a community:
“Honourable settlement can only be achieved between equals, and unless the two parties learn to respect and fear each other, there is no solid ground for any settlement. Offers of peace by the weaker party always mean confession of weakness, and an invitation to aggression. Appeals to patriotism, justice, and fair play, and for good will, fall flat. It does not require political wisdom to realise that all safeguards and settlements would be a scrap of paper, unless they are backed up by power. Politics means power, and not relying only on cries of justice or fair play or good will. Look at the nations of the world, and look at what is happening every day. See what has happened to Abyssinia; look at what is happening to China and Spain--and not to say of the tragedy of Palestine…”
Conclusion
Power is indeed what mattered. Mazower argues that what replaced the League of Nations approach to collective rights was an emphasis on individual human rights:
“As the post-war settlement in Europe would show, the main interest of the major powers was in limiting their obligations to minor states, and this meant that they too were happy to bury the League’s approach to collective rights. The result was that the United Nations’ eventual commitment to individual human rights was as much an expression of passivity as of resolve by the Allies. It was a means of avoiding problems, not of solving them. This fact helps us understand why so few of the wartime hopes for a reinvigoration of international law were to be realized.”
Therefore, while there are superficial arguments made about the similarity of Pakistan and Israel, a deeper examination would suggest some critical differences need to be acknowledged when considering the arguments for their creation. If similarities are to be sought, it is more fruitful to find these through the prism of minority politics and minority concerns in the age of nationalism.
Last edited by a moderator:
