How can a Pakistani blame Zionism, when the underlying principle for both the nations is the same. Zionism called for a state for Jews and Pakistan was created because they wanted a state for muslims.
Pointing to the similarities of two nations born out of land partitioned at about the same time - 1947 for Pakistan and 1948 for Israel - is not a recent idea. It has been suggested that as Zionism and Muslim separatism in India were rooted in religious nationalism, rather than ties of blood and soil, they had a particular ‘abstract’ or ‘ideological’ quality to it. In an interview in 1981 with
The Economist a certain individual asserted:
“Pakistan is, like Israel, an ideological state. Take out the Judaism from Israel and it will fall like a house of cards. Take Islam out of Pakistan and make it a secular state; it would collapse.”
This individual was in fact the military ruler of Pakistan at the time, none other than Zia-ul-Haq.
Yet this view is undermined, I think fatally, by three key differences. Firstly, blood and soil, history and geography, were hardly incidental to Zionism. Importance was given to the idea of the Jews as being descended from common biological descent. The land in Palestine was also considered by Zionists to be holy and rich with ‘historic’ memory.
In the case of Muslim nationalism in India, the idea of being united by ties of common biological descent was not and indeed could not be the basis of nationhood. Nor was the land that became Pakistan sacred or specially holy. It just happened to be the land where the Muslims were a majority.
The second key difference has already been mentioned by
@DeadlyVenom. A majority of Muslims - indeed millions and millions of Muslims - already lived in the areas that eventually made up Pakistan. In this respect Pakistan cannot be compared to Israel at all.
Thirdly, whereas the ‘right of return’ is central to Zionism it is not a feature of Pakistani nationalism.
Therefore, I don’t see much value in seeking to find similarities at the level of nationalist ideology. But 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. In addition, with the rise of representative institutions, there was the threat of the ‘tyranny of the majority’ as nineteenth century thinkers, Tocqueville and John Stuart Mills, had famously noted.
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. As Mazower writes, there was “the virtual elimination of many minorities in eastern Europe – falling from 32 per cent to 3 per cent of the population in Poland, 33 per cent to 15 per cent in Czechoslovakia, from 28 per cent to 12 per cent in Romania. The German Volk was now more closely aligned with the boundaries of the (divided) German state; so, too, the Ukrainians. War, violence and massive social dislocation turned Versailles’s dreams of national homogeneity into realities.”
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…”
Jinnah understood the spirit of the age. 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 if similarities are to be sought, it is perhaps more fruitful to find these through the prism of minority politics and minority concerns in the age of nationalism.