Daily Times

Two important things happened on May 13 and 14: Pakhtun Tahaffuz Movement (PTM) had its rally in Karachi, and the United States opened its embassy in Jerusalem respectively. The PTM rally came about despite pathetic attempts by the state to keep Manzoor Pashteen from reaching Karachi, which he did anyway.

Manzoor and the PTM are a threat to the Pakistani security state because they challenge the deeply held fictions that lie at the heart of the security state’s identity, which include: Terrorism in Pakistan is fundamentally caused by India and possibly the United States; Taliban in Afghanistan are the only guarantors of Pakistan’s interests in that country; India is a mortal threat to Pakistan, and any deviation from the above plot line is either financed by India or America.

In the echo chamber of the military’s training institutes and mess halls, there is no question that anyone disagreeing with the above has either been paid off by India, America or Israel or paid off by someone else. In this world, even the Pakistani Taliban do suicide bombings for money.

In this dichotomous view of the world, on one side are the state functionaries, who defend against the evil intentions of the enemies, with their lives and souls. And, on the other side are the paid lackeys of the enemy.

Money is the crux of the matter. It is the virtue of the state against the money. There is no room in there for recognising that someone else may actually believe in something, as fervently and as they do, without money. Because conceding that would mean that their reality is only one of the realities, and possibly an increasingly dysfunctional, dystopic and a dangerous one for the Pakistani polity. The PTM cadres have thrown a monkey wrench into their world, by not resisting by force, to which the state is too good at responding. All the state can do is play the role of a petty kidnapper for ransom. Freedom for your silence.

The common denominator between Pakistan and Israel is their deeply strategic alliance with Saudi Arabia, and the right wing in the West

In Israel too, the daughter and son in law of Donald Trump celebrated with Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, the moving of the US embassy to Jerusalem. Bernard Avishai, writing in the New Yorker, points out that as laser light shows and music were playing in Jerusalem, unarmed Palestinian protesters were being shot in cold blood by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF).

The call by Netanyahu to his people was to celebrate. Instead, the Israelis went to bed watching the news of young men, women and children being murdered by the IDF. The Israeli state fiction here is that Palestinians do not exist, only terrorists do. The historical fictions at the heart of Zionism do not even bear attention, being that they have been thoroughly debunked by many Israeli and Jewish scholars, so no need to get into a biblical discussion here. The blood of Palestinians is the price of maintaining the fiction that Jerusalem belongs to Israel, and Israel alone; its almost 1500 year Arab history and contemporary reality be damned.

Israel also has to sell that fiction to its principal benefactor, the United States. Whereas in the colonial era it was able to sell the story of socialist Zionism to the liberal but deeply racist West in the early part of the 20th century, today, Israel’s main votaries are the political right and the evangelical movement in the United States.

The US Congress may tow the line because every congressperson there fears the political death that American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the principle pro-Israel lobbying group, is able to deliver in short order. But this consent too is unlikely to last given Israel’s behaviour.

With 300,000 Palestinians as their neighbours, the American diplomats in Jerusalem may also get a dose of reality, according to Avishai. Perhaps the diplomatic cables from Jerusalem to Washington won’t be as steeped in Zionist fiction, as they had been from Tel Aviv to Washington.

Between Pakistan and Israel, the fictions at the heart of the states’ narratives are going to be their undoing. The common denominator between both the countries is their deeply strategic alliance with Saudi Arabia, and the right wing in the West. The civil society in Israel has undertaken a heroic struggle against the militarist paranoia of the state, just as the likes of PTM are in Pakistan. In both countries, they are labelled Arab loving peaceniks and Zionist/Indian agents, respectively. But the little bit of a dent that these civil society movements make in the fragile armour of the security states can really be the saving grace of the polity. Otherwise, I see both Israel and Pakistan hurtling towards the abyss — cheering and celebrating all the way — how righteous they are, and how powerful too.

The writer is a reader in Politics and Environment at the Department of Geography, King’s College, London. His research includes water resources, hazards and development geography. He also publishes and teaches on critical geographies of violence and terror

Published in Daily Times, May 20^th 2018.