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IN a comment titled 'Pakistan's recognition of Israel is now inevitable', published last week in the liberal Israeli daily Haaretz, Kunwar Khuldune Shahid suggests that the pressure from 'the godfathers of normalisation with Israel, namely Saudi Arabia and the United States' is becoming harder to resist.
That may well be the case. There's nothing new about the US pressure, and there have been occasions over the decades where Islamabad toyed with the idea of succumbing to it. Ziaul Haq, if memory serves, was the first head honcho to publicly point out the affinities between Pakistan and Israel. And Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri, the foreign minister under Pervez Musharraf, enjoyed a tete-a-tete with his Israeli counterpart in Turkey in 2005.
The initiatives didn't go anywhere, and at those junctures Saudi Arabia is unlikely to have officially been supportive. It's hard to tell, though. Links between Israel and the Arab Gulf states existed long before they were publicised, at least at the 'security' level. It may well be possible to track back the turning point to the first invasion of Iraq in 1990-91, after the Saddam regime was stupid enough to assume that its occupation of Kuwait would entail no serious repercussions at the geopolitical level.
Read: Historic summit with Arab states to 'deter' Iran, says Israel
All the same, it was more than a couple of decades before most of the Gulf states could pluck up the courage to acknowledge that their repressive and distinctly undemocratic polities potentially made them perfect partners for a powerful, US-backed, nuclear-armed entity that identified itself as the region's only democratic power.
What is wrong with recognising Israel?
That was always something of a farce, given the military rule over the dispossessed Palestinians since 1967 in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. But then, the supposed sympathy for the so-called Palestinian cause in the Arab and broader Muslim worlds never amounted to much beyond occasional lip service.
Perhaps it is no coincidence that Israel's formal rapprochement with the Gulf region came after it had ripped off its hypocritical mask. The two-state 'solution' was never really an option for the Zionists, and Benjamin Netanyahu deserves credit for making this patently obvious - as he does for persuading the likes of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, in collusion with the Trump administration, to discard their respective masks.
As for Pakistan, its unacknowledged compatibility with...
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