Nothing to see here: Pakistan, Gaza, and collaboration done the Zionist way

The most durable political crimes are not announced. They are administered—quietly—through protocol, wrapped in adult nouns like ‘restraint,’ ‘responsibility,’ ‘national interest.’ By the time outrage arrives, it is already being audited for tone and reminded to behave.

Gaza is not merely the site of mass death. It is a stress test for political systems: a measure of who still believes there are moral limits, and who has redesigned governance so extermination becomes an externality—tragic, regrettable, and above all, inconvenient.

Pakistan’s ruling establishment did not wake up and decide to “support Israel.” That would have required candour. Instead, it perfected something more contemporary: alignment without recognition, participation without signatures, collaboration without the embarrassment of saying the word. A politics of compatibility.

This is not hypocrisy. Hypocrisy still implies a standard you are failing. This is architecture.

The grammar that makes empire look reasonable

Modern empire no longer relies on declarations. It relies on supply chains, vetoes, diplomatic atmospherics, and the careful outsourcing of moral liability. It does not say “we conquered;” it says “we stabilized.” It does not say “we starved;” it says “we managed humanitarian access.” It does not say “collective punishment;” it says “security environment.”

Gaza is administered in this grammar. Israel performs the violence. Washington supplies weapons, cover, and the procedural scaffolding that keeps outrage from becoming consequence. Regional partners normalise the fallout. Other states—Pakistan among them—adjust their posture so nothing jams the machinery. No endorsement required. Only compatibility with the operating system.

Empire prefers subcontractors: allies who absorb reputational risk, do the dirty work, or—more elegantly—do nothing with disciplined consistency. Not all collaborators wear uniforms. Some wear adjectives.

Strategic silence as a revenue stream

Pakistan’s official language on Gaza has been a masterclass in calibrated emptiness. Statements are issued. Nouns softened. Verbs passivized. Children ‘die’ rather than being killed; hospitals ‘are hit’ rather than bombed; starvation becomes ‘a humanitarian crisis’ rather than a policy.

This is not confusion. It is rational behaviour within a political economy that prices moral clarity as a luxury good. Pakistan’s state depends on Western indulgence, financial arrangements, and Gulf capital embedded in a regional order where Israeli impunity is treated as a fact of adult diplomacy. In that ecosystem, outrage is permitted as theatre, not as interference.

Moral clarity is expensive. Silence is subsidised—and easily sold as sophistication. “We are being prudent,” officials say, as if prudence were a synonym for anaesthesia.

From non-recognition to functional alignment

Pakistan’s non-recognition of Israel is often advertised as proof of principle. But recognition is no longer the threshold of alignment. The world now counts intelligence cooperation, logistics, security coordination, and willingness to “contribute” to post-war
governance—especially when that governance entrenches the violence that preceded it.

Hence the recurring proposal of an “International Stabilisation Force” for Gaza, and Islamabad’s conspicuous eagerness to be considered. Call it peacekeeping. Call it stabilisation. Call it a multinational security arrangement. The function remains recognisably colonial: pacification dressed as management. Coercion outsourced so the occupying power can harvest strategic gains while distributing the moral stain across a
committee of uniforms.

Pakistan’s political class approaches such ideas via trial balloons and strategic ambiguity, keeping plausible deniability in reserve. Officials speak of “helping” and “stabilising,” then—when public anger erupts—discover a sudden devotion to misunderstanding. The choreography is familiar: volunteer quietly, deny loudly, blame the audience for reading the script.

“Stabilisation” after the rubble settles

Gaza is pulverised, and the world announces the “day after,” as though the “day before” were a weather event. An international force is proposed, not to guarantee Palestinian life, but to supervise Palestinian compliance. The question is not how to dismantle the
conditions that produced resistance; it is how to make resistance administratively inconvenient.

The euphemism does real work. Stabilisation suggests neutrality—two unruly sides needing adult supervision. In imperial usage, it rarely means peace. It means order after violence has achieved its aims. It means rubble must now behave.

If the mandate includes disarming Palestinians while occupation, blockade, and siege remain intact, this is not peacekeeping. It is the policing of victims. A force that arrives after mass killing to confiscate the capacity to resist is not a remedy; it is a second phase.

Pakistan’s rulers—keen to appear “responsible”—seem tempted by the prestige of managing consequences they were too timid to confront. Photo-ops as foreign policy: a genre in which uniforms become costumes and complicity becomes “global leadership.”

Zionist candour and the lesson Islamabad missed

One revealing detail is not Pakistan’s volunteering but Israel’s discomfort with Pakistani troops in such a force. The stated reasons—trust, security, sympathies—are predictable. The subtext is sharper.

Israeli officials grasp what Pakistan’s own establishment often pretends not to: Pakistani public sentiment remains overwhelmingly hostile to apartheid, occupation, and genocide. A Pakistani soldier is not a programmable asset; a Pakistani street is not a think-tank seminar. The risk is not merely operational; it is political contagion. A uniform sent to ‘stabilise’ Gaza might return with ‘destabilizing’ questions.

There is a bitter comedy here. Pakistan’s elite lectures its population about cohesion while being treated by Zionist and Western power centers as a contractor class—useful, pliable, and disposable. The same generals who posture as custodians of sovereignty appear as applicants for a job whose moral hazards they hope will be neutralized by the word ‘mandate.’

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The road they chose not to take

Early in the catastrophe, Pakistan briefly possessed an alternative vocabulary. Former Prime Minister Imran Khan did not speak of “stabilisation.” He spoke of protection—of an international force that would defend Gazans rather than police them. The distinction was not semantic; it was moral. It explains, in part, why Zionist circles reviled him so openly. Protection threatens the architecture. Stabilisation preserves it.

That contrast has since been buried beneath managerial realism: a politics that finds defending victims impractical but finds managing them eminently feasible.

Gaza as a mirror

What unsettles Pakistan’s rulers is not Gaza as an event but Gaza as a mirror. It collapses the distance elites depend on. It reveals a shared architecture: ‘security’ as permission slip for obliteration abroad and repression at home; dissent criminalised while mass killing is filed under ‘complexity.’

This recognition travels. It produces comparisons elites cannot control. It turns foreign policy into domestic moral accounting. Hence the irritation when Palestinians refuse the role of silent victims. The dead may be mourned; the living must be managed.

Pakistan’s establishment has internalized a lexicon that rewards obedience and punishes dignity. Moderation becomes accepting humiliation politely. Pragmatism becomes never inconveniencing power. Maturity becomes watching atrocity unfold while congratulating yourself for remaining calm. This is not merely prejudice; it is governance—grief as
public relations.

Pakistan’s rulers will say this posture preserves sovereignty. It erodes it. A state that cannot object to mass killing without fear of displeasing patrons is not sovereign; it is managed.

History is not always dramatic. Sometimes it is people in offices perfecting the art of not saying the word – collaboration – while practicing it anyway.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.