The two most dangerous countries in the world

Many people argue that Israel and Pakistan are similar states. That both were created in the name of faith and declared a home for the followers of a certain faith — Israel for Jews and Pakistan for Muslims. What they quite comfortably miss in this nonsensical argument is that the people who became the citizens of the newly created Pakistan were already living here. They were the indigenous people of this land. They were not shipped and brought in from Europe or the Soviet Union. This land mass was the home of the Muslims and the Hindus for centuries before Pakistan and India were put on the world map.

Israel, however, was a non-existent idea, except in the cunning minds of the Zionists. The Jews were brought there from other parts of the world such as Europe and the Soviet Union etc. They were installed in what was Palestine where the indigenous people called the Palestinians lived. This was not their land. They had not lived there. And this is still not their land.

If any two states are similar in various ways than any other pair of states in the world, that would be India and Israel. Both have kept certain territories under a brutal military occupation. The West Bank and Gaza are bad enough, but Kashmir is the world’s most densely militarised zone. Both countries would want their states to become religiously homogeneous. Both have longstanding hatred for one particular religious group: Muslims.

In 2018, Israel enacted a law called the Nation State Law, which states, among other racist things, that the right to vote is “unique to the Jewish people”, thereby excluding all Arab citizens of Israel from the right to national self-determination. Of the 9 million people in Israel, the Arabs make up about a fifth of that. Then there is Israel’s Druze community, which is a small group of about 120,000 and they are usually the ones on the frontlines of the battle sacrificing their lives for a country that does not embrace them as equal citizens. These were the people who had signed the notorious “covenant of blood” with the newly created state of Israel. Around 80% of Druze men enlist in the Israeli army. Only the Druze women are exempt.

The following year, India enacted a law called the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which allows immigration to religious minorities from neighbouring states such as Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh but there is a condition: the immigrants have to be non-Muslims. At the same time, in the Indian state of Assam, there are millions of Muslims migrants who have lived there for decades as illegal non-citizens but they are not given Indian citizenship because they cannot prove that they came to India before the creation of Bangladesh as a sovereign country. And because they are Muslims. As a matter of fact, the non-Muslim migrants encouraged to arrive from the neighbouring states would flood the state of Assam because it borders Bangladesh. No such strict requirements for those migrants to become Indian citizens.

The aim of both the Israeli and the Indian laws mentioned above are to turn their societies into completely Jewish and Hindu respectively.

Israel uses coercion, propaganda, lobbying and their status as a local cop on the beat for America in order to keep the American government under check and prevent it from acting against this Jewish state. India uses its potential to become the local cop on the beat against China and its utility in being a huge market for American corporations to keep the American government under the same check. Israel prevents any cinematic or broadcast work that might be critical toward the aggression it does against innocent Palestinian civilians. India has — through the threats of arrests, WhatsApp propaganda, mass public pressure and other pressure tactics — even convinced Netflix and Amazon Prime Video to indulge in self-censorship. The world will have no peace as long as these dangerous states are supported by Uncle Sam for its selfish interests.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 23^rd, 2023.

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