Strangers in Phnom Penh

Late one evening last week, I sampled Cambodian cuisine in a crowded café on the banks of the Mekong River in Phnom Penh. Under the dull orange glow of the Japanese lanterns sat clusters of corpulent Swiss, German and French tourists with russet faces like apples, wolfing down plates of chicken and noodles and draining pints of Angkor draught, probably wondering how to spend the rest of the week of interminable Sundays. By contrast, at the table next to mine, a quiet, soft-spoken individual with a hint of a Polish accent introduced himself. We shook hands, discovered we were both journalists and proceeded to make political small talk.

But when we exchanged visiting cards, there was this brief moment of unease, this epigrammatic flash of political angst. There we were — two journalists — an Israeli and a Pakistani, sipping pineapple juice in the land of the killing fields. It was a seminal moment in our lives. Neither of us spoke for a few seconds. But eventually, we both found the situation quite hilarious and burst out laughing. The Israeli had been chatting with a citizen of a country which is supposed to have a cottage industry that produces suicide bombers and I had been conversing with a resident of a republic with whom we have fought no wars, that never had an empire and that, according to our foreign office, technically did not exist because it hasn’t been recognised! It was a case of judicial solipsism.

Actually, Pakistan and Israel have a great deal in common. Both countries were created around the same time and on the basis of religion. Both countries have embryonic infrastructures, economies based largely on agriculture and light industry and long, virtually indefensible borders. Both countries have spawned fierce nationalists, large swathes of ordinary nice people who are sick of war, who hate their politicians and want peace. Both countries have been victims of some form of oppression: the perceived domination of the Hindu majority in one case; and centuries of targeted persecution followed by intense widespread ethnic cleansing, in the other. Both countries have had hostile neighbours and faced military threats from an enemy that was many times larger.

And yet, in spite of the exceptionally brutal treatment that the Israelis have been repeatedly inflicting on the Palestinians — their infinite reluctance to grant them their own state and their disinclination to pay heed to the counsels of the United States, Russia and the European Union about settling the Palestine issue — I have never really come across any obvious flagrant display of anti-Semitism in Pakistan. Other than the time when the religious right protested quite harshly against the overtures made to the Jewish state by former president Pervez Musharraf and critics did wonder why the dictator felt it necessary to consult Saudi Arabia rather than members of Pakistan’s national assembly. One still hears the educated denizen of Karachi or Lahore who studied at an American university utter the old cliché about some of his best friends being Jews. After all, a race that has produced violinists like Josef Hassid and Jascha Heifetz, pianists like Solomon and Horowitz and chess masters like Emanuel Lasker and Akiba Rubinstein can’t be all that bad. It’s the Jewish leaders headed by Benjamin Netanyahu who are the bad guys and who are behaving no better than the Nazis of World War II. The Palestinians are not Untermenschen. They have a right to their homeland.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 15^th, 2012.