Arabs have nothing to apologize for: Of dignity and solidarity-II

I WANT now to speak about dignity, which of course has a special place in every culture known to historians, anthropologists, sociologists and humanists.

I shall begin by saying immediately that it is a radically wrong Orientalist, and indeed racist proposition to accept that, unlike Europeans and Americans, Arabs have no sense of individuality, no regard for individual life, no values that express love, intimacy and understanding that are supposed to be the property exclusively of cultures like those of Europe and America that had a Renaissance, a Reformation and an Enlightenment.

Among many others, it is the vulgar and jejune Thomas Friedman who has been peddling this rubbish, which has alas been picked up by equally ignorant and self-deceiving Arab intellectuals — I don’t need to mention any names here — who have seen in the atrocities of 9/11 a sign that the Arab and Islamic worlds are somehow more dysfunctional than any other, and that terrorism is a sign of a wider distortion that has occurred in any other culture.

We can leave to one side that, between them, Europe and the US account for by far the largest number of violent deaths during the 20th century, the Islamic world hardly a fraction of it. And behind all of that specious unscientific nonsense about wrong and right civilizations, there is the grotesque shadow of the great false prophet, Samuel Huntington, who has led a lot of people to believe that the world can be divided into distinct civilizations battling against each other forever. On the contrary, Huntington is dead wrong on every point he makes. No culture or civilization exists by itself; none is made up of things like individuality and enlightenment that are completely exclusive to it; and none exists without the basic human attributes of community, love, value for life and all the others.

To suggest otherwise as Huntington does is the purest invidious racism of the same stripe as people who argue that Africans have naturally inferior brains, or that Asians are really born for servitude, or that Europeans are a naturally superior race. This is a sort of parody of Hitlerian science directed uniquely today against Arabs and Muslims, and we must be very firm as to not even go through the motions of arguing against it. It is the purest drivel.

On the other hand, there is the much more credible and serious stipulation that, like every other instance of humanity, Arab and Muslim life has an inherent value and dignity which are expressed by Arabs and Muslims in their unique cultural style, and those expressions needn’t resemble or be a copy of one approved model suitable for everyone to follow.

All one has to do is to look at the huge variety of literature, cinema, theatre, painting, music and popular culture produced by and for Arabs from Morocco to the Gulf. Surely that needs to be assessed as an indication of whether or not Arabs are developed, and not just how on any given day statistical tables of industrial production either indicate an appropriate level of development or they show

failure.

The more important point I want to make, though, is that there is a very wide discrepancy today between our cultures and societies and the small group of people who now rule these societies. Rarely in history has such power been so concentrated in so tiny a group as the various kings, generals, sultans, and presidents who preside today over the Arabs. The worst thing about them as a group, almost without exception, is that they do not represent the best of their people. This is not just a matter of no democracy. It is that they seem to radically underestimate themselves and their people in ways that close them off, that make them intolerant and fearful of change, frightened of opening up their societies to their people, terrified most of all that they might anger big brother, that is, the United States. Instead of seeing their citizens as the potential wealth of the nation, they regard them all as guilty conspirators vying for the ruler’s power.

This is the real failure, how during the terrible war against the Iraqi people, no Arab leader had the self-dignity and confidence to say something about the pillaging and military occupation of one of the most important Arab countries. Fine, it was an excellent thing that Saddam Hussein’s appalling regime is no more, but who appointed the US to be the Arab mentor? Who asked the US to take over the Arab world allegedly on behalf of its citizens and bring it something called “democracy,” especially at a time when the school system, the health system, and the whole economy in America are degenerating into the worst levels since the 1929 Depression. Why was the collective Arab voice not raised against the US’s flagrantly illegal intervention, which did so much harm and inflicted so much humiliation on the entire Arab nation? This is truly a colossal failure in nerve, in dignity, in self-solidarity.

With all the Bush administration’s talk about guidance from the Almighty, doesn’t one Arab leader have the courage just to say that, as a great people, we are guided by our own lights and traditions and religion? But nothing, not a word, as the poor citizens of Iraq live through the most terrible ordeals and the rest of the region quakes in its collective boots, each one petrified that his country may be next.

Perhaps the one thing that strikes me as the low point in Arab inability to grasp the dignity of the Palestinian cause is expressed by the current state of the Palestinian Authority. Abu Mazen, a subordinate figure with little political support among his own people, was picked for the job by Arafat, Israel, and the US precisely because he has no constituency, is not an orator or a great organizer, or anything really except a dutiful aide to Yasser Arafat, and because I am afraid they see in him a man who will do Israel’s bidding, how could even Abu Mazen stand there in Aqaba to pronounce words written for him, like a ventriloquist’s puppet, by some State Department functionary, in which he commendably speaks about Jewish suffering but then amazingly says next to nothing about his own people’s suffering at the hands of Israel?

How could he accept so undignified and manipulated a role for himself, and how could he forget his self-dignity as the representative of a people that has been fighting heroically for its rights for over a century just because the US and Israel have told him he must? And when Israel simply says that there will be a “provisional” Palestinian state, without any contrition for the horrendous amount of damage it has done, the uncountable war crimes, the sheer sadistic systematic humiliation of every single Palestinian, man, woman, child, I must confess to a complete lack of understanding as to why a leader or representative of that long-suffering people doesn’t so much as take note of it. Has he entirely lost his sense of dignity?

But that has been the behaviour of Palestinian rulers since Oslo and indeed since Haj Amin, a combination of misplaced juvenile defiance and plaintive supplication. Why on earth do they always think it absolutely necessary to read scripts written for them by their enemies? The basic dignity of our life as Arabs in Palestine, throughout the Arab world, and here in US, is that we are our own people, with a heritage, a history, a tradition and, above all, a language that is more than adequate to the task of representing our real aspirations, since those aspirations derive from the experience of dispossession and suffering that has been imposed on each Palestinian since 1948. Not one of our political spokespersons — the same is true of the Arabs since Abdel Nasser’s time — ever speaks with self-respect and dignity of what we are, what we want, what we have done, and where we want to go.

Slowly, however, the situation is changing, and the old regime made up of the Abu Mazens and Abu Ammars of this world, is passing and will gradually be replaced by a new set of emerging leaders all over the Arab world. The most promising is made up of the members of the National Palestinian Initiative; they are grass-roots activists whose main activity is not pushing papers on a desk, nor juggling bank accounts, nor looking for journalists to pay attention to them, but who come from the ranks of the professionals, the working classes, and young intellectuals and activists, the teachers, doctors, lawyers, working people who have kept society going while also fending off daily Israeli attacks.

Only if we respect ourselves as Arabs and Americans, and understand the true dignity and justice of our struggle, only then can we appreciate why, almost despite ourselves, so many people all over the world, including Rachel Corrie and the two young people wounded with her from ISM, Tom Hurndall and Brian Avery, have felt it possible to express their solidarity with us.

I conclude with one last irony. Isn’t it astonishing that all the signs of popular solidarity that Palestine and the Arabs receive occur with no comparable sign of solidarity and dignity for ourselves, that others admire and respect us more than we do ourselves? Isn’t it time we caught up with our own status and made certain that our representatives here and elsewhere realize, as a first step, that they are fighting for a just and noble cause, and that they have nothing to apologize for or anything to be embarrassed about? On the contrary, they should be proud of what their people have done. — Copyright Edward W. Said, 2003 Concluded

High cost of neglect

THEE is a large measure of unanimity among agricultural experts in lower Sindh that the negligence of the irrigation and executive officials in the region caused far more damage to the people than the average of 300 mm rain water which came down in July.

Loss of human life might have been far less than 163, including 27 in Karachi and 45 in Badin which suffered the most and the houses destroyed or damaged far less than 141,060 if the irrigation officials and others had been more vigilant before and after the rains. Loss of cattle heads too might have been less than 9,336 and the fish farms washed off less in number if the officials had taken precautionary measures. As a whole nearly a million people have been directly affected in a poor region, particularly economically, and the cost of real compensation and rehabilitation of the economy would be very heavy.

There is a consensus that the key Left Bank Outfall Drains (LBOD) had been badly designed and when the rains came these acted more as a bottleneck than as facilitators for draining out the accumulated rain water. This complaint was there long before the current spell of rains. Will it be re-resigned now and the bottlenecks removed? Or will the engineers continue to disagree and perpetuate the folly?

Of course, it will take quite some time for a final assessment of the widespread damage to, among other things, the standing crops, fruits and vegetable, and fish farms. The government would then determine the final compensation. To add to the complications the feeble sea walls which prevent sea water from coming in to those low lying areas gave way quickly, and the sea water flooded the region, including many fish farms.

To add to the damage corruption played its part and many irrigation officials had been posted or transferred from there on a political basis. And the funds allocated for repair of irrigation channels were not used and hence the channels remained choked when the floods came. It has been said that in June huge amounts were withdrawn, apparently for repairing the canals but where did the money go? However, this is the usual story in Sindh where politics over-rides all other factors.

Now the Sindh Abadgar Board wants Rs 10 billion as compensation; but the money should be distributed after a proper survey of the losses. The Board says that between 2000 and 2003 the government suffered losses worth Rs 42 billion. New money should not go the way of the old money.

The fact remains whether it is a flood, earthquake or an epidemic or any other major calamity, it is the poor who are always the hardest hit. And the poor are in such large numbers, living in conditions exposed to wind and water, but without safe drinking water. And unlike the rich, they have no insurance for themselves or their assets. Nor is there any crop insurance. And official assistance ends after expression of sympathy, some relief and a few VIP visits.

The nation has to pay a heavy price for the initial official neglect or failure to take adequate precaution measures. The government has to spend on relief work, then on rehabilitation followed by assistance in the reconstruction of their homes. The victims have then to be compensated for their economic losses, like loss of crops, large number of cattle, fish farms, poultry etc.

The richer victims then claim tax exemption for some years and relief from repayment of the loans obtained from the Zarai Taraqqi Bank or other banks. And the government has to spend on various VIP visits by air or otherwise which keep the relief officials busy or distract them from their work.

The originals sin in such situations is usually corruption, the proverbial corruption of the public works department. Bad roads which crode fast. Feeble drainage system which crumble quick. The irrigation system which withers away with the first floods.

When Benazir Bhutto was prime minister and Abdullah Shah chief minister a small hill torrent had washed away the river bund at Dada. She visited the place and ordered suspension of the executive engineer. Minister Leghari objected to that. “If I don’t suspend him, then I shall have to suspend you”, she said, as it became known that the funds allocated for strengthening the bund during the last 17 years had not been utilised for the purpose. He kept quiet discreetly.

So before a lot of money is dished out for the reconstruction of the infrastructure in the flood-hit areas an experts committee should be asked to go into the task of analysing what happened to the money spent earlier, and who gained and who lost? Otherwise the new money may flow into the old channels and make the corrupt far more rewarded. May be a deep probe into the wealth of the irrigation officials and other public works officials proves to be worthwhile.

A probe into the Sindh Irrigation Development Authority (SIDA) which has been vastly funded by international aid agencies over the years is also needed. Changing the man at the top alone cannot produce positive results or bring forth miracles. The whole structure needs to be looked into along with the assets of its senior officials. It is not that SIDA or other bodies in the interior of Sindh fail dismally every time the country has heavy rains. Has the KMC and KDA been any better? For that matter, is the Defence Housing Authority any more efficient? No. Every time it rains the 26th street, which is a main entrance to the Defence Housing Authority and even to the new Creek City is in a shambles. And it has not improved over the years. And of course street lighting fails with the first few drops. In fact, street lighting had become an occasional thing in the city.

It is easy to blame the administration for its failures, but if the people were to follow any rule and be disciplined we still will have civic calamities. When the city is over-populated and Kachhi Abadis spring up every now and then, any vacant area would be occupied.

Population explosion expresses itself in many unhappy or ugly ways. Kachhi Abadis springing up everywhere is one of the facets of the problem. And when we have too many people, and they are totally unregulated and grab anything they can usefully get hold of, they give vise to serious complications.

At the moment within the cities and in the suburban areas there is confusion following the introduction of the local body system. In some places it is working well. In many places it is not. John Wall, the head of the World Bank in Pakistan says the British took 150 years to devise an administrative system for India, and it would take at least 15 years to evolve a local body system and not 15 months, as the new rulers want.

But if service is the motto of the local bodies, and the local officials are willing to go along with them, instead of presuming they represent a superior power they can make a success of the local bodies.

Here again having too many people to deal with creates a serious problem for the officials. They have too many people to meet, too many people to adjudicate between and too many people to satisfy and so leave too many dissatisfied which makes their task less pleasant.

I think the time has come for Pakistan to set up crisis management organization. That should deal with floods, quakes, epidemics, train disasters, etc. Its officials should have a thoroughly professional approach. There should be a central body with its provincial units, and if possible district units. And it should have a large number of volunteers who are well trained in relief and rehabilitation work.

In the olden days we had the ARP — Anti-air Raid Precaution on a voluntary basis. In the days of nuclear weapons that may seem antiquated. But we can have them now for relief purposes and we have to discourage or try to prevent the explosion of kachhi abadis which are the source of many weaknesses in the socio-economic fabric, including theft of electricity. Above all, most of our problems spring from the pervasive corruption. That is behind the bad roads, feeble electric supply system, shortage of water, poor schools and colleges. and unless that is remedied we will have not only the “soft state” of which Gunnar Myrdal speaks of but also a crumbling state each time it faces a major challenge.

And every small problem can become a major challenge to such a state as in such a context small social cultural or religious problems can become a political threat to the state. And every time there is a small tragedy we have to spend a great deal and the provinces have to appeal to the Centre, and the Centre to international organizations, as we are doing now. But this time the Punjab has come to the help of Sindh gallantly or generously. It is good for inter-provincial solidarity.

Prime Minister Jamali has done well to cancel noisy and wasteful Independence Day celebrations. Such over-festive celebrations do not strengthen our freedom, only solid and sustained achievements do in a country with 40 per cent living below the poverty line and 60 per cent illiterate and only 20 per cent effectively literate.

Normally widespread and varied epidemics follow such rains and floods. City Nazim Naimatullah Khan has ordered a ten-day clean-up of the city after keeping the schools and colleges in the city closed until August 18. We hope the clean-up is truly effective and the areas cleaned up are retained in good order for long.

It looks odd to order planting of thousands of trees in a city marked for its shortage of water, even drinking water. Let Naimatullah Khan take up the water issue seriously in the manner the armed forces are taking up the construction of the Creek city as the city of dreams. There is no life without water for human beings, trees or animals. Let him try hard to ensure that while the Central government makes sure there is enough power and the system works and not as a stop-go fiasco for ever.

Welcome to Iraq-Nam

IN the past week or so, Iraqi guerillas have been killing US troops at the rate of about two a day. Even if the fighting does not escalate any further, at least 1,000 more American troops will die in Iraq before the election in November, 2004. Welcome to Iraq-Nam.

US President George W. Bush continues to insist that the Iraqi resistance is just “a few remaining hold-outs” from Saddam Hussein’s defunct regime because he needs this to be true. Otherwise, his invasion of Iraq would have been a dreadful mistake. At least in public, the US army in Iraq agrees: “There’s mid-level Baathists, Iraqi intelligence service people, Special Security Organisation people, Special Republican Guard people...conducting what I would describe as a classical guerilla-type campaign against us,” said US General John Abizaid two weeks ago.

However, the videos claiming responsibility for the attacks that are delivered almost daily to Arabic-language satellite TV channels attest that most of them are actually being made by radical Islamist groups within the Sunni Arab population. These are precisely the religious extremists who were suppressed by Saddam’s resolutely secular Baath Party: Salafists and other radicals who long for a ‘pure’ Iraq purged of corrupting non-Islamic influences. Now they are free to act at last, and their first goal is to purify Iraq of American occupation troops.

Drop a grenade on a Humvee from an overpass, walk up behind an American soldier in a market and blow his brains out, plant a radio-controlled mine in the road: it’s easy in a country awash with weapons, and meanwhile the Americans push the population into your arms with endless heavy-handed raids in search of Saddam Hussein, as if he mattered. ‘When in doubt, do something’ is a sound tactical axiom on the battlefield, but a rotten guide to strategy.

A tipping point of sorts has been passed: there is now a serious guerilla war in Iraq, even if the US command is still unclear about the nature of its opponents. It will get far worse if religious extremists and nationalists among the Shia Arab majority follow the example of their Sunni Arab cousins and begin attacking the occupation forces, but it is already affecting many calculations about the near-term future.

The first conclusion is that Washington’s strenuous efforts to get other countries to send troops to Iraq to lessen the burden on American forces will almost all end in failure, because nobody wants to send their troops into a meat-grinder. The Japanese have agreed to send a (probably token) number of troops to Iraq after a bruising parliamentary debate, and Turkey may yet send a division because it wants to have troops in place in case Iraq breaks up entirely when the US finally pulls out, but that’s about it.

Nobody wants to anger Washington by saying bluntly that they don’t feel like sharing the blame and the punishment for a ghastly strategic mistake, so they argue that they cannot send troops to Iraq without a new United Nations resolution that puts it under international control. The Bush administration is ideologically incapable of agreeing to that, so there will be no French or German troops going to Iraq, no Indian or Pakistani troops, no Arab troops, not even Canadian troops.

El Salvador, Ukraine and a few other governments that desperately want to ingratiate themselves with Washington will send modest numbers of troops, but that will not even be enough to make up for the number of British troops that have been quietly withdrawn from Iraq since April. (Tony Blair may be a true believer, but the British general staff aren’t fools.) This will be an American war, just like Vietnam was.

It will escalate, and by this time next year the Bush re-election bid will be in serious trouble — so serious only another brief and victorious war against alleged ‘terrorists’ may be able to save it. Washington is already blaming ‘foreign terrorists’ for the non-Baathist resistance in Iraq, and Syria and Iran are going to find themselves filling the same rhetorical role that the Ho Chi Minh trail did in the earlier war.

Since Syria is a much softer target than Iran, it is quite likely to be invaded and occupied by American forces before November, 2004. If there is another major terrorist attack on American soil, that likelihood becomes a near certainty.

Bush probably will be re-elected next year, only to go under a couple of years later as military and economic troubles overwhelm his second administration. That would leave radical Islamists in power in Iraq (or at least in the Arabic-speaking parts of Iraq, if the country breaks up in the process). If the US has also invaded Syria in the meantime, the eventual pull-out would bring the same sort of people to power in Damascus — and in such a general retreat American troops would be pulled out of Afghanistan too, allowing the Taliban back into power there.— Copyright

Dickensian illogic

IMMIGRANT children have long bridged the language gap between their families and English-speaking society, say, in translating grandma’s query for directions.

That’s just harmless, convenient conversation. But when the subjects turn grave and vital — from talking to doctors, lawyers or police to handling teacher-parent matters — it’s inappropriate to call on kids to do adult duties.

The consequences of doing so can be downright dangerous and traumatic. Children just can’t deal well with complex terminology, be it medical, legal or otherwise. Since when does a 12-year-old understand benign versus malignant? Why must a child tell her mother she has cervical cancer or relate to police how dad beat mom? It’s daunting and traumatizing for kids to know that their least slip-up can cause a misdiagnosis or put a parent in jail.

State lawmakers should take children out of this nightmarish situation, approving a bill, AB 292, by Assemblyman Leland Yee, D-San Francisco.

His measure, which has passed the Assembly and is under consideration in the Senate, would bar state-funded agencies from using children 14 or younger as interpreters, except in emergencies or for casual conversation. The bill is supported by the California Academy of Family Physicians, women’s shelters and ethnic groups.

Opponents, like the California Medical Association and the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, say Yee’s bill would drive up medical costs and delay access to needed services. Opponents effectively argue, “Sure, we try not to use kid interpreters more than necessary. But, hey, they’re convenient and cheap.”

That’s a Dickensian illogic that belies the reality that translation services can be inexpensive and readily available in this polyglot state. Providing these services would let state-funded entities do the jobs they’re supposed to.

Police and hospitals statewide have found willing, able and helpful volunteers conversant in Spanish and Chinese, not to mention Hmong and Mongolian. The Department of Motor Vehicles employs nearly 2,000 certified bilingual employees who speak more than 30 languages.

Many HMOs already provide translation services for free — Kaiser Permanente, for example, offers patients help in Spanish and Chinese for everything from getting an appointment to going to the pharmacy. Businesses statewide have built internal banks of language-skilled employees. Phone companies offer emergency translation aid. A host of community organizations dedicate themselves to providing language services. And isn’t there a role here for college and university language programmes across California?

Talk can be cheap and relatively easy. But so, too, is the practice of using kid translators, and it will hang on, as exploitative child labour did, until the law steps in. Curtailing this too-convenient wrong is the right and grown-up thing to do.

— Los Angeles Times

Choosing one’s enemies

‘ONE can choose one’s friends, but one cannot choose one’s neighbours,’ India’s Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee commented recently. It was a sage observation by the leader of a country that since 1947 has dominated the most fractious neighbourhood in the world.

Like the other countries in the subcontinent, Pakistan had no say in the selection of its neighbours, but even in such situations where it could have determined its own decisions, it has deliberately elected, rather than cultivating the right friends, to make the wrong enemies instead.

Pakistan’s stormy relationship with two of its immediate neighbours — India on the one side and Afghanistan on the other — are the most obvious demonstrations of this porcupine style of diplomacy, on how to lose friends and to antagonize people. A third country that is not a physical neighbour but ranks with the other two as a recurring obsession in Pakistan’s psyche is the sibling state of Israel.

Born within a year of each other, Pakistan and Israel share many commonalities. The Jewish sons of Abraham and from another line the Muslim grandsons of Abraham were each given a homeland justified on the grounds of theocracy. Both were (and continue to be) nurtured by the same wet-nurse — the United States of America. Both apply a major portion of their budgets on defence, against enemies who are in fact close friends of the other’s, and both have yet to recognize each other’s existence formally.

If Pakistan’s preoccupation with India is natural and organic, its fixation with the state of Israel is by comparison artificial and quite disproportionate to their respective sizes. One has only to look at a map of Israel to realize that. It is no more than 21,946 sq. km. in area, one-fortieth of Pakistan’s size. Israel’s extreme length is 420 km. (almost the exact distance from Lahore to Peshawar Cantonment) and its width from 16 to 115 km. (on an average no more than the short distance between Rawalpindi and Abbottabad.)

Its six million citizens — half of whom were born like modern Pakistanis after 1947 — could be accommodated easily within the metropolitan limits of Lahore, with a suburb or two to spare. Unsurprisingly, considering the composition of its educated diaspora returning to their Promised Land after many millennia of migration, Israel has a literacy rate of 99.7 per cent. Despite is midget size, Israel is a nuclear power with atomic and hydrogen bombs, which makes it the most heavily armed manikin in that dangerous, combustible ghetto known as the Middle East.

The highs and lows of the mutual awareness (one can hardly use the word recognition) between Pakistan and Israel have been summarized in a well-researched memorandum titled Beyond the Veil: Israel-Pakistan Relations, compiled by P. R. Kumaraswamy and published in March 2000 by the Jaffee Centre for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University.

In it, Kumaraswamy asks a question that has typified Pakistan’s ambivalent attitude towards the Zionist state: ‘What is real, the public rhetoric against Israel or the private understandings?’ He adds an opinion that speaks the mind of many concerned Pakistanis: ‘Dichotomy has been the hallmark of Pakistan’s foreign policy’.

The Pakistani public is already much familiar with the rhetoric. What it may not be as aware of nor be expected to ferret out are the ‘private understandings’, the furtive contacts off-shore, and the visits made by Pakistanis to a country that their government refuses overtly to recognize. Kumaraswamy, citing published sources, discloses that in late 1992, a group of Pakistani entrepreneurs visited Israel to discuss ‘business opportunities’. A year later, according to an official Israeli publication, over 300 Pakistanis travelled to Israel. And in August 1997, a delegation of Pakistani religious leaders spent a week in Israel.

More significantly, Kumaraswamy tells us that ‘Sharon’s senior aide Avraham Tamir visited Pakistan in 1980s... and even concluded certain military and conventional arms deals with President Ziaul Haq.’ In 1997, Maulana Ajmal Qadri, Chief of the Jamiat-i-Ulema-i-Pakistan, went on a private pilgrimage to worship at the Al-Aqsa mosque, and on his return advocated official recognition of Israel.

An unexpected disclosure is that in October 1998, President Rafiq Ahmed Tarar met Israeli President Ezer Weizman at Ankara during the 75th anniversary celebrations of modern Turkey’s independence, while the most surprising revelation by Kumaraswamy is a quotation attributed to General Mirza Aslam Beg. It is most probably genuine for it has not been refuted by the former army chief, and it rings too true, too characteristic of the belated wisdom preached by retired Pakistani service chiefs. General Beg is quoted as proposing: ‘Pakistan has no direct differences with Israel, therefore, we are a third party to the dispute...We have no conflict with Israel, therefore we should not hesitate in recognizing Israel.’

Whatever may have been the compulsions that prevented Pakistan from recognizing Israel — solidarity with the Palestinian cause, camaraderie with the Muslim ummah, the effect of such recognition on Pakistan’s commitments to the people of Kashmir, the expectation of a nod from the Saudis — they were overshadowed by a mushroom-cloud reality when in May 1998 the Israelis were suspected of planning an attack on Pakistan’s nuclear facilities at Kahuta, near Islamabad.

A week after the crisis had abated, a Pakistani Foreign Office spokesman was able to reveal: ‘There was a real threat of attack on our installations on the night of 27th May (that is, on the eve of the Pakistani nuclear tests), which was thwarted through immediate diplomatic activities.’ These assurances were conveyed by Israel for added authenticity through the United States.

In the closing chapter of his memorandum, Kumaraswamy suggests that four options are available to Pakistan — recognition of Israel without the establishment of diplomatic relations (the Turkish model); recognition without public acknowledgement (the Iranian precedent); political and military contact without formal recognition (Jordan’s example); military collaboration as a prelude to diplomatic relations (the Chinese approach).

The fifth option — unconditional and unequivocal recognition — is most probably the one President George W. Bush asked of President Pervez Musharraf, as casually as he might have asked for the salt cellar, during their private lunch at Camp David recently. It was a request that in the circumstances Musharraf could hardly refuse. All he could do (and most probably did) was to plead for time, to postpone the diplomatically inevitable.

After fifty years of sterile confrontation, it is time perhaps for Pakistan to acknowledge the reality of Israel’s existence, especially now that Israel has no need for Pakistan’s stamp of approval. In this initiative, Pakistan can take a cue from its tennis player Asimul Haq Qureshi who demonstrated at Wimbledon in 2002 and again this year that it is possible for a Pakistani and an Israeli (his partner was Amir Hadad) to play on the same side, without hostility and mutual suspicion. Above all, at this time of re-evaluation of its foreign policy directions, Pakistan needs seriously to revisit its choice of enemies, especially when it has been behaving with them surreptitiously as if they were already friends.

There may well be a time when Pakistan, instead of asserting that some of its best enemies are Zionists and Indians, could bring itself to say that ‘Some of my best friends are Jews and Hindus.’ It may make no difference to the Israelis or to the Indians. It could do wonders to our own standing in the comity of nations.