THE exhausted, brutalised people of Gaza have been promised a let-up in Israel’s relentless assaults at numerous points over the past two years. Yet the bombs have continued to drop. This time, Donald Trump insists, will be different. It is no coincidence that Trump pushed hard for his ‘peace plan’ to go into effect a day before the announcement of the Nobel Peace Prize. Aside from being the world’s most powerful man, he is undoubtedly the most conceited. He is desperate to add Gaza to his list of ‘peace-making’ achievements. We in the subcontinent have, of course, been reminded by Trump repeatedly that it was due to his good graces that India and Pakistan did not pull the trigger on a fully-fledged and possibly nuclear war in May.

Trump’s wish may be fulfilled and with it the theatre of the absurd he headlines will carry on. The real question for us is why Pakistan’s hybrid regime has left no stone unturned to tell the world that Trump is the world’s biggest dove. The seven other Muslim countries that publicly backed his Gaza ‘peace plan’ have also lavished platitudes on Trump for his leadership and courage and so on, while carefully avoiding calling Israel’s depraved actions a genocide or indicting butcher-in-chief Benjamin Netanyahu.

Yet these ‘Muslim’ leaders continue to project the fiction that Palestine is the ultimate ‘Muslim’ cause. Indeed, what does it even mean to suggest that liberating a colonised people is a ‘Muslim’ cause? Pakistan’s state ideology is centred on the indivisible unity of the subcontinent’s Muslims and the fact that Pakistan was the ultimate realisation of the historical destiny of the Muslim ‘nation’. It follows that Muslims anywhere else in the world demand Pakistan’s unequivocal support.

Alongside Palestine, there is one other issue that the Pakistani state and its ideologues depict as the ultimate Muslim cause — Kashmir. Unlike Palestine, however, Kashmir is neither far away nor ruled entirely by ‘aliens’.

The state’s conduct belies its claims of upholding ‘Muslim interests’.

Last week, despite all efforts by the authorities to censor any mention of it, the territory known as Azad Jammu & Kashmir was wracked by a mass strike. A popular movement has in fact gripped AJK for the best part of two years. Led by the Jammu Kashmir Joint Awami Action Committee, the movement has articulated the sentiments of a largely young, disenfranchised population that is frustrated both by economic hardship and the machinations of an unrepresentative political order.

The movement has been peaceful in its methods. Yet as it ratcheted up the pressure on the AJK government and the state apparatus, familiar and threatening rhetoric started doing the rounds in official circles and pro-state social media. It was termed anti-state, accused of conspiring with the proverbial ‘foreign hand’ to undermine national security.

This is something that most mass movements in Pakistan’s history have faced, especially those hailing from the geographical peripheries. Baloch youth, including women, who have repeatedly sought integration into the political and economic mainstream along with accountability for state excesses past and present, are the biggest targets.

Whether in Balochistan, AJK or even metropolitan Pakistan, such rhetoric serves only to further alienate. Indeed, the Pakistani state’s deployment of the language of ‘terrorism’ to criminalise protest has become endemic.

In case we need reminding, the country’s history has been coloured by repression of all manner of Muslims who have challenged the structures of economic, political and cultural power presided over by the establishment and its hangers-on. The ideological claims that the state is the ultimate defender of ‘Muslim interests’ have alw­ays directly cont­r­adic­ted its conduct with respect to oppr­es­sed classes, eth­­nic nations and genders.

Mind you, Pale­st­in­­­-ians are not all Mus-lims. The people of Jammu & Kashmir are not all Muslims either. And Pakis­tanis are not all Muslims either, a fact that oppressed Christians, Hindus, Ahmadis and so many more religious groups know too well.

A much more meaningful ideological basis for the support of oppressed peoples like the Palestinians is simply the opposition to Zionist settler colonialism, and global imperialist capital more generally. It is such principles that have motivated millions to come out onto the streets in many non-Muslim countries against the genocide, including many anti-Zionist Jews.

Let’s call a spade a spade. It is these millions that have highlighted the Palestinian cause and forced the hand of governments around the world, which were otherwise speaking the language of Israel’s ‘right to defend itself’. For most of these past two years, those who speak of ‘Muslim causes’ have also been complicit.

The writer teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.

Published in Dawn, October 10th, 2025