by Junaid S Ahmad
The most durable political crimes are never announced. They are administered. They arrive wrapped in laminated phrases — ‘restraint,’ ‘responsibility,’ ‘ interest’ — and by the time anyone begins screaming, the screams are already being reviewed for civility and forwarded to the department that specializes in tone management.
Gaza is not simply a site of mass death. It is a systems audit. A live demonstration of which states still believe there are moral red lines, and which have upgraded governance so extermination becomes an accounting problem—tragic, regrettable, and ideally kept off the balance sheet.
Pakistan’s ruling establishment did not wake up one morning and decide to “support Israel.” That would have required honesty. Instead, it perfected a more advanced technique: alignment without acknowledgment, participation without paperwork, collaboration without the vulgarity of saying the word. A politics of seamless compatibility.
This is not hypocrisy. Hypocrisy still requires a belief you are betraying. This is infrastructure.
The Grammar That Makes Empire Sound Like Adult Supervision
Empire no longer declares itself. It manages. It does not say “we conquered”; it says “we stabilized.” It does not say “we starved civilians”; it says “humanitarian access was complicated.” It does not say “collective punishment”; it says “security environment.” Violence is not denied — it is laundered.
Gaza is governed entirely in this grammar. Israel performs the killing. Washington supplies the weapons, the diplomatic vetoes, and the procedural scaffolding that ensures outrage never matures into consequence. Regional partners normalize the aftermath. Other states — Pakistan included — adjust their posture so nothing clogs the machinery. No endorsement necessary. Only compatibility with the operating system.
Empire loves subcontractors: allies who absorb reputational damage, handle logistics, or—most elegantly — do nothing with monk-like discipline. Not all collaborators wear uniforms. Some wear adverbs.
Strategic Silence as an Export Commodity
Pakistan’s official language on Gaza has been a clinic in disciplined vacancy. Statements are issued. Verbs are tranquilized. Children “die” rather than being killed; hospitals “are hit” rather than bombed; starvation is upgraded into a “humanitarian crisis,” as though it were a seasonal inconvenience rather than an engineered outcome.
This is not confusion. It is rational behavior inside a political economy where moral clarity is treated as an extravagance. Pakistan’s state remains financially oxygen-dependent-on Western indulgence, IMF choreography, Gulf capital, and a regional order in which Israeli impunity is treated as an adult fact of life. In this ecosystem, outrage is permitted as performance, not as disruption.
Moral clarity is expensive. Silence, on the other hand, is generously subsidized — and can be marketed as sophistication. “We are being prudent,” officials say, mistaking anesthesia for wisdom.
From Non-Recognition to Fully Functional Alignment
Pakistan’s refusal to formally recognize Israel is often presented as evidence of principle. This is charming but obsolete. Recognition is no longer the threshold of alignment. Alignment is now measured in intelligence coordination, logistics, security interoperability, and enthusiasm for “post-conflict governance” — especially when that governance is designed to consolidate the violence that preceded it.
Hence the recurring fantasy of an “International Stabilization Force” for Gaza, and Islamabad’s eager signals that it would very much like to be considered. Call it peacekeeping. Call it stabilization. Call it a multinational security arrangement. The function remains unmistakably colonial: pacification repackaged as management. Violence is completed, then its moral residue is distributed across a committee of uniforms.
Pakistan’s political class approaches such schemes through trial balloons and strategic fog, keeping plausible deniability ready for domestic consumption. Officials murmur about “helping” and “stabilizing,” then—when public anger spikes—suddenly discover a deep commitment to being misunderstood. Volunteer quietly. Deny loudly. Scold the audience for reading the choreography.
“Stabilization” After the Bodies Are Counted
Gaza is reduced to rubble, and the world begins speaking about the “day after,” as though the “day before” were a natural disaster. An international force is proposed — not to safeguard Palestinian life, but to supervise Palestinian obedience. The question is never how to dismantle occupation, blockade, or siege; it is how to make resistance administratively inconvenient.
The euphemism is doing heavy labor. Stabilization implies neutrality — two unruly parties requiring adult supervision. In imperial usage, it almost never means peace. It means order after violence has accomplished its objectives. It means the rubble must now behave.
If the mandate involves disarming Palestinians while the architecture of domination remains intact, this is not peacekeeping. It is victim-policing. A force that arrives after mass slaughter to confiscate the capacity to resist is not a remedy; it is Phase Two.
Pakistan’s rulers — eager to look “responsible” — appear tempted by the prestige of managing consequences they lacked the courage to confront. Photo-ops as foreign policy: a genre in which uniforms become costumes and complicity graduates into “global leadership.”
Zionist Candor, and the Joke Islamabad Doesn’t Get
One revealing detail is not Pakistan’s willingness to volunteer, 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 understand what Pakistan’s own establishment prefers to forget: Pakistani public sentiment remains viscerally hostile to apartheid, occupation, and genocide. A Pakistani soldier is not a programmable appliance; a Pakistani street is not a policy memo. The risk is not merely operational — it is ideological leakage. A uniform sent to “stabilize” Gaza might return with destabilizing questions.
There is a bleak 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 eminently replaceable. The same generals who posture as guardians of sovereignty appear as applicants for a job whose moral hazards they hope the word “mandate” will neutralize.
The Vocabulary They Briefly Had — and Abandoned
Early in the catastrophe, Pakistan briefly flirted with a different language. Former Prime Minister Imran Khan did not speak of “stabilization.” He spoke of “protection” — of an international force designed to defend Gazans rather than police them. The distinction was not semantic; it was structural. It explains, in part, why Zionist circles despised him so openly. Protection threatens the architecture. Stabilization preserves it.
That vocabulary has since been buried under managerial realism: a politics that finds defending victims impractical but finds administering them eminently feasible.
Gaza as a Mirror, and the Panic It Produces
What unsettles Pakistan’s rulers is not Gaza as an event, but Gaza as a mirror. It collapses the moral distance elites rely on. It exposes a shared architecture: ‘security’ as a license for obliteration abroad and repression at home; dissent criminalized while mass killing is filed under ‘complexity.’
This recognition travels. It invites comparisons elites cannot manage. 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 administered.
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 staying calm. This is not bias; it is governance — grief converted into public relations.
Pakistan’s rulers will say this posture preserves sovereignty. It does the opposite. A state that cannot object to mass killing without first checking who might be offended is not sovereign. It is managed.
History is not always loud. Sometimes it is people in offices perfecting the art of never saying the word —collaboration — while practicing it with professional finesse.
Prof. Junaid S. Ahmad teaches Law, Religion, and Global Politics and is the Director of the Center for the Study of Islam and Decolonization (CSID), Islamabad, Pakistan. He is a member of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST – https://just-international.org/), Movement for Liberation from Nakba (MLN – https://nakbaliberation.com/), and Saving Humanity and Planet Earth (SHAPE – https://www.theshapeproject.com/).
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