There is a species of Islamabad analysis that should be served on expensive hotel stationery, with diplomatic coffee, complimentary ambiguity, and a small warning at the bottom: may contain traces of reality. The recent Middle East Eye  piece — “Why Pakistan will likely refuse to join the Abraham Accords” — belongs gloriously to this genre:

It mistakes elite choreography for the country’s actual politics, passport inscriptions for anti-imperialism, and conversations conducted somewhere between GHQ, the Prime Minister’s House, and the Serena Hotel lobby for the pulse of a country of 240 million people.

This is not analysis. It is elite gossip dressed up as geopolitical insight. 

The Passport Is Not a Revolution

Yes, Pakistani passports exclude Israel. Yes, Pakistan has not formally recognized the Zionist state. Yes, this matters. But to inflate this into evidence of Pakistan’s unique moral exceptionalism is not erudition; it is travel-document mysticism.

Yes, Pakistani passports exclude Israel. Yes, Pakistan has not formally recognized the Zionist state. Yes, this matters. But to inflate this into evidence of Pakistan’s unique moral exceptionalism is not erudition; it is travel-document mysticism.

Roughly forty other Muslim-majority states also do not recognize Israel. Pakistan is not some solitary anti-Zionist lighthouse standing heroically against a sea of Arab betrayal. It is one state among many whose formal non-recognition coexists with deep entanglement in the imperial architecture that protects Israel.

The relevant question is not whether Islamabad hosts an Israeli embassy. The question is whether Pakistan’s ruling order materially opposes the regional system that makes Zionist supremacy possible: American military power, Gulf authoritarianism, surveillance cooperation, debt dependency, comprador elites, and the systematic suffocation of popular politics.

On that test, the state’s record is not ‘principled refusal.’ It is polished hypocrisy with a foreign-office seal.

Civil Society, Apparently Sighted Near the Buffet

The MEE article’s most charming hallucination is its portrait of Pakistan’s “vibrant and contested” political landscape........

© Middle East Monitor