The Israel factor in India-Pakistan crisis

As India and Pakistan, two nuclear rivals, agreed on a US-brokered ceasefire after going to nearly a full-fledged war in the build-up of tensions that spiked after an attack in Indian-occupied Kashmir on April 22, an outlier emerged during the crisis that both countries seemed myopically fixated upon, and could not help draw parallels with, Israel. Despite being miles away and not being a direct party to the India-Pakistan standoff, Israel became a hot point of discussion with regard to the nature of the conflict in Kashmir and Islamabad and Delhi’s drastically different approaches to the long-standing Israel-Palestine issue.

Social media were flooded with posts on Israel by mostly Indians, touting their “allyship” and supposed similarity of situations of being confronted with terror and thereby acting upon it. The Israeli ambassador to India extended support to New Delhi’s action and strikes in Pakistan — without taking the latter’s name —stating that Israel supports “India’s right for self-defense”. “Terrorists should know there’s no place to hide from their heinous crimes against the innocent,” he wrote on X. 

Pakistanis, on the other hand, in their protests and posts lambasted both countries, seeing them as a common enemy; some even denounced the Indian and Israeli flags in protests during the intense week. Pakistan’s military, during the height of tensions with India, said it shot down Israeli-made drones launched by the Indian military into Pakistani airspace, following a series of strikes across the country earlier. The military said it had shot down 25 Israeli Harops, including in the major cities of Karachi and Lahore.   

India maintains strategic ties with major Israeli defense firms and remains a strong market for Israeli weapons. This association and camaraderie, however, does not automatically make Islamabad and Jerusalem adversaries, contrary to local Indian and Pakistani populations’ widely-held beliefs. Israel excels in war technology and provides weapons to whoever asks for them, including New Delhi, and it would be willing to provide them to Islamabad if the latter indulges in bilateral engagements on a set of issues. Israel is also an arms supplier to  Azerbaijan, a Muslim country, and assisted it in its fight in Nagorno-Karabakh. Religion or conspiracy theories of the “Hindu-Jewish” and “India-Israel” alliance reeking at antisemitism that is rife on Pakistani social media have little to do with it, are inaccurate and not grounded in reality.

During the standoff, India also used French fighter jets which Pakistan downed, but no theories of an “India-France alliance” or “Hindu-Christian conspiracy” were circulated anywhere.

Israel has never declared Pakistan an enemy and in many instances has refrained from mentioning the country altogether. During a visit to India in 2018, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dismissed suggestions that his country’s partnership with India was a threat to Pakistan, saying, “We (Israel) are not enemies of Pakistan and Pakistan should not be our enemy either.” 

Both India and Pakistan were urged to show restraint during the recent standoff by Western capitals. The response from the US initially was less consequential, as evident from Vice President JD Vance’s statement that said the India-Pakistan war was “none of our business” until, as reports claim, he received alarming intelligence. As Pakistan went tit-for-tat with its counterstrikes, it established much-needed deterrence, forcing India to come to the negotiating table after intervention from US Secretary of State Marco Rubio — a diplomatic channel New Delhi has avoided ever since Prime Minister Modi and his Hindu nationalist BJP party came to power.

As far as Israel is concerned, Pakistan’s foreign policy remains pro-Palestinian to the point of being self-sabotaging. It gives India an edge too in its relations with the Jewish state. Instead of being heavily one-sided, religiously-motivated and counterproductive to any rapprochement as it is now — especially when Palestinians and most Arab states, despite the recent OIC statement, do not extend the same unflinching solidarity and support to Islamabad in its disputes with India and pursue their own bilateral relations — Pakistan should aim for the same and center its strategic objectives first, even if that means developing ties with Israel. This is what successful Islamic countries like the United Arab Emirates have done. It will have to start with the deradicalization of Pakistani society on a scale not seen before and tightening the noose around extremist parties which are antisemitic and anti-minorities instead of being a reasonable political force against India, an adversary that seeks to isolate Pakistan on every global avenue. 

The escalation with India has stressed the need to establish more ties, including with Israel and challenge New Delhi’s regional hegemony. The day of normalization — which Israel has always been eager to see with Islamic states, including Pakistan — may be far away, but that day will come. The first step in that long chain of process will have to be the deradicalization of the populace in a country like Pakistan.