Uncertain Comparisons: Zionist and Israeli Links to India and Pakistan in the Age of Partition and Decolonization

Abstract

This article examines Zionist/Israeli comparisons and connections to India and Pakistan between 1945 and 1955. While Zionists found striking similarities between the unfolding realities in Palestine/Israel and South Asia, the exact nature of the comparison was quite equivocal. On the diplomatic axis, Israelis sought to establish full diplomatic relations with India by underscoring the similarity of their two nations. Here, comparisons were a way of positioning Israel as an analogue of India. On the technocratic axis, Israelis looked to Pakistan as a model for constructing legal institutions to expropriate Palestinian property. The appeal of Pakistan as a model was due to a perceived glaring difference: Pakistan was a Muslim state, Israel the Jewish State. Meanwhile, as Zionists/Israelis looked to India and Pakistan, Indians returned the gaze. Indian technocrats found the methods Israel used to resettle Jewish refugees and immigrants worthy of emulation. When they came to Israel to study these resettlement efforts, they were-unknowingly-often looking at projects that had been built upon former Palestinian land which the Israeli government had seized using the transplanted Pakistani law-the very same laws that had dispossessed India's new citizens, whom the technocrats were seeking to resettle. This article ultimately uncovers a broader post-imperial technocratic sphere in which nascent states continued to transplant legal institutions developed in other parts of the former colonial world to construct their own.