During the past several weeks, as two nuclear powers – India and Pakistan – edged ever closer toward a full-fledged war, I was reminded both of the parallels between their ongoing conflict with that of Israel and Palestine, as well as the striking double standards in how the international community has regarded them since their inception.
As a result of increased violence, rising nationalism, and conflicting religious and political ideologies, the partition of British India led to the establishment of the Republic of India and the Islamic Republic of Pakistan in August and September 1947, while the partition of British Mandate Palestine two months later on November 29 similarly allowed for the creation of two separate countries: the States of Israel and Palestine.
(The 1920 mandate was itself a partitioning of part of the Ottoman Empire, acquired by the British after WWI, into Transjordan east of the Jordan River [the original “Palestinian” state] and Israel – then called “Palestine” and just a third of Transjordan in size – on the west side.)
In response to dissatisfaction with these later partitions, both regions experienced mass migrations or expulsions and devolved into bloody wars, fighting for both land and national identity.
Despite the overwhelming similarities in their formation, only one of these national projects – Israel – is still routinely questioned in its right to exist. This discrepancy is not only inconsistent, but is also rooted in a dangerous narrative that frames Jewish self-determination as uniquely illegitimate.
When British India was carved into a Hindu-majority India and a Muslim-majority Pakistan in 1947, the split was violent and chaotic, with an estimated 10 million people displaced (through violent expulsion or voluntary migration) and approximately one million killed. Comparatively, after the British Mandate in Palestine ended in 1948, the UN partition plan (UN Resolution 181) divided the land into a Jewish-majority state and an Arab, Muslim-majority state.
The necessary outcome of two people with deep historic ties to the land
The Jewish people, historically indigenous to the land and freshly massacred by the Holocaust (with one-third of their people murdered), accepted this plan and the small sliver of land granted to them in the territory of the biblical kingdoms of Israel and Judah.
INSTEAD OF accepting the partitioned land granted to them for the formation of an Arab Palestinian state, five Arab nations – Egypt, Transjordan, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon – invaded the newly established country of Israel, launching the first Arab-Israeli war. As a result, an estimated 700,000 Palestinian Arabs and 850,000 Jews were displaced from the Arab countries, becoming refugees, and an estimated 6,000 Jews and 10,000 Arabs were killed.
Despite the fact that millions more people were displaced and killed during the first Indo-Pakistani war that ensued as a result of the British partition plan than in the Arab-Israeli war, only the Jewish state’s establishment has garnered allegations of illegitimacy and occupation ever since.
The world accepted the creation of India and Pakistan as the necessary outcome of two people with deep historic ties to the land and conflicting religious, political, and national identities. Palestinians had an equal opportunity for self-determination as the Jewish people did, but they squandered it.
Just like India and Pakistan, but unlike most countries that were formed through revolution or war, Israel’s founding was rooted in international law. The re-establishment of Israel, therefore, was not an act of conquest but a legal, internationally sanctioned proposal for coexistence, one that the Jewish community embraced.
The violence that followed stemmed not from Israel’s refusal to share the land, but from others’ refusal to allow a Jewish state to exist at all. This legal foundation underscores that Israel’s existence is not the product of conquest, imperialism, or colonialism, but a historical act of decolonization and recognition of the Jewish people’s right to return to and govern their ancestral homeland – a right no less valid than that of Indians and Pakistanis seeking independence from British colonialism.
THERE IS a troubling asymmetry in how these two partitions are remembered. India and Pakistan were granted international recognition almost immediately. Their independence movements are celebrated as the rightful reclamation of native identity and the necessary partitioning of land based on differing religious and political aspirations. India and Israel are democracies, while Pakistan and a would-be Palestine are governed by religious, Islamic law. While India’s secular democracy and Pakistan’s struggles with religious nationalism are debated, no one denies their existence or right to self-determination.
Israel, however, is treated differently. It is the only nation among the 195 UN-recognized countries whose right to exist is openly contested by global institutions, student movements, and political voices. Criticism of Israeli policy is one thing – demonization of the Jewish state’s very being is another.
Movements that oppose Israeli policy often deny Jewish peoplehood and cast Israel as a foreign, colonial entity. This is historically false. Jews are indigenous to the Land of Israel, with a continuous cultural, religious, and physical presence stretching back more than 3,000 years.
Their return to the land was not an act of European conquest – it was a long-awaited revival after centuries of persecution and exile. To deny the Jewish right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland while celebrating the nationalism of other colonized peoples is a blatant double standard.
The lesson from both partitions is that nationhood is messy and history rarely provides perfect outcomes. What we must reject is the selective moral outrage that paints one people’s liberation as noble and another’s as criminal. If we want peace and justice, then those attempting to delegitimize Israel’s existence as a Jewish state must change course, acknowledge their inherent bias, and instead strive for moral consistency while also advocating for the Palestinian people.
The notion of a one-state solution is not viable, just as a one-state solution for India and Pakistan would have proven to be disastrous. A Palestinian state can only exist alongside Israel, just as Pakistan must exist alongside India.
The writer is the cantor and spiritual co-leader of East End Temple in Manhattan.