October 4, 2025

Against Complicity – Statement of Pakistani diaspora’s rejection of PM Shehbaz Sharif’s embrace of the Trump-Netanyahu plan for Gaza

“This passport is valid for all countries of the world except Israel.”
    - The Pakistani passport

We, as concerned diaspora of Pakistan, hereby express our strongest condemnation of Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s endorsement of Donald Trump’s Gaza proposal and cannot stand by as Pakistan becomes complicit in the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people. 

We wish to make clear that the people of Pakistan remain committed to supporting the Palestinian people and their right to self determination. We stand with Palestinian people and extend unequivocal solidarity. 

We reject any attempts of the Pakistani leadership to broker deals that legitimize imperial policies or lead to the dispossession of the Palestinian people. If the plan presented by Trump is not what Pakistani diplomats agreed to, we urge the leadership to distance themselves from the plan.

The proposed plan is not a path to peace; it is an externally imposed scheme designed to subjugate Palestinians and erase their right to self-determination. Since October 2023, Israel has devastated Gaza and attacked and killed innocent people in Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, Tunisia and Iran. Israel also launched a targeted attack in Qatar while diplomatic dialogue with Hamas representatives was underway. All this has happened with impunity and protection for Israel by Western imperial powers, particularly the United States of America. We refuse any attempts to be allied with any nation-states that have allowed the destruction of Gaza. Moreover, we strongly condemn PM Shehbaz Sharif’s use of the term ‘war’ to describe Israel’s assault on Gaza. It is a genocide. International jurists, UN experts, and human rights organizations have laid out compelling evidence of systematic destruction, mass killings, and collective punishment. To avoid this truth is to grant impunity to Israel’s actions of decimating Gaza and slaughtering tens of thousands of innocent civilians, with hundreds of thousands unaccounted for, buried under the rubble. 

The founding members of this nation understood what Palestine represented. Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah, acknowledging that Palestinian Arabs were “betrayed” by the Balfour Declaration in 1917, stated in his presidential address to the All India Muslim League (AIML) in 1938 in Patna: 

“Among the immediate issues we have to grapple with, which may come up before the Subjects Committee, is the question of Palestine. I know how deeply Muslim feelings have been stirred over the issue of Palestine. I know Muslims will not shirk from any sacrifice if required to help the Arabs who are engaged in the fight for their national freedom. You know the Arabs have been treated shamelessly—men who, fighting for the freedom of their country, have been described as gangsters, and subjected to all forms of repression. For defending their homelands, they are being put down at the point of the bayonet, and with the help of martial laws. But no nation, no people who are worth living as a nation, can achieve anything great without making great sacrifices such as the Arabs of Palestine are making. All our sympathies are with those valiant martyrs who are fighting the battle of freedom against usurpers.”

Moreover, one of Pakistan’s first international political statements was in solidarity with Palestine. Sir Muhammad Zafrullah Khan, Pakistan’s first Foreign Minister, warned the United Nations in 1947 that to partition Palestine against the will of its people would be “the gravest risk of impairing, beyond the possibility of repair, any chance of real cooperation between East and West, by thus forcibly driving what in effect amounts to a Western wedge into the heart of the Middle East.” Spoken over seventy years ago, his words still reverberate with unsettling clarity today. 
  
 We thus call upon all Pakistanis, in civil society as well as political parties, to demand from the government:

1. A formal and full retraction of any endorsement of externally imposed Gaza “peace plans”.

2. A public declaration recognizing that the ongoing assault on Gaza by Israel constitutes genocide and its condemnation.

3. A renewed foreign policy that centers Palestinian self-determination, rejects normalisation without justice, rejects demilitarization of the Gaza Strip, and insists that any peace is anchored in full sovereignty, not trusteeship or foreign “boards”.

4. Robust support (diplomatic, financial, moral) to Palestine’s legitimate representatives, and parliamentary resolutions affirming as much.

Palestinians must be at the centre of any negotiations or decisions about their homeland. Any attempts by the Zionist entity or the US regime to sideline the Palestinians, indigenous to their land, will not be tolerated. This is not merely a matter of regional politics; it is a test of Pakistan’s relationship to colonial injustices and international law. We either stand unequivocally with those resisting a brutal occupation, as affirmed by principles of international law and the right to self-determination, or we risk weakening our own commitment to justice, sovereignty, and the very legal frameworks that protect us all. 
  
Source: Pakistanis For Palestine
https://www.instagram.com/pakistanis4palestine/