The State of Israel and the Islamic Republic of Pakistan have never had formal diplomatic relations. In 1947, Pakistan voted against the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine, and does not recognize Israeli sovereignty. Despite the Pakistani position on the Arab–Israeli conflict, there have been multiple instances of close cooperation, such as during the Soviet–Afghan War and the Black September conflict. Pakistan supports the Palestinian Arabs and endorses the two-state solution. Pakistan says it will not normalize relations with Israel until the establishment of an independent Palestinian state within the pre-1967 borders with East Jerusalem as the capital. Nevertheless, with Turkey serving as middleman, Israel and Pakistan have used their embassies and consulates-general in the cities of Ankara and Istanbul to communicate and exchange necessary information. In 2010, the Pakistani newspaper Dawn reported that Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence, following up on reports received in Washington, had gone through Ankara to pass on information to Israel's Mossad about an upcoming terrorist attack in Mumbai, India, where a Jewish cultural centre was listed as a major target; this information first surfaced on WikiLeaks one year after the 2008 Mumbai attacks were carried out by Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistan-based terrorist organization.
In 2018, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, while on an official visit to India, stated that Israel is not an enemy of Pakistan and that Pakistan "should not behave like an enemy" towards Israel.
Following the success of the Abraham Accords in 2020, erstwhile Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan disclosed that the United States and "at least one other country" had been urging his administration to normalize ties with Israel. He did not reveal the countries' names and did not say whether or not they were from the Muslim world, but explained that "the pressure is because of Israel's deep impact in the United States," and that "Israel’s lobby is the most powerful, and that’s why America’s whole Middle East policy is controlled by Israel." Khan's administration later reiterated that Pakistan would not establish any official bilateral relationship with Israel until a "viable, independent, and contiguous" country is created for and accepted by the Palestinians.
Background Muhammad Ali Jinnah and Allama Muhammad Iqbal put the Palestine issue on top of agenda and opined that "the Balfour Declaration was unjust".
On October 12, 1945, Muhammad Ali Jinnah said,Pakistan and Israel, Muhammad Ali Jinnah and the Jews
History Following the Israeli Declaration of Independence in May 1948, David Ben-Gurion attempted to contact Muhammad Ali Jinnah via a telegram to establish diplomatic ties, but received no particular response.
In 1952, Pakistani foreign minister Muhammad Zafarullah Khan promoted hardline state policies against Israel, and advocated for Pakistan's unwavering support for the Arabs in the Arab–Israeli conflict. Thus, Khan's policy laid the groundwork for Pakistan's strategic ties with the Arab world.
Political tension
Pakistani attitudes towards Israel
During the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Israel's diplomatic mission in Washington received information that Pakistan was trying to provide military assistance to the Palestinians alongside rumours that a Pakistani military battalion would be sent to Palestine to fight the Israelis. Pakistan had apparently bought 250,000 rifles in Czechoslovakia that were meant for the Arabs, and a later discovery revealed that Pakistan had bought three military-grade aircraft in Italy for the Egyptians.Moshe Yegar, "Pakistan and Israel", Jewish Political Studies Review 19:3–4 (Fall 2007)
The Pakistan Air Force sent a group of its fighter pilots to engage the Israelis in combat during the 1967 Six-Day War and the 1973 Yom Kippur War, greatly bolstering the Palestinians who were suffering repeated defeats to the Israel Defense Forces. A Pakistani fighter pilot, Saiful Azam, had shot down at least four Israeli fighter planes during the Six-Day War. After the Yom Kippur War, Pakistan and the PLO signed an agreement for training PLO officers in Pakistani military institutions.Mushahid Hussain, "How Pakistan Views Israel and the Palestinians", Middle East International, September 1988, 21; P. R. Kumaraswamy, Beyond the Veil: Israel–Pakistan Relations (Tel Aviv: Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, Tel Aviv University, 2000), 34 During the 1982 Israel-Lebanon War, irregular Pakistani volunteers served in the PLO and 50 were taken prisoner during the Siege of Beirut.
The relationship between Pakistan and Israel continued to be ridden with hostilities following these direct engagements, and when Mossad was unable to stop Pakistan's nuclear weapons program from making major developments, a plan to bomb Pakistani nuclear facilities in a similar fashion to Operation Opera was authorized. Israel subsequently made contact with India in an effort to gain support and secure a launching point for Israel's aircraft. However, India refused to allow Israeli aircraft to station on its soil, whereas Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency had discovered the plan and prepared suicidal one-way retaliatory measures to bomb strategic sites in Israel.India Thwarts Israeli Destruction of Pakistan's "Islamic Bomb", McNair Paper Number 41, Radical Responses to Radical Regimes: Evaluating Preemptive Counter-Proliferation, May 1995
According to Time Magazine, French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy said that Daniel Pearl, a Jewish American journalist, was assassinated by elements with backing from Pakistan's ISI over his alleged role in attempting to gather information linking a continued relationship between the ISI and the Taliban. According to other reports from BBC and Time, Pakistani militants murdered him because of their belief that Pearl was an Israeli Mossad agent who had infiltrated Pakistan under the cover of being an American journalist.
Pakistan's religiously-oriented political parties such as Jamaat-e-Islami and militant groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba fiercely oppose any relationship with Israel, and have repeatedly called for the destruction of Israel due to its standing as an alleged sworn enemy of Pakistan. Currently, as Pakistan refuses to recognize Israel until a viable solution is reached with Palestine, all Pakistani citizens are unable to travel to Israel, with Pakistani passports bearing an inscription outlining the invalidity of the passport for this purpose.Canada Immigration Info' - FAQs, Info' available as answer for the question "Are some passports better to have than others?".
Tashbih Sayyed was a well-known Pakistani-American scholar and Zionist who openly expressed his support for relations between Israel and Pakistan in many of his columns and writings throughout his journalistic career.
Israeli attitudes towards Pakistan In the 1980s, Israel was said to have planned, with or without Indian assistance, a possible attack on Pakistan's nuclear facilities that would be reminiscent of the Israeli attack previously carried out on an Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981. Using satellite imagery and intelligence information, Israel reportedly built a full-scale mock-up of the Kahuta nuclear facility in the Negev desert region where Israeli pilots in F-16 and F-15 squadrons practiced mock attacks.
According to The Asian Age, British journalists Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark stated in their book Deception: Pakistan, the US and the Global Weapons Conspiracy that the Israeli Air Force was to launch an air attack on Pakistan's nuclear facility in Kahuta sometime during the mid-1980s from an airfield in Jamnagar, Gujarat, India. The book claims that "in March 1984, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi signed off (on) the Israeli-led operation bringing India, Pakistan and Israel to within a hair's breadth of a nuclear conflagration". Israel's plan met with disapproval from some Indian officials on the grounds that Israel would not face any major consequences after the strike while India would surely face full-scale retaliation—possibly nuclear—from Pakistan for its involvement in the Israeli attack. The plan was discouraged out of the fear of a fourth Indo-Pakistani war starting as a consequence of this operation, and was shelved indefinitely after Indira Gandhi was assassinated in 1984.
A paper published in the U.S. Air Force Air University system—India Thwarts Israeli Destruction of Pakistan's "Islamic Bomb"—also confirmed this plan's existence. It stated that "Israeli interest in destroying Pakistan's Kahuta reactor to scuttle the 'Islamic bomb' was blocked by India's refusal to grant landing and refuelling rights to Israeli warplanes in 1982." India's refusal to cooperate forced Israel—which on its part wanted the attack to be a joint Indian-Israeli strike to avoid being held solely responsible—to drop the plan.
In October 2015, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu cancelled his booking at a dine-in hotel in New York City, due to the fact that Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was dining in at the same time to avoid a confrontation over what Sharif stated to be "Israel's naked brutality in Palestine".
Intelligence cooperation
Despite their hostilities, both countries are reported to have directorates to deal with each other at an intelligence level. The history of Israeli–Pakistani intelligence cooperation dates back to at least the early 1980s, when Pakistani President Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq directed the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) to establish contact with Israel's Mossad.Charlie Wilson's War: The Extraordinary Story of How the Wildest Man in Congress and a Rogue CIA Agent Changed the History of Our Times, by George Crile, Grove Press, 2007, Chapter 10. Intelligence offices were set up at both countries' embassies in Washington, where the ISI, MI6, CIA and Mossad ran a decade-long anti-Soviet operation in Afghanistan, codenamed Operation Cyclone., mirrored at During this operation, Israel supplied Soviet-made weaponry (seized from Palestinian militants) to the Afghan mujahideen, who were waging guerrilla warfare against the Soviet military following its invasion of Afghanistan. Pakistan and Israel cooperated very closely during the entirety of the conflict and the Pakistani military—which was covertly engaging Soviet aircraft (by posing as an Afghan rebel force) and providing the mujahideen with funds and weapons—received a generous amount of Israeli armaments and aid as a result.
WikiLeaks, in a disclosed United States diplomatic cable, revealed that around early 2008, Pakistan's ISI had secretly passed on vital intelligence and data to Israel's Mossad. The ISI had intercepted information alluding to a possible major attack by terrorists in Mumbai, India that Israeli citizens may be targeted in. This turned out to be a valid report as on 26 November 2008, the notorious Mumbai terrorist attacks were carried out by Lashkar-e-Taiba, a terrorist group which had, among other targets, attacked a Jewish centre known as the Nariman House. Following these attacks, It was reported that Pakistani Lieutenant-General Ahmad Shuja Pasha was in direct contact with Israel's Mossad.
During the Cold War, Israel was part of the United States-led Western Bloc to which non-aligned Pakistan was allied, whereas non-aligned India was allied to the Soviet Union-led Eastern Bloc. Consequently, India supported the Soviets in Afghanistan as well as the pro-Soviet Afghan leader Mohammad Najibullah. American-allied Pakistan and Israel strongly opposed the Soviet invasion, and Israel and the United States ran arms and funds to and through Pakistan in support of the Afghan mujahideen. Israel had captured the Soviet armaments from Palestinian and other Arab groups (who were all supported by the Soviet Union) from previous conflicts.
Normalization of ties
Discussions on Diplomatic ties