There is pressure,” the prime minister told an interviewer some two weeks ago, “because Israel has a large impact on America,” but that he’d never recognise it (the source of the said pressure was left unsaid.

Pakistan was a mass movement for the subcontinent’s Muslims to breathe free, and it became the world’s largest Muslim-majority state at birth. “Pakistan was of course nothing like Israel in this particular respect,” wrote historian David Gilmartin, “for the areas that became Pakistan were already occupied by tens of millions of the Muslims in whose name the state was created.”

Zafrullah Khan, the Quaid’s foreign minister, opposed Palestine’s partition for the same reasons at the UN.  By contrast, Israel was the result of a settler militia driving out 700,000 Palestinians from their homes, and cleansing many more from the adjoining areas — Mr Sharon participated by lobbing grenades and getting shot in the groin and stomach.

The cry of ‘a land without a people for a people without a land’ is a Zionist fairytale; just as calling Pakistan a ‘Muslim Zion’ is, in the words of Mr Gilmartin, an act of historical erasure.