Why do Israel and Pakistan fight?

They don’t. Pakistan and India have repressed issues however.

I don’t really understand your question. Israel has never directly fought Pakistan.

Israel has fought its Arab neighbors since its inception, mostly because for a long time they refused to accept Israel had a right to exist.

The fighting in Pakistan is, if I understand it similar to the fighting the Native Americans did before the advent of Columbus. It is almost a sport. It is something to do to pass the time waiting for the crops to grow.

Are you sure you didn’t mean the “Palestinians” and not “Pakistan”?

The Muslims in India went to Pakistan when India was partitioned. Pakistan covertly supports al Qaeda

@anartist is correct as we have observed. And this is well known by other groups as well.

@WestRiverrat “The fighting in Pakistan is, if I understand it similar to the fighting the Native Americans did before the advent of Columbus. It is almost a sport. It is something to do to pass the time waiting for the crops to grow.”

Excuse me? Do you have something to back that up? Some that allows you to construct an argument that Native Americans fought one another merely as sport, as a way to “pass the time waiting for the crops to grow?” Which Native Americans? What tribes, what nations? And regarding Pakistan… in what way do you mean the the “fighting” there is something similar to whatever it is you are saying about Native American? Whatever it is… whatever it is that you have provided no background on, no documentation supporting and no real argument in defense of whatever it is you are saying?

I don’t know why I put Pakistan. I think I was listening to NPR and there was something about Pakistan. I meant Palestinians. I wonder if we can delete this question? Mods? Anyone?

Do not disregard Pakistan. They have or are close to having nuclear weapons. And there is no love for Israel or the United States.

To my understanding, taking your modification into account (Palestine over Pakistan), the “reason” for Israelis and Palestinians fighting is highly complex and goes back thousands of years to Abraham and his two sons: Isaac and Ishmael. I would argue that it is essentially the most intense and nuanced case of sibling rivalry in our history.
As time has gone on, the fight gets more and more complicated by present-day clashes, but it began biblically (both groups feel they are the great nation God promised) and has, sadly, never been reconciled.

Obama and Netanyahu: Worlds Apart on Israel
Thursday, August 12, 2010 10:20 AM
By: George Will

JERUSALEM — Two photographs adorn the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Together they illuminate a portentous fact: No two leaders of democracies are less alike — in life experiences, temperaments and political philosophies — than Netanyahu, the former commando and fierce nationalist, and Barack Obama, the former professor and post-nationalist.

One photograph is of Theodor Herzl, born 150 years ago. Dismayed by the eruption of anti-Semitism in France during the Dreyfus Affair at the end of the 19th century, Herzl became Zionism’s founding father. Long before the Holocaust, he concluded that Jews could find safety only in a national homeland.

The other photograph is of Winston Churchill, who considered himself “one of the authors” of Britain’s embrace of Zionism. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 stated: “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” Beginning in 1923, Britain would govern Palestine under a League of Nations mandate.

Netanyahu, his focus firmly on Iran, honors Churchill because he did not flinch from facts about gathering storms. Obama returned to the British Embassy in Washington the bust of Churchill that was in the Oval Office when he got there.

Obama’s 2009 speech in Cairo, courting the Arab world, may have had measurable benefits, although the metric proving this remains mysterious. The speech — made during a trip when Obama visited Cairo and Riyadh but not here — certainly subtracted from his standing in Israel. In it, he acknowledged Israel as, in part, a response to Jewish suffering in the Holocaust.

Then, with what many Israelis considered a deeply offensive exercise of moral equivalence, he said: “On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people — Muslims and Christians — have suffered in pursuit of a homeland.”

“On the other hand”? “I,” says Moshe Yaalon, “was shocked by the Cairo speech,” which he thinks proved that “this White House is very different.” Yaalon, former head of military intelligence and chief of the general staff, currently strategic affairs minister, tartly asks, “If Palestinians are victims, who are the victimizers?”

The Cairo speech came 10 months after Obama’s Berlin speech in which he declared himself a “citizen of the world.” That was an oxymoronic boast, given that citizenship connotes allegiance to a particular polity, its laws and political processes. But the boast resonated in Europe.

The European Union was born from the flight of Europe’s elites from what terrifies them — Europeans. The first Thirty Years’ War ended in 1648 with the Peace of Westphalia, which ratified the system of nation-states. The second Thirty Years’ War, which ended in 1945, convinced European elites that the continent’s nearly fatal disease was nationalism, the cure for which must be the steady attenuation of nationalities. Hence the high value placed on “pooling” sovereignty, never mind the cost in diminished self-government.

Israel, with its deep sense of nationhood, is beyond unintelligible to such Europeans; it is a stench in their nostrils. Transnational progressivism is, as much as welfare state social democracy, an element of European politics that American progressives will emulate as much as American politics will permit.

It is perverse that the European Union, a semi-fictional political entity, serves — with the United States, the reliably anti-Israel U.N., and Russia — as part of the “quartet” that supposedly will broker peace in our time between Israel and the Palestinians.

Arguably the most left-wing administration in American history is trying to knead and soften the most right-wing coalition in Israel’s history. The former shows no understanding of the latter, which thinks it understands the former all too well.

The prime minister honors Churchill, who spoke of “the confirmed unteachability of mankind.” Nevertheless, a display case in Netanyahu’s office could teach the Obama administration something about this leader. It contains a small signet stone that was part of a ring found near the Western Wall. It is about 2,800 years old — 200 years younger than Jerusalem’s role as the Jewish people’s capital. The ring was the seal of a Jewish official, whose name is inscribed on it: Netanyahu.

No one is less a transnational progressive, less a post-nationalist, than Benjamin Netanyahu, whose first name [Binyamin] is that of a son of Jacob, who lived perhaps 4,000 years ago. Netanyahu, who no one ever called cuddly, once said to a U.S. diplomat 10 words that should warn U.S. policymakers who hope to make Netanyahu malleable: “You live in Chevy Chase. Don’t play with our future.”