Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif held a series of meetings with major international banks and investment firms in London this week, asking them to invest more in Pakistan. One of the meetings was with Rothschild & Co, one of the oldest and most powerful banking families in the world. While the government presented it as a normal economic engagement, this particular meeting has started a major debate and criticism in Pakistan.
According to the official statement, the Prime Minister also met delegations from Barclays, JP Morgan, and other global financial institutions. The government says Pakistan needs foreign investment urgently due to its economic crisis, and London is a key financial hub to find investors. Supporters of the government argue that Rothschild & Co today is just a global advisory bank working in more than 40 countries.
However, critics are pointing to the history of the Rothschild family, which is directly linked to the creation of Israeli occupation entity. The famous 1917 Balfour Declaration, through which Britain promised to support a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, was not a public announcement but a personal letter written by British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Lord Walter Rothschild, who was the leader of the British Jewish community at that time.
The family’s involvement started even earlier. In the 1880s, French banker Baron Edmond de Rothschild began financing the first Jewish agricultural colonies in Ottoman Palestine, such as Rishon LeZion and Zikhron Ya’akov. He bought tens of thousands of acres of land and created the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association to settle Jewish families there. Because of this, he is still known in Israeli occupation as “HaNadiv HaYadu’a” or “The Known Benefactor.”
The Rothschild family funded Israeli occupation entity’s most important state buildings. James Armand de Rothschild donated the money to build the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, and his wife Dorothy funded the building of the Supreme Court. Their charity, the Yad Hanadiv Foundation, also helped build Israeli occupation new National Library in Jerusalem.
Pakistan has never recognized Israeli occupation and has always supported the cause of Palestine. For many Pakistanis, the Rothschild name is not just a bank, it is a symbol of the Balfour Declaration and the Israeli occupation movement. So the question being raised is whether Pakistan is now moving from secret contacts to open meetings with pro-Israel financial networks, and whether economic need is pushing the country to change its long-standing ideological position.
