This project examines Arab views of Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s call for Pakistan—a state for South Asia’s Muslims. In particular, it focuses on Arab concerns that open support for this goal could legitimize Zionist calls for a Jewish state in the Palestine Mandate. It also analyzes the staunch opposition of Jinnah’s pro-Arab Muslim League to suggestions that Pakistan could provide any precedent for Israel. I argue that as various anticolonial groups in India, Pakistan, and Palestine drew closer to power, they took great care in the kinds of comparisons they made, or allowed others to make, between their cases. This argument is significant because it highlights the difficulties that transcolonial or transnational alliances can pose. It is therefore relevant to today’s world, in which the Tunisian and Egyptian regime changes demonstrate the power of such alliances—power that can sometimes lead to unintended consequences. In a mid-1947 interview with Jinnah in the Egyptian newspaper Akhbar al-Yaum, Taqiuddin al-Solh emphasized “the difficulties for the Arabs if they approved Indian Muslims’ stand on the partition because their approval of this principle would provide justification to the Zionist for partitioning Palestine.” Jinnah and his top advisors understood the Arab position well. After Pakistan’s independence, its Foreign Minister, Zafrullah Khan, made several eloquent pro-Arab speeches during the November 1947 debate over the partition plan proposed by the United Nation Special Commission of Palestine, emphasizing differences between the situation in South Asia and that in Palestine. The story this paper tells is that of a delicate dance between allies eager to support each other where possible without damaging their own causes. Focusing on the crucial years after World War II, this paper is part of a larger project examining imperial and anti-colonial links between South Asia and Palestine during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Transcolonial history—a focus on the flow of people and ideas across colonial and mandatory boundaries—provides my methodological framework. My conclusions rest on primary sources gathered from published Palestinian sources, in English and in Arabic, and from archival research in Britain, the United States, and Israel. The most useful sources have been correspondence and memoirs of nationalist leaders, British government documents, and interviews shedding light on Palestinian memories of the years leading up to 1948. By the time I present this paper I will have completed additional archival research in India (and possibly Pakistan, depending on the security situation there).