At a demonstration in Ramallah this week, a woman holds a mockup of a traditional key, symbolising the homes from which Palestinians were forced to leave in 1948 at gunpoint during the Nakba. AFP
Very little has changed in the shameful conduct of the civilised West. The West was an accomplice or a perpetrator 78 years ago when the Nakba—or catastrophe—struck Palestine, with Zionist terror gangs massacring hundreds of Palestinians and uprooting 800,000 indigenous people from more than 500 villages. Today the West—with the exception of a few countries—contributes in many ways to the genocide of Palestinians.
The Nakba continues. The difference between then and now lies only in the cruelty and barbarism with which it is perpetrated. The Nakba is expanding and has now reached Lebanon.
The beast speaks only the language of genocide. It has no conscience, no empathy, no sense of justice. Its only goal is to devour as many Palestinians as possible and ethnically cleanse Palestine—or whatever is left of it—and claim the territory as its own. It is not bothered about the illegality or immorality of its acts, because the beast—the Zionist regime of Israel—is loved, pampered, and sustained by powerful Western nations. They don the cloak of morality to portray themselves as paragons of virtue but have no qualms about resorting to deception. In their immoral diplomacy, injustice against Palestinians is portrayed as justice, war as peace, and genocide as Israel’s right to defend itself.
The Nakba exploded in a genocide that began on October 7, 2023, following a Hamas retaliatory attack on an Israeli settlement along the Gaza border. Most Western countries support the genocide in Gaza by supplying weapons and economic aid to Israel. The United States, for instance, has given Israel more than US$22 billion in the past two years from US taxpayers’ money to carry out its genocide on Palestinian civilians. More than 80,000 Palestinians, including 20,000 children—most under the age of 12—have perished. The killings continue despite a ceasefire that allows Israel to kill and maim Palestinians whenever it chooses. US financial assistance has amounted to almost 70 per cent of the cost of the Gaza war. No amount of penance by US President Donald Trump, in the form of peacemaking with a dubious board of peace—still a non-starter—could absolve the United States of the crime.
Britain’s complicity lies in its blind support of the Israeli genocidal regime and the deployment of reconnaissance planes over Gaza for intelligence sharing with Israel. Its recognition of Palestine as a state amidst the genocide serves as a mere facade to conceal its crime.
Also complicit in the genocide is Germany, which should have been at the forefront of a global campaign to bring peace to Palestine, given its culpability in World War II crimes. Disregarding appeals from global peace groups, it supplies the lethal weapons Israel requires to massacre Palestinians.
The Nakba is not merely an allegation born of Palestinian imagination. It is a living reality that the West and Israel tried to erase from the people’s memory. The Nakba was omitted from history classes. If it was taught, a distorted version was presented as the truth. Even today, the Western media hardly mentions the word “Nakba”. If it does, it hides the context.
The context begins with the Ottoman Empire’s defeat in World War I—a war it might have won if not for the Arab betrayal. Palestine fell into the hands of Britain. Sharif Hussain, the Ottoman-appointed governor of Hejaz and a key protagonist in the British-engineered Arab betrayal, believed Palestine would be part of the new state the British had promised him. The Balfour Declaration shattered those hopes.
In Ottoman Palestine, Jews comprised only 4 per cent of the population. When World War I ended, they made up 11 per cent, largely due to the arrival of European Ashkenazi Jews, who traced their ancestry more to Eastern Europe than to Palestine. This migration aligned with the Zionist ideology of Theodor Herzl and Chaim Weizmann.
In its submission to South Africa’s genocide case against Israel in the International Court of Justice in 2024, the Arab League explained, “The legal right of self-determination of the Palestinian people originates in the ‘sacred trust’ obligations of Article 22 of the League of Nations Covenant, part of the Versailles Treaty. Palestine—an ‘A’ class Mandate under British colonial rule—was, after the First World War, supposed to have its existence as an independent state ‘provisionally recognised’: a sui generis right of self-determination. The United Kingdom and other members of the League Council attempted to bypass this, incorporating the 1917 Balfour Declaration commitment to establishing a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine into the instrument stipulating how the Mandate would operate.”
Violence followed, as Zionist terror gangs massacred unarmed Palestinians. Survivors living in Gaza and refugee camps across neighbouring countries like Lebanon and Jordan still carry the corroding keys of their houses in Palestine as a symbol of resistance.
Thanks to Palestinian resistance and scholarship that emphasises the critical study of history, the Nakba, with all its gruesome details, refuses to be erased—though historians with academic integrity, such as Edward Said and Ilan Pappe, continue to face challenges. To erase the Nakba, Israel spends more than US$730 million a year on Hasbara—propaganda.
With such vast sums available, Israel employs social media sycophants—whether psychopaths or mercenaries—who whitewash its crimes. Many of those leading the disinformation campaign are right-wing Hindu nationalists from India. They consider it an act of patriotism to support Israel’s genocide, while Prime Minister Narendra Modi elevates Israel to the status of India’s fatherland, taking sycophancy to revolting levels.
In Sri Lanka, too, the dollars Israel directs to bootlickers create a loud presence on social media. Their posts lack substance but drip with hatred and Islamophobia—a global campaign Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu devised in the late 1980s to demonise Islam and Muslims as the new enemies not only of the West but of humanity at large. Thanks to Hasbara, the role of Israeli intelligence in handling ISIS, al-Qaeda, and other extremist groups that taint the image of Islam is less often spoken of or exposed.
The Nakba continues not only because of Israel’s expansionist policy and the support it receives from Western allies, but also because of the collusion and silence of some Arab countries. Their silence amounts to complicity: a silence louder than the sound of the bunker buster bombs Israel drops and more painful than the bullet and shrapnel wounds inflicted on Palestinian children, who are starved of food and deprived of medicine.
With apologies to Grantland Rice, his famous poem is twisted to remind today’s Arab leaders: “For when the One Great Scorer comes to mark against your name, he writes—not that you signed the Abraham Accords with Israel and uttered empty words, but what you did to end Palestinian suffering, genocide, and the Nakba.”
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