TEHRAN – In 1917, British Foreign Minister Arthur Balfour set the stage for a tragedy that is still bleeding, and there is no light at the end of the tunnel.

Balfour, a Christian Zionist, supported the creation of a Zionist regime on Palestinian lands at a time when Britain, at the height of its colonial power, occupied and controlled Palestine under its mandate.

The fire that Balfour triggered is still burning with much greater flames. It did not remain confined to Palestine. Its flames immediately spread to neighboring states, including Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. In fact, it affected the entire Arab world. 

The vicious colonial plan, which led to the establishment of Israel in May 1948, 18 years after the death of Balfour, is known as the Nakba (catastrophe) in the Arabic language. It is commemorated every year as Nakba Day.  

Following the establishment of Israel, of the 1.4 million-strong Palestinian population at the time, 800,000 were displaced and never allowed to return to their homes. 

In fact, Balfour exported evil and tragedy to the West Asia region.

In modern history, such a plan in which one nation is replaced by settlers from hundreds of miles away is unprecedented. Today, after more than 500 years, we have Native Americans, but Israel is planning to erase what remains of the Palestinian descendants. 

Before the creation of Israel, the native inhabitants of Palestine – Jews and Arabs – were living in peace. According to history books and famous scholars, including Jewish researchers, it was the Europeans who did not treat Jews well, and the term anti-Semitism originates from Europe. 
 
Despite the passage of 78 years, the tragedy of creating Israel in West Asia is getting more complicated and more horrific. No conflict in the 20th century lasted for the entire two decades. Even the famous Vietnam War lasted 19 years, 5 months, and 29 days. 

Following the October 7 attack, Israel has expedited the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians both in Gaza and the West Bank. It is purging Palestinians in different ways, either through appropriating the remaining Palestinian lands in the West Bank, or killing them en masse in the Gaza Strip.
 
“This year, with more than 450,000 people—nearly a quarter of Gaza’s population—newly displaced in just the past week, the commemoration of the Nakba takes on new significance,” the Time magazine wrote in January 2026.

The dimensions of the Nakba is getting wider and wider. In addition, to Gaza and the West Bank, Lebanon is bleeding. Israeli rulers, including Prime Minister Netanyahu, are openly speaking of “Greater Israel,” a plan for the conquest of not just Palestine but also parts of Egypt, Jordan, and potentially other countries.

In August 2025, Netanyahu said he feels “very” attached to the vision of “Greater Israel”. In an interview with Israeli outlet i24, Netanyahu said in Hebrew that he is on a “historic and spiritual” mission to extend the borders of Israel.

When the leader of the regime talks and behaves in this way, imagine what the extremists do. 

According to the Institute for National Security Studies, a think tank affiliated with Tel Aviv University, the scope of Jewish terrorism against Palestinians living in the West Bank “has evolved from marginal, localized incidents into a widespread phenomenon occurring within the broader struggle for control of the area and a growing effort to uproot the Palestinian presence.

Similarities of atrocities from 1948 until this date
 
“They (Palestinians) witnessed rapes, imprisonment of men and boys, and almost all of them witnessed the destruction of major cultural sites,” Professor Abdel Razzaq Takriti, who teaches modern Palestinian and Arabic History at Rice University, says of the start of Nakba. 

“There were attacks on water sources; Akka [also known as Acre], for example, was subjected to biological warfare. Their water was poisoned to try to force the populations out,” Takriti says. “The idea was to have as much land appropriated with the fewest Palestinian population remaining as possible.” Further attempts to poison water supplies in Gaza were thwarted when Egyptian officials found out, says Takriti.

At the beginning of the attack on Gaza after the October 7 attack, then Israeli war minister Yoav Gallant ordered the closure of water, food and other essential items to Gaza and called its inhabitant human “animals”.

On May 11, the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof also recounted the brutal rape of Palestinians described to him on a trip to the occupied West Bank.

Middle East Eye also revealed similar testimonies last month. In a report titled “Sexual violence and forcible transfer in the West Bank”, MEE laid bare the spiteful plan to dispirit the Palestinians to force them to leave their homeland.

It should be borne in mind that after the collapse of the British empire, which is responsible for planting Israel in the heart of the Middle East, it has been the United States that has been complicit in enabling Israel to go on with the Nakba by providing advanced weapons to it and protecting it at the United Nations Security Council. 

“The Nakba never ended,” U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib said in a statement on Thursday as she reintroduced a resolution recognizing the 78th anniversary of the Nakba and reaffirming the right of return for Palestinian refugees.

“Today, the Israeli apartheid regime is committing genocide in Gaza, violently erasing entire communities across the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem, and bombing Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. It is a campaign to erase Palestinians from existence.”

Tlaib said Netanyahu and his regime are seeking to permanently displace Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and expand military threats into southern Lebanon.

History is repeating itself in the occupied territories, as if the Nakba is beginning anew—only now, it is even more depraved. The atrocities committed against Palestinians in those early years mirror the current violence in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

Despite the passage of decades and a global shift toward prioritizing human rights, the Zionist movement in Israel has only grown more extremist.