Nakba 2025 The missing link in Trump’s Gulf agenda

Palestinians leaving their villages in 1948 following warnings from Zionist terrorists who carried out massacres in Dier Yassin and other Palestinian villages

How many Nakba days do we have to commemorate before freedom day dawns for the shackled Palestinians who are going through indescribable suffering at the hands of the world’s most brutal regime, Israel?

Al Nakba means ‘the catastrophe’. It began in 1948, months before Israel declared itself an independent country, the outcome of the 20th century’s worst colonial crime, stemming from the sinister Balfour Declaration, which imperial Britain high-handedly issued in 1917.

Every year, on May 15, the Palestinians mourn Al Nakba, an event that marked the massacre of hundreds of people and ethnic cleansing of some 750,000 Palestinian Arabs from some 530 cities and villages, 77 years ago.

Dier Yassin was not only a site of a notorious massacre. But it was also the seed the Zionist terrorists sowed and reared with Palestinian blood to eat the evil fruit of what they sowed. Like a cancer, the accursed fruit, however, destroys whatever good is left in the Zionist bosom and makes them sociopathic war criminals. It makes them believe that it is kosher to dehumanise and kill Palestinians.

On April 9, 1948, Zionist terror gangs Irgun and Stern Gang (Lehi) raided Dier Yassin, which lay outside the area allocated to Israel under the 1947 United Nations partition resolution. The terrorists lined up the men and boys and gunned down more than 100 of them to give a warning that if the Palestinians would not leave their villages and go elsewhere, they would be killed.

Witnessing similar horrors were Lydda, Ramle, Safad, Acre, Haifa, Jaffa, Beersheba and more than 500 villages. Today these Palestinian villages are part of Israel and are not even recognised as ‘occupied Palestinian territory’—a label, in a preposterous travesty of justice, applies only to territories Israel has been occupying since the 1967 war. For the sake of peace, the Palestinians, in an act of unsung generosity, make no claims to the pre-1967 Nakba territories. Yet, in symbolic defiance, the descendants of displaced Palestinian families still possess the corroding keys to the houses from which their parents and grandparents were ousted.

When the first Nakba was happening in 1948, the world was still recovering from the horrors of the Second World War. The world powers had set up the United Nations with the strong resolve to see never again a destructive war, another Holocaust, and crimes against humanity. 

Yet, when the 1948 Nakba horror happened, there was little international outcry. The imperial West and even the socialist Soviet Union, on the contrary, sided with Israel. Evident was then the same indifference the imperial West shamefully displays today in the face of the ongoing Gaza genocide—the live-streamed Nakba—that has seen nearly 52-70,000 Palestinian deaths, including more than 20,000 Palestinian children. 

Nakba was the Palestinian equivalent of the Holocaust. Renowned British historian Arnold J. Toynbee said, “The treatment of the Palestinian Arabs in 1947 (and 1948) was as morally indefensible as the slaughter of six million Jews by the Nazis. Though not comparable in quantity to the crimes of the Nazis, it was comparable in quality.”

It was only after the first Arab-Israel war that the UN appointed Count Folke Bernadotte, a well-known Swedish humanitarian who had saved thousands of Jews during the Nazi Holocaust, to recommend a peaceful solution to the conflict. As part of his peace plan, he proposed a halt to Jewish immigration and the return of the Palestinians who were expelled from their homes during Nakba. The Zionists saw his proposals as a threat to their expansionism. On September 17, 1948, while Count Bernadotte was in Jerusalem, a member of the Zionist terror group, the Stern Gang (Lehi), assassinated him. Among the terrorists who orchestrated the assassination was Yitzhak Shamir. He later became Israel’s prime minister, rubbing shoulders with hypocritical Western leaders who politicise democracy and human rights to further their malicious national interests. 

It is becoming increasingly evident that the ongoing genocide in Gaza has been designed to make the territory uninhabitable and force its population to leave. The United States President, Donald Trump, who is trying to project himself as a peace president worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize, came up with a horrendous proposal to convert the Gaza Strip into a Riviera after the mass eviction of 2.2 million people into Egypt’s Sinai desert. Gaza’s battered Palestinians stayed put and defiantly displayed their resolve that they would rather die in Gaza than move into Sinai.

As President Trump visited the Gulf capitals of Riyadh, Doha and Abu Dhabi this week, in Gaza, less than an hour’s flight duration, funerals were held for more than 140 Palestinians, including children, killed in Israel’s indiscriminate bombings of hospitals and civilian areas. 

Yet, in speeches made during the Gulf visit, Trump did not call on the child killers to stop, though he boasted about his intervention to stop the India-Pakistan conflict, his peace efforts to bring Russia and Ukraine to the negotiating table, and the talks he is offering to Iran to resolve the nuclear crisis. Conspicuously absent from his bombast was a mention about ceasefire in Gaza, though he bragged that he managed to secure the release of an American-Israeli hostage from Hamas captivity. He did not ask Israel to lift the blockade on Gaza, and the omission appears deliberate.

During his visit to the Gulf, Trump signed deals worth a mindboggling US$ 3 trillion for contracts ranging from defence and artificial intelligence to aviation and energy. Sadly, the Gulf leaders who could endear the US president with trillions of dollars could not send a single loaf of bread to the Gaza Strip to save the starving Palestinians who haven’t seen an aid truck for more than 70 days. As Israel continues its blockade and uses starvation as a weapon of genocide, hapless parents watch their children becoming just skin and bones, deprived of food. Already some 60 children have died due to hunger, prompting UN Humanitarian Affairs Chief Tom Fletcher to call on the Security Council this week to act decisively to prevent the genocide. The scenes of pot-carrying children, some barely five years old, scrambling for a morsel of food at Gaza’s last few community kitchens are heart-rending, to say the least.

While Israel, unchallenged by any world power, intensifies its genocide in Gaza, the vulgar display of opulence during Trump’s Gulf visit cannot be more revolting. However, some may say it was all part of diplomacy. Then a question arises: will the diplomatic gains that the Gulf leaders make with their multitrillion-dollar contracts be channelled toward peace in Palestine? Past records, however, betray those hopes. 

Meanwhile, Nakba continues. Nakba is not only what happened in 1948 or what is happening in the Gaza Strip. Nakba is also the failure of world leaders to end the genocide. Some say Nakba is also the moral impropriety with which the Arab leaders embrace Trump, disregarding US complicity in the Gaza genocide. But we hope that is not the case. We hope that what we witnessed this week in Riyadh, Doha, and Abu Dhabi showcases the Gulf leaders’ ingenuity, in which lies a reinvigorated diplomatic clout—one they will wield to end the suffering of the brotherly Palestinian people and bring about peace in the region.