Nations usually commemorate moments of triumph and honor. That is why every country celebrates its Independence Day or National Day. Russians commemorate the heroism of Leningrad and Stalingrad and victory over Nazi Germany. Italians celebrate unification. Americans celebrate independence from Britain. The French mark the storming of the Bastille. And so on.
Seventy-eight years after the loss of Palestine, we once again mark the anniversary of the Nakba and the Balfour Declaration. Our collective memory swings each year between catastrophe and defeat. The rest has been a relentless cycle of revolutions, coups and massacres.
After Palestine was lost, loss itself became habit, almost tradition. What remained of Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza was lost as well. Egypt lost Sinai before recovering it. Syria lost the Golan. Lebanon lost Lebanon itself. Israel destroyed its villages, redrew its borders, and still we celebrate.
As we mark the loss of Palestine, we find ourselves negotiating yet another temporary ceasefire in Lebanon. We look around and see Israel’s defense minister threatening Lebanon with Gaza’s fate, then immediately beginning to carry out the threat. Three southern cities are turned into devastated rubble.
Seventy-eight years after Balfour, in 2026, we are haggling over the toll of 3,000 Lebanese killed in a single month and 8,000 wounded. And all this under the label of a ceasefire, not even a war.
Nothing changes in this endless spectacle of paralysis and noise. What I am writing today is the same thing I read, or heard, every day as a boy. Every year I told myself I would not be reading the same words again the following year, that we would finally win a battle, or at least avoid losing the next war.
But nothing in our world seems willing to change. Wars remain wars among ourselves. The road to Jerusalem remains cut off. Everything becomes indistinguishable: death and life, victory and defeat, knowledge and ignorance, hunger and dignity, celebration and disgrace.
The only difference between 1948 and everything that has happened since October 7 is the scale of the catastrophe. In the past, the number of victims was smaller and the tragedies less vast. Today we live in the age of mechanized digital killing, where catastrophe knows no limits.
Nor does the hostility and hatred among ourselves.
All of it unfolds under the same banner: Palestine, the road to Jerusalem, and the cities and villages of the South.
