From Nakba to Nuclear Brink: How Trump and Netanyahu Made an Iranian Bomb Inevitable

So much has happened, so fast, that it is extremely difficult to make sense of where the world is going. But none of the portents are good. An equally worried American friend asked me whether I had been reading the Economist recently. Despite my having been the India correspondent of the magazine for four years before joining the Prime Minister’s office in 1990,  I had to regrettably answer ‘No’.  My reason was that there is simply too much happening and too much news is being blocked from circulation, especially in the West.  So I had lost my trust in the honesty of “Western” journalism.

But I cannot help reflecting, with growing despair, on how far down the moral slope the US, NATO and Israel have slipped  in the past few months. In November 1946, the Allies hanged a score of Nazi leaders for having participated in, or tolerated, the genocide of millions of European Jews. Today, the Israeli state (which claims leadership of the Jewish world) has been committing genocide for 21 months in Gaza, while the US and its allies have not only been queueing up to talk to Benjamin Netanyahu, but have been undermining each and every attempt to censure and condemn Israel’s mass murdering spree in Gaza whether in the UN Security Council, the General Assembly or the international courts at The Hague.

I wonder how many people in the West saw the findings of a poll by Pennsylvania State University, conducted in March but published in Haaretz (the only humane newspaper left in Israel), on May 22 this year. The poll had found that 82% of Jewish Israelis supported the forced expulsion of all 2 million Palestinians from the Gaza Strip. What is worse, when respondents were asked whether, upon conquering an enemy city, the Israeli army should act in a manner similar to the way the Israelites did when they conquered Jericho under the leadership of Joshua, i.e. kill all its inhabitants, 47% of them answered "yes".

What has become unbearable to me is to see, night after night on Al Jazeera, the heart-rending sorrow and utter hopelessness in the eyes of starving fathers and mothers beside themselves with grief, as they cover their dead children in white shrouds to bury them, and be able to do nothing to end their misery. How are the leaders of the so-called “civilised” nations standing by without uttering a word of condemnation, dealing daily with Israel as if it was a normal country and a valued ally, and writing sage “analyses” that blame Hamas for having pushed Israel over the edge?

With the US and NATO giving their uncritical and unstinting support, Israel has first eliminated the leadership and most of the cadres of Hamas in Lebanon and Syria, and then turned its attention to completing the task that terrorist groups like Irgun, Haganah and the Stern Gang had begun in 1948. This was the  complete expulsion or slaughter of all Palestinians to create Eretz Israel, a nation containing only Jews, and ruled by only Jews. The Palestinians called the resulting slaughter and herding north of more than a million Arabs the Nakba, or catastrophe.

The systematic way in which these terrorist organisations acted in 1948 and the ensuing years has been described by Ilan Pappe in his 2006 book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Pappe is an Israeli historian who continued to live in Israel and fight for justice even after his book was published, but now lives in England and teaches at the University of Exeter.

Also read: Ceasefire Without Closure: How Iran, Israel and the US Have Emerged from 12 Days of Conflict

In his book, Pappe documented how, years before the Nakba (i.e. the forced eviction of Arabs) began, the Zionists had sent spies to every village in 80% of the Palestinian mandate that they coveted and listed every headman, influential person and political notable in it, the number of families and the land each owned. They also listed all those who would resist eviction.

Between 1947 and 1949, Irgun destroyed over 400 Palestinian villages.  Civilians who resisted were massacred and around a million men, women and children were expelled from their homes at gunpoint and forced to flee northwards to Syria and Lebanon.

Today history is repeating itself, only this time with the world watching the slaughter as it finishes its dinner every evening. This is not just a world in disrepair but a world that has lost every vestige of honour and humanity that it once possessed. Readers of this column must be seeing nightly on their television sets how the death toll in Gaza has steadily risen, month after month.

Between  October 7,  2023 and  June 4, 2025, according to the still functioning Ministry of Health (MoH) in Gaza, at least 54,607 Palestinians had been reported killed and 125,341 had been injured. Some scholars believe that is a gross undercount. A recent report in Haaretz estimates the Gaza death toll to be close to 100,000: bodies buried under the rubble have not been recovered and counted, many families buried their dead without first bringing them to hospital, and then there is the excess mortality caused by Israel's relentless bombing.

In those 21 months, Israel‘s so-called “Defence” forces also killed more than 310 team members of UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees and about three score (60) journalists.

When the final count is taken, if one ever takes place, we will find that up to 250,000 men, women and children have already been killed or injured in Gaza,  and the IDF had so completely run out of targets that they were shooting those who were queuing  for the little food that was still getting into that benighted territory.

Let me add one more observation to drain my cup of despair. Netanyahu was speaking the truth when he told the UN General Assembly in 2012, that Iran had traversed 90% of the road to the development of nuclear weapons. What he did not tell the assembled delegates was what the US's Congressional Research Service reported to the US Congress a mere six weeks after Netanyahu’s speech. Which is that Iran had reached 5% enrichment of natural Uranium (U-238)  with the highly fissile U-235 – regarded as the critical threshold for the sprint towards making weapon grade uranium –  as far back as 2003but had made a conscious decision not to go the whole way.

In 2015, as Iran was on the threshold of signing the JCPOA, its foreign minister at the time,  Mohammad Jawad Zarif, explained Iran's reasons for deciding not to make nuclear weapons to a group of journalists and political analysts at the Imperial Hotel in Delhi, at which I was present: "Today,  with conventional arms, we are a far more powerful country than any of our neighbours in the Middle East. We therefore enjoy a strategic advantage over them that keeps us safe. But if we go nuclear they will all ask the USA and Europe to give them a nuclear umbrella. If the US and the West agree, we will lose our strategic advantage over our neighbours.”

Iran therefore decided not to go nuclear and to try instead for the "Grand Bargain" in 2003 that was treated with disdain by then US President George Bush, but did result in the signing of the JCPOA under Barack Obama a dozen years later. This, as we all know, was what Donald Trump, egged on by Netanyahu, destroyed in 2018.

There is one final question that demands an answer. Why, after saying that the US would stay out of the war between Iran and Israel, did Trump send in B-2s without any warning from halfway around the world, to bomb Iran's uranium enrichment sites? Why, in short, did the US join the war on Iran without gaining the consent of the US Congress, or consulting even with its European allies? The only explanation that I can find is Trump’s need to protect Netanyahu from the growing anger among his own citizens, who had begun to panic because of Iran’s incessant and increasingly successful missile attacks, and had started blaming Netanyahu for unnecessarily dragging Iran into the war.

Their panic was probably all the greater because in the 77 years of its existence, Israel has unleashed pain, destruction and death but has almost never been at their receiving end. Israelis are therefore experiencing for the first time a little of the pain and uncertainty of their and their families’ lives that Palestinians have been living with for more than 80 years. When Netanyahu attacked Iran, Teheran’s response destroyed the cocoon of complacency in which Israelis had been living.

Their famous Iron Dome failed to keep all of Iran's missiles out and a great deal of damage and loss of life than has been reported had taken place. What is more, Israel is such a small country that getting out of the cities and finding shelter in the countryside is far more difficult than it would be in Iran, and elsewhere. So the fear of getting trapped in an escalating war, with more missiles raining down every night and few safe places to seek shelter in; of going to sleep at night without being sure they will wake up in the morning, has been a completely new experience for most ordinary Israelis.

It would have been  surprising if this had not begun to sow seeds of panic in them. So the longer the war went on, a greater number of them would have begun to blame Netanyahu for putting their lives and future in danger. Netanyahu could not but have foreseen this possibility. He therefore had to end the war as soon as possible, but do it on Israel's terms. For this, he had to drag the US into the war on Iran, and thanks to Trump’s ignorance and prejudices, he succeeded.

Contrary to the early Zionists, Netanyahu has no illusions, or desire to recreate the largely imagined Israel of antiquity; he has revived the Nakba because it is the only way he can stay out of prison. But whatever gods he worships have blessed him by giving him the most unprincipled and easily corruptible president that the US has had in the 250 years of its existence. So when fear began to settle into Israeli minds, Netanyahu turned to that US president to save him by doing something to allow him to proclaim the end of the Iranian threat, and Trump obliged.

It is worth asking what the bombing of the Natanz, Isfahan and Fordow sites has actually achieved. The absence of radioactive materials in the air above Natanz after the first Israeli bombing suggests that Iran had moved its nuclear stockpiles out of the facility before it was bombed. Similarly, while there is clear photographic evidence that the entrances to the Isfahan and Fordow enrichment facilities have been all but obliterated, the nuclear enrichment facilities deep inside and underground may not have been destroyed. Certainly, this is what the initial US assessment appears to be. Thus restoring access to them and recommencing enrichment may take Iran less than a year

Now that two nuclear armed nations, Israel and the US, have acted in tandem to destroy several Iranian nuclear installations and murder key scientific and military personnel, is there any reason why Iran should still live up to its commitments under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) – a treaty that Israel is not even a member of? 

The Iranian government has remained silent about its future plans vis-a-vis the NPT but has said it is suspending cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency – which monitors compliance with the NPT – and said it “reserves the right to take any steps in defence of its interests, its people, and its sovereignty.”

The plain truth is that Iran – which has already enriched uranium up to 60% – would be hurting itself if it does not now renege on its commitments under the NPT. If Fordow has not been damaged beyond repair, Iran will now almost certainly take up uranium enrichment as soon as the facility has been brought back on line again and go up to the 90-95% enrichment that a weapon requires.

Thus, with Trump’s help, Israel has now created a situation in which Iran will likely never forswear the right to acquire nuclear weapons and might actually take the steps needed to make them.

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