A friend commented on the evening of October 7th 2023 with these words: “The Balfourian era is over today!”
He was referring to the British foreign minister Arthur Balfour, who decided in 1917 to grant Palestine to European Jews without consulting the opinion of the country’s natives
Balfour died physically a long time ago, but the illegitimate Balfour child was planted, grew up, and grew in the land of Palestine like a thorn in the middle of a flower garden.
A French journalist described Israel to me years ago by saying that Israel is like a snake in the house garden, you are not able to kill it and you are not able to live in peace with it.
Whatever the analogies and metaphors, the fact is that Israel is the last colonial plantation in the world after the disappearance of the apartheid system in South Africa.
Since the time of Balfour, much water has flowed under the bridge. The imperial powers have shaped the Middle East between two equations. First, the Sykes-Picot equation that divided the region, and the second, the Balfour equation.
Since those times, the struggle in the region has focused on canceling the effects of these two equations, but without success.
On the contrary, Israel has expanded more and has become so powerful that it has become an imperial extension in the heart of the Middle East, and this is what explains Biden’s saying that if there were no Israel, it would be necessary to create it in order to protect American interests.
But the storm of October came to change a lot of the climate of the Balfourian stage. The war proved that Israel is not able to protect itself in the face of a few thousand fighters, so how can it protect American interests? On the contrary, Israel has become a burden on America and the West.
The leaders of Israel realized this, so they began to play the game of culture by saying that they are defending Western culture in the face of (the barbarian world), and this is a new old game that Herzl started by saying that he is seeking to build a wall to protect the West from barbarism.
Using the war of cultures is an Israeli policy par excellence, its goal is to create a rift between the Islamic East and the West in order to benefit from it.
But if the governments of the West support Israel, the Western peoples are not all. The youth generation in the West has risen up to demonstrate against the genocide war waged by Israel, and a public opinion poll in America indicates that 51% of the youth generation supports the removal of the entire racist Israeli entity. These are developments that would not have been possible before October 7th.
There is no doubt that the war is complex and may take a long time. There is no doubt that Israel still enjoys broad support from Western governments. But the world after October 7th is not the same as it was before. This war has launched the end of the Balfourian era towards a new stage in the history of the Middle East.
There are events of weeks that may have an impact that extends for decades, as there are events of decades that may have no effect.
Dr Salim Nazzal is a Palestinian Norwegian researcher, lecturer playwright and poet, wrote more than 17 books such as Perspectives on thought, culture and political sociology, in thought, culture and ideology, the road to Baghdad. Palestine in heart.
