At the Riyadh Arab-China summit on Friday, the Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas demanded that the UK and the U.S. apologize for the Balfour Declaration, and that Israel apologize for the nakba (i.e., the “catastrophe” that befell Palestinian Arabs in 1948). Of a piece with this rhetorical focus on past grievances was the UN General Assembly’s recent vote to mark May 15 as “Nakba Day.” Adi Schwartz comments:

Contrary to popular belief in the West (and in certain circles in Israel), Nakba Day was not intended to mark the alleged humanitarian disaster that befell the Palestinian people in the 1948 war. They do not mourn the dead, the wounded, or the exiled, but the very establishment of the Jewish state. They mourn Jews gaining independence rather than the human cost of the war.

The term nakba was coined by the Syrian Arab intellectual Constantin Zureiq in a book he wrote in the summer of 1948 titled “The Meaning of Disaster.” Analyzing the Arab response to their failure to prevent the establishment of Israel, he wrote, “Seven Arab states declare war on Zionism in Palestine, stop impotent before it, and turn on their heels.”

The thought that 600,000 Jews managed to defeat 60 million Muslim Arabs at the time was—and still is—unimaginable to the Arabs. This is the greatest humiliation, the source of the frustration, rage, and violence directed toward the state of Israel. This is the true meaning of “nakba,” the disaster of the Jews’ success to declare a state despite all the efforts by the Arabs to prevent them from doing so.

The fact that Palestinians commemorate Nakba Day on May 15 is a clear indication of this. If the occasion was truly meant to remember the casualties among Palestinians, they could have a day that had more meaning loss-wise, such as the fighting in the Deir Yassin village or the day when Arab Haifa fell to the Jews. These events had a great impact on the course of the war, and they reflect a real Palestinian loss. But on May 15, nothing happened but the very declaration of Israel’s independence.

Early Friday morning, Israel attacked military installations near the Iranian cities of Isfahan and nearby Natanz, the latter being one of the hubs of the country’s nuclear program. Jerusalem is not taking credit for the attack, and none of the details are too certain, but it seems that the attack involved multiple drones, likely launched from within Iran, as well as one or more missiles fired from Syrian or Iraqi airspace. Strikes on Syrian radar systems shortly beforehand probably helped make the attack possible, and there were reportedly strikes on Iraq as well.

Iran itself is downplaying the attack, but the S-300 air-defense batteries in Isfahan appear to have been destroyed or damaged. This is a sophisticated Russian-made system positioned to protect the Natanz nuclear installation. In other words, Israel has demonstrated that Iran’s best technology can’t protect the country’s skies from the IDF. As Yossi Kuperwasser puts it, the attack, combined with the response to the assault on April 13,

clarified to the Iranians that whereas we [Israelis] are not as vulnerable as they thought, they are more vulnerable than they thought. They have difficulty hitting us, but we have no difficulty hitting them.

Nobody knows exactly how the operation was carried out. . . . It is good that a question mark hovers over . . . what exactly Israel did. Let’s keep them wondering. It is good for deniability and good for keeping the enemy uncertain.

The fact that we chose targets that were in the vicinity of a major nuclear facility but were linked to the Iranian missile and air forces was a good message. It communicated that we can reach other targets as well but, as we don’t want escalation, we chose targets nearby that were involved in the attack against Israel. I think it sends the message that if we want to, we can send a stronger message. Israel is not seeking escalation at the moment.