The 60th anniversary of the creation of the Israeli state provides an appropriate occasion for looking back at the past, if only to assess the situation now and plan for the future.

It has been 60 years of pain, of hopes constantly dashed — and that is only for the Palestinians living in exile. For those in the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem, it has been 60 years of absolute misery — being forced to live, not in the sunlight like other peoples, but in the shadow lands of constant humiliation, discrimination, injustice and oppression, of homes bulldozed, lands stolen, arbitrary arrest, no work, being forced to live in squalor, sons anddaughters slaughtered by Israeli military. It has been 60 years of fear and exhaustion. No wonder for Palestinians it is the 60th anniversary of “Al-Nakba”, the Catastrophe. Nor is there any sign of the catastrophic consequences ending. Indeed, for the Palestinians in prison-camp Gaza, things have never been worse. Despite the Bush administration’s prediction of a settlement by the end of the year, the so-called road map is kept locked away by the Israelis. Indeed, the way things are going, with the Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert under investigation by the police, there may not even be an Israeli government to negotiate with at the end of next week.

Britain’s and France’s involvement prior to the creation of Israel — the Balfour Declaration, the Sykes-Picot Agreement — and those also of the US, the UN and the then Soviet Union at the time are well-documented and well-known. The USSR was initially a wholehearted supporter of Israel and rushed to recognize it in the hope that it would become a close ally. Well-documented and well-known too is Britain’s and France’s subsequent alliance with Israel which they saw as an strategic ally in their bid to the doomed effort to maintain their continued colonial presence in most of the Arab world. It was an alliance that saw France become the Israelis’ initial military backer, providing them with arms and planes and the means to go nuclear with the construction of the Dimona reactor; at its worst, it saw all three in military action together in 1956 in the hope of doing to Nasser what the Americans finally did to Saddam Hussein in 2004: topple him.

The past cannot be unmade. It is what happens now that is important. The Palestinians do not expect the British or the French to undo the great wrong they wrought all those years ago. The only reason there are expectations of the Americans, and resentment when they do not deliver, is that they have the power to force change, to end the oppression and bring a new Palestine into being.

As for Israel, despite its show of celebration for the anniversary, it has never been more unsure of itself. It has lost so many of its friends by its oppressive policies, there is deep conflict within between secularists and Jewish fundamentalists and a paralysis as to how to deal with the Palestinians and its neighbors. It resembles a society slowly coming apart at the seams. Sixty years on, it is a state heading nowhere.