Bertrand Russell on Israel/Palestine

 

Various stories have taken the genocide in Gaza out of the corporate news, but it continues.

Since the supposed “ceasefire” was declared last October, Israel has violated it well over 2,000 times. These violations have resulted in over 800 Gazan deaths by “airstrikes, shelling, and gunfire.” The number wounded is over 2,000.

For the survivors, very little, if anything, has improved. They are living in a kind of hell that is being deliberately forced upon them by the psychopaths running Israel. One witness very recently described it as follows:

We are speaking about systematic transformation of life into something unlivable. What’s happening is no longer just bombardment or physical destruction. It is the collapse of every essential condition required for human survival: water, food, health, dignity, shelter, safety, everything

… [M]ore than 59 percentage of our people suffer from insufficient drinking water. And more than 55 are uncertain whether the water they consume is safe or not. And also, nearly 94 percentage of families report food spoilage. Rodent infestation also, Amy, has become widespread inside shelters due to the environmental collapse.

All of this, it turns out, was predictable to anyone paying attention decades ago. Consider, for instance, a statement issued by the British philosopher Bertrand Russell on January 31,1970.

Russell’s statement is notable not only for its prescience, but for its clarity -- refreshingly free of slangy buzz-phrases and long, convoluted sentences. It’s also refreshingly concise, consisting of just four paragraphs and 617 words.

So here it is, as they say, “in its entirety”:

Statement on the Middle East by Bertrand Russell, as read to an International Conference of Parliamentarians meeting in Cairo on Feb 3, 1970

 The latest phase of the undeclared war in the Middle East is based upon a profound miscalculation. The bombing raids deep into Egyptian territory will not persuade the civilian population to surrender but will stiffen their resolve to resist. This is the lesson of all aerial bombardment. The Vietnamese who have endured years of American heavy bombing have responded not by capitulation but by shooting down more enemy aircraft. In 1940 my own fellow countrymen resisted Hitler’s bombing raids with unprecedented unity and determination. For this reason, the present Israeli attacks will fail in their essential purpose, but at the same time they must be condemned vigorously throughout the world. The development of the crisis in the Middle East is both dangerous and instructive. For over 20 years Israel has expanded by force of arms. After every stage in this expansion Israel has appealed to “reason” and has suggested “negotiations”. This is the traditional role of the imperial power because it wishes to consolidate with the least difficulty what it has already taken by violence. Every new conquest becomes the new basis of the proposed negotiation from strength, which ignores the injustice of the previous aggression.

The aggression committed by Israel must be condemned, not only because no state has the right to annex foreign territory, but because every expansion is an experiment to discover how much more aggression the world will tolerate. The refugees who surround Palestine in their hundreds of thousands were described recently by the Washington journalist I.F. Stone as “the moral millstone around the neck of world Jewry.” Many of the refugees are now well into the third decade of their precarious existence in temporary settlements.

The tragedy of the people of Palestine is that their country was “given” by a foreign Power to another people for the creation of a new State. The result was that many hundreds of thousands of innocent people were made permanently homeless. With every new conflict their number have increased. How much longer is the world willing to endure this spectacle of wanton cruelty? It is abundantly clear that the refugees have every right to the homeland from which they were driven, and the denial of this right is at the heart of the continuing conflict. No people anywhere in the world would accept being expelled in masse from their own country; how can anyone require the people of Palestine to accept a punishment which nobody else would tolerate? A permanent just settlement of the refugees in their homeland is an essential ingredient of any genuine settlement in the Middle East.

We are frequently told that we must sympathize with Israel because of the suffering of the Jews in Europe at the hands of the Nazis. I see in this suggestion no reason to perpetuate any suffering. What Israel is doing today cannot be condoned, and to invoke the horrors of the past to justify those of the present is gross hypocrisy. Not only does Israel condemn a vast number of refugees to misery, not only are many Arabs under occupation condemned to military rule; but also Israel condemns the Arab nations only recently emerging from colonial status, to continued impoverishment as military demands take precedence over national development.

All who want to see an end to bloodshed in the Middle East must ensure that any settlement does not contain the seeds of future conflict. Justice requires that the first step towards a settlement must be an Israeli withdrawal from all the territories occupied in June 1967. A new world campaign is needed to help bring justice to the long–suffering people of the Middle East.

I invite you all to read the letter with thoughtful consideration.

 

End