Bertrand Russell’s last statement, made many decades ago, bears repeating today.
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.
“To invoke the horrors of the past to justify those of the present is gross hypocrisy.”
Bertrand Russell
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 annexe 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 en 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.
“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.”
Bertrand Russell
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.
Recommended Reading
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Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel’s War Against the Palestinians
– Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappé
In Gaza in Crisis, Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappé, two of the issue’s most insightful and prominent critical voices, survey the fallout from Israel’s conduct in Gaza and place it into the context of Israel’s longstanding occupation of Palestine.
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Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid
– Jimmy Carter
Carter argues that Israel’s continued control and construction of illegal settlements has been the primary obstacle to a comprehensive peace agreement in the Middle East. That perspective, coupled with the use of the word Apartheid in the titular phrase ‘Peace Not Apartheid,’ and what critics said were errors and misstatements in the book, sparked an intense backlash. Carter has defended his book and countered that response to it ‘in the real world… has been overwhelmingly positive.‘Later events in the ongoing bombing, dispossession and occupation of Palestinian lands confirm Carter’s conclusions.
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Out of Place
– Edward W. Said
From one of the most important intellectuals of our time comes an extraordinary story of exile and a celebration of an irrecoverable past. A fatal medical diagnosis in 1991 convinced Edward Said that he should leave a record of where he was born and spent his childhood, and so with this memoir he rediscovers the lost Arab world of his early years in Palestine, Lebanon, and Egypt.
Overcoming Zionism
– Joel Kovel
A call to transform Israel into a secular democracy. This book is fundamental for those who reject the unfortunate confusion between Jews, Judaism, Zionism and the State of Israel – a confusion which is the basis for systematic manipulation by the imperialist power system. It argues in favor of a single secular state for Israelis and Palestinians as the only democratic solution for the region.
Zionism creates a contradiction that eats at the soul and conscience of the Jewish people. The problem is that it is a moral and logical impossibility have a democratic state for only one ethnic group while excluding others. The notion of democracy derives from universal ideals based on universal human rights; it cannot exist where there is systematic inequality, and all the more so when the ‘others’ are the indigenous population.
The Balfour Declaration
– Jonathan Schneer
Issued in London in 1917, the Balfour Declaration was one of the key documents of the twentieth century. It committed Britain to supporting the establishment in Palestine of ‘a National Home for the Jewish people,’ and its reverberations continue to be felt to this day. With new material retrieved from historical archives, Jonathan Schneer recounts in dramatic detail the public and private fight to depopulate and colonize a small strip of land in the Middle East
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In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story
– Ghada Karmi
This widely acclaimed memoir draws you into the life of Ghada Karmi; a childhood spent in Palestine and a life of displacement and struggle in Britain. Here is the human cost of the loss of one’s home and the reshaping of one’s identity written with wit, humour and often heart-breaking insight.
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The Question of Palestine
– Edward W. Said
Published: 1979
For a long time, Edward Said was the most high-profile and internationally recognized of Palestinian intellectuals. His untimely death in 2003 was a blow for Palestinian advocacy, especially in the US, where few Palestinian voices are allowed to rise to general public awareness.
I Saw Ramallah
– Mourid Barghouti
Barred from his homeland after the ‘Six-Day War’ in 1967, the poet Mourid Barghouti spent thirty years in exile–shuttling among the world’s cities, yet secure in none of them; separated from his family for years at a time; never certain whether he was a visitor, a refugee, a citizen, or a guest. As he returns home for the first time since the Israeli occupation, Barghouti crosses a wooden bridge over the Jordan River into Ramallah and is unable to recognize the city of his youth. Sifting through memories of the old Palestine as they come up against what he now encounters in this mere ‘idea of Palestine,’ He discovers what it means to be deprived not only of a homeland but of ’the habitual place and status of a person.’
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On Palestine
– Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappé
An erudite and nuanced account of Palestine’s history. First published in 2015, it is an essential guide to understanding the shifting situation and is itself a sequel to their acclaimed book, Gaza in Crisis.
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Orientalism
– Edward W. Said
Discusses the situation of the Palestinians, including the history of the Nakba, the dispossession and scattering of the Palestinian diaspora, and the misrepresentation of the Palestinian cause in the Western world. Said also examines the development of Palestinian political movements, particularly the Palestine Liberation Organization led by his then friend, Yasser Arafat, and the changing perceptions of Palestinian groups towards the question of Jewish identity and Israeli statehood.
