Bertrand Russell’s Last Message on Israel and Palestine

This statement on the Middle East was dated 31st January, 1970, and was read on 3rd February,
the day after Bertrand Russell’s death, to an International Conference of Parliamentarians
meeting in Cairo. See/hear on YouTube.

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 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.

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.

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