Bertrand Russell's Last Message
By permission of B.R.P.F.
Summary: Dated January 31st 1970, and published in the April 1970 Spokesman, this piece was Russell's survey of Israel to date. - Rae West
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 fellowcountrymen 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 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.
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 if 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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Russell on Israel. Additional notes: 6 June 2020[Right:] Bertrand Russell's Last Message as published in The Spokesman of April 1970, Number 2. Note that the title does not include the word 'Israel'.[Below:] Account in Ronald W Clark's biography of Russell published in 1975 by Jonathan Cape and Weidenfeld & Nicholson. This scan is from the 1978 Penguin edition 'with minor revisions and corrections'. The piece was to be read to the 'International Conference of Parliamentarians in Cairo, February 1970. Clark presumably obtained his account from Christopher Farley. Clark implies there may have been opposition to its publication; if so this would not be surprising, as Russell had been in effect an ally of Jews all his life.
Russell's piece includes what now seem naïve details about bomb damage—in fact Germany was defeated by heavy bombing—and about Jews—it's now known the supposed suffering of Jews was a fraud, partly to conceal Jewish massacres and worldwide wartime collaboration against whites. And 'nuclear weapons' were yet another Jewish fraud. And he omitted Jewish control of money.
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HTML Rae West First uploaded 98-01-18 revd 98-06-27 revised with scans 16 June 2020
file name bertrand-russell-7004-israel.html