Bertrand Russell’s Message to the World on Zionism in January 1970

thuppahi

3 years ago

“Bertrand Russell’s Last Message“…. January 1970 — presented at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egfCTz-ZuZU .… & now sent to me by “A Sri Lankan in Brisbane” who reiterates the stance he took a few days back with An APPRAISAL that I present for readers to appraise after listening to the You Tube presentation marked above and is attached Blogging Theology MEMO below.

Portrait of British philosopher and social activist Bertrand Russell smoking his pipe as he looks out to sea, circa 1960….. Photo by Keystone Features/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

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. 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 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 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.

Russell in 1952

ALSO NOTE

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_Russell

* Russell, Bertrand (2000) [1967]. The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell: 1872–1914. New York: Routledge.

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“A Sri Lankan in Brisbane,” 29 October 2023

The Europeans did not treat Jews as humans, put them in concentration camps. So now it is the Jews turn to inflict the same pain on the Palestinians.

God gave the Jews the land 6000 years ago. The jews lived in Europe for 5900 years under so much suffering and discrimination.

Then a 100 years ago the British gave Jews Palestine and since then the people who lived in Palestine peacefully have to undergo the same suffering the Jews were subjected to in Europe.

It’s only a matter of time the Jews erect the gas chambers too for the final solution.

No, it is much easier to bomb them all to extinction and take the Gaza Strip.

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