Bertrand Russell, who, in 1937, suggested that the Brits should welcome a Nazi army of occupation with hugs and kisses, wrote, on 1st January 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.
Bombing or otherwise attacking Israel stiffened its will to resist because Israel was a cohesive and viable state. Bombing Egypt (Operation Priha) had the same effect because firstly only military targets were selected and secondly the Soviet Union was powerful enough to get Israel to back down. America was relatively weak and Rodgers peace plan seemed to tilt towards the Arabs which gave them a respite to prepare for a sneak attack. On balance, Priha did succeed. It showed an aggressive spirit. America was defeatist and was afraid it was backing a loser. Priha showed Israel had the will to win. The problem was, so did Sadat. The Rodger's peace plan, with hindsight, was about weaning Sadat away from the Soviets while convincing the Kremlin the US wished to pressurize the Israelis to exchange land for peace but otherwise maintain the status quo. The Soviets saw their role as defending Egypt from air attack rather than providing Sadat with the tools to defeat Israel. In the event, Sadat broke with Egypt without having secured those tools. But, his initial success forced Nixon to commit wholly to Israel. The Arabs had lost the Soviets while soldering Israel and the US together at the hip. Israel's air superiority was now assured. This meant its own people enjoyed greater security than that of its neighbours to its East.
This is the lesson of all aerial bombardment.
Russell forgets the impact of such bombardment on Japan- more particularly when backed up by nukes.
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.
In the Thirties, Baldwin and Chamberlain thought air superiority could keep the Home Islands safe. They were right though they didn't bother to actually equip the country with any such thing.
Still, the fact is France and other European countries yielded to the blitzkrieg quickly enough. We don't know what would have happened if the R.A.F hadn't won the Battle of Britain. Indeed, if Hitler hadn't attacked the Soviets and then, more foolishly yet, declared war on the US, his evil regime may have survived for decades.
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.
Why? Israel was hitting military targets because it feared military attack. On the other hand, it was probably a mistake to hit buildings in a Cairo suburb where many diplomats lived. Students at a foreign school were terrified and this was widely reported in the international press. It is a different matter that Egyptian civilians rallied behind their military. But those civilians posed no threat to anyone.
The development of the crisis in the Middle East is both dangerous and instructive.
It was neither. Dangerous things were occurring in the region. Crazy dictators who would utterly ruin their respective countries were coming to power. What was significant about the 'war of attrition' was that the US was appearing to side with Egypt with the secret aim of getting Sadat to throw out the Soviets. At the same time, Nixon pretended, to the Soviets, that he was shocked when it happened. The truth, I suppose, was that the Soviets were keen on detente and were getting sick of the Egyptians whom they considered overly religious. Sadat, for his part, had never been keen on the Communists and had always been resolved to get rid of the Rooskis at the earliest opportunity.
For over 20 years Israel has expanded by force of arms.
Because Israel kept getting attacked. Had Palestinians, and then Egyptian army units in Gaza, not launched raids on Israel, that country would probably not have joined Britain and France in their crazy attempt to take back the Suez canal.
After every stage in this expansion Israel has appealed to “reason” and has suggested “negotiations”.
The Israeli objection to the Rodgers approach had to do with their wanting Egypt to recognize them and to negotiate directly with them.
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.
It is also the role of the former colony which wants to be recognized by the former imperial power. Both the Jews and the Arabs had wanted Britain to fuck off. The Jews were able to create a viable state. The Palestinians never did.
Every new conquest becomes the new basis of the proposed negotiation from strength, which ignores the injustice of the previous aggression.
Even after the 'injustice' has been reversed, the ex-colony wants to negotiate with the former 'aggressor' so as to have a peace treaty which acknowledges their gains.
The aggression committed by Israel must be condemned, not only because no state has the right to annexe foreign territory,
Every state does. The question is whether they can keep what they grab.
but because every expansion is an experiment to discover how much more aggression the world will tolerate.
The world will tolerate any evil shit. It is a different matter that some States have the firepower to be highly intolerant of other regimes.
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.”
Moral millstones don't matter a damn. It is the financial cost of conflict which keeps a lid on the thing.
Many of the refugees are now well into the third decade of their precarious existence in temporary settlements.
By September of 1970, the Palestinians were being shelled by the Jordanian Army. These 'refugees' had made Jordan precarious. They would go on to ruin Lebanon as well.
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.
No. Immigrants turned up, thought Britain tried to regulate this, and then, after the war, there was a big influx of battle-hardened Jews who were able to create Israel after defeating the Arabs- though Jordan didn't fight them. It just helped itself to the West Bank and East Jerusalem. But Jordan came to regret this just as Egypt regretted taking Gaza.
The result was that many hundreds of thousands of innocent people were made permanently homeless.
12 million Germans were expelled or had to flee from the East between 1945 and 1950. So what? The Partition of India displaced an even larger number of wholly innocent people.
With every new conflict their number have increased. How much longer is the world willing to endure this spectacle of wanton cruelty?
The world endured the spectacle of Churchill refusing to welcome Herr Hitler to dinner at Downing Street followed by a handing over of the British Commonwealth to that evil tyrant. Russell must have cried his little eyes out.
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. What was and is at the heart of this continuing conflict, is the attempt to kill Jews in Israel. For some reason, they don't seem to welcome such attentions.
No people anywhere in the world would accept being expelled in masse from their own country;
French Algerians and 'harkis' had to accept it. Big boo-hoo.
how can anyone require the people of Palestine to accept a punishment which nobody else would tolerate?
Every defeated country has had to tolerate it. Indeed, some undefeated countries- e.g. France in Algeria- had to tolerate it because the thing didn't make financial sense.
A permanent just settlement of the refugees in their homeland is an essential ingredient of any genuine settlement in the Middle East.
There was a roughly equal exchange of populations between Jews and Arabs in the MENA. Palestinians should have been given citizenship in their new countries- the trouble was they might try to take over their new country, as happened in Jordan. That is why the Arabs don't want to take Palestinian refugees. Let them remain in an open air prison tended to by the UN-RWA.
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.
We should recognize that Jews had a good reason to seek to establish a state of their own. But, we should also recognize, as the Brits did in 1946, that a Palestinian state would be neither economically viable, nor politically cohesive. True, Arab countries may be wary of admitting Palestinians, but they are an asset to America or Europe or other places where they have found refuge. Moreover, it was hilarious that Sirhan Sirhan shot Bobby Kennedy.
I see in this suggestion no reason to perpetuate any suffering. What Israel is doing today cannot be condoned,
Russell did not condone Britain's refusal to welcome Hitler's hordes with open arms.
and to invoke the horrors of the past to justify those of the present is gross hypocrisy.
Nothing wrong with hypocrisy. The fact is, pretending Russell or Chomsky were or are smart gives rise to superb comedy.
Russell thought it very horrible of the Brits to fail to welcome the Waffen SS. But the Brits could justify doing so by pointing out that invading armies have previously inflicted great harm on Britain. What hypocrisy was involved in Churchill saying the Brits would fight the Germans on the beaches? Russell may have thought that morality required Churchill to spread a nice picnic for Herr Hitler but Russell had shit for brains.
Not only does Israel condemn a vast number of refugees to misery,
Jordon would do so in September of that very year. The fact is, if refugees run amok, then they are killed or kicked out even if this makes them very miserable indeed.
not only are many Arabs under occupation condemned to military rule;
Egyptians were condemned to military rule. Democracy did not thrive in the MENA- save in Israel though, no doubt, Lebanon is a democracy- more's the pity.
but also Israel condemns the Arab nations only recently emerging from colonial status, to continued impoverishment as military demands take precedence over national development.
But this was also happening in Israel. The fact is, after the 1967 victory, the first thing Israeli officers in East Jerusalem did was to go grocery shopping. They were amazed at the variety and the quality of the produce available to less Socialistic communities.
All who want to see an end to bloodshed in the Middle East must
tell the Palestinians to stop shedding blood. It is only their own people who lose by it.
ensure that any settlement does not contain the seeds of future conflict.
Was Russell saying that the Ba'athists needed to be uprooted from Syria and Iraq? The 'seeds of future conflict' are sown by military dictators or guys who think they look good in an Army uniform even if they never actually served.
Justice requires that the first step towards a settlement must be an Israeli withdrawal from all the territories occupied in June 1967.
After which, it will be unable to protect itself and therefore will be wiped out. Sadly, they might fire off a lot of nukes before being expelled from the region.
A new world campaign is needed to help bring justice to the long–suffering people of the Middle East.
What has this 'world campaign' achieved? More misery for the Palestinians and more and more right wing governments for Israel. The Left shat the bed when it ignored reality and pretended the Israelis weren't immigrant refugees who successfully established a State. It continues to make this mistake. It pretends the Jews can go back to Jew-land which is a real country in Northern Europe. They can give up their colony in the Fertile Crescent in the same way that France gave up Algeria.
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