To the people in Gaza and all of Palestine: we have no platitudes, no pity, no piety, no passivity; we pronounce instead our sadness and rage.
To the people in Gaza and all of Palestine: we vow never to apologize for the oppressor.
To the people in Gaza and all of Palestine: your light nourishes our joy; your darkness ignites our consciousness.
To the people in Gaza and all of Palestine: we will never forgive the silence; we will never forgive the treachery; we will never forgive the obedience.
To the people in Gaza and all of Palestine: we will vote for no president.
To the people in Gaza and all of Palestine: we do not condemn you.
To the people in Gaza and all of Palestine: we will remind anyone who tries to forget.
To the people in Gaza and all of Palestine: we love you without any of the conditions imposed by the West.
“You cannot just put people into prison, deprive them of their fundamental rights, and then see nothing in response,’ Hasaneen replied. ‘You cannot dehumanise people and expect nothing … I am not Hamas, and I was never a big fan of Hamas … But what’s happening here is not about Hamas at all.’
Vengeful Pathologies
Adam Shatz on the war in Gaza In the London Review of Books.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n21/adam-shatz/vengeful-pathologies
Steve, you’ve been such a big part of my education and I just want to say thank you so much.
I have so much respect for you. You are the intellectual we need to help us guide our collective liberation; one who leads with honesty, integrity, and dignity, like the Zapatistas in Mexico and many more Indigenous movements around the world. I just hope we can keep listening to your wisdom which emerges from a space of love.
Bertrand Russell’s Last Message: Israel-Palestine War
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 in 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.
I invite you all to read the letter with thoughtful consideration.