Statement by Rasil al-Azeem

The final phase of the undeclared war in the Middle East is based on a grave miscalculation. Air raids launched deep into Egyptian territory will not persuade the civilian population to surrender; rather, they will only strengthen their resolve to resist. This is the lesson of every aerial bombardment. The Vietnamese, who endured years of intense American bombing, did not surrender; instead, they shot down more enemy aircraft. In 1940, the people of my homeland resisted Hitler’s air raids with unprecedented unity and determination. For this reason, the current Israeli attacks will fail to achieve their primary objective, yet they must be strongly condemned worldwide. The evolution of the crisis in the Middle East is both dangerous and instructive. For more than twenty years, Israel has expanded through military force. After each stage of this expansion, Israel has turned to “reason” and proposed “negotiations.” This is the traditional role of imperial power, seeking to consolidate what it has seized by violence with the least possible difficulty. Each new conquest becomes a new basis for proposed negotiations from a position of strength, ignoring the injustice of previous aggression. Israeli aggression must be condemned, not only because no state has the right to annex foreign territories, but because every expansion serves as an experiment to gauge the world’s tolerance for aggression. The American journalist Stone recently described the refugees besieging Palestine, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, as a “heavy burden on the shoulders of world Jewry.” Many of them live in difficult conditions in temporary settlements. Their tragedy lies in the fact that their land was “granted” by a foreign power to another people to establish a new state, resulting in the permanent displacement of hundreds of thousands of innocents. With each new conflict, their numbers grow. How long will the world remain willing to endure such excessive cruelty? It is clear that the refugees have every right to the homeland they were forced to leave, and denying this right is the core of the ongoing conflict. No people in the world accept being collectively expelled from their homeland; how can the Palestinian people be forced to accept a punishment that no one else accepts? The permanent and just resettlement of refugees in their homeland is a fundamental element of any genuine settlement in the Middle East. We are often told that we should sympathize with Israel due to the suffering of Jews in Europe at the hands of the Nazis. I see no justification in this argument for prolonging suffering. One cannot overlook what Israel is doing today, invoking past atrocities to justify present ones; this is blatant hypocrisy. Israel not only condemns a vast number of refugees to misery and subjects many Arabs under occupation to military rule, but it also condemns the Arab states that have just emerged from the clutches of colonialism to remain in poverty, prioritizing military demands over national development!! * * * This was written seventy years ago by the British philosopher and Nobel Prize-winning mathematician Bertrand Russell (1872–1970). The above text demonstrates how prescient his thinking was. Despite all of Russell’s achievements in various fields of science, he was a strong advocate for peace and an opponent of imperialism. He opposed World War I and was imprisoned for his beliefs. Although he later considered the war against Nazi Germany an unavoidable evil, he criticized Stalin’s regime and condemned involvement in the Vietnam War. He was also one of the strongest advocates for nuclear disarmament. In 1950, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in recognition of his diverse and important writings that defended human values and freedom of thought. It is strange to find thousands of world artists, writers, and Western scientists, such as Bertrand Russell, standing with the Palestinian people’s right, while a large proportion of our own people lack such understanding and empathy for the rightful, oppressed party. There is no doubt that the absence of culture plays a role in this. Ahmed Al-Sarraf