The Tragedy Of The People Of Palestine Is That Their Country Was Given Away By A Foreign Power

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 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 sympathise 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.

Bertrand Russell, 31. 01. 1970

When you allow the warmongering U.S. to occupy your country with their military bases and facilities, you then not only become complicit when the U.S. decide to attack or invade other nations, you also become an enemy of those other nations and a legitimate target for those other nations.
( Wilfred Soon, 29.10.2025 )

All Over Europe Israel Has Made It Impossible To Question Their History Of World War II.

In Texas and Florida it is punishable to criticise Israel or to doubt Zionist explanations.
For example, in Texas, critics of Israel, or someone who participates in a boycott of Israel, cannot work for the state of Texas or have a contract from the state of Texas to supply goods or services.
In other words, the First Amendment no longer exists in some American states.
The Israel lobby has succeeded in erasing the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The Israel lobby long ago succeeded in substituting its propaganda version of World War II for the facts.
For example, Auschwitz is portrayed in all American history books as a death camp where Jews were gassed to death and cremated.
In actual fact, Auschwitz was a work camp where I. G. Farben produced synthetic fuel and rubber tires for the German army and Air Force.
Germany, once the tide of battle turned against them, needed all the labour it could find.
With industrial labour drafted into the German army and sent to the Russian front, work camp inmates were far too valuable to be exterminated.
There was no one else to produce the artificial fuel and tires.

All over Europe Israel has made it impossible to question their history of World War II.
People who do are generally imprisoned for the offence of revealing the truth.
The Israel Lobby currently is working overtime in the United States to prevent the expression of any explanation different from the Israel Lobby’s line.
I see nothing to prevent the Israel Lobby’s success.
If both the Republican governors of Texas and Florida can be bought like commodities, and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu comes to Washington every two months to give his marching orders to President Trump, clearly Israel is in control of the American democracy in which the power of the people’s voice diminishes daily.

Paul Craig Roberts, 22.02.2026 .. thealtworld.com

I Cannot Believe That The British Museum Would Yield To Political Pressure From UK Labour Friends of Israel.

The British Museum needs to come with a clarifying statement.
If, as UK Labour Friends of Israel claims, the decision to remove the word “Palestine” from several displays was made at its request, then this could rightly be interpreted as yielding to political pressure from a pro-Israel lobbying organisation.

I have an interest in contemporary and ancient history of Palestine going back more than 50 years.
In 2018 I read “Palestine, A Four Thousand Year History” by Professor Nur Masalha, historian and academic at SOAS University of London.
It is a wide ranging book. He demonstrates convincingly that “Palestine”, indicating the geographical region in the southern Levant between the Mediterranean Sea, the Jordan River and the Red Sea is the name most commonly used from the Late Bronze Age (from 1300 BC onwards) to the modern period.

The Egyptian name for Palestine (Peleset) first occurs in the 13th century BC and is not witnessed in any earlier historical source.
So it would be inaccurate to use the name Palestine for the region before the 13th century.
However, to be historically accurate one should point out that the name of the region of Palestine prior to the Late Bronze Age is simply unknown.

From the Late Bronze Age onwards, the names used for the region of the southern Levant, such as Djahi and Retenu (1500s-1200s BC) or Cana’an (1400s-1300s BC) all give way to Palestine, which from then on becomes the most commonly used name to the present day, including by academia.
An example of this is the posthumous publication in 1993 of “The History of Ancient Palestine” by Gosta Ahlstrom, a Swedish professor of Old Testament and Ancient Palestinian Studies at the University of Chicago.
The research for his magnum opus extended from the earliest times to Alexander’s conquest.

The UK Labour Friends of Israel claim of the British Museum’s terminology being “inaccurate” or conveying an “incorrect meaning” or that the term “Palestine” is in some circumstances “no longer meaningful” is in my opinion motivated by ideological, not scientific considerations.
By all means, let’s have a proper debate about ancient Palestine.
But I cannot believe that the British Museum would yield to political pressure from UK Labour Friends of Israel.
That is why a clarification by the British Museum of what actually happened with regards to changing the displays in the Ancient Middle East galleries is urgently needed.

Ben Alofs, 17.02.2026 .. museumsassociation.org