Three Years and Counting

“I wish children didn’t die. I wish they would be temporarily elevated to the skies until the war ends. Then they would return home safe, and when their parents would ask them, where were you? They would say, we were playing in the clouds.” —Palestinian poet, Ghassan Kanafani (1936 - 1972) In the long and laudable tradition of pacifism, the most severe crisis ever faced by its proponents was the Second World War, for the simple reason that if there ever was such a thing as a “just war,” that was probably it. For two of the world’s most impressive and principled intellectuals, the British logician Bertrand Russell and German physicist Albert Einstein, it became necessary to mediate this crisis within their own political philosophies. These men, who had reasoned out their political principles in meticulous detail, were suddenly compelled to navigate a scenario that challenged their moral certainty. Both men were committed pacifists, even before the First World War—which unleashed unprecedented carnage on Europe during the continent’s first industrial slaughter. Historian Howard Zinn offered this description: The killing started very fast, and on a large scale. In August 1914, a volunteer for the British army had to be 5 feet 8 inches to enlist. By October, the requirement was lowered to 5 feet 5 inches. That month there were thirty thousand casualties, and then one could be 5 feet 3. In the first three months of the war, almost the entire original British army was wiped out. For three years the battle lines remained virtually stationary in France. Each side would push forward, then back, then forward again—for a few yards, a few miles, while the corpses piled up. In 1916 the Germans tried to break through at Verdun; the British and French counterattacked along the Seine, moving forward a few miles, and lost 600,000 men. One day, the 9th Battalion of the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry launched an attack with eight hundred men. Twenty-four hours later, there were eighty-four left. Back home, the British were not told of the slaughter. One English writer recalled: “The most bloody defeat in the history of Britain … might occur … and our Press come out bland and copious and graphic with nothing to show that we had not had quite a good day—a victory really.” The same thing was happening on the German side; as Erich Maria Remarque wrote in his great novel, on days when men by the thousands were being blown apart by machine guns and shells, the official dispatches announced “All Quiet on the Western Front.” It was one of the most unpopular wars ever fought. Accordingly, the level of propaganda and censorship grew to new proportions in the participating countries. The public relations industry was given its name during the effort to “sell” the war. Those who publicly criticized the war or the draft were put in prison. In the United States this happened to anarchists like Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, as well as socialists like Eugene Debs and Kate Richards O’Hare, for the crime of voicing criticism of the draft. (O’Hare had said, for example, that the women of the United States were being treated as “nothing more nor less than brood sows, to raise children to get into the army and be made into fertilizer.”) In Germany, socialists like Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht suffered the same punishment. And so did Bertrand Russell in England. Before being imprisoned for six months, in 1916 Russell was fired from his lecturing job Trinity College for opposing the war. He wrote at the time, “I hate the world and almost all the people in it. I hate the Labour Congress and the journalists who send men to be slaughtered, and the fathers who feel a smug pride when their sons are killed, and even the pacifists who keep saying human nature is essentially good, in spite of the daily proofs to the contrary. I hate the planet and the human race—I am ashamed to belong to such a species.” A very sane position, I think, given the depraved state of the world at that moment. After the war, in 1930, both Einstein and Russell, along with other prominent writers and scientists, signed a manifesto issued by the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, that read in part: “scientific methods of warfare have rendered national defence and protection of civilian population illusory; a new war would mean simultaneous annihilation of a large part of the population by fire, poison gas, and chemicals.” The Women’s International League was also part of the Joint Peace Council, which produced another letter signed by both men, as well as John Dewey, Thomas Mann, Sigmund Freud, and other prominent figures, that opposed conscription and the military training of youth. Einstein, a Jewish man living in Germany at that time, saw the writing on the wall before most others did. Shortly after the Nazis took power in 1933, Einstein was asked to support conscientious objectors in Belgium, but refused. “In the present threatening situation, created by events in Germany,” he wrote, “Belgium’s armed forces can only be regarded as a means of defense, not an instrument of aggression.” After the Second World War broke out, Einstein wrote a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt urging him to consider starting a project to study uranium as a new energy source that could be weaponized. That became the Manhattan Project. Russell, meanwhile, had come to a similar conclusion as Einstein: that Nazi Germany posed such a threat to humanity that it had to be defeated. He took a little longer to reach that point, having still urged Roosevelt to pursue a peaceful diplomatic settlement in early 1939, it was the German invasion of Poland that began to change his mind, and the German invasion of Belgium, France, and Holland definitively did. Although he struggled with the implications of this, and the question of what it meant for his pacifist ideology, a little bit before Einstein would. Initially he just wrote to a friend, “Ever since the war began, I have felt that I could no longer go on being a pacifist; but I have hesitated to say so, because of the responsibility involved. If I were young enough to fight myself, I should do so, but it is more difficult to urge others. Now, however, I feel that I ought to announce that I have changed my mind, and I would be glad if you could find an opportunity to mention in the New Statesman that you have heard from me to this effect.” Russell later reflected in his Autobiography: “Although I clung to my pacifist convictions, I did so with increasing difficulty.” In 1943, Russell reconciled the contradictions in his anti-war ideology by sharpening his definition of pacifism. In “The Future of Pacifism” he wrote: “Absolute pacifism” is the doctrine that, in all circumstances, it is wrong to take human life—or even animal life, according to some. There may also be an objection to all use of force, even when it stops short of taking life. This doctrine was held by Tolstoy and is held by Gandhi; it used to be part of the creed of the Quakers, and is still held by various sects. Among Christians, it is based on the Commandment “Thou shalt not kill.” The Commandment does not say you must only kill bad people, or only kill by due process of law, or only kill in defense of your country; it says, simply and unequivocally, “Thou shalt not kill.” Those who regard the Bible as the Word of God are, therefore, inconsistent when they allow certain kinds of killing. The Sermon on the Mount, by inculcating nonresistance, reinforces the absolute pacifist position for those whose moral system is based on the Bible. The doctrine of non-violence, which has been practiced on a large scale in India, can be defended on other than religious grounds. In certain circumstances, it is the best practical policy. These circumstances arise when one party is unarmed but resolute, while the opposing party is armed but irresolute. Killing people who do not resist is a disgusting business, and decent men will yield much rather than persist in it. But when the enemy is resolute and brutal the method has no success. The Church persecuted heretics and Jews relentlessly, even when they made no attempt at armed resistance. The Japanese, if they conquered India, would make short work of any movement of non-cooperation on the part of Gandhi’s followers. Russell had now reached the point where he rejected absolute pacifism. The Nazis had disenchanted him of that view. Instead, he outlined two alternatives. Firstly, he defined “relative pacifism” as “the doctrine that very few wars are worth fighting, and that the evils of war are almost always greater than they seem to excited populations at the moment when war breaks out.” And secondly, he distinguished between “individual pacifism” that encourages individuals not to participate in conflict, and “political pacifism” which seeks to prevent governments from going to war. Combining these two forms, Russell declared himself a “relative political pacifist”: I think myself that the most useful kind of pacifism, and also the one most likely to become influential, is relative political pacifism. According to this view, there are causes, but only a very few, for which it is worth while to fight; but whatever the cause, and however justifiable the war, war brings about such great evils that it is of immense importance to find ways short of war in which the things worth fighting for can be secured. I think it is worth while to prevent England or America being conquered by the Nazis, but it would be far better if this end could be secured without war. Meanwhile, after the defeat of Nazi Germany in May of 1945, when it became clear to the European scientists in the Manhattan Project, who were working to beat Hitler to the bomb, that the United States intended to deploy their nuclear weapons on civilian cities in Japan, many of them protested and appealed to the American president not to use the weapon they had created. Einstein, who had no involvement in building the bomb other than encouraging its construction in 1939, also wrote to Roosevelt after having been informed of America’s plan by the Hungarian scientist Leo Szilard. Einstein strongly opposed using the bomb, especially on civilian cities. Nevertheless, in 1953, Japanese pacifist Seiei Shinohara asked Einstein how a pacifist could’ve encouraged the Manhattan Project in the first place. Their correspondence lasted several years. In one of Einstein’s letters to Shinohara, he clarified: “I am a dedicated but not an absolute pacifist; this means that I am opposed to the use of force under any circumstances except when confronted by an enemy who pursues the destruction of life as an end in itself.” He also added, “I have always condemned the use of the atomic bomb against Japan. However, I was completely powerless to prevent the fateful decision for which I am as little responsible as you are for the deeds of the Japanese in Korea and China.” In the aftermath of the Second World War, Einstein and Russell had some difficulty resuming their pre-war collaboration. Russell at the time was more concerned about preventing the Soviet Union from acquiring a nuclear bomb whilst Einstein was more skeptical of the American position. Though the two remained on friendly terms. Over time, Russell’s views shifted. As he recounts in his Autobiography: Later I was brought around to being more favorable to Communism by the death of Stalin in 1953 and by the Bikini test in 1954; and I came gradually to attribute, more and more, the danger of nuclear war to the West, to the United States of America, and less to Russia. After Russell made a speech, “Man’s Peril,” about the danger of nuclear weapons on Christmas eve, 1954, he was approached by several European colleagues who suggested a scientists’ campaign against nuclear weapons. Einstein was the first person that Russell contacted to jointly issue his manifesto, writing him on February 11, 1955: Dear Einstein, I have been turning over in my mind, and discussing with various people, the best steps for giving effect to the feeling against war among the great majority of men of science. I think the first step should be a statement by men of the highest eminence, Communists and anti-Communists, Western and Eastern, about the disasters to be expected in a war. I enclose a draft of such a statement, and I very much hope that you will be willing to sign it. I enclose also a list of those whom I am asking to sign. If sufficient signatures are obtained, I think the next step should be an international scientific congress which should be invited by the signatories to pass a resolution on the lines of the draft resolution which I enclose. I hope that in this way both Governments and public opinion can be made aware of the seriousness of the situation. On the whole, I have thought that it was better at this stage to approach only men of science and not men in other fields, such as Arnold Toynbee whom you mentioned. Scientists have, and feel that they have, a special responsibility, since their work has unintentionally caused our present dangers. Moreover, widening the field would make it very much more difficult to steer clear of politics. Yours sincerely, Bertrand Russell. Einstein responded warmly: “I am gladly willing to sign your excellent statement.” Russell only learned of his reply after Einstein died. He later wrote: I was among those who almost always agreed with him. He and I both opposed the First World War, but considered the Second unavoidable. He and I were equally perturbed by the awful prospect of H-bomb warfare. We agreed to make a joint pronouncement on this subject in conjunction with any eminent men of science who were willing to cooperate. I drew up a statement and sent it to Einstein. Before getting an answer from him, while travelling by air from Rome to Paris, I learned of his death. On arrival in Paris, I found his letter agreeing to sign. This must have been one of the last acts of his life. Russell remained active in the peace movement. He was again arrested, along with his wife, in London in 1961 for participating in anti-nuclear protests when he was 89 years old. A magistrate sentenced him to seven days, but offered to suspend the sentence if Russell promised to behave himself, to which he replied, “No, I won’t,” and served his time in protest. He opposed the American wars against Korea and Vietnam; famously establishing the Russell Tribunal in Denmark to adjudicate American war crimes and crimes against humanity using the same principles as the Nuremberg trials. When John F. Kennedy almost destroyed planet Earth with his naval blockade, Russell cabled him: “To President Kennedy: Your action desperate. Threat to human survival. No conceivable justification. Civilized man condemns it. We will not have mass murder. Ultimatums mean war. … End this madness.” For Kennedy’s refusal to work towards nuclear disarmament, starting the Vietnam War, and almost causing a nuclear holocaust, Russell called him “much more wicked than Hitler.” Adding, The idea of weapons of mass extermination is utterly horrible and is something which no one with one spark of humanity can tolerate. I will not pretend to obey a Government which is organizing mass massacres of mankind. I will do everything I can to oppose the Government in any way which I think can be fruitful and I exhort you to do the same. We cannot obey these murderers. They are wicked. They are abominable. They are the wickedest people who ever lived in the history of man and it is our duty to do what we can against them. Bertrand Russell died on February 2, 1970, at the age of 97. His last political act was a statement completed on January 31, first read out publicly one day after his death. “Bertrand Russell’s last message” was about Israel-Palestine. 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. That was Bertrand Russell. Einstein didn’t live to see the Six Day War, but he was arguably, as I. F. Stone once called him, “the greatest Jewish figure of the time.” Because of that, the Zionists had a lot of correspondence with him in the years leading up to the founding of Israel. Einstein said he supported a Jewish “homeland” after WWII which could be in the Soviet Union or in “a free, bi-national Palestine … after agreement with the Arabs.” In 1946 he unequivocally stated, “I have never been in favor of a state.” A year later, when asked by Zionist I. Z. David for his opinion about the partition plan of Palestine, he responded curtly, “I am against partition.” Einstein’s editor and translator, Leon Simon, remarked that “For him the domination of Jew over Arab in Palestine, or the perpetuation or a state of mutual hostility between the two peoples, would mean the failure of Zionism.” “If we are not able to find a way to honest cooperation and honest pacts with the Arabs,” Einstein wrote, “then we have learned nothing during our two thousand years of suffering, and deserve the fate which will befall us.” A few weeks before the official founding of Israel, Shepard Rifkin, executive director of American Friends of the Fighters for the Freedom of Israel, contacted Einstein to ask for a meeting. The physicist rebuffed him: “When a real and final catastrophe should befall us in Palestine the first responsible for it would be the British and the second responsible for it the Terrorist organizations built up from our own ranks. I am not willing to see anybody associated with those misled and criminal people.” One of those Zionist terrorist groups was Irgun—infamous for its role in the Deir Yassin massacre—led by Menachem Begin, who later became Israel’s prime minister. When Begin visited New York in 1948, Einstein was one of a number of Jewish academics to condemn his visit in a letter to the New York Times. Begin had founded the political party Herut (later renamed Likud, now led by Benjamin Netanyahu), which they likened to “a political party closely akin in its organisation, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.” Einstein would himself repeat this accusation in 1955, the year of his death, writing: “These people are Nazis in their thoughts and actions.” We are now, currently, in the third year of this genocide. Last Year, when we discussed whether the word genocide was appropriate or not (it very much is), I mentioned Ilan Pappé’s opinion that Israel was already committing a slow-moving “incremental genocide” before October 7, 2023. Personally, I accept this thesis. I do believe that Israel was already committing genocide before that fateful, inevitable day exactly three years ago. But nevertheless, something has changed. The genocide is no longer incremental. Gaza is in ruins, scarcely a building left standing. And even though Israel signed an agreement—that Hamas has lived up to—to allow 600 aid trucks a day into the beleaguered Strip, Israel only allows in a daily average of 217 trucks. The supposed “ceasefire” that we’re meant to pretend exists is a sadistic joke. The media collectively connive in this cockamamie story through downright Orwellian  Newspeak. NBC News, for instance, dutifully soiled themselves, reporting that “Even as the ceasefire between Hamas and Israel holds, Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces.” Who exactly is that for? No thinking human reads that sentence without being insulted by its absurdity. At least 1,467 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since the “ceasefire.” A number that increases daily. As do the wounded. And yet, still they insist on calling it “war.” By that metric, that whole business in Iraq was a touristic jaunt down Mesopotamia. Using the war metric, more journalists have been killed in Gaza than in the US Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War (including the offshoots in Cambodia and Laos), the wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s and 2000s, and the Afghanistan War, combined. Or take the scale of destruction. According to the UN Development Programme’s special representative in Palestine, Jaco Cilliers, “The estimate of the total amount of rubble in Gaza is 61 million tonnes. It is approximately 20 times the amount of rubble generated in all wars across the world over the last 18 years.” And still the media want you to forget—if you even heard it to begin with—that on September 16, 2025, an independent United Nations commission determined that Israel is guilty of genocide. Nobody in power cares. The Israelis don’t care—neither the government nor the people. The reason that I turned to Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein is because I have had my own ideological crisis. For all of my life I have opposed war. But I have opposed imperialist wars most of all. I have held closely to the doctrine of non- interventionism. The crisis for me is that I now believe—for the first time in my life—that the use of force is warranted. For the record, I don’t think that a war against Israel will or could ever happen; Israel has nukes and is essentially the petulant child of the old imperial powers, having inherited their bloodlust and militarism from their parents. These ancient powers will never reprimand their child, not even after they’ve leveled the playground and killed every kid in sight, for it would be reprimanding themselves. The most ardent supporters of Israel are the old settler colonial powers, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence. Just like it’s no coincidence that the countries once facing the sharp end of the bayonets, like Ireland and South Africa, are most supportive of Palestinian rights. I’m therefore not actually arguing for war. It’s unrealistic on several fronts, nor do I think it’s a practical road towards Palestinian liberation. Additionally, the peace movement hasn’t yet exhausted its creativity. But I still needed to reconcile my belief that foreign intervention would be justified to save the people in Gaza (if a foreign intervention could save the people in Gaza). That’s why I’ve been interested in how Russell and Einstein dealt with similar ideological crises with respect to their pacifism. I guess I, too, am a non-absolute pacifist. And I am angry at Israel for forcing me to discover that fact about myself. But Israel now “pursues the destruction of life as an end in itself” and has to be stopped. Ruling out war on practical grounds, states could still use (and be pressured to use) sanctions. In November of 1958, US ambassador to South Africa Henry Byroade met with the apartheid regime’s minister of foreign affairs, Eric Louw. There had recently been a vote on a resolution in the United Nations against apartheid. The original Indian resolution was watered down significantly by the United States to merely express “regret and concern” at South Africa’s failing to live up to international commitments on racial progress. Recounting the meeting with Louw in a telegram to Washington, Byroade wrote: He accepted the information that I had previously given his staff about our role in moderating the original resolution but stated press treatment of our change from “abstention” to “voting for” had been very bad indeed, showing large shift in our thinking. … He said as far as he was concerned he would have preferred the original Indian resolution with our abstention rather than the modified resolution with our support. When I expressed surprise at this statement he said he wished to be very frank. A specific and strong resolution against South Africa voted for by a majority of nations in the UN did not matter so much as this was to be expected. What mattered perhaps more than all other votes put together was that of the US in view of its predominant position of leadership in the Western world. Years later, the apartheid regime survived with the United States practically being the last country that supported it. When US support faltered, so did the regime. In the end, history proved Eric Louw correct: apartheid in South Africa could survive with US support, but not without it. A lesson for the peace movement of today. Amid the rubble, let’s dream of peace. From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.