Bertrand Russell: "How much longer is the world willing to endure this spectacle?"

Several decades ago, three intellectuals made a lasting impression on me.

Betrand Russell was an nonogenarian legend when I became aware of him as a young boy in the 1960s.

Russell was the epitome of the decent, humane, scholarly tradition within the British intelligensia. His strident advocacy for peace and unilateral nuclear disarmament would have probably have excluded him from mainstream discourse – but Lord Russell was in a similar situation to Jimmy Carter today: too famous to ignore, too conscientious to shut up, too full of life to give up. Russell – right through to the end of his long life – was an inspiration to a young peace activist.

As a teenager, I devoured the science fiction of Isaac Asimov with gusto. His epic Foundation Trilogy was far-fetched, for sure – and perhaps not great literature. But it was an easy to read and quite remarkable futuristic vision, with an underlying spirit of universalism. Along with Arthur C Clarke, Asimov was right up there for me with the best of the sci-fi Greats.

I didn’t discover Erich Fromm until the early 1970s, when I was searching for help to make sense  of a world which evidently had huge environmental, social and political problems.

Erich Fromm: "If all nations would suddenly claim territories in which their forefathers lived two thousands years ago, this world would be a madhouse."

Fromm attempted to blend his vision of humane, anti-bureaucratic, libertarian socialism with far-sighted ecological thought. I never believed Fromm had all the answers, nor did he ever make such a claim. But to this day I believe Fromm’s overall sense of political direction was correct, if ahead of its time.

Whether famous authors were Jewish or non-Jewish never struck me as much of an issue, but I recall being vaguely aware Fromm and Asimov were Jewish. Dust covers often volunteered such information. At the time, it seemed little more than a biographical footnote of dubious relevance.

Perhaps some people around that time, because of a strongly anti-Jewish animus, avoided the works of Asimov and Fromm. If so, I think they missed out. I would have throught that then and I still do. How silly to condemn any book before opening the cover.

One of the great Jewish elders of this current generation is Jeff Blankfurt, a Californian social justice activist who has been waging an anti-Zionist struggle for decades. It’s made him unpopular in some quarters, but Blankfurt is erudite as well as gutsy. Like Russell, Asimov and Fromm before him, he has helped inspire and inform a new generation of progressives and idealists.

Isaac Asimov: "more important to be human"

Thus it was a particular delight to stumble across a short article on the PeacePalestine blog, featuring material contributed by Jeff Blankfurt, entitled Bertrand Russell – On Palestinian refugees, and a word by Fromm and Asimov.

Blankfurt hunted down quotations by Russell, Asimov and Fromm on the topic of Zionism and Israel, helping retrieve these gems from The Memory Hole.

This is what three of my youthful heroes thought about Zionism and Israel. No wonder I’ve found the creeping normalisation of Zionist values in the English-speaking society offensive.

Zionism jarred with all of them too…

Bertrand Russell

“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 numbers 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.”

- Message delivered posthumously to the February 1970 International Conference of Parliamentarians in Cairo, the day after Lord Russell’s death.

Isaac Asimov

“As usual, I found myself in the odd position of not being a Zionist and of not particularly valuing my Jewish heritage.

“I like Jewish cooking, Jewish music, Jewish jokes — but I’m not *serious* about it. I also like other kinds of cooking, music, and jokes (in fact, we were eating in a Chinese restaurant). I don’t even mind *being* Jewish. I make no secret about being Jewish in this book, or elsewhere, and I’ve never tried to change my name.

“I just think it is more important to be human and to have a human heritage; and I think it is wrong for anyone to feel that there is anything special about any one heritage of whatever kind. It is delightful to have the human heritage exist in a thousand varieties, for it makes for greater interest, but as soon as one variety is thought to be more important than another, the groundwork is laid for destroying them all.”

- Extract from Joy Still Felt – the second volume of Isaac Asimov’s autobiography.

Erich Fromm

“The principle holds that no citizen loses his property or his rights of citizenship and the citizenship right is de facto a right to which (Palestinians in Israel) have much more legitimacy than the Jews…. If all nations would suddenly claim territories in which their forefathers lived two thousands years ago, this world would be a madhouse.”

- from ‘Jewish Letter’, February 9th 1959