Palestinians forced from their villages in 1948.
Regarding the Palestinian people ethnically cleansed from Israel-Palestine in 1948 (the Nakba) and now living as refugees in camps around the Middle East, Bertrand Russell issued this statement to the International Conference of Parliamentarians in February 1970. It was cited in Palestine and the Palestinians: A Social and Political History by Samih K. Farsoun & Naseer Hasan Aruri (second edition, p.370) and recently quoted by Lawrence of Cyberia.
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 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.
Things change in the Middle East, like Israel’s continuing annexation of the Palestinian territories, but the moral-ethical issue remains the same.
Palestinian women walk through the Nahr el-Bared refugee camp in Lebanon in 1951. (UNRWA)