Al Owski > Recent Status Updates

“It is argued that because Israel has not exterminated the Palestinians, comparisons cannot be drawn with the Nazis. During the period 1933-9, the Nazi policy was expulsion not extermination. The attitude of Zionism towards non-Jews is comparable to the Nazi attitude toward Jews in the pre-Holocaust period.”

“Word work is sublime, she thinks, because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in which we are like no other life. We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”

“When a president of the United States thought about the graveyard his country had become and said, “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.” His simple words are exhilarating in their life-sustaining properties. because they refused to encapsulate the reality of six hundred thousand dead men in a cataclysmic race war.”

“Today there are demonstrations in Israel where the main slogan is ‘Death to the Arabs’. How is it anti-Semitic to compare this to similar demonstrations in Europe in the 1930s where the slogan was ‘Death to the Jews’?”

“Comparing a country to Nazi Germany doesn’t mean that they are the same but that they have certain features in common, not least a shared view of the other as sub-human.”

“Hannah Arendt observed that: Israeli citizens, religious and non-religious seem agreed upon the desirability of having a law which prohibits intermarriage… there certainly was something breathtaking in the naiveté with which the prosecution denounced the infamous Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which had prohibited intermarriage and sexual intercourse between Jews and Germans.”

“At a demonstration in Tel Aviv in 2016 in support of Elor Azaria, the Israeli soldier who murdered an unconscious Palestinian in Hebron, there was a banner which read ‘Kill them all’. Alongside it was another banner ‘My honour is my loyalty’, the slogan of the SS. The demonstrators filled Rabin Square chanting ‘death to the Arabs’. ”

“As a Jewish state, Israeli policies are driven by concerns for the maintenance of a Jewish demographic majority. This is why Israel can never be a democratic state.”

“Zionist concerns about a high Arab birth rate in Israel mirror the Nazis’ racial obsessions. Ideologically Zionism and Nazism drink from the same poisoned well. Comparisons between the Israeli state, where planning policy is based on the ‘demographic threat’ from Palestinians and Nazi Germany are all too obvious.”

“The Hebrew press in Palestine was particularly dismissive of ‘unproven and exaggerated rumours’ by news agencies and correspondents who competed in atrocity stories. In an editorial Davar stated that: Some of the numbers concerning the slaughter of tens of thousands which were published recently seemed to be exaggerated … From this point of view, the Nazi denial may be trustworthy.”

“Stern proposed recruiting some 40,000 Jews from occupied Europe to invade Palestine with German support to oust the British. The full text was published in Israel. If the Nazis accepted the offer, ‘Lehi would join the war, fighting on the side of Germany.’ The Nazis did not reply.”

“No one...had consulted the Jews in the extermination camps as to whether they were willing to die for the sake of a Jewish State. Zionist policy was ‘to use the specter of Jewish annihilation in Europe as pressure to open the gates of Palestine.’ This resulted in a conflict... which Schonfeld and Hertz lost. ‘The Zionist emphasis was certainly not favourable to the refugee cause.’ ”

“At the Parliamentary meeting held on January 27, 1943, …. a spokesman for the Zionists announced that the Jews would oppose the motion [to accept refugees] on the grounds of its omitting to refer to Palestine. Some voices were raised in support of the Zionist view… and thereafter the motion was dead. Even the promoters exclaimed in desperation: If the Jews cannot agree among themselves, how can we help?”

“Shmuel Zygielbojm, committed suicide in protest against the indifference of the West to what was happening... he couldn’t live with himself knowing that thousands of Jews were dying every day in the gas chambers. The Bund had previously written to Zygielbojm that: The silence, in which England, America and others pass over the massacre of Polish Jews, is for us a worse blow than the criminal action of Hitler.”

“When Gruenbaum was asked, if the United Jewish Appeal could contribute funds for the rescue of Jews in Europe, his response was negative: And I say again no. In my opinion one should resist this wave which relegates the Zionist activities to secondary importance. And because of that I was called anti-Semitic, was judged to be responsible for the fact that we do not absorb ourselves completely in the rescue activity”

“To the Zionist leaders the Holocaust was a distraction. If saving Jews had been a priority, they would have established a central coordinating body to pull together all the various reports in order that they could identify where the destruction was taking place and where rescue was possible. The tiny Al-Domi group in Palestine suggested this but they were ignored.”

“Ben-Gurion blamed the victims for the Holocaust. On 8 December 1942 at a Mapai meeting he complained that ‘they did not want to listen to us’. Ben-Gurion claimed that in their deaths they had sabotaged the Zionist dream. It was as if they had chosen to die.”

“The Holocaust was seen through a Zionist prism. In almost all his speeches, Ben-Gurion spoke about ‘the prospects the Holocaust may open up for Zionism.’ Speaking in Rehovot in 1941, Ben-Gurion pointed to the fact that all the significant steps in the progress of Zionism were always related to the intensification of Jewish distress.”

“Unreceptive to interrogation, it cannot form or tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts, tell another story, fill baffling silences. Official language...to sanction ignorance and preserve privilege is a suit of armor... Yet there it is: dumb, predatory, sentimental. Exciting reverence in schoolchildren, providing shelter for despots, summoning false memories of stability, harmony among the public.”

“a dead language…is unyielding language content to admire its own paralysis. Like statist language, censored and censoring. Ruthless in its policing duties, it has no desire or purpose other than maintaining the free range of its own narcotic narcissism, its own exclusivity and dominance. However, moribund, it is not without effect, for it actively thwarts the intellect, stalls conscience, suppresses human potential”

“In this country, women’s liberation flowered best in the soil prepared by black liberation. The mid-nineteenth-century abolitionist movement yielded suffragettes; the mid-twentieth-century Civil Rights movement yielded Woman’s Liberation.”

“This is what I sense: in spite of all the commercial and political strategies to separate, divide, and distort us, young people seem to be truly tired of racism’s control over their lives.”

“Make no mistake, the privatization of prisons is less about unburdening taxpayers than it is about providing bankrupt communities with sources of income and especially about providing corporations with a captured population available for unpaid labor.”

“For dreaming is not irresponsible; it is first-order human business. It... is work. When Martin Luther King Jr. said, "I have a dream," he was not playing; he was serious. When he imagined it, envisioned it, created it in his own mind it began to be, and we must dream it too... Don’t let anybody, convince you this is the way the world is and therefore must be. It must be the way it ought to be.”

“If I spend my life despising you because of your race, or class, or religion, I become your slave. If you spend yours hating me for similar reasons, it is because you are my slave. I own your energy, your fear, your intellect. I determine where you live, how you live, what your work is, your definition of excellence, and I set limits to your ability to love. I will have shaped your life.”

“The SS had consistently promoted the Zionist movement in Germany and Jewish emigration to Palestine… by the end of 1938, the Zionist option in National Socialist Jewish policy would continue with even greater intensity. An example of the Zionist endorsement of the Nazi goal of racial separation was the editorial in Judische Rundschau, eight years before it was made compulsory, endorsing the Yellow Star.”

“Zionism had always been a German Jewish taboo. Today when the equation is made between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, one should bear in mind that when Hitler came to power, German Jewry vehemently rejected Zionism as an enemy from within… Anti-Zionism was one of the few Jewish topics, Reform, Orthodox, cosmopolitan and ghetto Jews could agree on.’ ”

“On 28 January 1935 Reinhard Heydrich, the ‘real engineer of the final solution’ issued a directive stating: the activity of the Zionist-oriented youth organisations that are engaged in the occupational restructuring of the Jews … lies in the interest of the National Socialist state’s leadership…. The Gestapo and the SD ‘place(d) no restrictions on Zionist organisations.’ ”

“Bloom quoted Emil Ludwig (1881-1948), ... ‘who expressed the general attitude of the Zionist movement’: ‘Hitler will be forgotten in a few years, but he will have a beautiful monument in Palestine. You know, the coming of the Nazis was rather a welcome thing. … Thousands who seemed to be completely lost to Judaism were brought back to the fold by Hitler, and for that I am personally very grateful to him.’ ”

“Perhaps most shameful of all was the welcome that the ZVfD and the Zionist leaders gave to Hitler’s coming to power. The Zionist leaders thought solely in terms of how the Zionist movement could profit from what was happening. Hence their decision to pursue a trade agreement, Ha’avara, with the Nazi state. The Zionist leaders saw the Hitler regime as a golden opportunity to prosper.”