Al Owski > Recent Status Updates

“Ben-Gurion explained his thinking in January 1933 when he warned that ‘Zionism… is not primarily engaged in saving individuals’ and that if there was ‘a conflict of interest between saving individual Jews and the good of the Zionist enterprise, we shall say the enterprise comes first.’ ”

“Zionism has always had a fatal attraction for anti-Semitism and anti-Semites.”

“by education I do not mean hobbling the mind, but liberating it; by education I do not mean passing on monologues, but engaging in dialogues. Listening, assuming sometimes that I have a history, a language, a view, an idea, a specificity. Assuming that what I know may be useful, may enhance what you know, may extend or complete it. My memory is as necessary to yours as your memory is to mine”

“Too many babies by all the wrong mothers? Too many people living too long? Even our goodwill is couched in killing. We are asked to give millions ...to “Feed the Children”—until they are fourteen, that is, at which point we are forced to pay billions to blow their brains out if they make demands in their own interests but not ours. Are their deaths not timely enough for us? They will all die anyway—as we will.”

“What would it be like to live in a world where the solution of serious, learned people to practically every big problem was not to kill somebody? ... Whom shall we kill—or lock up? Disease? Whom shall we let die—or lock up? Self-rule by a neighboring (or even distant) country? Whom shall we slaughter? Famine? What is an acceptable death rate? Unemployment? Homelessness? What is the tolerable starvation rate?”

“Isn’t it reasonable to assume that projecting earthly human life into the future may not be the disaster movie we are constantly invited to enjoy, but a reconfiguration of what we are here for? To lessen suffering, to know the truth and tell it, to raise the bar of humane expectation.”

“But if scientific language is about longer individual life in exchange for an ethical one; if political agenda is the xenophobic protection of a few of our families against the catastrophic others; if secular language bridles in fear of the sacred; if the future of knowledge is not wisdom but ‘upgrade,’ where might we look for humanity’s own future?”

“There is real danger in the world. And that is precisely why a correction is in order—new curricula containing some meaningful visionary thinking about the life of the moral mind and a free and flourishing spirit can operate in a context increasingly dangerous to its health.”

“We owe others our language, our history, our art, our survival, our neighborhood, our relationships with family and colleagues, our ability to defy social conventions as well as support those conventions. All of this we learned from others. None of us is alone; each of us is dependent on others—some of us depend on others for life itself.”

“The ethics of affluence insist upon civic obligations and when we assume that obligation we reveal not our solitary goodwill but our dependence on others. You, all of us, struggle to turn data into information into knowledge and, we hope, into wisdom. In that process we owe everything to others. We owe others our language, our history, our art, our survival, our neighborhood, our relationships with family...”

“This myth was integral to the forging of a Western imperialist alliance. It laid the foundations for the multi-billion dollar reparations agreement which Germany agreed to pay the Israeli state. Germany atoned for the Holocaust by financing Israel as the West’s watchdog in the Middle East. Israel’s wars of colonial conquest were koshered by the memory of the Jewish dead of Auschwitz.”

“As time went by, the post-war myth that the Israeli state was ‘the world’s atonement for complicity in the Holocaust grew.’ German imperialism’s Judeocide was the pretext for the creation of a state that began life with the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. Israel was seen as the heir to the Holocaust dead whereas the Arabs were depicted as the inheritors of the mantle of German fascism.”

“From time to time, as with Ken Livingstone’s statement that Hitler supported Zionism, the ghosts of Zionism’s past come back to haunt it. Hannah Arendt described how, ‘during the first stages of their Jewish policy, the National Socialists thought it proper to adopt a pro-Zionist attitude.’ The Zionist movement was not unhappy at the coming to power of the Nazis. It represented the defeat of assimilation. ”

“When unhoused remain suspect aliens, when the frightened and destitute huddle in beleaguered, garbage-strewn tent cities on land not their own, when identity becomes the very essence of the self, then recurring strategies of political construction are demanded. When incompetence and irrationality run roughshod over decency and continue to endanger lesser lives, we can anticipate a steep rise in the cost of caring.”

“Sugar, tea, spices, water, oil, opium, territory, food, ore all sustained the power of nations like the United Kingdom, like the Dutch, like ours. Here in America the slaughter of millions of bison in order to replace them with cattle required the massacre of Native Americans. Here a new agricultural nation moved quickly into the industrial period via the importation of slaves.”

“I believe it is helpful to rehearse something of the price of wealth, its history. The origins of its accumulation are bloody and profoundly cruel, involving as it always and invariably does war. Virtually no empire became one without mind-warping violence. The Spanish empire saved itself from collapse and irrelevance by the theft of gold from South America necessitating massacres and enslavement.”

“But if we see the world as one long brutal game, then we bump into another mystery, the mystery of beauty, of light, the canary that sings on the skull... Unless all ages and all races of man have been deluded… there seems to be such a thing as grace, such a thing as beauty, such a thing as harmony… all wholly free and available to us.”

“We cannot be optimistic, but we can be clear. We can identify the enemy. We can begin by asking ourselves what is right rather than what is expedient.”

“Our past is bleak. Our future dim. But I am not reasonable. A reasonable man adjusts to his environment. And unreasonable man does not. All progress, therefore, depends on the unreasonable man. I prefer not to adjust to my environment. I refuse the prison of ‘I’ and choose the open spaces of ‘we.’ ”

“The matrix out of which these powerful decisions are born is sometimes called racism, sometimes classicism, sometimes sexism. Each is an accurate term surely, but each is also misleading. The source is a deplorable inability to project, to become the ‘other,’ to imagine her or him. It is an intellectual
flaw, a shortening of the imagination, and reveals an ignorance... as well as a... lack of curiosity.”

“Mike Marqusee told how it was ‘in resistance to anti-Semitism’ that his grandfather ‘found a core, a purpose to his Jewishness’. The Jewish identity of Marqusee’s grandfather is now unrecognisable. It has changed ‘from a highly sophisticated ethical tradition into a state ideology that rationalizes racism and lawlessness by dehumanizing "goyim." ”

“Of the more than two million Jews who fled the Russian pogroms from the middle of the 19th century to 1914, at most 30,000 went to Palestine. The vast majority went to the United States. ... The Jewish tavern owner or ‘farmer’ of 16th-century Poland thought as little of ‘returning’ to Palestine as does the Jewish millionaire in America today.”

“In Eastern Europe in the 19th century, Jews found themselves ‘wedged between the anvil of decaying feudalism and the hammer of rotting capitalism.’ It was precisely at this time, when Jews were losing their distinct socio-economic role, that anti-Semitism increased. ”

“In Britain some 150,000 Jewish refugees entered between 1881 and 1914. ‘The Anglo-Jewish leadership… was dismayed and terrified by the mass immigration.’...Anglo-Jewish leaders were using ‘every possible influence to prevent immigrants coming over here from Russia and Poland.’ It was the prospect of mass Jewish immigration which later caused ... anti-Zionists like Neville Laski to make their peace with Zionism.”

“People often see Zionism as having a left and a right. Even Fourth International supporter Gilbert Achcar wrote that ‘There is Zionism and there is ‘Zionism’’. Achchar criticised the equation of Zionism and racism for its ‘totalizing nature… we can hardly treat all Zionists ... as birds of the same racist feather.’ ”

“Both Labor and Likud subscribe to the idea of Israel as a Jewish Democratic State and both agree that the contradiction between the Jewish and Democratic can only be resolved in favour of the former. Labour and Likud are different currents from the same poisoned stream.”

“Yosef Nahmani, a senior officer of Haganah, was stunned by the cruelty of Israeli troops. He described how in Safsaf, the villagers raised the white flag but 60-70 men and women were massacred and asked: ‘Where did they learn cruel conduct such as that of the Nazis?’ According to one officer, ‘The most eager were those who had come from the [concentration] camps…’” (Idith Zertal)

“I had to...defend the fact that I would not accept Arabs in my Trade Union, the Histadrut; to defend preaching to housewives that they should not buy at Arab stores; to defend the fact that we stood guard at orchards to prevent Arab workers from getting jobs there... to pour kerosene on Arab tomatoes; to attack Jewish housewives in the markets and smash Arab eggs they had bought...” (David Hirst)

“humane scholarship and the realization of a humane society...toward the creation of...a society who can make humane decisions... a scholarship that refuses to... produce generation after generation of students who are trained to make distinctions between the deserving poor and the undeserving poor but not between rice and human beings. To make distinctions between an expendable life and an indispensable one...”

“The justifications for enslavement became accepted wisdom and a whole race of people became criminalized. This criminalization is as old as the republic and stems from, among other things, the outside-the-law status imposed on slaves—and the dishonor that accompanies enslavement. Its modern formation is the residue, the assumption of criminality flash-signaled by skin color.”