The people whose necks hurt when I write about the Middle East tend to live in Brooklyn or Boca Raton: the kind of Zionist who pays another man to live in Israel for him. I have nothing but contempt for such people.
We are not merely historians but also and always citizens.
As citizens of a free society, we have a duty to look critically at our world. But if we think we know what is wrong, we must act upon that knowledge.
History can show you that it was one pile of bad stuff after another. It can also show you that there’s been tremendous progress in knowledge, behaviour, laws, civilisation. It cannot show you that there was a meaning behind it.
I’m not sure I’ve learned anything new about life; but I’ve had to think harder about death and what comes after for other people.
I’ve lost count of the interviews I’ve done about my illness and its relationship to my ideas and writing.
It does irritate me when I am described as a controversialist and commentator on Israel.
I don’t believe that one should have one-size-fits-all moral rules for international political action.
I know exactly how and where I am going to die. The only question is when.
I grew up in a world where the social democratic state was the norm, not the exception.
If we have learned nothing else from the 20th century, we should at least have grasped that the more perfect the answer, the more terrifying its consequences. Incremental improvements upon unsatisfactory circumstances are the best that we can hope for, and probably all we should seek.
Apparently, the line you take on Israel trumps everything else in life.
But I’m English. We don’t do uplifting.
I can still boss people around. I can still write. I can still read. I can still eat, and I can still have very strong views.
I do think we’re on the edge of a terrifying world, and that many young people know that but don’t know how to talk about it.
I don’t much mind being expelled from communities.
I don’t believe in an afterlife. I don’t believe in a single or multiple godhead. I respect people who do, but I don’t believe it myself.
After 1945 what happened was rather the opposite: with one major exception boundaries stayed broadly intact and people were moved instead.
If active or concerned citizens forfeit politics, they thereby abandon their society to its most mediocre and venal public servants.
If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have.