We Write What We Like

If one read the Zionist literature from objective sources – one will find out that some of greatest anti-Semites have been Zionist Jews – including Theodor Herzl, Chaim Weizmann, Lenni Brenner, Golda Meir, David Ben Gurion, etc.

In Canada, we have columnist Eric Margolis – whose journalism career has been ruined by the powerful Jewish Lobby (CJC) for criticizing Israel and supporting some Muslim causes:

http://rehmat1.wordpress.com/2009/03/27/zionists-iranophobia-and-canadian-intellectuals/

I doubt anyone in the audience managed to grasp what he was saying, but when you spit out the word “Jews” then at least it gives the impression what you’re saying about them is bad!

—-

This is so true. As a non-Jew, it is often hard to even bring the term up in discussion as the mere mention of it seems to invite accusations of bigotry. I am sorry that Gilad had to waste time on trying to deflect that criticism as most everything I’ve read of Mr. Atzmon’s in context seems supported by the facts (certainly worthy of discussion, at the very least).

Maybe Gilad should have ready a list of Zionist quotes that could be hung around the necks of pro-Zionists like an albatross.

we who negate Israel’s existence , do so because we do not want ever to reward ash’m with a state after their numerous crimes have been comitted against a defensless people who lived in the region for at least 7T yrs.
once these land robbers call us names, it proves that we are right. labeling people this and that comes froma wretched, broken soul and they do not emanate from facts on the ground.

to retain or reacquire calm, it is useful to remember the truth: labeling starts from s’mthing inside a person and not s’mthing outside the person.

and also, we can only be against what person does or says; thus that is what we are against. let’s be proud of our work against israeli crimes against all of us. tnx

@LanceThruster –
you are right Lance, and if you listened to the audio stream, it is amazing that this Aaronovitch thought a circus trick like that could even work. When it didn’t, and he started screaming at people to stop applauding, pointing at them, calling them names, it not only dropped the mask, but it simply pointed out a kind of behaviour that I don’t think I’ve ever seen in any kind of debate, and I live in Italy, where the debates are VERY lively and can get into levels of volume that are annoying, but to actually try to silence people who are clapping, I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything like that before.

Furthermore, the whole arrangement looked very creepy. 18 minutes for the first speaker, 9 minutes for the last one! At that point, they should have not kept Gilad to a 10 minute intervention, but let him continue another 9. The moderator should not have allowed the character assassination in the first place. But, as usual, Gilad manages to come out well in these things. It’s the force of the argument. When you are not climbing on mountains of lies, you don’t have to remember a strategy, you just say what you have to say.

And in case anyone is any doubt about the ideological heir of Irgun leader and former Israeli PM Menachem Begin, here is current Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu speaking in 1989:

 “Israel should have exploited the repression of the demonstrations in China, when world attention focused on that country, to carry out mass expulsions among the Arabs of the territories.”

Benyamin Netanyahu, then Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister, former Prime Minister of Israel, speaking to students at Bar Ilan University, from the Israeli journal Hotam, November 24, 1989.

And here is the architect of the explosion at the King David Hotel himself (deaths in excess of 88, including 15 Jews):

“The Partition of Palestine is illegal. It will never be recognized …. Jerusalem was and will for ever be our capital. Eretz Israel will be restored to the people of Israel. All of it. And forever.”

— Menachem Begin, the day after the U.N. vote to partition Palestine.

Menachem Begin Prime Minister of Israel 1977 – 1983

Begin is not the only terrorist PM of Israel. We may add the names of Ariel Sharon and Yitzhak Shamir, operational commander of the Stern gang which killed UN mediator Count Bernadotte.

@The Saker –

In fact Shlom Sands’ book will be the best possible source… as far as i am aware it will be available in English soon…

for the time being you can look at this

http://palestinethinktank.com/2008/09/02/gilad-atzmon-the-wandering-who/

Peace
G

Meanwhile it’s been available in French for the past six months, price 23 Euros. “Comment le peuple juif fut inventé” Schlomo Sand, publisher Fayard.

Meanwhile there’s this, from the English edition of Le Monde Diplomatique, an invaluable source for current affairs:

Israel deliberately forgets its history

An Israeli historian suggests the diaspora was the consequence, not of the expulsion of the Hebrews from Palestine, but of proselytising across north Africa, southern Europe and the Middle East

By Schlomo Sand

Every Israeli knows that he or she is the direct and exclusive descendant of a Jewish people which has existed since it received the Torah (1) in Sinai. According to this myth, the Jews escaped from Egypt and settled in the Promised Land, where they built the glorious kingdom of David and Solomon, which subsequently split into the kingdoms of Judah and Israel. They experienced two exiles: after the destruction of the first temple, in the 6th century BC, and of the second temple, in 70 AD.

Two thousand years of wandering brought the Jews to Yemen, Morocco, Spain, Germany, Poland and deep into Russia. But, the story goes, they always managed to preserve blood links between their scattered communities. Their uniqueness was never compromised.

At the end of the 19th century conditions began to favour their return to their ancient homeland. If it had not been for the Nazi genocide, millions of Jews would have fulfilled the dream of 20 centuries and repopulated Eretz Israel, the biblical land of Israel. Palestine, a virgin land, had been waiting for its original inhabitants to return and awaken it. It belonged to the Jews, rather than to an Arab minority that had no history and had arrived there by chance. The wars in which the wandering people reconquered their land were just; the violent opposition of the local population was criminal.

This interpretation of Jewish history was developed as talented, imaginative historians built on surviving fragments of Jewish and Christian religious memory to construct a continuous genealogy for the Jewish people. Judaism’s abundant historiography encompasses many different approaches.

But none have ever questioned the basic concepts developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Discoveries that might threaten this picture of a linear past were marginalised. The national imperative rejected any contradiction of or deviation from the dominant story. University departments exclusively devoted to “the history of the Jewish people”, as distinct from those teaching what is known in Israel as general history, made a significant contribution to this selective vision. The debate on what constitutes Jewishness has obvious legal implications, but historians ignored it: as far as they are concerned, any descendant of the people forced into exile 2,000 years ago is a Jew.

Nor did these official investigators of the past join the controversy provoked by the “new historians” from the late 1980s. Most of the limited number of participants in this public debate were from other disciplines or non-academic circles: sociologists, orientalists, linguists, geographers, political scientists, literary academics and archaeologists developed new perspectives on the Jewish and Zionist past. Departments of Jewish history remained defensive and conservative, basing themselves on received ideas. While there have been few significant developments in national history over the past 60 years (a situation unlikely to change in the short term), the facts that have emerged face any honest historian with fundamental questions.

Founding myths shaken

Is the Bible a historical text? Writing during the early half of the 19th century, the first modern Jewish historians, such as Isaak Markus Jost (1793-1860) and Leopold Zunz (1794-1886), did not think so. They regarded the Old Testament as a theological work reflecting the beliefs of Jewish religious communities after the destruction of the first temple. It was not until the second half of the century that Heinrich Graetz (1817-91) and others developed a “national” vision of the Bible and transformed Abraham’s journey to Canaan, the flight from Egypt and the united kingdom of David and Solomon into an authentic national past. By constant repetition, Zionist historians have subsequently turned these Biblical “truths” into the basis of national education.

But during the 1980s an earthquake shook these founding myths. The discoveries made by the “new archaeology” discredited a great exodus in the 13th century BC. Moses could not have led the Hebrews out of Egypt into the Promised Land, for the good reason that the latter was Egyptian territory at the time. And there is no trace of either a slave revolt against the pharaonic empire or of a sudden conquest of Canaan by outsiders.

Nor is there any trace or memory of the magnificent kingdom of David and Solomon. Recent discoveries point to the existence, at the time, of two small kingdoms: Israel, the more powerful, and Judah, the future Judea. The general population of Judah did not go into 6th century BC exile: only its political and intellectual elite were forced to settle in Babylon. This decisive encounter with Persian religion gave birth to Jewish monotheism.
Then there is the question of the exile of 70 AD. There has been no real research into this turning point in Jewish history, the cause of the diaspora. And for a simple reason: the Romans never exiled any nation from anywhere on the eastern seaboard of the Mediterranean. Apart from enslaved prisoners, the population of Judea continued to live on their lands, even after the destruction of the second temple. Some converted to Christianity in the 4th century, while the majority embraced Islam during the 7th century Arab conquest.
Most Zionist thinkers were aware of this: Yitzhak Ben Zvi, later president of Israel, and David Ben Gurion, its first prime minister, accepted it as late as 1929, the year of the great Palestinian revolt. Both stated on several occasions that the peasants of Palestine were the descendants of the inhabitants of ancient Judea (2).

Proselytising zeal

But if there was no exile after 70 AD, where did all the Jews who have populated the Mediterranean since antiquity come from? The smokescreen of national historiography hides an astonishing reality. From the Maccabean revolt of the mid-2nd century BC to the Bar Kokhba revolt of the 2nd century AD, Judaism was the most actively proselytising religion. The Judeo-Hellenic Hasmoneans forcibly converted the Idumeans of southern Judea and the Itureans of Galilee and incorporated them into the people of Israel. Judaism spread across the Middle East and round the Mediterranean. The 1st century AD saw the emergence in modern Kurdistan of the Jewish kingdom of Adiabene, just one of many that converted.

The writings of Flavius Josephus are not the only evidence of the proselytising zeal of the Jews. Horace, Seneca, Juvenal and Tacitus were among the Roman writers who feared it. The Mishnah and the Talmud (3) authorised conversion, even if the wise men of the Talmudic tradition expressed reservations in the face of the mounting pressure from Christianity.

Although the early 4th century triumph of Christianity did not mark the end of Jewish expansion, it relegated Jewish proselytism to the margins of the Christian cultural world. During the 5th century, in modern Yemen, a vigorous Jewish kingdom emerged in Himyar, whose descendants preserved their faith through the Islamic conquest and down to the present day. Arab chronicles tell of the existence, during the 7th century, of Judaised Berber tribes; and at the end of the century the legendary Jewish queen Dihya contested the Arab advance into northwest Africa. Jewish Berbers participated in the conquest of the Iberian peninsula and helped establish the unique symbiosis between Jews and Muslims that characterised Hispano-Arabic culture.
The most significant mass conversion occurred in the 8th century, in the massive Khazar kingdom between the Black and Caspian seas. The expansion of Judaism from the Caucasus into modern Ukraine created a multiplicity of communities, many of which retreated from the 13th century Mongol invasions into eastern Europe. There, with Jews from the Slavic lands to the south and from what is now modern Germany, they formed the basis of Yiddish culture (4).

Prism of Zionism

Until about 1960 the complex origins of the Jewish people were more or less reluctantly acknowledged by Zionist historiography. But thereafter they were marginalised and finally erased from Israeli public memory. The Israeli forces who seized Jerusalem in 1967 believed themselves to be the direct descendents of the mythic kingdom of David rather than – God forbid – of Berber warriors or Khazar horsemen. The Jews claimed to constitute a specific ethnic group that had returned to Jerusalem, its capital, from 2,000 years of exile and wandering.

This monolithic, linear edifice is supposed to be supported by biology as well as history. Since the 1970s supposedly scientific research, carried out in Israel, has desperately striven to demonstrate that Jews throughout the world are closely genetically related.

Research into the origins of populations now constitutes a legitimate and popular field in molecular biology and the male Y chromosome has been accorded honoured status in the frenzied search for the unique origin of the “chosen people”. The problem is that this historical fantasy has come to underpin the politics of identity of the state of Israel. By validating an essentialist, ethnocentric definition of Judaism it encourages a segregation that separates Jews from non-Jews – whether Arabs, Russian immigrants or foreign workers.

Sixty years after its foundation, Israel refuses to accept that it should exist for the sake of its citizens. For almost a quarter of the population, who are not regarded as Jews, this is not their state legally. At the same time, Israel presents itself as the homeland of Jews throughout the world, even if these are no longer persecuted refugees, but the full and equal citizens of other countries.

A global ethnocracy invokes the myth of the eternal nation, reconstituted on the land of its ancestors, to justify internal discrimination against its own citizens. It will remain difficult to imagine a new Jewish history while the prism of Zionism continues to fragment everything into an ethnocentric spectrum. But Jews worldwide have always tended to form religious communities, usually by conversion; they cannot be said to share an ethnicity derived from a unique origin and displaced over 20 centuries of wandering.
The development of historiography and the evolution of modernity were consequences of the invention of the nation state, which preoccupied millions during the 19th and 20th centuries. The new millennium has seen these dreams begin to shatter.

And more and more academics are analysing, dissecting and deconstructing the great national stories, especially the myths of common origin so dear to chroniclers of the past.

Shlomo Sand is professor of history at Tel Aviv university and the author of Comment le people juif fut inventé (Fayard, Paris, 2008)

@Gilad & Paul: thanks! I will get the book in French. Cheers!

Another work, also not available in English, is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “Two Hundred Years Together.”
Rather odd these epic works are not yet available in English. Or perhaps it’s not odd at all..

We learned that atzmon is an antisemite and that aside from his few supporters no one cares about him.

@The Saker – Anyone who is accused by both opposing factions is usually, like a cynic, right nine times out of ten.
And what was the point Solzhenitsyn made, using Jewish sources exclusively?

To answer the question: “So what did we learn about anti-Semitism?” I’d say what I’ve learned is there are a few Israelis, seemingly a small minority, who are not anti-Semites.
Gilad Atzmon among them.

I just checked online and that book by Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People, is available for pre-order on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.ca/dp/1844674223 (Canada)
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1844674223 (USA)
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1844674223 (UK / Europe)

Just thought i’d share :-)

I want to make it a matter of public record that I have apologised to David Aaronowitz by email for calling him a “snivelling pundit”. I do not know David, I have never read his articles, and I do not know what his views are. In any case it was completely unwarranted on my part to descend to personal abuse on the basis of listening to a recording. If he had distinguished between institutional anti-semitism, which does not exist in England, personal judaeophobia (fear and hatred of Jews as a collective), and anti-Judaism (characterisation of Judaism as a genocidal ideology, and hatred of Jews by Christians on the basis of their religion, and the resulting pogroms in, for example, Tsarist Russia) he might have made some headway in the debate, and demonstrated that Gilad exhibits reactionary views on race where his own ethnic group is concerned.

I won’t call Gilad an anti-semite because the term itself is totally redundant. The term anti-semitism appeared in the language at the same time as Zionism; in the late nineteenth century. The two are connected. But judaeophobic, yes, on the evidence. I do not care for this attitude in him at all. But I am not into name calling. That is why I apologised to David.

If David had been prepared to acknowledge that Gilad talks a great deal of sense about the behaviour of his native land, he might have been to distinguish the sense from the nonsense in Gilad’s oeuvre. But it would have taken a great deal more than ten minutes, or even the eighteen that David took to read out his potted quotations. If we characterise Christianity on the basis of its adherents’ behaviour in the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition, we can with reason call it a genocidal ideology. If we characterise Judaism on the basis of the last two chapters of the Torah and selected statements from the Talmud, we can also correctly characterise it as a religion that advocates hate and genocide.

Yet in neither of these two monotheisms is that the whole story: religion is always two sided. Judaism has also given us law and psychoanalysis: both are in a direct line of descent from the Talmud. In Yuri Slezkine’s reading of history (The Jewish Century), Judaism has also given us modernity. If secular Jews wish to resist Zionism as Jews, I have never had a problem with this. Gilad has, and his calling the Jews a “racially orientated group” does not alleviate the problem of his own essentialist reading of Jewishness. In my view Gilad is not a consistent thinker: he is primarily a brilliant composer of great jazz, an artist and a fantastic saxophonist.

This is his gift to the world.

He uses it to serve the liberation of the Palestinian people from Zionism. Fantastic. I’m right behind him. The man’s an inspiration. I don’t care for Gilad’s politics at all but his heart is where it should be.

All the other stuff is secondary. In my view Gilad does stray into the territory of judaeophobia and anti-Judaism; and occasionally he does not. Jews are not connected by blood and soil to Palestine; in the Heideggerian reading the Palestinians are (see Ariella Atzmon’s article “Homeland as the Gift of Destiny: Homecoming between dwelling and settling” for the full Heideggerian treatment), but what does it matter? Why should it even be an issue? Vikings once conquered England; they brought their Norse ways and their Norse religion.

If ancestrally you come from the East of my country you will have Norse genes in your makeup. Eventually the Jews in the Middle East will hybridise with Palestinians, or leave; this apartness is temporary, this racist supremacism is temporary, and it is the result of European colonialism a century too late. That is why in the larger scheme of things Israel does not stand a chance. It is the Johnny Come Lately of European imperialism, and it will leave the stage quite soon. We just have to help it on its way, and identify and support those forces that will help it on its way.

Blood and soil are not the issue in Palestine; they never have been. We shall get sidetracked by issues of ethnicity, fascinating though they are. Conquest, colonialism, injustice and inequality are. The ideology described in Sven Lindqwist’s book Exterminate All The Brutes is alive and active in Palestine. Genocide is not Jewish; it is European, and Israel was founded by European colonialist Jews. We have just seen its results in Gaza. Zionism is a colonial ideology of capitalism; and so is Nazism. Hitler’s originality was that he fought a colonial war in the heart of Europe, and the Jews were its target. Hitler simply brought home what Leopold II of Belgium had done in the Congo almost a century earlier after the humiliation of Germany by the Allies at the end of the First World War and the defeat of the popular classes in the Weimar Republic. Following the defeat of Hitler this ideology was exported in its full genocidal glory to Palestine, with the full support of the international power elite; Stalin, Truman and Churchill.

Let us focus on power and its abuse rather than on ethnicity; let us focus on a class analysis of Zionism and the Middle East. The Palestinians have allies; we saw it in the mass demonstrations in Egypt during the invasion of Gaza. Let us look beyond Palestine for destruction of Zionism to the peoples enslaved under the yoke of corrupt Arab plutocracies, whether monarchies or secular dictatorships, beholden to and dependent upon US and EU imperialism. When these peoples liberate themselves, as they shall, Zionism does not stand a chance; it will fall, as all empires do, under the demand for liberty and self-determination.

Now it’s time for breakfast! Thanks for a great website, Palestine Thinktank!

@Paul Grenville – I haven’t read such a big heap of nonsense for a long long time…

@Paul: I’m fine with facts. I do not know the whole story. I do not read Russian, but French and Spanish. I did not know about Reds’ pogroms against Jews. I would have to see that substantiated. Most
peculiar and it makes little sense. In general Jews fared well under Bolshevism, as they did after
the French Revolution.

The thing is that while some Jews in the Ukraine were poor, other were not, at least not when compared to the Ukrainian peasants. This is why all pogroms had a strong class-struggle component both before and after the Revolution. True, many Jews did well in the Bolshevik Party, but the influence of that party was more felt in Saint Petersburg and Moscow and other Russian cities. In the Ukraine, a great deal of anarcho-socialist parties existed, some with Ukrainian nationalist agendas, and a lot of the anti-Jewish pogroms under the Reds were simply seen by them as popular anti-bourgeois resistance operations. Again, this was very much like the Jacqueries. Since you read French, may I point you to this:

http://www.amazon.fr/Deux-si%C3%A8cles-ensemble-1795-1995-r%C3%A9volution/dp/2213611580

Kind regards,

The Saker

I cannot prove it, but I suspect Zionism needed a partial genocide of the Jews in order to triumph. What a propaganda gift for the Jewish state as well.

That is just obvious. The handful of Zionists needed such a catastrophe to happen, because most Jews just wanted to “be normal”, to assimilate. The religious barriers of the ancien regime had fallen and they felt as German, French, Polish, Russian, etc. more than “Jews”, when they were not outright humanist internationalists, like so many bolsheviks.

Hitler in fact flirted with them: he wanted to get rid of Jews, so Zionism or a rather tamed variant of it was a reasonable solution. The nazis considered creating Jewish deportation colonies in places like Uganda or Madagascar in fact.

But whatever the case, before 1939 there were only 10% Jews in Palestine, mostly native Arab Jews. In 1946, they were 33%! The Holocaust mobilized European Jews en masse towards the Zionist dream. Nightmare for the natives – but nobody cared much about “natives” yet at that time in fact, a time when black people were still discriminated against nearly everywhere, and that real racism applied in fact to every non-European, with almost no exceptions. It was only in the decades to come that cutural and political racism began to be challenged seriously. You still find such hidden racist prejudices in “perfectly normal” people born in the 40s: you think they are normal, rather liberal, humanist… and then they say despectively “but they are negroes!” – and you just can’t but think: poor idiot!

Zionists also jumped to that cart and in fact they used to call Palestinians “negroes”, as to dehumanize them sybolically, depriving them of rights in their own European racist imperialist minds, not so different from Hitler’s after all.

Inside Israel, too, that is within the borders established in 1967, the mortality rate of
Palestinian Arabs is double that of Israeli Jews…So much for the Jewish and democratic
state…

@Paul Grenville –
To be honest, I’ve just skimmed over all these comments, and shouldn’t really respond if I’m not clear about all of the comments. However, a few thoughts of mine from Paul’s post here I feel I need to comment on.
1) why should anyone need to apologise to David Aaronovitch? That he decided (or had help from Harry’s Place) how to organise his time (and double it) in the panel discussion demonstrates that he had no real intention of arguing the point, but attacking one of the other panelists is as clear as day: if I go to a talk, I prepare myself, give a dry run with a stop watch and see how much time I have to improvise should another issue become important. Kind of like packing for a trip, pack everything you KNOW you absolutely can not do without, then take half of it out. Aaronovitch, intervening in the way he did can only be described as a “snivelling pundit” (I would opt for worse) because attacking the opponent as the strategy is no strategy at all, and it is clear by the recording and especially his shouting down the public to stop applauding. Is this normal, mature behaviour? I think it isn’t, and I have no problem saying it, despite the (despicable) material Aaronovitch produces on his own. I wonder how he responded to you, Paul.

My second point (there may be more, but for now, will focus here) is on your claim that you don’t support Gilad’s politics. As far as I know, and I can claim to be fairly certain of his politics due to close affiliation for something around 7 years, has always been to condemn Zionism and to condemn the exertion of power (Jewish, Western, Imperialist, American, UK) whenever it interferes with the legitimate rights and need for freedom and liberation of Palestinian people. This is his politics. I agree with it entirely. To have these politics doesn’t mean to be “anti-Western” (if I was, I’d be living in some other place than Europe), anti-Jew (how can one be anti-Jew if one does not consider Jews a race? I don’t and neither does Gilad and many others who are condemned by the likes of Aaronovitch), anti-American (I was born there, most of my family lives there, I love these people), but… Imperialism, like Zionism, is an ideology, as is the concept of “Jewish tribalism”, which seeks to group people together who may have NOTHING in common, not race, religion, political affiliation… what they have in common is nothing, but they allow themselves to be categorised as a race, just like the Nazis did to people who were of Jewish origin (when that meant believing in the Jewish religion). These are people who maybe today are even anti-Zionists, but they spent time in Israel working on Kibbutzes, studying, what have you, why?? Because they believed they were entitled to because they were of Jewish origin.

You see, today maybe they no longer apply to make Aliyah or get a student grant, but they sign petitions or open letters “as Jews” and in this sense.. they act in a racially oriented way. Some of these petitions do not even have elements a decent person could sign, believe me, I get them in the mail all the time, things like “back to the 67 borders, stop oppression against Palestinians and give security to Israel,” and more of the same. I won’t even recognise the legitimacy of the 67 borders, but these self-styled Jewish anti-Zionists will sign something like this, why? Because they still believe there is something that makes sense in signing “ethnically” divisive petitions. This is where Gilad protests, and I am with him here. If you call him Judeophobe for it, it means you don’t understand at all what he is saying.

@Paul Grenville –

The point is: if Gilad doesn’t see Jews as a race, and sees “Jewishness”, which is what he calls a tribal kind of awareness of being “different” … but by the definition of many of these people who call themselves Jews not united by anything in particular such as race, ethnic group, religion, belief system…. what is there that makes a Jew a Jew… the idea that Jews are fundamentally a category, ie., different. To be against Jewishness (in the secular sense) is to be against a racial categorisation of people. It is actually very Anti racist! Gilad doesn’t buy this “we are Jews stuff” obviously, and those who DO are playing out the thing he calls an ideology of “Jewishness”. If I sign a petition as a Jew, that means that I in some way must identify myself as one: I don’t practice the religion, I don’t believe they are an ethnic group, and they certainly aren’t a nation… then what is it about me that would be Jewish? I don’t know!

That there is a lobby of people who sustain things known as Jewish interests -can include a lot of things, from Israel to absence of being criticised, to being able to condemn others are anti-semites because they dare to say things that bother some people such as point out that it is really pretty much a peculiarly Zionist thing to have 52% of an administration (more than half) Jews who are also declared Zionists, in a country where the population of Jews is under 2%. It simply is something that any normal person would point out as being a Zionist success and totally relevant to the power of Jews and Zionists in the US administration, and is not a racist statement. To twist that into one means that one doesn’t understand Zionist power at all.

Well thank you Mary. I feel we are tlking a past each other a little bit, but never mind.

Ok, I shall come clean. I have only been to a synagogue once in my life. It is the first and now probably the last time. After all, I’m a goy, and I’m not welcome anymore. Someone’s Bar-Mitzvah. It was in Finchley. It was lovely. It was a Reform synagogue. Maybe that makes a difference. Sure, there was singing in Hebrew, but religious singing, no singing of the Israeli national anthem and no Israeli flag, in fact no references to Israel of any kind! Maybe I just got lucky….

Of course, of course, I accept that Israel is at the centre of British Jewish life. Most people accept power and most people are quite conformist. Jews are no exception. I don’t care much about states, religions, national borders etc. I feel a certain sense of European identity, not English particularly. Your other points in this email: I can’t see anything to disagree with strongly. Jews are two ethnicities and none. Both the Sephardis and the Ashkenazis can trace a certain “bloodline”, but in both cases it has been considerably diluted, in the first case by Berber, Arab and Spanish blood, and in the second by waves of conversion throughout Ashkenazi history.

I’ll tell you what I feel is Jewish. It is the aura of specialness that no other group quite claims for themselves. Special suffering, special history, special dispensations, special silencing operations, and special types of illegality all under an aura of sanctity. I’m talking about modern Jewishness.

Maybe you are right about the tribal identity. I’ve always balked at this because I know so many exceptions.
Almost only exceptions. It was only when I came across right wing Jews for the first time in my life that I noticed there was a certain conformity, a certain type of thinking, or rather non-thinking.

And then I meet Jews who just don’t want anything to do with it, neither the religion nor Israel. My friend’s like that. About the only thing she’s interested in are the pretzels, a smattering of yiddish, and the jokes. The other one has even less identification with her heritage. It means nothing to her.

I bought a copy of Jewish Socialist once on a Gaza demo and I think it’s a great magazine. No specialness there. Yet these socialists still want to be identified as Jews. In this case it must be a familial, cultural thing. It isn’t necessarily a racial identification with radical Jews is it, since they would reject out of hand the concept of race, or at least any radicals worth their salt would…That is an instance, I would suggest, of diversity. But I guess it’s really really marginal and not making any headway.

I sent you a couple of emails to your PTT address. I launched my own personal Exocet at Zionist Jewishness and anti-semitism, back in January, and from an Is it good for the Jews Judaeocentric perspective. It was very destructive, but not in the way hoped. Apparently the smashing of icons did not work. It produced murderous feelings in the recipient instead,

Paul

Mary I made myself clear already. Why should I repeat myself?

I don’t have a “game”. I am genuinely inconsistent and genuinely naive.

You think I am undercover for the Jewish Chronicle? Aaronovitch works for it.
I found out yesterday, looking at the other blog running on Aaronovitch.

There is something that feels unhealthy here but I cannot work out
what it is. Lack of a socialist perspective maybe.

The Hitler reference is genuine, yet it produced no reaction at all. I wish it were not.
Nothing cryptic about it. What would I have to gain by lying?

Why would I want to read Solzhenitsyn? His novels, yes, but as a historian?
I am not even familiar with the territory. I have to review They Destroyed Iraq
and Called It Freedom (Geoff Simons), something I look forward to, but it’s long too.

Anyway, Good luck. I won’t be back. I’ve been wasting time better
employed in activism. I had a similar experience on Itszone. One ends up
feeling exposed, and in strange company, a little at sea, wondering why the
hell one bothered in the first place.

Regards to Gilad. I look forward to the new album.

Why would I want to read Solzhenitsyn?

Good question: I have only seen his books in the hands of fascists. And I mean real fascists of the kind of going voluntary to fight for fascism back there in the 30s and 40s. Cryptofascists also (those are legion) .

Yes Mary, you have treated me well. Especially as I did not have anything particularly original to say. In addition Gilad has treated me well. And what you say is fair. Gilad commented that as soon as someone says Hitler leftists go all weak at the knees. To be honest I find this a macho use of language and I can’t see the point. Hitler needs a phenomenological analysis that places him inside, not outside history. The latter only dovetails with the Zionist propagandist understanding of the Hitler phenomenon. I have a rather irritating book called Understanding the Nazi Genocide by an Italian trotskyist, Enzo Traverso, who uses the word Shoah throughout the text. I nearly sent the book to Gilad when I realised that actually, Traverso’s own understanding of the event is deficient. Oh and very Jewish. Traverso is of course a Jew.

Mary I don’t really think I should go quoting Gilad’s emails to me and my responses, or even the entire discussion on that occasion. It would not be appropriate here would it? I will email the whole discussion I had with him on that occasion to you privately. My reaction at the time was to think, well this guy’s got some weird ideas. Where on earth does he get them except from fascist groups? As I’m sure you are aware most of the criticism of what are termed Jewish tribal interests come from fascists like David Duke and the Republican Right like Mearscheimer and Walt. The latter have some fairly obvious things to say, but they have no analysis of US capitalism and imperialism. As if it would magically change its spots and become all humanistic and cuddly if Jews were removed from all those positions of power and replaced by WASPS! Do you see my point?

Now the latter are not racist in the least; they simply focus on the preponderance of Jews in US politics, and Jewish power and control, to the exclusion of all else, including the analysis of US imperialism and militarism. It is very interesting how Jews have managed to migrate to the very top of the global power hierarchy, but I am not sure how significant that is, since empire and its depredations all over the world, including numerous genocides, existed before the US Jews got there! Do you see my point? So Jews are in positions pf power in a global and highly destructive empire that threatens human existence on this planet
(US capitalism until now has been the number one force driving global climate change, which threatens
the continuation of the human species). But so what? Does it change anything? What does that tell us? How does it change the analysis? How does it affect the Palestinian struggle? Is it of use? These are genuine, not rhetorical questions, by the way…The problem is still Empire, how to roll it back. If Jews are part of the Empire, it’s because they are ruling class Jews, with the vast majority of non ruling class Jews also in agreement with what Israel is doing in the Middle East. But how significant is this? What does it mean?
There are roughly ?15 million Jews worldwide. If they were all vapourised tomorrow by a special secret process known only to a brilliant Palestinian scientist, d’you think the world would look different?

Gilad certainly managed on that occasion to offend what he saw as my parochial leftist understanding of 20th century European history. He also suggested it was deficient. We discussed the failure of the Allies to bomb the railway line to Auschwitz, for example. I think he suggested that the line had to remain so that Hitler could get his soldiers to the Russian front, something the Allies wanted too, as they feared Communism more than Nazism. Actually this makes sense. Stalin, not Hitler, was the ultimate nightmare for the ruling classes of Western Europe, as the triumph of the former would have meant their termination.

Yes I’ve seen one or two things on here by Palestinian or Arab marxists, and I certainly don’t claim to be one of those. Neither do I have any affiliation with the International Socialists/SWP. The only thing I have time for is the Palestinian issue.

On Jewish tribalism, I have acknowledged before that yes, the phenomenon exists but it would not have the power it has in the US without the vast Christian electorate, who have the same Zionist perceptions of the Middle East as the bulk of US Jews. It’s a case of a Judaeo-Christian-neoliberal alliance, which is global in scope. Is Tony Blair a Jew? Is Bush? Is Berlusconi? Obviously not, yet they are totally in accord with empire. Now if Gilad had something fresh to say, I am not sure what it is. I have not read all 100 papers. Each time I read something by him I find he focusses on the Jews to the exclusion of other factors. It is odd. Is it judaeophobic? I don’t know anymore. It sounds that way to me. I am not name calling here, neither am I calling Gilad a fascist (as you know now Aaronovitch compared him with Nick Griffin). I am genuinely puzzled.

When he talks about “judaeo-bolshevism” (another piece of terminology he has pinched from the fascists) what on earth does he mean by that? Is anti-communism at the bottom of it? I suspect this is probably the bottom line. Gilad has rejected the Left and socialism, and Palestinian nationalism fills the gap.
Palestinian nationalism shows amazing persistance and determination and resourcefulness. Actually Gilad has these qualities too. But if you cross over the ethnic divide in Israel and support the occupied people struggling for liberation, which is admirable in itself, and at the same time you reject socialism/marxism
and any materialist philosophy of human liberation and equality, then where are you going to get your ideas from?

Gilad describes marxism as a “disaster failure philosophy”. Is it so clear cut? Gilad is a Germanophile, nothing wrong with that. He has even described himself as a GERMAN philosopher! Will your ideas come from German existential philosophers? The US Republican Right? Fascist groups? If you reject leftist thinking you have to purloin your ideas from somewhere else. The result is curious, very curious. I read Gilad’s first novel. It was hilarious and wicked, and I mailed a copy in Hebrew that he sent me off to an Israeli in Yahud. Never heard what the latter thought of it…

May I suggest that both he and you read a short study to put the record straight both on fascism and communism. I mentioned it before. Michael Parenti’s “Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism And The
Overthrow of Communism.” (City Lights books, San Francisco, 1997). I have been prepared to learn things from Gilad. Actually I have learned a LOT from Gilad, despite his odd ideology, He is nearly always illuminating, quite often funny, and seemingly well informed, as well as PASSIONATE, which I like.

Now Gilad can learn something from an old Commie, even if he does not accept Parenti, he can at least read a good Italian American marxist who is not in the least interested in defending the Soviet system, but in showing us how little we know of it (I include myself), and comparing it with fascism, the other contender for our hearts in the last century.

I shall read Solzhenitsyn in the French when I can afford the book and when I have finished with Schlomo Sand, also in French, but I am not very hopeful given what I know of Alexander already. Cancer Ward was good.

Now I have to go and make Hummous because I have promised my Jordanian Palestinian friend that I would have some on the table tomorrow,

Ciao,

Paolo

Date: Fri, May 1, 2009 at 9:01 PM

Mary

I am mistaken about Gilad.

I tend to become manic and regret what I’ve written later. I suggest you take down all my comments suggesting Gilad Atzmon is judaeophobic, if it matters, or just delete all my comments on PTT, or print this, if anyone cares. But I don’t think they do. Blogs are full of irrational comments and mine are no exception.

I am well aware that, most of the time, the insignia of Jewishness, whether it be Judaism or cultural baggage, are being mobilised by the Jewish community on behalf of Israel. I had a conversation this evening with a close friend who happens to be half-Jewish , and who has never been to Israel in her life. I pushed her hard on why she thought my piece Why Boycott Israel, which I gave her a copy of, should cause hatred. It all came down to her view of the Holocaust (most of the generation before that of her mother were killed in it) and Israel as the ultimate place of refuge. Now I would never have fingered L- as pro-Israel in the least. Whether this is tribalism exactly I wonder. Maybe it is the mythologising of Jewish oppression that is really pernicious, and maybe this is tribal, and this is carried in uncritical form by someone nonintellectual like L-.

L- also repeated the myths about Arabs being violently anti-semitic and Ahmad dinner jacket as she called him wanting to destroy Israel. It was an unpleasant surprise. I’ve known this person twenty years.

I’m done with apologising, after apologising to that prat Aaronovitch, now that I know who he is.

I’ve been reading Roy Ratcliffe carefully on The Case of Atzmon, published nearly a year ago on PTT. I know Gilad’s intention is entirely humanitarian. I’ve always known this. Let’s face it, I grew up in a culture that is judaeophilic, Jew loving, and to encounter an ex-Jew like him who questions Jewishness, critiques Jewish identity and identifies a dark side to Judaism (all the monotheisms seem to have a dark side in practice) that may underlie our genocidal culture is quite a shock. I live in a Judaeochristian culture. We have a love/hate relationship with Jews. (deleted)

It may be that Judaism and Jewish supremacism is at the heart of white supremacism generally and hence of the very negative view Western cultures have of Arabs and Islam. It may be that I just disagree with Gilad’s emphasis on Jewish Power (I still think it’s a fiction: the real issue is imperialism and colonialism: whether or not Jews are at the heart of the power structures and their ideologies is a complete red herring in my view), not with the substance of his argument with the Jews.

Some time ago Mary, you created a petition identifying the issue of anti-semitism as something that was splitting the pro-Palestinian movement in the hands of a group of British anti-Zionist Jews, and I signed (I’m around the 1240 mark), and left a comment, agreeing with those who felt that the purpose of the Palestine Solidarity Movement was not to campaign against anti-semitism, but to support the Palestinians in whatever form that took. I still hold that view.

I ordered a copy of Blackshirts and Reds by Parenti for Gilad, but that may be another red herring, and arrogant of me to boot. I thought I’d include a dedication from the Verkoyansk Committee of Ideological Correction (I think Verkoyansk was part of the Gulag). One of my correspondents told me you have been an anti-fascist activist, so you probably know far more about it than I do from books.

Paul Grenville