Every
once in a while, I post articles that I especially like and want to
share. No amount of writing on my part could communicate what this
article says.
www.gilad.co.uk
By Kevin Barrett
March 9, 2012
Gilad Atzmon is one of the sweetest, funniest, most charming and likable people I’ve ever met.
He’s
also one of the world’s best saxaphone players. Gilad’s music is not
only gorgeous, but uncommonly accessible for music in its class.
His writing, which includes
two novels, a nonfiction book, and countless essays, is grounded in the highest humanistic ideals, invigorating laughter, and an irrepressible joie de vivre.
In short, Gilad is outrageously easy to like.
So why is he hated so much?
Why
are his appearances protested by angry picketers? Why is the most
vicious and mendacious kind of calumny being hurled at him in such
quantities? Why is there an organized effort to make this gentle, loving
free spirit out to be some kind of deranged Nazi?
His
detractors say his writing invites it. But they’re wrong. The proof
is that the anti-Atzmon brigade has to resort to lies (or to be
charitable, gratuitous distortions) to make him look bad.
There must be some deeper reason why they hate him.
Maybe it’s because he’s such a powerful symbol of – and argument for – the end of Zionism.
Gilad
Atzmon grew up in Israel in a Jewish family that included Holocaust
survivors. He fell in love with jazz as a teenager, so when it came
time to serve in the IDF he joined a military band. During his IDF
service, Gilad awakened to the horrors of Zionism and its brutality
toward Palestinians. Shortly after leaving the IDF, he also left Israel
and never returned.
Now London-based, Gilad Atzmon is
considered one of Europe’s top jazz musicians – and, increasingly,
its leading ex-Israeli anti-Zionist voice. He has published two
acclaimed novels, and his new book The Wandering Who? has endured
vicious attacks, smear campaigns, and boycotts by such Zionists as
Alan Dershowitz, and is becoming a worldwide bestseller.
In
all of this, Gilad Atzmon is quite the anti-Zionist success story.
His creative output, both musical and verbal, challenges arbitrary
boundaries and celebrates freedom. (Jazz, the greatest art form America
ever produced, is at its root a celebration of musical freedom by
once-enslaved African-Americans.)
Today, more and more
Israelis are lining up to get second passports and asking themselves,
“Is there life after Zionism?” Gilad Atzmon offers a perfect example,
with plenty of supporting arguments, of how ex-Zionist Israelis can
liberate themselves from the shackles of a brutal, abusive, and
ultimately doomed ideology and identity.
So that’s why they hate him. He’s the walking, talking, saxaphone-blowing embodiment of the joy of life after Zionism.
You
see, most of the people who hate Gilad are radical Zionists; all
(including the handful of “pro-Palestine” phonies) are prisoners of
Zionist ideology. They have been trained to heap mountains of hate on
anyone who crosses the one meaningful line in the whole Israel-Palestine
debate: The line that separates those who support or accept the
existence of a “Jewish state” in Palestine from those of us who do not.
As Norman Finkelstein
inadvertently pointed out,
Israel – despite its horrendous human rights record – is not going to
be changed by people focusing on ephemeral abuses of human rights.
The Zionists (like Finkelstein) will simply respond, “There are, and
have been, human rights abuses elsewhere that are just as bad; so
anybody who focuses on Israeli human rights violations must be an
anti-Semite.” (Most murderers don’t get off by pleading to the judge
that someone else committed an equally bad murder; but we’ll let that
slide.)
Chris Hedges might respond to Finklestein that
nowhere else do army snipers lure children into range of their guns,
then gut-shoot them for sport; and British Medical Journal might add
that the more than 600 children sport-shot during the interval they
examined, who were essentially hunted and killed for fun by IDF
soldiers as a de facto national policy, died from a specific and
horrific type of human rights abuse that has never been seen anywhere
else. But these events will be buried by the Zionist-dominated media;
and no matter how horrific the abuses, there will always be different
sufficiently revolting examples of inhumanity from other times and
places to relativize the Israeli atrocities.
There is
only one argument the Zionists cannot possibly win: The argument over
whether there should be a “Jewish state” in Palestine in the first
place.
Defenders of this bizarre notion must argue that
it is perfectly fine for a religious-ethnic group to invade and
occupy another group’s land, halfway across the world, on the basis of
the aggressor group’s ancient mythology. And that it is perfectly
fine for the aggressor group to dispossess and destroy the people
living on that land, and to create an ethnic-specific apartheid system
under which the invaders are first class citizens, while the victims
are either second-class citizens or permanently exiled from their
homeland.
To defend Zionism, you would also have to
grant American Celts (like me) the right to invade, occupy, and erect a
“Celtic state” in the Baltic or Western France or wherever our
mythology says we originated. You would have to allow Andalusian
Muslims (another ethnic-religious category I identify with) to invade,
occupy, and ethnically-cleanse Spain. You would have to allow
Protestants, whose mythology tells them that they are the true
Christians, to invade and occupy the Vatican – and Palestine, for that
matter. You would have to allow virtually all of the 3,000 ethnic
groups on earth to invade, occupy, and ethnically cleanse someplace
halfway across the world that they can claim is their “ancient
homeland.”
Obviously, any and all “invade-and-occupy-our-
mythological-ancient-homeland” projects are equally indefensible and equally insane.
Zionism is genocidal insanity.
It must be ended.
No more Jewish state in Occupied Palestine.
Period.
This
is the bottom line. This is the line that all the Zionists, from
right-wingers like Netanyahu to left-wingers like Chomsky and
Finklestein and Amy Goodman and Matt Rothschild and Michael Lerner and
Rob Kall and Chip Berlet and all of the hundreds of other Zionist
gatekeepers that dominate the “alternative” as well as mainstream media
DO NOT WANT YOU TO CROSS. These are the Police Lines that the Zionist
thought police have erected, and are working overtime to maintain.
Because
if you ask that one little simple question – “is the Zionist project,
and the Israeli ‘nation,’ legitimate in the first place?” the whole
thing crumbles to dust and ashes.
That’s the real
reason the Zionists want to nuke Iran. The Iranian government is the
only government in the Middle East to have, as its official policy,
exactly the same position as the vast majority of the people of the
Middle East: The Zionist entity in Occupied Palestine is not, and
never will be, legitimate; and it must be ended, preferably by
nonviolent means, as soon as possible.
And that’s why
the Zionists are getting more and more hysterical in their
denunciations of “delegitimizers.” (How can you delegitimize something
that was never legitimate in the first place?)
And that’s why they’re hate-swarming all over Jenny Tonge, who correctly pointed out that Israel won’t last forever.
And
that’s why they hate Gilad Atzmon. Not only is Gilad forthrightly
anti-Zionist, thereby showing the “peacenik Zionist” phonies up for
what they are; but he is also fearless in his analysis of the way Jewish
identity politics fosters the delusion that Jews are an “exceptional
people” who should be allowed to do things to Palestine that no other
ethnic/religious group would ever be allowed to do to its mythological
ancient homeland across the seas.
Worse: The guy
expressing these taboo but obviously-correct views, and setting such a
beautiful example as an ex-Israeli anti-Zionist, is an energetic and
fabulously talented Renaissance man – a superb musician and writer and
mesmerizing public speaker. This must gall the Zionists to no end.
No wonder they hate Gilad Atzmon.
Maybe
someday, when they get tired of hating, they’ll drop their Zionism
(itself an ideology of hatred, starting with self-hatred) and embrace
the love, joy and liberation Gilad embodies so beautifully.
SEE
POSTS: "DOES CRITICIZING ISRAEL MEAN YOU ARE AN ANTISEMITE?", "SETTING
THE ISRAELI QUESTION STRAIGHT" and "ILLEGAL TO CRITICIZE ISRAEL?!"
"I
should much rather see reasonable agreement with the Arabs on the
basis of living together in peace than the creation of a Jewish state.
…the essential nature of Judaism resists the idea of a Jewish state
with borders, an army, and a measure of temporal power…. I am afraid of
the inner damage Judaism will sustain – especially from the
development of a narrow nationalism within our own ranks…" ~ Einstein speech in New York, 1938