One Decent Israeli: Profile of Gilad Atzmon
October 15, 2010
"I think there is something untenable, simply untenable in the fact that the Jews, who suffered so much racial discrimination, should establish a state that is founded on race laws."
-Gilad Atzmon
by yaron frid
(abridged from Ha'aretz by henrymakow.com)
Gilad Atzmon was born in Tel Aviv in 1963 and grew up in Jerusalem.
"It was a regular secular childhood," he says, "with a right-wing Jabotinskyite grandfather. I wasn't ashamed of him, no way. I understood where he was coming from. I understood where I was coming from."
Most of his military service was spent in the Air Force orchestra, after a stint as a combat medic.
"In the first week of the Lebanon war in 1982 I saw a lot of wounded soldiers, but contrary to the rumors, that was not the turning point in my life. I think the big change actually started in the orchestra, when we went to Ansar, that concentration camp" - a prison built by the Israeli army in Lebanon - "and then I realized that I was in the wrong army."
In 1994, Atzmon planned to study abroad, in New York or Chicago, but in the end found a university in England with an interesting program combining psychoanalysis, philosophy and art history.
"I was 30, and thought I would focus on an academic career. But then I fell in love with London, which was like a small village - it has changed completely since, and not for the better - and the local music scene gave me so much love. So I said to myself: We'll play jazz for the jazz, we'll live for art. We don't need a lot of money, we have everything we need. So we'll stay. And we stayed."
"We" is Atzmon and his wife, Tali, a fine singer and a stage actress with a burgeoning career. They met - we promised you irony, we deliver - at the Hasidic Song Festival in Israel.
"I didn't like Israel and what was happening there but I wasn't politically involved in any way. ... At first I was seen as a nice Jew who was badmouthing Israel, which the goyim liked. But it didn't take me long to understand that I am not a nice Jew, because I don't want to be a Jew, because Jewish values don't really turn me on and all this 'Pour out Thy wrath on the nations' stuff doesn't impress me."
[Secular Israelis are afraid to confront these questions.] Why am I here? Why do I live on lands that are not mine, the plundered lands of another people whose owners want to return to them but cannot? Why do I send my children to kill and be killed, after I myself was a soldier, too? Why do I believe all this bullshit about 'because it's the land of our forefathers' and 'our patrimony' if I am not even religious? What the fuck? That is something the secular Jews simply cannot cope with. They are deathly afraid of those questions. I see more truth among the settlers than among the biggest secular Jews in the country.
"The Israelis can put an end to the conflict in two f**king minutes. Netanyahu gets up tomorrow morning, returns to the Palestinians the lands that belong to them, their fields and houses, and that's it. The refugees will come home and the Jews will also finally be liberated: They will be free in their country and will be able to be like all the nations, get on with their lives and even salvage the bad reputation they have brought on themselves in the past 2,000 years. But for Netanyahu and the Israelis to do that, they have to undergo de-Judaization and accept the fact that they are like all peoples and are not the chosen people. So, in my analysis this is not a political, sociopolitical or socioeconomic issue but something basic that has to do with Jewish identity.
"Think for a minute about the dialectics of Jewish identity, about 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' Who is your neighbor? Another Jew, of course. In other words, from the moment you were chosen to be the 'chosen people' you lost all respect for other peoples and for the other as such.
"Take, for example, the way gays are treated in Israel. It smacks so much of 'Look how liberal we are, we have homosexuals in Israel.' Max Nordau [Zionist leader, 1849-1923] wrote about the emancipation of the Jews, about how the Europeans don't really like Jews but like themselves for supposedly liking Jews. I find a lot of similarity between Jews and gays as separatist, marginal philosophies. It's very interesting.
"There are interesting values in Judaism, and the proof is that the Palestinians' greatest supporters are the Jews of the Torah, Neturei Karta [an ultra-Orthodox sect]. Our problem - and it took me time to understand this - lies with the secular Jews, and even more with the left-wing Jews. The idea of left-wing Jews is fundamentally sickening. Totally. It contains an absolute internal contradiction. If you are leftists it doesn't matter whether you're Jewish or not, so on principle when you present yourselves as leftist Jews you are accepting the idea of national socialism. Nazism. That is pathetic. That is why the Israeli left has never succeeded in doing anything for the Palestinians. The absolute absurdity is that it's actually the right wing that is leading toward a one-state solution and a final-status agreement."
Atzmon played into the hands of politicians such as Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who in a debate with President Shimon Peres quoted Atzmon by name, to the effect that "Israeli barbarism is greater than [regular] cruelty."
Atzmon has been accused from every possible platform of disseminating vitriol against Jews. He, though, maintains that he "hates everyone in equal measure." He's also been accused of self-hatred, but he is the first to admit this, and in comparison with Otto Weininger - the Austrian Jewish philosopher who converted to Christianity and of whom Hitler said, "There was one good Jew in Germany, and he killed himself" - he is even proud. "Otto and I are good friends."
Seriously, though?
"What seriously? I am married to a Jew, I work and play in a band with Jews. I have adopted a Palestinian identity, true, but to accuse me of anti-Semitism is ridiculous. Part of my success derives from the recognition that I am 'from there.' I do not try to hide that or blur it or deny it. I look, speak and behave like someone from there."
I address him in Hebrew and he replies in English with a distinctly Israeli accent, interspersed with Hebrew. He is sometimes amazed at some of the excellent Hebrew words he comes out with.
The hybrid language is intermittently amusing. Asked, for example, if he misses Israel, he replies, "I don't miss the medina [the state], I miss the eretz [the land/country], and elaborates: "When I started missing the soil, the landscapes, the scents, I understood that what I actually miss is Palestine. Palestine is the land and Israel is the state. It took me time to realize that Israel was never my home, but only a fantasy saturated in blood and sweat."
He speaks of "sweat" but really means "tears." It's a sad story, as we noted.
His children, Mai, 14, and Yan, 10, have no Jewish friends. Yan was not circumcised and bar or bat mitzvahs are out of the question. Atzmon's computer does not have Hebrew. He says he writes, thinks and dreams in English. He will not set foot in Israel until it is again Palestine.
http://www.haaretz.com/weekend/magazine/haunted-by-ghosts-1.319263
Heather said (October 16, 2010):
Just thought I would drop you a line and ask this just for fun...how come we are overly informed of a handful of "gay suicides" when the suicide rate for our men in Iraq and Afghanistan are, from what I understand, astronomical??? Thanks again for your article today. I always print out ones I really like for my husband to read.