Gilad Atzmon's New Book: The Wandering Who? A Study Of Jewish Identity Politics
Jewish identity is tied up with some of the most difficult and contentious issues of today. The purpose in this book is to open many of these issues up for discussion. Since Israel defines itself openly as the ‘Jewish State’, we should ask what the notions of ’Judaism’, ‘Jewishness’, ‘Jewish culture’ and ‘Jewish ideology’ stand for. Gilad examines the tribal aspects embedded in Jewish secular discourse, both Zionist and anti Zionist; the ‘holocaust religion’; the meaning of ‘history’ and ‘time’ within the Jewish political discourse; the anti-Gentile ideologies entangled within different forms of secular Jewish political discourse and even within the Jewish left. He questions what it is that leads Diaspora Jews to identify themselves with Israel and affiliate with its politics. The devastating state of our world affairs raises an immediate demand for a conceptual shift in our intellectual and philosophical attitude towards politics, identity politics and history.
We in the West, we like to have the feeling that we have the Arab world under control. The states there are strategically important, full of oil, and the people strange, in what is for us a disturbing way. But they are hopefully largely under control by dictatorial regimes and the political or sometimes military interventions of the West. The Western discourse revolves around the question of whether Islam is at all compatible with democracy, and thus whether Arab Muslim immigrants can be integrated into European societies.
"It was the moral force of non-violence” stated President Obama in his first comment on the revolution in Egypt. Yet it is far from being clear who was the Egyptian Mandela, Gandhi, or Martin Luther King? I guess that in Cairo it was the people themselves who peacefully transformed their own reality.
Jerusalem, Zionists, and some elements within the Left have demonised Arabs, Muslims and Islam for decades. Yet the people of Egypt just proved how restrained and peace-seeking Islam is for real.
Ynet reported today that US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said during a House Intelligence Committee hearing Thursday that Egypt’s branch of the Muslim Brotherhood movement was "a very heterogeneous group, largely secular, which has eschewed violence and has decried al-Qaeda as a perversion of Islam."
Clapper, who heads the organization commanding 16 American intelligence and investigation agencies, told the committee that the Muslim Brotherhood "have pursued social ends, a betterment of the political order in Egypt, et cetera….. There is no overarching agenda, particularly in pursuit of violence, at least internationally.”
The following is an updated edition of a paper I published eighteen months ago. The current edition includes new references to the unfolding events in Egypt.
In front of our eyes, a gigantic regional Arab uprising is taking place. It is evident that until the last few days Western Left had very little to say about it all. It seems as if the Left has reached a rock bottom state of detachment. It has lost contact with the people, social reality, and humanity in general.
People keep talking of a new war. They tell you about their neighbors — they’re probably too shy to admit that its their family, not their neighbors — who already started stocking up on food items and candles in preparation for the upcoming war. “People are really scared,” they tell you, using “people” instead of “we.” Everyone — groundless news reports and loud rumors — is saying that they can hear the war drums, can’t you?!
Well, to me war has already started, and Israel is already chanting victory, given the very conversation the two of us are having. About two weeks ago I saw what looked to me like a confused Israeli pilot flying around in his F-16 jet, drawing circles in the sky. People immediately took it as a sign, a threat and a signal that war was coming. They even made up memories from back in 2008, and were convinced that on 27 December 2008, an Israeli jet, possibly even the same one, drew the same circles in the sky, and that was when war started.
In his novels “A Guide to the Perplexed” and “My One and Only Love”, his web site and his political commentaries, jazz musician Gilad Atzmon doesn’t fear mordant satire, aggressive provocations nor even brutal comparisons when it comes to stigmatizing the real apartheid reigning in Israel. He was born there and he is asking his country for a fundamental change.
The Orient House Ensemble: Eddi Hick, Yaron Stavi, Frank Harrison and Gilad Atzmon
FOR THE GHOSTS WITHIN, Robert Wyatt, Atzmon, Stephen (Domino Recordings)
THE TIDE HAS CHANGED, Gilad Atzmon & The Orient House Ensemble (World Village)
Sunday, February 13, 2011 at 5:13PM 
We in the West, we like to have the feeling that we have the Arab world under control. The states there are strategically important, full of oil, and the people strange, in what is for us a disturbing way. But they are hopefully largely under control by dictatorial regimes and the political or sometimes military interventions of the West. The Western discourse revolves around the question of whether Islam is at all compatible with democracy, and thus whether Arab Muslim immigrants can be integrated into European societies.
