The email sent will contain a link to this article, the article title, and an article excerpt (if available). For security reasons, your IP address will also be included in the sent email.
Introduction By Gilad Atzmon: Roy Ratcliffe is a non-sectarian anti-capitalist thinker. I have been following Ratcliffe's impressive work for years. Ratcliffe reading of my work is accurate. He certainly understands where I come from. Being involved with the UK PSC for years. Ratcliffe is also pretty familiar with the damage inflicted by the enemy within.
http://criticalmassdotnet.wordpress.com/
This book is sub-titled ‘A study of Jewish identity politics’, and this is exactly what methodically unfolds throughout the book. With refreshing honesty, Gilad Atzmon, traces his own progress, from birth in a Zionist family, through youthful enthusiasm for Israel, to eventual horror at its brutality. The latter perception arising when in the Israeli army he realised that the Palestinians he witnessed in a Lebanese ‘concentration camp’, were the equivalent of 1940’s Jews and that he and his army comrades were the post-war equivalent of Nazis. From then on he progressively engaged with the struggle for Palestinian rights and critically with the state of Israel, Zionism and the concept of Jewish-ness. In the book he rejects the biological assertion of Jews as a race or that modern Jews can now be defined by adherence to the religion of Judaism. He, therefore, distinguishes three categories of those who say they are Jews: a) those who follow Judaism; b) those who regard themselves as human beings – who happen to be of Jewish birth; and c) those who put their Jewish-ness over all other traits. It is the latter, 3rd category Jews, which he argues create the problem for Palestinians and others because those who assign themselves to this ‘political’ category, raise it over and above all others. He convincingly argues that what unites most Jews in the modern era is their ‘identification’ with a separatist, anti-assimilation, re-constructed ideology. It is, he argues, an ideology of ‘Jewish-ness’.