Atzmon: No Choice But To Speak Out
Martin Gibson
Now a resident of
London, Gilad Atzmon is a world-renowned saxophonist and the author
of two novels, which have been translated into 22
languages.
He left Israel in 1994 after service in the
Israeli military convinced him Israel had become a racist,
militarised state that was a danger to world peace.
"I was
born in a place that happens to be very strategically crucial to
quite a few empires, and I was indoctrinated to take part in these
idiotic wars and I managed to escape eventually. When I was there I
started to see the scale of the atrocities that are committed on my
behalf by the Israelis in the name of the Israeli state, with the
support of the Jewish people around the world.
"Now and then
you hear about one Jew here and one Jew there who is against it, but
institutionally this war is supported by world Jewry
inside-out."
While he believes people run a risk speaking out
against Israel, Gilad Atzmon says he has no choice.
"I think
we are under severe danger. We are fighting against the most
powerful people on this planet. Seemingly the national state has
proved in the last couple of weeks that murdering is not any concern
to them, so we have good reason to be afraid or be aware, but I want
to tell you something - this planet is at the moment in a devastated
state. I have two kids who I love a lot and this is their planet.
I'll be here another 20 years, 30 years, maybe tomorrow I'm gone.
But they are going to stay here.
"Mossad (the Israeli secret
service) probably realise that shooting a saxophonist would not
reflect well on them. I don't feel suicidal and if you hear I fell
off a cliff you know who did it."
There have been numerous
attempts to silence Mr Atzmon, including inevitable charges that he
is anti-Semitic, although he is Jewish himself.
"I wish I
could shut myself up and not care, but every time somebody tries to
silence me, I know it must be because I'm saying the right thing,
pointing on evil, on the core of evil.
"They try to call me
an anti-Semite, I'm not an anti-Semite. I've got nothing against the
Semite people, I don't have anything against people - I'm
anti-Jewish, not anti-Jews.
"I think Jewish ideology is
driving our planet into a catastrophe and we must stop."
When
you grow up in Israel, the anti-Arab, and anti-Palestinian
sentiments expressed by Gina Hughes are common, he says.
"I'm
familiar with the voice, and my voice is much different. My voice
may be slightly more interesting, but we are far fewer and we are
not operating as a political collective.
"The difference
between me and 99 percent of Jews on this planet is that I do not
believe they have the right to a state.
"Considering the
crimes they committed since the state was born, along with the
murderous extravaganza of the past weeks, not only do they not have
the right to a state, the state should be dismantled immediately
before they turn our planet into a fireball."
Mr Atzmon says
the brutality we see in Israel, that is reminiscent of the Nazis,
has arisen through a simple failure of logic.
"One of the
things that happened to us was that stupidly we interpreted the Nazi
defeat as a vindication of the Jewish ideology and the Jewish
people.
"The Nazis were indeed . . . evil. They did things
that were disastrously inhuman and unacceptable. But this doesn't
mean the Jewish ideology is correct, because in fact Jewish ideology
and Nazi ideology were very similar."
There is less excuse
for our sitting idly by while the mess in the Middle East grows
progressively more brutal than for Germans in World War 2, he
says.
"They themselves were a victim of tyranny, and still we
vilify all of them, while it is democracies from America and Britain
that launched an illegal invasion of Iraq which has killed two
million Iraqis.
"In Israel, 80 to 93 percent of people
support this genocide of the Palestinian people, and by the way, the
Israeli state is a theological state so it is in the name of the
Jewish people - we are dealing here with a major criminal, political
identity."
"It is perplexing - you would expect that after
what the Jewish people had gone through, after it was very clear to
them that the European nations, not just the Germans, but the
French, the Ukrainians the Romanians and the Poles spat them out,
you would expect they would start a new page where they would be
very reflective and very, very careful.
"Some Jewish
philosophers were completely sure this was what was going to happen;
one philosopher, Emanuel Levinas, said: 'Now we must be at the
forefront of the fight against racism. We must make sure this never
happens again'.
"Not only was this not the case, but three
years after the liberation of Auschwitz they were ethnically
cleansing the population from Palestine and their brutality is now
far more obvious, manifested, celebrated.
"They're living in
a ghetto in the Middle East. They're threatening the entire region
with their idiotic nuclear bombs. They're throwing their white
phosphorus on civilians.
"Gaza looks like a place that was
nuked, and these are the people who are supposed to be the victim,
and the bodyguard of humanity?"
Growing up, Mr Atzmon could
never work out the anger of people towards Israel, but now he can -
the actions of Israel are sowing seeds of hatred throughout the
world, he says.
"What they are doing brings so much rage in
so many people, including myself. I never felt any anger or rage
towards anyone except my people. So I think if I feel it, an Arab or
Muslim or person who was ethnically cleansed, or someone whose
neighbours or kids have been wiped out? They are not going to
forgive.
"They are really dragging us into a level of
violence that this world has never seen. It's the quality, the
essence of what they're doing. It is the strongest army in the world
against innocent civilians.
"To drive with tanks over
innocent people, to see their houses demolished. To see babies cling
for days to their dead mothers because Israeli armed forces don't
allow the UN to come and rescue them, and these were the people who
were meant to be the guards of humanity? No. They definitely
maintained evil."
Where a charge of anti-Semitism will not
stick to Jewish people who criticise Zionism, it is replaced by the
label of "self-hating Jew", but this does not bother Gilad
Atzmon.
"I'm not only a self-hating Jew, I'm a proud
self-hating Jew!
"When you try to think of the biggest
humanists ever, Spinoza Marx and Christ were basically proud
self-hating Jews also.
"Why? Because of growing up in this
kind of racist, nationalist, tribalist, chauvinist, supremacist
society - and this is exactly what they stood up
against."
While anxious to avoid comparing himself to these
men, he thinks like them, he says.
"You know, I am not
exactly the Messiah, but I must admit that when I started to read
about Christ, you know, it was the story of my life - about a person
who is indoctrinated into hatred and finds a way to start to
love.
"Because I could see some light and goodness, I thought
to myself for a while all my brothers would be able to see it, but I
don't know how to deliver it.
"Many people ask me about peace
and I say you cannot have peace with people who do not internalise
the concept of 'love thy neighbour'. This is almost a paradox,
because if they love their neighbour, they cease to be who they
are.
"What is the difference between Jews and Christians
theoretically? Christians are basically Jews who love their
neighbour, so they are committed to the universal concept of
humanity, whereas Judaism is tribalism."
The word
Judeo-Christian is an artificial construct, he says.
"It's a
joke. A joke. It's obviously a political campaign to try to unite
the power of America to fight the Jewish enemies, because if the
Americans are convinced that there is Judeo-Christian, so then the
enemies are the Muslims."
The rockets launched into Israel do
not justify the killing of 1000 Palestinians in Gaza over the past
few weeks, he says.
"My view on the rockets is very, very
simple. The Palestinian people are ethnically cleansed. The majority
of people living in Gaza were ethnically cleansed from Palestine,
the place that is now momentarily called Israel.
"The rockets
are hardly dangerous. I think in eight years they have managed to
kill six people, yeah?
"The rockets are almost a peaceful
message to the Israelis telling them: 'In case you don't realise it
yet, you are living on my stolen land'.
"You can send a
message in a bottle, and you can send a message in a rocket, but the
Israelis are not yet ready to acknowledge there won't be peace in
the region as long as they are sitting on Palestinian stolen
land.
"If the Jewish people were clever, and they do claim to
be so clever and chosen, they would make sure that Gaza and the West
Bank were flourishing. But not only did they not do that - they
starved them! They starved them! What do they expect anyone to do?
And who is the one who comes to the aid of the oppressed? Not
America, not Britain, not France - (Iranian leader)Ahmadinejad.
There are plenty of Iranians who are not happy about this, but he is
a humanist, and so is Hugo Chavez.
"It is very interesting
that the humanists are now not in the Western world, which is just
obsessed with hegemony and control of energy
resources."
Although newly-elected American President Barack
Obama has had to proclaim his Zionist credentials, and his
vice-president Joe Biden proclaimed "I am a Zionist", there is some
cause for hope, he says.
"There is a lot of pressure on me to
denounce Obama. He has done quite a few things that have made me
suspicious of him - but I want to give him a chance.
"I could
see that the Israelis were really concerned and were quick to
evacuate their forces before he took office.
"They have a lot
of people around him already and reading the Israeli press they know
something about this man being ethically concerned, and this is
something that didn't happen in America for many years.
"He
wants to amend the damage caused by those Jewish political
strategies such as Neoconservatism, such as the sub-prime mortgage
crisis that was led by Alan Greenspan, who is not exactly a
Rasta."
The financial meltdown is all just part of the
programme, he says.
"I don't think it was a credit crunch, I
think it was a Zionist punch.
"This war in Iraq may have
something to do with energy but largely it was America acting as an
Israeli mission for fighting the last pockets of resistance, led
tactically by Neoconservatives and the Federal Reserve.
"Alan
Greenspan's job was to create a financial boom so America's people
were not concerned with the tactics used in the Middle
East.
"It should have worked but it didn't work because the
all-American boom was done at the expense of the most deprived
Americans, and they just couldn't pay the mortgages so it all
collapsed.
"It's not only Jews that have adopted this world
view either. Bush behaved Jewishly (ideologically) - he is a
supremacist, he was a tribalist, but he is not a Jew as far as I'm
aware.
"Even in Christianity, this tendency to go Old
Testament - into tribalism, into supremacy, into violence, into
shock and awe . . . . This is something we have to fight
against."
