Gilad Atzmon is a jazz & world music artist, a novelist and an author focusing on ID politics.
Welcome to Gilad Atzmon's webpage. This site provides information about Gilad's musical and intellectual activity.
At 8:30 am, an Israeli naval warship attacked the international observers and Palestinian captain of the Civil Peace Service Gaza (CPSGAZA) boat "OLIVA", in an apparent attempt to harm and arrest the crew members.
Andre Pshenichnikov, an Israeli who immigrated from the former Soviet Union, was arrested by the IDF after living for two months in the Dheishe Refugee Camp near Bethlehem and kept in detention for eight days at the police station in the settlement of Kiryat Arba.
He told his police interrogators that he wants to break all ties with Israel, to give up his Israeli citizenship and obtain a Palestinian citizenship instead. Eventually he was released under restrictive conditions and banned from entering the "A" areas of the West Bank penidng the end of legal proceedings against him. He was indicted for having entered these "A" areas which Israelis are forbidden to do under military orders. During some of the proceedings at the Jerusalem Magistrates' Court and District Court, representatives of the prosecution asserted that Pshenichnikov had joined the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) but eventually withdrew that charge. Regarding the indictment filed against him, Pshenichnikov is represented by Attorney Andre Rosenthal of Jerusalem.
The Moscow City Court upheld last Thursday a district court’s decision to ban gay parades in the Russian Capital for the next 100 years. Not just one year, two years or even ten years, the court was pretty clear about it all-a century with no gay parades. Pretty sinister I would say.
As it seems Homosexuality is not very popular amongst Russia’s political establishment. In 2007, Former Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov described attempts to hold a gay parade in the capital as “satanic.” In fact, no gay Parade has ever been officially permitted in Russia. Russian gays are heavily discriminated. But they should never lose hope. In the last few days I have come up with a simple and creative solution that would calm this rift down and may even bring peace to what is left of occupied Palestine.
A birthday video tribute to jazz musician Gilad Atzmon, featuring highlights from Global Music Foundation courses and Orient House Ensemble concerts. Soundtrack: "Her Smile" from the OHE Album Refuge (http://www.enjarecords.com/cd.php?nr=TIP-888%20849).
The Wandering Who? A Study Of Jewish Identity Politics
The book can be ordered on Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk
A Power Point video presentation by the admired DrArthur F. Billy
45th anniversary of the attack on the USS Liberty
By Gilad Atzmon
Back in 2009, in Houston Texas, Mimi Adams, a distinguished Palestinian solidarity & human rights activist, gave me a present- a USS Liberty baseball cap. She put it on my head and said,
“Gilad, in the next two weeks, make sure you have it on your head everywhere you go in America. You will see what happens.”
It was around midnight, I was tired and jet-lagged, I couldn’t really understand the significance of the baseball cap, I just wanted make my way to my hotel room and catch some sleep. At 7 AM in the airport on my way to the gate with a USS Liberty baseball cap on my head, just before boarding on a flight to San Francisco, I noticed an older guy chasing me. He was breathless and agitated.
“Sorry to bother you, were you on the USS Liberty” he asked.
“No” I said, “I was actually four years old in 1967.” Amused I admitted that the Baseball cap was given to me by a friend in a Palestinian solidarity gathering just a few hours ago. I asked him what did he know about the USS Liberty.
“I was a 6th Navy’s pilot” he said. “We were deployed to the Mediterranean Sea. On that day in June 1967, we heard it all, the sailors on board of the Liberty, they were begging for help, it was a real agony, we were fuming, we wanted to get on the planes, we were about 10-12 minutes away, we wanted to save our brothers, but they didn’t let us onto the deck.”
On June 8, 1967 USS Liberty, an American auxiliary technical research ship, a military vessel specialised in gathering intelligence, was attacked by the Israeli forces. It was subject to an 18 hours combined air and sea raids that left 34 American crew-members dead (naval officers, seamen, two Marines, and one civilian) and 170 injured. The attack also severely damaged the ship. Like the Mavi Marmara, at the time of the attack, the ship was in international waters, north of the Sinai Peninsula, about 50 km northwest from the Egyptian City of El Arish.
Welcome to Zionised America
To listen to MP3 click here
So far, the orthodox Torah Jews are the only genuine Jewish anti Zionists. Interestingly enough they do not attempt to dominate the Palestinian solidarity discourse. Bless them all..
Gilad Atzmon on Afshin Rattansi's Double Standard. Gilad Atzmon, novelist, journalist and saxophonist speaks about Lebanon, Palestine, Jewishness and censorship.
The original program can be watched here..
Note: The handsome young soldier in the B&W photo is not me, it is actually my father. The picture was taken in the 1950's.
By Eva Bartlett & Ali Mallah You may rob me of the last span of my land
You may ditch my youth in prison holes
Steel what my grandfather left me behind:
Some furniture or clothes and jars,
You may burn my poems and books
You may feed your dog on my flesh
You may impose a nightmare of your terror
On my village
Enemy of light
I shall not compromise
And to the end
I shall fight....
With the passing of the 64th anniversary of the Nakba, (the establishment of the illegal Zionist state on the land and homes of Palestinians), should
we mourn or celebrate? Professor Nurit Peled–Elhanan wrote of her mourning:
“I will mourn on Nakba Day. I will mourn for vanished Palestine most of which I never knew. I will mourn for the holy land that is losing its humanity, its landscape, its beauty and its children on the altar of racism and evil. I will mourn for the Jewish youngsters who invade and desecrate the homes of families in Sheikh Jarrah, throw the inhabitants into the street, and then sing and dance in memory of Baruch Goldstein, the infamous murderer of Palestinian children, while the owners of the desecrated houses with their children and old people are sleeping in the rain, on the street, opposite their own homes. …All these things I will mourn on Nakba Day. I will join the millions of dispossessed, downtrodden and humiliated who have not given up on the future and who still believe there is a chance, who stand as witnesses and as firebrands of the true human spirit.…”
For the last 64 years, Palestinian women, men, elderly, and youth have steadfastly and spiritedly resisted the occupation and the Zionist state. It is a resistance that continues flourishing among Palestinians from all walks of life both inside and outside Palestine, be they farmers, workers, students, poets, or intellectuals.
The Amira Brothers of Ni'lin villege try to get to Madonna's "Peace Concert".The road is long, but they are determined. Through the apartheid wall, to the checkpoint' to the DCO's office, will they make it?
The true reality of the 'Jews only State' . It isn't just the Palestinians. Segregation and ethnic cleansing are at the heart of Israeli and Zionist cultures. If we want to understand it all, we must elaborate on the real meaning of Jewish identity politics...
Watch the Israeli mob celebrating their symptoms...
The Wandering Who? A Study Of Jewish Identity Politics
The book can be ordered on Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk
If we are ‘humanists’ we cannot be lured into suppressing or vandalizing art or ideas.
Last week I went to see an excellent play at the National Theatre called The Collaborators by John Hodge. The play explored Josef Stalin’s unlikely admiration for dissident playwright Mikhail Bulgakov and the complex bond between art and ‘the State’. The play was a reminder that historically, even when culture has been puppeteered by an authority, unapproved and unintended meanings have a way of leaking out. Had the horror of Stalin’s Holodomor been contemporaneous today, we may well have been called upon to boycott the works of Bulgakov. This would do a great disservice, not only to the cannon of great literature, but also to the counter-revolutionary spirit evoked by Bulgakov’s work. I don’t claim that all art originating from criminal or repressive states, is loaded with subversive messages, but that art has the capacity to transcend the binary world of ‘placard politics’ (‘for’ this or ‘against’ that) and deliver the transforming might of pathos, spirit, sadness and beauty.
Reflecting on this reinforced my reluctant opposition to the cultural and academic boycott of Israel and, in particular to the call by the BDS to sabotage or ban any mode of expression delivered by state-enforced Israeli artists, musicians and thinkers. While the motives of many activists speaking out against Israeli artists and intellectuals are well intended and heart-felt, any action that seeks to abolish freedom of expression or thought is not winning any prizes for tolerance. Jews had their books burnt by Nazis & Israelis continue this dubious tradition by banning writer Gunter Grass, composer Daniel Barenboim and academic Norman Finkelstein. Surely, if we are ‘humanists’ we cannot be lured into suppressing or vandalizing art or ideas. If we do, we enter the supremacist domain of those we claim to oppose.