The Wandering Who? By Gilad Atzmon

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2/9/08

Tel Aviv University historian, Professor Shlomo Sand, opens his remarkable study of Jewish nationalism quoting Karl W. Deutsch:

“A nation is a group of people united by a common mistake regarding its origin and a collective hostility towards its neighbours.”(1)

As simple or even simplistic as it may sound, the quote above eloquently summarises   the figment of reality entangled with modern Jewish nationalism and especially within the concept of Jewish identity.  It obviously points the finger at the collective mistake Jews tend to make whenever referring to their ‘illusionary collective past’ and ‘collective origin’. Yet, in the same breath, Deutsch’s reading of nationalism throws light upon the hostility that is unfortunately coupled with almost every Jewish group towards its surrounding reality, whether it is human or takes the shape of land. While the brutality of the Israelis towards the Palestinians has already become rather common knowledge, the rough treatment Israelis reserve for their ‘promised soil’ and landscape is just starting to reveal itself. The ecological disaster the Israelis are going to leave behind them will be the cause of suffering for many generations to come. Leave aside the megalomaniac wall that shreds the Holy land into enclaves of depravation and starvation, Israel has managed to pollute its main rivers and streams with nuclear and chemical waste.

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The Hostage Dream Loving Oneself at the Expense of Another By GILAD ATZMON

August 212009

http://www.counterpunch.org/atzmon08212009.html

 

“As a man in a dream who fails to lay hands upon another whom he is pursuing- the one cannot escape nor the other overtake.” (Homer’s Iliad, XX11.)

Greece Revisited


In his valuable book Looking Awry, Slavoj Zizek offers a Lacanian interpretation of Zeno’s Achilles and the Tortoise paradox (1) “The libidinal economy of the case of Achilles and the Tortoise is here made clear: the paradox stages the relation of the subject to the object cause of its desire, which can never be attained. The object cause is always missed” (Looking Awry, Slavoj Zizek pg’ 4). Our object of desire always eludes no matter what we try to do to attain it. Achilles can never arrive at the tortoise, he can only get closer and closer.

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War On Terror Within: The End of Jewish History by Gilad Atzmon

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Mar 18th, 2009

The issue I am going to discuss today is probably the most important thing I’ve ever had to say about Israeli brutality and contemporary Jewish identity. I assume that I could have shaped my thought into a wide-ranging book or an analytical academic text but instead, I will do the very opposite, I will make it as short and as simple as possible.

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The Primacy of the ear by Gilad Atzmon

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Thursday, January 10, 2008

 Rather often I face the same question when interviewed by Arab media outlets: ?Gilad, how is it that you observe that which so many Israelis fail to see?? Indeed, not many Israelis interpret the Israeli ethical failure as an inherent symptom. For many years I didn?t have any answer to offer. However, recently I realised that it must have something to do with my Saxophone. It is music that has shaped my views of the Israeli Palestinian conflict and formed my criticism of Jewish identity.
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Freedom of Speech: the right to equate Gaza with Auschwitz by Gilad Atzmon

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Thursday, March 6, 2008

(A talk given on the First of March 2008 at Invitation to Learn’s weekend retreat)

“They (the Palestinians) will bring upon themselves a bigger holocaust because we will use all our might to defend ourselves” (Matan Vilnai, Israeli Deputy Defence Minister, 29 February 2008)

It is clear beyond any doubt that the Israeli Deputy Defence Minister was far from being reluctant to equate Israel with Nazi Germany when revealing the genocidal future awaiting the Palestinian people, yet, for some reason, this is precisely what Western media outlets refrain from doing. In spite of the facts that are right in front of our eyes, in spite of the starvation in Gaza, in spite of an Israeli official admitting genocidal inclinations against the Palestinians, in spite of the mounting carnage and death, we are still afraid to admit that Gaza is a concentration camp and it is on the verge of becoming a deadly one. For some peculiar reason, many of us have yet to accept that as far as evil is concerned, Israel is the world champion in mercilessness and vengeance.

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Tractatus Logico Palestinicus By Gilad Atzmon

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1 “What can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about, we must pass over in silence.” (Ludwig Wittgenstein 1918)
1.1 Humanism and ethics are ends worth fighting for.
1.2 Western politics and political discourse (on the other hand) are concerned with power and hegemony.
1.3 Hence, humanism and ethics are foreign to the Western political discourse and vice versa.

2 The Palestinian liberation struggle is grounded on humanist and ethical arguments since it is based on moral rights, namely ‘the right of return’ and ‘liberation’.
2.1 Since the Palestinian liberation struggle is a humanist cause, Western politicians and political discourse are foreign to the Palestinian struggle.

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Moisha’le’s New Suit by Hans Christian Underdog

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Wednesday, November 7, 2007

 



NOT THAT MANY years ago, at the hub of the Kosher Palestinian solidarity cyber ghetto lived a Marxist emperor named Moisha’le, who thought so much of new clothes for the progressive cosmopolitan chosen people that he spent all his time in trying to obtain them; his only ambition was to make his very people look as important and righteous as he mistakenly believed himself to be. But in fact, he did not truly care for his two and a half obedient Gefilte soldiers, and the Palestinian reality did not bother him either. For instance, he believed that as far as the Palestinian struggle is concerned, fighting anti-Semitism was a major priority. For him, starvation in Gaza or the emerging involvement of Zionists in the American imperial wars were something that one should not even bother to mention in any significant way. For every event and occasion emperor Moisha’le had a ready-made proletarian thought to offer. And as one would say of a king “He is in his cabinet,” so one could say of him, “Moisha’le was well imbued is in his red light kosher haven philosophy.”
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Mein Little Kind Lenni’le by Hans Christian Underdog

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A short theatrical piece in which Freethepeeps, Indymedia UK administrator pulverizes Lenni’le Brenner, a Jewish Secular Fundamentalist. Mamma Brenner speaks from heaven. The clever old woman, a voice of Jewish wisdom, tries relentlessly to save her little progressive Kind, but as it seems, the infantile elder is determined to bring it all on himself.

The short play is based on a shocking documented exchange between an archivist Lenni Brenner and IM UK administrator Freethepeeps. It can be found here:

http://lists.indymedia.org/pipermail/imc-uk-features/2007-November/1112-lq.html

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Jewnetic Engineering by Gilad Atzmon

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11.08.06
As the Israeli Army buries its dead in what seems to be a war that the Jewish State can never win, we happen to learn from a high official within the Pentagon that Israel is about to make use of what seems to be its ultimate devastating weapon. We also have discovered that the recent French-American diplomatic push for a UN Security Council Resolution calling for an immediate cease-fire is there to postpone the deployment of this new weapon, preventing Israel from dragging the world into a new horrifying phase of warfare, with results whose outcome cannot be predicted.
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The Tzabar and the Sabbar: A Refection on Memory and Nostalgia by Gilad Atzmon

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Illustration “The Memory of Land” by Juan Kalvellido for Tlaxcala and Peacepalestine

Zionism is a total disaster. It is a colonial, expansionist, nationalist philosophy based on racial chauvinism. Those who take its precepts to the letter have been robbing the land of the indigenous Palestinian people in the name of the Jewish people. It is regarded by many of us as a major threat to world peace. Its devoted supportive lobbies around the world call for more and more bloodshed in the name of ‘liberalism’, ‘democracy’, 'freedom’ and even in the name of the ‘Judeo-Christian’ alliance. Yet, Zionism, and we better admit it, has managed to do something that even God has failed to do: it united the Jews. Zionism has become the Jewish symbolic identifier.

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Operation Security Roof by Gilad Atzmon

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Monday, August 7, 2006




Following the IDF difficulties in defeating Hezbollah’s and Hamas’s ballistic warfare, the Israeli Government is now searching for contractors with some advanced experience in large scale reinforced concrete constructions. The mission ahead is the building of a solid concrete roof over the entire Jewish State (known as ‘Greater Israel’). PM Olmert is determined that the only way to defend Israel’s populated area is to cover the Jewish State with a thick layer of iron and cement.

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Gilad Atzmon – Swindler’s List

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April 3, 2008 ·

It is a common trend amongst rabid Zionists and notorious Islamophobes to quote some isolated and mistranslated verses from the Qur’an for the purpose of collectively libeling Muslims and presenting Islam as a regressive and violent belief system.

Needless to say, so far, such repetitive attempts have been found futile if not actually counter-effective. Not a single Western politician, Zionist campaigner or Neocon think tank has managed to establish a comprehensive case against Islam. The reason is rather simple, in spite of the clear fact that some devastating atrocities have been committed in the name of Islam and in the name of Jihad, these acts were performed by sporadic radicalized and isolated cells. As at it seems, in the eyes of the Western masses, it takes more than just a few random acts of a very few to undermine a humanist universal belief system and implicate its one billion followers.

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Some People Never Learn the Lesson by Gilad Atzmon

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On Thursday afternoon, Gordon Brown learned that he was to become only the second sitting British Prime Minister to be subject to a police investigation.
This is happening less than six months after Tony Blair had left Downing Street under the severe cloud of a police probe into the Cash for Honours affair.
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The 3rd CategoryThe 3rd Category and the Palestinian Solidarity Movement by Gilad Atzmon

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30.6.05


As far as self perception is concerned, those who call themselves Jews could be divided into three main categories:

1. those who follow Judaism.

2. those who regard themselves as human beings that happen to be of Jewish origin.

3. those who put their Jewishness over and above all of their other traits.

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Between the Shtetl and the Big City One Hundred Years of Jewish Solitude

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January 20/21 2007

http://www.counterpunch.org/atzmon01202007.html

BY GILAD ATZMON

“The emancipated Jew is insecure in his relations with his fellow-beings, timid with strangers, suspicious even toward the secret feeling of his friends. His best powers are exhausted in the suppression, or at least in the difficult concealment of his own real character.”
Max Nordau, Speech at the First Zionist Congress August 29, 1897

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