Wednesday, December 13, 2006

THINK TRIBAL, SPEAK UNIVERSAL


A Great Piece
By Gilad Atzmon

"I may as well be the King of The Jews. I have achieved the unachievable, accomplished the impossible. I have managed to unite them all: Right, Left and Centre. The entirety of the primarily-Jewish British political groups: the Zionists the anti-Zionists, Jewish Socialists, Tribal Marxists, The Board of Deputies, Jewish Trotskyites, Jews Sans Frontieres, Jews Avec Frontieres for the first time in history all speak in one single voice. They all repeat exactly the same misquotes. They all hate Gilad Atzmon.....

I recently came across an interesting insight into the subject of hate and anti-Semitism. It goes like this:

While in the past an 'anti-Semite' was someone who hates Jews, nowadays it is the other way around, an anti-Semite is someone the Jews hate.’

The politics of hate can be effective, as well as being vicious. And you’d think tribal Jewish activists would be the first to understand this. We all know that Jews have been suffering hatred and discrimination for centuries. Yet the Jewish ethnic activists seem to have learned hatred from their enemies so much that the secular Jewish political discourse has been totally shaped by it. Moreover, hate has become the main matrix of negation: The Israelis are set to hate the Arabs, the Zionists are there to hate the Goyim (in general), Jews against Zionism hate the Goyim as well as Israel as well as Atzmon (in particular).

But why do they hate so much? The answer is simple. Once Judaism is eliminated, what remains of Jewish identity is pretty threadbare. Once stripped of religious spirituality, all that is left of Jewishness is a template of negation fuelled by racial orientation and spiced up with some light cultural context. Sadly, I have to say that though very many emancipated and assimilated Jews have adopted universal humanist ideas, secular collective Jewish identity has never matured into adopting a universal humanist ideological standpoint or even a philosophical insight. The reasons are simple:

A. Racial or even ethnic orientation cannot form a basis for a universal ethical argument.
B. Chicken soup or Jewish humour (culture) does not make an ideological argument.
......
....However, I must admit that I am not concerned at all with the healthiness of the Socialist or Marxist discourse. I am engaged here solely in the deconstruction of a political standpoint and in scrutinising its rhetoric. Rather than saving the Marxist philosophy, I care for the people of Beit Hanoun, Jenin, Ramallah and Nablus. I devote my energy to support the Palestinian people who are bombed and starved by a State that happens to be ‘the Jewish State’. My message is clear. A crime of immense proportions is taking place in Palestine. As far as the humanist argument is concerned, Palestinians are the priority. If the crime against the Palestinians is a crime against humanity, we had better fight it collectively as human beings rather than as isolated formations of ethnically and racially segregated groups. The task ahead is complicated enough. Tribal Judeo-centric issues to do with anti-Semitism may be important to some. However, I maintain that they are secondary as far as Palestine solidarity is concerned. In other words, when you speak universal you may as well mean it for a change."

No comments: