“While in the past an ‘anti-semite’ was someone who hates Jews, nowadays it is the other way around, an anti-Semite is someone that the Jews hate.”The Wandering Who? A Study of Jewish Identity Politics by Gilad Atzmon.
I learned of this little book and its author on, of all places, the website of The New Republic. The context for TNR’s mention of it was hardly an endorsement. In fact, it was an brief article demonizing Professors John Mearsheimer (who wrote the very compelling The Israel Lobby) and Richard Falk for merely providing a dust jacket blurb for The Wandering Who? The hit job, which was really directed at the two professors, was written by none other than one of the world’s foremost jerks, Harvard Law School Professor Alan Dershowitz. As it turns out, Dershowitz does not care about about Gilad Atzmon’s book -- from his rarified post, he does not take it seriously; rather, Mearsheimer’s limited connection with Atzmon’s book was another way for Dershowitz to slander Mearsheimer and Falk. Given the topic of the book, an analysis of Jewish identity politics, an endorser (Mearsheimer) who I admire, and a bullying detractor (Dershowitz) who I loathe, I immediately ordered my copy. I was not disappointed and am so happy that Dershowitz took his valuable time to condemn it and its endorsers.
Gilad Atzmon is a Jerusalem-born ex-pat who now resides in London by choice. He hails from a family of Zionist settlers and served as a solder in the Israeli Defense Force. He is a well-known Jazz musician (concededly, I do not know much of his music) and a writer (both fiction and non-fiction). He is also rabidly anti-Zionist and quite proudly wears the moniker of a “self-hating Jew.” Much like Norman Finkelstein, who is an incredible pest and thorn to American Zionists (like Dershowitz), Atzmon is derided by the vast majority of his fellow Jews, who identify Israel as “holy” ground (albeit not always for religious reasons).
Make no mistake: The Wandering Who? is a controversial book for good reason. It carves up a host of sacred cows: all in a style that is gratuitously politically incorrect. If anyone took the time to read the book, however, and see through his over-the-top phraseology, they would find a thinker genuinely struggling with the question of what “Jewishness” means. To be anti-Zionist is not the same as being anti-semitic although Zionists are desperate to combine the two whenever possible. In my opinion, it is absurd to call Atzmon an anti-semite any more that it is to call the prophet Isaiah an anti-Israelite: Atzmon is, in his own estimation, albeit secular terms, calling Israel and its supporters to account for the crimes of ethnically cleansing a population, for committing war crimes, and for imposing collective punishment on civilians. There is a reason that most prophets are killed for delivering the message of divine judgment -- those who are subject to it hate the message and the messenger.
Before I begin address some of Atzmon’s ideas and arguments in The Wandering Who?, critiquing Jewish identity politics and Zionism invariably -- indeed, if talking about anything “Jewish” in less than panegyric terms -- is likely to being labeled anti-semitic. Indeed, the “anti-semite” canard itself is a theme in Atzmon’s book; a rampant political correctness serves to insulate these questions from debate by destroying people who may be critical of both Israeli policies and American Zionist support thereof. But the political reality is that I do not want my tax dollars to subsidize a regime that is predicated on apartheid. I am also appalled that the United States Congress appears to be little more than a rubber stamp for these human rights abuses. Finally, I openly question whether it is acceptable for Americans to pursue a policies on behalf of a foreign sovereign that are clearly antithetical to American interests. Am I allowed to think that certain hardcore American Zionists display a dangerous dual loyalty -- one that would appear primarily Israeli at the expense of American interests?
The Wandering Who? is more or less a series of essays on the related questions of the political, social and philosophical foundations and ramifications of “Jewishness” and Zionism. Part of his analysis is drawn from Atzmon’s personal experience; both the experience of being an Israeli in the metaphysical sense of the term as well as the practical lived-out experiences of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. The rest is drawn on certain philosophical conclusions he draws about Zionism and “Jewishness” -- its past and its present. Atzmon’s main target is Zionism, which he defines as essentially separatist: “Zionism is all about the abolition of the other, the re-creation of the conditions in which Jews celebrate their symptoms, in which they can love themselves for who they are -- or, at least, who they think they are.”
The third category is problematic. Its definition may sound inflammatory to some. And yet, bizarrely enough, it was the formulation given on the eve of the 20th century by Chaim Weizmann, a prominent early Zionist figure and later the first Israeli President: ‘There is no English, French, German or American Jews, but only Jews living in England, France, Germany or America.’ In just a few words, Weizmann managed to categorically define the essence of Jewish-ness. It is basically a ‘primary quality.’
He traces the beginnings of Zionism as an outgrowth of the Enlightenment and corresponding emancipation of the Jews during the Nineteenth Century. Following the French Revolution and the emancipation of the Jews, the Jews, who were once ghettoized were more or less free to become one of the “new” Europeans who were then throwing off the so-called yokes of crowns and cassocks. When we factor that the emancipation of the Jews in Europe was predicated primarily on non-religious grounds, e.g., drawn from such ideals as those of Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen adopted by the revolutionary French National Assembly in 1789, the threat to Jewish disappearance through assimilation too was non-religious; it would not happen, as it were, in the midst of a mass conversion to Christianity, but rather in the withering of religious Judaism (consistent with the general anti-clerical nature of the times) coupled with a melding of Jews with non-Jews in a new humanity premised on Western liberal ideals. If assimilated and mixed, the great-grandchildren of emancipated Jews might abandon any notion of Jewishness.
As the “chosen-ness” of religious Judaism was coming to a close, at least in the minds of those among a new breed of intellectual and influential European Jews, something had to provide the rationale for remaining Jewish in any meaningful way. Into the abyss, Atzmon writes, “is exactly where Zionism interfered. It was there to set up the Jews in a project that aimed towards an authentic identification. Zionism was there to let the Jew think in terms of ‘belonging.’” If this sounds vaguely familiar, it is because this “project,” as it were, is not strictly speaking a Jewish one. The whole enterprise of Modernism has been been to throw off the “shackles” of religiosity in favor of a new meaning, a self-created meaning: it is to find a foundation for man, an anchor for his existence that is divorced from God. From a Catholic perspective, this search is bound to be fruitless until it is concluded in reality, which is prostration before the living God. Anything short of that is utterly futile and will continue to haunt man -- both individually and as collectively.
This idea of Jewishness sans Judaism is a critical one. Atzmon contends that “[o]nce Judaism is renounced, what remains of Jewish identity is pretty threadbare ... all that is left of Jewish-ness is a template of negation fuelled [sic] by racial orientation and spiced up with some light cultural references such as matza balls and chicken soup.” The refusal to believe the bible, to take serious the accounts of Creation and to doubt that God who took a personal interest in the world of men was endemic (and remains so) for the intellectual -- Jew and Christian alike. What he appears to be getting at in his condemnation of “Jewishness” without Judaism is in fact its parochialism. He goes even further -- and harsher -- in proclaiming that, [w]hile the religious (Judaic) understanding of Chosen-ness is interpreted as a moral burden in which the Jews are ordered by God to stand as an exemplary model of ethical behaviour, the secular Jewish interpretation has been reduced to a crude, ethno-centric, blood-oriented chauvinism.”
Atzmon attacks Zionism’s historical predicate; maintaining that the Jewish people were never a nation as such. He draws on the work of certain historians who now claim that there was no Roman exile of the Jews, that the vast majority of European Jews are not descended from biblical Israelites but rather Eastern European converts, and that the actual descendants of ancient Israelites are most likely the indigenous peoples of Palestine, i.e., the current Palestinians. He points out the following irony, citing an Israeli historian, that “there were times in Europe when anyone who argued that all Jews belonged to a nation of alien origin would have been classified at once as an anti-semite. Nowadays, anyone who dares to suggest that the people known in the worlds as Jews (as distinct from today’s Israelis) have have been, and are still not, a people or a nation is immediately denounced as a Jew-hater.”
Zionism as a movement can be described theoretically as a dialectical struggle between tribal praxis that aims for insularity, and the universal promise of openness and tolerance. It is an ongoing debate between Jerusalem and Athens, that tries to promise both, but it is doomed to failure because tribalism and universalism are like oil and water, they don’t mix well.A concrete example of Zionism’s ethical limitations is that while it, and its supporters, parrot national self-determination as a basis for continued Israeli occupation, they are either blind or willful in refusing to see the reality of the Palestinians’ right to the same national self-determination. He laments that it is strange indeed that a people that had survived an international persecution of such grotesque proportions could -- in the space of three years (1945 to 1948) -- preside over the wholesale ethnic cleansing of the local indigenous populations of Palestine. In other words, how could a people so sensitized to suffering dole out the Nakba? He continually uses this argument against any talk that denying the right of Israel to exist is denying the Jewish people what all other nations possess in sovereign autonomy: he seems to says fine, have it, but it cannot come at the literal expense of the people who lived there before you and whom you evicted and stole their land. In other words, don’t baldly assert rights about the righteousness of Jewish self-determination while the same rights of Palestinians are denied and trampled.
One suspects that hostility Atzmon has towards Zionism is only incidentally connecting to the laundry list of crimes that he attributes to Israel relating to Palestinians. He argues that “if we redefine Judaism as a modern form of Jewish activism that aims to halt assimilation, we can then reassess all Jewish tribal activity as an internal debate within a diverse Zionist political movement -- the colonizing of Palestine can then be considered as just one of the faces of Zionism.” (p. 76.) Stated differently, even if history had played itself out quite differently and Israel had been placed, for example, in an abandoned stretch of 1,000 square miles of Montana, Atzmon, or so it seems, would still be hostile to it. It is the faulty rationale behind the fact of separation he laments, not the circumstances by which the separation have occurred. That Zionism has occurred -- and still does -- through the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is merely an emphatic exclamation point in support of his other arguments.
One last prominent theme of Atzmon’s critique of Zionism is that its ideology of separation requires a continuing perception of -- and even manufacturing of -- hostility towards the rest of the world. As a Jew divorced from religious Judaism is essentially a negation, according to Atzmon, then Zionism as collective Jewishness is essentially an ideology premised on negation. Here, Atzmon makes probably his most controversial points. He argues that the the Holocaust was a Zionist victory just as every rape is a victory for radical feminist ideology. He says that, “[i]f there were no burned synagogues, Mossad would go so far as burning some itself.” (p. 43.) Atzmon’s point here, while admittedly hyperbolic, is that those who traffic in identity politics -- whether it be Feminist, Black, Hispanic or Jewish -- rely on hostility (real or imagined) to justify further separation. For identity ideologue himself, like Abraham Foxman or Jesse Jackson for example, the continued selling of hostility becomes the raison d’etre for continued relevance. Like many conservatives, I detest identity politics and the way it poisons discourse and begets mistrust -- the way it hyphenates Americans and creates dual and false loyalties. Zionism, it would appear, is the granddaddy of identity politics itself.
In many ways, I can understand the Zionist and Jewish antipathy towards Atzmon: his work reads like a traitorous treatise -- a full public airing of every single piece of dirty laundry with the attribution towards Zionists of the worst possible motives. He is like a whistleblower against his own people. Maybe he just doesn’t like Jews and the fact that he is a Jew should not insulate him from the anti-semitism charge. After all, he draws on virtually every negative stereotype and canard against the Jews. I can see the argument but I think it is wrong -- and wrong in a critical way. Atzmon, it seems to me, seeks to transcend his “Jewishness” -- to not be seen as a “Jew” in an existential way. He wants instead to be a “human being;” someone who belongs to the human family -- not in a hyphenated sense, but in a full sense. And he sees in Zionism a relic of the old, tribal worldview that constrains progress, constrains the human family, limits a true human connectedness with what I think he would characterize as artificial distinctions that, in the end, amount to no more than a sense of racial superiority. Zionism is the object of his furor because he sees it as a human retrogression and all of the machinations to prop it up, which he concedes are in the open for everyone to see, damage both Jew and Palestinian alike. Therefore, Atzmon is not a Jew-hater or anti-semite; not in the strict sense of the term. Rather, he is opposed to the idea of “Jewishness;” not because it is inherently evil, but because it is anachronistic and imprisoning.
One area that Atzmon is mistaken is in his seeming denial of the existence itself of the Israelite nation itself. While he correctly sees the difference between Zionism’s chosen-ness and that of religious Judaism’s concept of the same, he obviously does not believe in the latter. As perhaps an atheist (or, at least, as an unbelieving Jew), on what basis does he summon the moral outrage at Zionist racism? It is no use to summon so-called “universal” Western liberal values -- there are no such universal things. In reality, if there is no God -- or at least no God with a personal interest in humanity -- than what exactly is Atzmon griping about? His lament only makes sense if we see that all human beings have an inherent dignity, that the truth is the most important touchstone for human societies, and that the very idea of crime exists and should be punished. Where else but from God can these concepts emanate?
The Wandering Who? is a book that I would recommend with some important caveats. It is hurtful to many Jews for good reason, but, at the same time, the author offers a powerful rejoinder to those who lionize Israel and the ideology of Zionism. At the very least, he is a prophetic if blunt voice for the secular anti-Zionist who screams, “not in my name.” Atzmon’s almost-existential longing for something more than the “Tribe” -- for the human family is right, and that is why he, as a moralist, has traction in any number of his points. The outlet for that belonging cannot, however be a tired Western liberalism that is on the point of collapse at the very moment Atzmon is making his point. The human family he seeks can find only one Father. There is an authentic identity for human beings, an authentic relationship with one another that is possible if only they will see reality for what it is. Only the Gospel that espouses a universal solution (forgiveness and redemption) to the universal problem of man (his fall and the reality of sin) can provide this authenticity.
I used to sit on a bench on Primrose Hill and look over the City of London. If it were true, I used to think, that God became man, and that His life and death had a personal meaning to every single person among all those millions of existences spent in the stench of slums, in horizonless world, in suffocating anguish of enmities, sickness and dying -- if that were true, it would be something tremendously worth living for. To think that someone knocked at all those millions of dark doors, beckoning and promising to each in an altogether unique way. Christ challenged not only the apparent chaos of history but the meaninglessness of personal existence.(Karl Stern, The Pillar of Fire.)
Perhaps Gilad Atzmon should seek out that same park bench -- Christ is still knocking at those doors.
So I come full circle on Atzmon’s work: he has written a stinging rebuke of the modern Zionist project albeit in controversial terms yet his overarching denial of the uniqueness of any aspect of Judaism is exactly the reason he is consigned never to enjoy the universality of meaning he so desires. The gift of the faith of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob
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