Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Calling Out the Tribalists

Saggio, il nonno di Atzmon: "Il tribalismo non può mai vivere in pace 
con umanesimo e universalismo".  Sintetico ed efficace.
 
-------------------------------------
 
October 10, 2011
 
Calling Out the Tribalists
by KATHLEEN CHRISTISON
 
Gilad Atzmon captures the essence of his book, The Wandering Who? A 
Study of Jewish Identity Politics, on the first page of his foreword. 
The book is about the conundrums of Jewish identity—what is it; why is 
it special, if it is in fact special; why do the rest of us so often 
celebrate it; what does the fixation on it mean for Israel and for its 
neighbors?  He wastes no time getting to the core of the issue—which is 
the politics these identity issues create.  On page 1, he cites his own 
very rightwing grandfather, who he says knew perfectly well that 
“tribalism can never live in peace with humanism and universalism.”  His 
grandfather was an unapologetic tribal Jewish nationalist, as were 
virtually all of the early Zionists in Israel, and none of them had any 
truck with humanism or universalist notions of coexistence with Arabs or 
Jewish-Palestinian equality in Palestine.
 
It is Zionism’s tribal exclusivism that has killed Palestinian 
aspirations to freedom and a national identity.  And it is the 
widespread liberal Jewish—and Western—failure from the beginning to 
recognize the realities of Zionism that has silenced the Palestinian 
voice for 60-plus years and prevented any just resolution of the 
Palestinian-Israeli conflict.  As a self-defined Jewish state, Israel is 
by definition non-democratic and tribal and, whether innocently or not, 
its supporters have been perpetuating its exclusivist, anti-universalist 
mandate since the days, well before 1948, when Zionists conceived the 
notion of dispossessing and dispersing the Palestinians so that Jews 
could have exclusive access to Palestine, and then carried through with 
this massive injustice.
 
Atzmon—a born-and-bred Israeli, now an expatriate, a citizen of the UK, 
and a renowned jazz musician—describes his own journey from tribalism to 
universalism by describing how his emerging devotion to jazz and his 
connection to music lovers gradually superseded his Jewish nationalism. 
  It was because of his love of music, he realized, which linked him to 
people “concerned with beauty and spirit rather than land, mammon and 
occupation” that he ceased being a Zionist nationalist.  “It was 
probably then and there,” he says, “that I left Chosen-ness behind to 
become an ordinary human being.”
 
He was still a teenager.  Only later, after military service and more 
years of music, did Atzmon learn the facts of Israel’s ethnic cleansing 
of the Palestinians and come to understand something about the 
Palestinians and what Zionism meant for them.  After a struggle to 
understand the “elusive Oriental sound” of Arab music, he learned 
finally to listen.  “[I]t is listening,” he writes, “that stands at the 
core of deep comprehension.  Ethical behaviour comes into play when the 
eyes are shut and the echoes of conscience can form a tune within one’s 
soul.  To empathise is to accept the primacy of the ear.”
 
Atzmon’s statement about having left chosenness behind and become an 
ordinary (and empathetic) human being speaks volumes not just about his 
own awakening, but about the very essence of Zionism—and also the 
continued ignorance of most of the Western world about Zionism’s 
fundamental objectives.  Few Israelis and few Israeli supporters 
anywhere in the world focus on or have any real understanding that 
Zionism is an ideology whose basic value is promoting the superiority of 
Jews and Jewishness and that it is thus irreconcilable with universalist 
concepts of human rights, equality, and democracy.  Zionism has from the 
beginning elevated Jewishness above all as “the fundamental 
characteristic of one’s being,” as Atzmon says, and as the basis for its 
national claims.  Atzmon cites Chaim Weizmann and other early Zionist 
leaders who pronounced that Jewishness is a “primary quality”: “there 
are no English, French, German or American Jews,” Weizmann said, “but 
only Jews living in England, France, Germany or America.”
 
There was never any expectation among the early Zionists that Jews in 
Palestine would have to accommodate Palestine’s native population.  Thus 
does Zionism have no concern or sense of remorse for having imposed a 
Jewish state on a land that was until 1948 home to a Palestinian Arab 
people.  And thus has the world come to accept that Jewish ascendancy in 
this land that was formerly non-Jewish is the natural order of things. 
In the wake of the Holocaust and the perception that Jews needed a 
refuge from persecution, the displacement of Palestine’s natural 
inhabitants came to be seen—and is still seen—as entirely acceptable. 
The human, humanitarian consequences of this philosophy for Palestinians 
have long since been forgotten, and the world ignores that this 
injustice in the name of Jewish chosenness was Zionism’s goal from the 
start.
 
Atzmon sets out his argument by clearly defining the ways in which Jews 
self-identify.  He puts forth three categories: those who follow Judaism 
as a religious and ethical belief system; those who regard themselves 
primarily as human beings who happen to be of Jewish origin, for whom 
Jewishness is secondary; and those who turn the two identifiers, human 
being and Jew, around and, a la Chaim Weizmann, place their Jewishness 
above all other traits.  Those in this third category feel a loyalty to 
and solidarity with the tribe over any other identity.
 
Atzmon has no argument with those in the first two categories.  It is 
the third category and what he sees as “the Jewish ideological 
inclination toward sameness” that raise his ire.  Noting that early 
Zionism rejected the Diaspora and tried to gather the exiles into 
Israel, he says that with the rise of the right since 1967 and the 
glorification of the Israeli settler who is reclaiming “Greater Israel,” 
there has been a bonding between Eretz Yisrael, the so-called whole land 
of Israel, and the Diaspora that has united most of world Jewry behind 
Zionism and has had the effect of uniting Jews against the world, 
setting them “apart from their surrounding social reality.”  Jews have 
again become members of a separate tribe.
 
It is the secular Jewish Zionists who profess universalist values while 
existing in solidarity with the Jewish tribe—who seem to straddle the 
second and third categories but give far too much primacy to their 
Jewishness to fit easily into the category of “ordinary human being”—who 
particularly irk Atzmon.  It is these people, Atzmon believes, who by 
continuing to identify primarily as Jews, even when professing to be 
anti-Zionist, actually enable worldwide Zionism to maintain its power 
and its role as the voice of world Jewry.  They actually embody, he 
contends, a continuum between hardcore rightwing Zionism and Jewish 
anti-Zionism, ultimately totally undermining the impact and significance 
of their anti-Zionism.
 
To illustrate his case, he cites the example of a Jewish couple in 
London profiled in a local Jewish paper, who are described as socialists 
who belong to no synagogue, do not believe in God, and are “antagonistic 
towards Zionism.”  Yet they “feel passionately” about Jewish history, 
have strong Jewish connections in their social lives, helped form a 
specifically Jewish socialist organization, love Hebrew and Yiddish 
culture, hold a Seder at Passover, and have circumcised and bar 
mitzvahed their sons.  They “want to remain Jewish,” according to the 
article, and “prove that there is a way of being Jewish that doesn’t 
involve saying prayers to a God you don’t believe in.”  They clearly 
want acceptance inside the Jewish community, whose preservation is 
vitally important to them; they are concerned to prevent Jewish 
assimilation.  (This couple identifies their Jewishness as ethnic. 
Atzmon—along with Israeli historian Shlomo Sand whose 2009 book The 
Invention of the Jewish People argued that Jews are not a unique nation, 
only a religion—challenge the existence of a Jewish ethnicity, on strong 
historical and evidentiary grounds.)
 
Atzmon’s point is that, whether the identification is secular and ethnic 
or religious, the need to identify primarily as Jewish is tribal and 
anti-universalist and essentially negates any pretense of anti-Zionism. 
  “Why don’t they just ‘get on’ with their ‘socialist agenda’ and join 
the human family as ordinary people?” he wonders.  Many people around 
the world have left their faith and ceased believing in God, but they 
exist in multi-cultural, multi-faith societies and do not insist on 
being identified first as Catholics, Hindus, or Muslims or on 
socializing primarily with their own co-religionists or on forming 
organizations exclusive to their ethnicity or religious preference.  His 
objection is to Jews who profess to be anti-Zionist but form what he 
calls “ethnocentric, separatist, peace-loving” organizations of Jews: 
Jews for Peace, Jews for Justice in Palestine, “Jews for this and Jews 
for that.”  This kind of “exclusive, ethnocentric Jewish discourse” is 
not something one sees from Germans or Aryans or Caucasians, he points 
out wryly.
 
Whether or not they realize that they are actually pushing Zionism, 
Atzmon says, they ultimately carry out a Zionist agenda by being so 
tribally focused.  The result continues to be—as Atzmon himself and many 
other non-tribal anti-Zionists have sadly discovered—that those who 
criticize Zionism for its fundamental objectives and for what it has 
done to the Palestinian nation are frequently vilified as anti-Semitic. 
  Solidarity with Jews tends to create—even in Jewish anti-Zionists, 
whom he calls “Jewish ethnic campaigners”—solidarity against anyone 
identified, however baselessly, as an enemy of the Jews.  In this loose, 
emotional world of tribal loyalty, because Israel is “the Jewish state,” 
critics of Zionism can easily be made out to be “enemies of the Jewish 
people.”
 
There is much more in this rich book.  Although it is not a scholarly 
book, it is deeply thoughtful and thought-provoking.  It is impossible 
to capture all its nuances without reading it carefully, and perhaps 
more than once.  Atzmon describes how Zionism has accrued its global 
political and financial power.  He also discusses at length, and quite 
perceptively, the role of the Holocaust in unifying Jews throughout the 
world, in inducing a “dialectic of fear” that governs the Jewish 
political and ideological mindset, and in leading to a trauma that he 
terms “Pre-Traumatic Stress Syndrome, in which stress and emotional 
terror result from fear of an imaginary episode, such as a supposed 
attack by Iran, that might occur in an imaginary future—something in 
this case that grows out of the real horror of the Holocaust but that is 
manipulated to unite Jews and becomes a part of Jewish identity.
 
It goes without saying that this book will be extremely controversial, 
indeed already has become controversial.  But the truth often is.  The 
tribal anti-Zionists whose principal concern is “what’s good for the 
Jews” have attacked Atzmon—generally not for what he says in the book 
but for what they claim he said in past writings (all of which claims 
are refuted precisely by this book).  But Atzmon’s analysis is exactly 
on point, and it cannot be dismissed simply because the mirror it holds 
up to Zionists and “Jewish ethnic campaigners” is undoubtedly 
uncomfortable for them to look at.
 
KATHLEEN CHRISTISON is a former CIA political analyst and the author of 
several books on the Palestinian situation, including Palestine in 
Pieces, co-authored with her late husband Bill Christison. She can be 
reached at 
kb.chr...@earthlink.net
.
 
http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/10/10/calling-out-the-tribalists/
 
-- 
Sostieni Rete ECO
 
http://rete-eco.it/it/sostienici.html
 
 

 the human family as ordinary people?” he wonders.
 
eh gia'.
 
E senza virgolette.
 
 

 con umanesimo e universalismo"
 
 
Giusto. Infatti sarebbe assolutamente anti-umano accettare uno stato 
tribalista e judenrein by design come quello che stanno attualmente 
progettando i palestinesi.
 
Introdotto un po' di universalismo (come quello che esiste per esempio 
nel vicino stato ebraico, che unisce senza discriminazioni lingue e 
religioni), se ne può parlare.
 
 
 
 
-- 
Dead men may not talk, but they also don't lie.  [Chuck Hawks]

 con umanesimo e universalismo".  
 
Giusto. Infatti sarebbe antiumano accettare uno stato tribalistico,
judenrein by design, come quello progettato dai palestinesi.
 
-- 
recoil is insignificant when there is a tiger on the head of your elephant