Friday, March 9th, 2012
On 6th March the ‘Wandering Who? Reading Group’ in Brighton met again (see First Report), this time to discuss Chapters Two (‘Credit Crunch or Zio Punch) and Three (‘Zionism and Other Marginal Thought’) of Gilad Atzmon’s book.
‘How did America allow itself [to] be enslaved by ideologies inherently associated with foreign interests?’ (p. 26) This seemed to us the crucial question in Chapter Two. We thought around the idea that if a whole society can be persuaded to adopt a general view of the world which is not obviously related to a particular political issue, but which nevertheless tends to make people think one way on such an issue, then members of that society will not notice that they have been robbed of their freedom to think.
This is a universal problem, but looking specifically at Israel and the US, the general view of the world which Americans have been persuaded to adopt is one which sees Jews as exceptionally talented and benevolent, while being scapegoated for this and other reasons. Islam, on the other hand, is regarded with suspicion, if not hatred, because it does not subscribe to ‘Western’ values. This world view is part of what we call liberalism, and expressing it confirms your liberal credentials.
We were in agreement that the Project for a New American Century had resulted in huge destruction, though we were unsure about the figures given in the book. For example we felt the figure given on page 25 of one and a half million fatalities in Iraq ought to have been presented more cautiously. Does anyone have any idea about the true figure? This related to a more general criticism of the book, which is that Atzmon was inclined to rather sweeping statements. Some of us argued that this was inevitable in such a polemical book
We were unsure about whether the Greenspan boom (pp 27-30) was consciously planned to enable the war on Iraq, but we were clear that it had the effect of diverting Americans’ attention away from foreign affairs.
‘[Greenspan, Wolfowitz and their like] employ abstract ethical concepts. But somehow the Jewish state is always set to benefit. One just has to read the first and prominent Zionist prophet, Theodor Herzl, to know that this is what political Zionism is all about: getting superpowers to serve the Zionist cause.’ (p. 30)
It should have been pointed out that Herzl wasn’t the first Zionist prophet, but we discussed how he had achieved his ideas, albeit posthumously, by means of a relentless negotiation with the leaders of political and economic power in his time. We would read later in the book that this tendency to cosy up to power may go back to the Babylonian exile.
Chapter 3 (Zionism and Other Marginal Thoughts) raised some central issues about Atzmon’s book which we expect to recur again and again through the rest of our meetings. The issue boils down to this. Is group identity a bad thing, with the corollary that identity politics is a bad thing? And conversely, are universalism and universalist ethics the answer to the ills of the world? We look forward to putting these questions to Atzmon himself in due course.
More specifically we asked: Is it really unreasonable that the Jews, like the Welsh, should wish to preserve their national identity, and that they should both take action to do so. Some of us were opposed to any form of national identity, because of its association with nationalism. On this basis both Welsh and Jewish nationalism should be opposed. But others of us found it natural that people should identify tribally, and we were not persuaded that being marginal in this way was necessarily a bad thing. And in any case, we wondered whether it was realistic to expect people to embrace a universalist identity, even if that were desirable.
The idea was proposed that the Jewish project in Palestine was not the same as other colonial movements, in that unlike them it involved the removal of the indigenous population. However, it was pointed out that American settlement involved the removal of native Americans, Australian settlement involved the removal of the Aborigines, and even Welsh nationalism may involve the exclusion of the English. One of us, who had lived in Namibia, talked about the slaughter of the native population there by German settlers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
So what is so different about Israel? Was it perhaps not so much a matter of principle, but one of our own self-interest? Israel, placed where it is, dividing the Arab world in two, and directly confronting the Muslim world, with its interest in Jerusalem, poses a massive threat to world peace, and therefore to our own security. We agreed that much of our anger about the Zionist project is the way in which we ourselves were, for many years, brainwashed by Israeli propaganda. As far as our discussions are concerned this was clearly unfinished business.
As before, all members of the group have been consulted in preparing this report.
River to Sea
Uprooted Palestinian 
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