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Jewish political discourse and the Palestinian struggleBy Gilad Atzmon*4 February 2007 Gilad Atzmon explains why political Jews "will never be able to grasp what the Palestinian cause and the discourse of liberation are all about". Introduction by Manuel Talens**In this brief essay Gilad Atzmon takes one more step ahead in his indefatigable task of deconstructing the Zionist enterprise.Atzmon, who already individualized with success the concept of "Jewish identity", enters here in psychoanalytical and philosophical territories of clear Freudian and Heideggerian parenthood. He contrasts the ontological impossibility of homo sionistus - whose ethical flourishing is impossible as it is based upon the spoil of a territory and the slow extermination of its proprietors, and who therefore must relay on a hypothetical Becoming projected toward the future - and the palpable ontological reality of the Palestinian people who for hundreds of generations - the past - have created deep roots into the earth of their predecessors - their ancestral Pacha Mama - through which they drink the sap of life. This is exactly the fundamental difference between the Zionist lie and the Palestinian truth: Palestinians don't need false identities to indulge in Becoming nor to acquire genuineness, as Zionists are obliged to. Quite simply, Palestinians have Been, are Being and will Be. The reader is invited to meditate each one of the sentences on this engine of significants written by Gilad Atzmon. The result is enlightening. *********************************The modern discourse of the "political" Jew is a discourse of the orphaned, a self-imposed state of being motherless and fatherless children. The political man kills his father. I am not referring here to the Oedipus complex, nothing libidinal. He is not jealous of his father, for you see, he does not like his mother either. This metaphysical murderous tendency applies to the left and to the right as well; to the Zionist and to his opponent, the so-called socialist "anti-Zionist". The right-wing Zionist is there to execute his Diaspora Father. The left-wing anti-Zionist is there to eradicate the Father Lord. They both kill their fathers. They want to join a new family, a better one, so to speak. For the Zionist, it is the nation that becomes his new family. He wants to become a nation like other nations. For the leftist anti-Zionist, it is the "working class" that becomes his family. He wants to be a man like other men. But they both fail. Rather than just Being in the world, they indulge themselves in Becoming. They insist upon Becoming that which they are not. Looking at it from another perspective, the Jewish political discourse, whose core is Jewishness, is all about forgetting the Being. The political man specializes in the erection of phoney authenticity. Ideology can be realized as a resurrection of motherhood and the elevation of fatherhood, the revival of the soil (the motherland) and the renaissance of the soul (the fatherland). Zionism, anti-Zionism and Jewish politics in general are the abolition of all that. The modern political man denies the soil and rejects the soul. The soil, rather than being "here and now", is a faraway land (Zion). The old soul - God, the spirit - is to be dismissed for being nonmaterial, an "opiate of the masses". Ideology can also be understood as a relatively new intellectual framework that lets the past form a logos, a principle that shapes the vision of the future. Yet, within the Jewish political discourse, time is in constant disintegration. For the political man, it is the future that forms a past. Rather than "the past", an abstract notion, for him it is "a past", a lucid chain of isolated events selectively chosen. Jewish political discourse reveals itself as a crude attempt against history and historicism. It prefers the notion of "the best of", it picks and chooses only very selected historical chapters. Within the Jewish political discourse, history is rather a set of sealed events, i.e. axioms. For the Zionist, the Bible is an historical axiom (a land registry). Anti-Semitism is another axiom. Together they form the epos of return. For the socialist, anti-Zionist, it is the emergence of working class politics together with the rise of Nazism that are the keystone to understanding a past. The Holocaust is an axiom. It serves as a point of departure, a sealed and isolated tale of destruction. Jewish history is a unique amalgam of precious events sailing confidently in an ocean of blind spots. The Jewish political narrative, both left and right, is a chain of fake slogans. The Zionist fakes the love for Eretz Israel while destroying it and its indigenous inhabitants. The leftist anti-Zionist fakes love for the working class (all the way to the bank). They both love "a past"; they both resist the notion of "the past". The above explains why political Jews (both Zionists and anti-Zionists) will never be able to grasp what the Palestinian cause and the discourse of liberation are all about. Palestinian liberation is all about soil. It is all about soul. It is about holding your grandfather's door key for six decades. It is about real sacrifice, it is about the real pain that is rooted in an organic past that is not really different from the present or even the near future. While Jewish political discourse is all about conveying the image of a new Becoming, Palestinian resistance is all about Being. Being who you are, craving the soil that is rooted in your soul like an olive tree. Palestine is the true homecoming. Palestinian resistance is indeed the revival of the soil and the resurrection of the soul. To be Palestinian is to find oneself at the forefront of a world struggle for liberation. To be a Palestinian is to be what the political Jew has been dreaming about being but never has been. To be a Palestinian is to be human. Unlike the Jewish political discourse that is obsessively engaged in a presentation of a virtual historical narrative of belonging and possession, Palestinians are the pre-Socratics of our time, they have never tried to set a narrative, their narrative is their present. They are the epic of creation and recreation. They are the Being, being in the midst of Being, they are as well the true Becoming of their true liberation. *Gilad Atzmon is an Israeli-born musician and writer, and a proponent of a secular and democratic one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in which the two peoples live in one state as citizens with equal rights and responsibilities. **Manuel Talens is a Spanish novelist, translator and columnist. Copyright © Redress Information & Analysis. All rights reserved. |
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