excerpts from the book

The Wandering Who?

A Study of Jewish Identity Politics

by Gilad Atzmon, 2011, paperback

 

p1
Israel Shahak

The Nazis made me afraid to be a Jew, and the Israelis make me ashamed to be a Jew.

p1
Tribalism can never live in peace with humanism and universalism.

p15
Zionism and Israel have become the symbolic identifiers of the contemporary Jew.

p18
Victor Ostrovsky, a deserter ex-Mossad

The sayanim [is] a unique and important part of the Mossad's operation. Sayanim (assistants) - must be 100 percent Jewish. They live abroad, and though they are not Israeli citizens, many are reached through their relatives in Israel... There are thousands of sayanim around the world. In London alone, there are about 2,000 who are active, and another 5,000 on the list. They fulfill many different roles. A car sayan, for example, running a rental agency, could help the Mossad rent a car without having to complete the usual documentation. An apartment sayan would find accommodation without raising suspicions, a bank sayan could get you money if you needed it in the middle of the night, a doctor sayan would treat a bullet wound without reporting it to the police, and so on. The idea is to have a pool of people available when needed who can provide services but will keep quiet about them out of loyalty to the cause.

p18
Sayanim ... are people who regard themselves primarily as Jews. The sayan is a person who would betray the nation of which he is a citizen out of devotion to a notion of a clannish brotherhood.

p18
In the last three decades it has become clear to the Zionist leadership that Israel would actually benefit from world Jewry, and especially the Jewish elite, staying exactly where they are. Paul Wolfowitz, Rahm Emmanuel, Lord Levy and David Aaronovitch have proved far more effective for the Zionist cause by staying where they are.

p19
Zionism ... is actually a global movement' that is fuelled by a unique tribal solidarity. To be a Zionist means to accept that, more than anything else, one is primarily a Jew.

p19
Victor Ostrovsky, a deserter ex-Mossad

You have at your disposal a non-risk recruitment system that actually gives you a pool of millions of Jewish people to tap from outside your own borders. It's much easier to operate with what is available on the spot, and sayanim offer incredible practical support everywhere.

p21
[Zionist] infiltrators within British and American administrations succeed in transforming the American and British armies into a Zionist mission force.

p23
[The USA Defense Planning Guidance (DFG) for the 1994-99 fiscal year] laid out the strategy for merging American and global Zionist interests into a unified practice.

[In 1992, the United States Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney, appointed Paul Wolfowitz (Undersecretary for Defence Policy at the time) and his deputy Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, to draft the USA Defense Planning Guidance (DFG) for the 1994-99 fiscal years. The document that was later named as the "Wolfowitz Doctrine"]

p24
USA Defense Planning Guidance (DFG) for the 1994-99 fiscal year [Wolfowitz Doctrine]

In the Middle East and Persian Gulf, we seek to foster regional stability, deter aggression against our friends and interests in the region, protect U.S. nationals and property, and safeguard our access to international air and seaways and to the region's oil. The United States is committed to the security of Israel and to maintaining the qualitative edge that is critical to Israel's security.'

p48
Considering the racist, expansionist Judeo-centric nature of the Jewish State, the Diaspora Jew finds himself or herself intrinsically associated with a bigoted, ethnocentric ideology and an endless list of crimes against humanity.

p54
While in the past an "antiSemite" was someone who hates Jews, nowadays it is the other way around, an anti-Semite is someone the Jews hate.

p54
Jews have been suffering hatred and discrimination for centuries. Yet the Jewish ethnic activists seem to have learned hatred from their enemies so well that the secular Jewish political discourse has been totally shaped by it.

p69
Zionism has become an efficient system that serves what the Zionists define as primary Jewish interests. Within the Zionist framework, the Israelis colonise Palestine and the Jewish Diaspora is there to mobilise lobbies by recruiting international support. The Neocons transform the American army into an Israeli mission force.

p70
Zionism is there to offer a new 'world order', with the English-speaking empire as a world policing force and a defender of Jewish interests.

p70
Zionism is a tribal Jewish preservation project.

p79
The Jewish ghetto resembles a hostile fortress with enough nuclear firepower to turn the Middle East into dust.

... Israel is the Jewish state and, despite the Zionist promise to build a civilised nation, it functions as a Jewish ghetto.

p84
It is not the idea of being unethical that torments Israelis and their supporters, but the idea of being 'caught out' as such.

p85
The more Israelis want to secure themselves by clinging to isolation, the more death they spread around themselves.

Once again, this reading of Israeli reality can help us to understand the magnitude of Operation Cast Lead, the

p85
As much as 94 percent of the Israeli Jewish population supported the lethal measures taken by the IDF against Palestinian civilians in Gaza.

p85
Israelis perceive themselves as inhabiting a democracy, and indeed Israel is a democracy, albeit a racially-selective and exclusive one.

p85
The more Israelis detest themselves, the more horrified they become at their doomed situation. They despise the fact that they might have lost the ghetto for good, yet have failed to join the community of nations. They have never become 'people like all people'. The more they insist on loving themselves for who they think they are, the more they loathe themselves for what they have become.

p94
Otto Weininger - one of the most influential thinkers of the early 20th century

People love in others the qualities they would like to have but do not actually have in any great degree. So we only hate in others what we do not wish to be and what, notwithstanding, we are partly. We hate only qualities to which we approximate, but which we realise first in other persons ... Thus the fact is explained that the bitterest anti-Semites are to be found amongst the Jews themselves.

p95
[Karl] Marx equates Jews with capitalism, self-interest and money-grubbing. For him, capitalism is Judaism, and Judaism is capitalism.

p97
Zionism does dictate the plunder of Palestine in the name of Jewish national aspiration and 'home- coming'. Israel has been efficient in translating Zionist philosophy into brutal practice. However, Israelis - more precisely, the vast majority of Israeli-born secular Jews - are not motivated by Zionist ideology. Its spirit and symbols are virtually meaningless to them. Zionism is, for most of them, either an archaic notion or a foreign concept altogether. Most forms of 'anti-Zionism', then, have hardly any effect on Israel, Israeli politics or the Israelis themselves. Zionism is largely a Jewish Diaspora discourse.

p135
Karl Deutsch

A nation ... is a group of persons united by a common error about their ancestry and a common dislike of their neighbours.

p135
Tel Aviv University historian Professor Shlomo Sand

At a certain stage in the 19th century, intellectuals of Jewish origin in Germany, influenced by the folk character of German nationalism, took upon themselves the task of inventing a people [Jews] 'retrospectively,' out of a thirst to create a modern Jewish people.

p140
Instead of a supernatural entity (namely, God) to command them to invade and commit genocide against the Promised Land's' indigenous inhabitants, in the Jewish national revival project it was they themselves - Herzl, Jabotinsky, Weizmann, Ben-Gurion, Sharon, Peres, Barak, Netanyahu, Lieberman, etc - who would decide to expel and kill. God no longer killed in the name of the Jewish people, the Jews did. They did it with Jewish symbols decorating their planes and tanks, and followed commands issued in Hebrew, the newly restored language of their ancestors.

The Zionist hijacking of the Bible was in fact a desperate Jewish answer to German Early Romanticism. However, as much as 19th century German philosophers, poets, architects and artists were ideologically and aesthetically excited about pre-Socratic Greece, they knew very well that they were not Hellenism's (biological) sons and daughters. The Jewish nationalists took their project one step further, binding themselves into a blood chain with their mythical forefathers; Hebrew, formerly a sacred tongue, became an everyday spoken language.

p141
The Bible, according to non-Jewish scholars such as Thomas Thompson, is a 'late collection of innovative literature written by a gifted theologian'.

p142
The Bible is fiction, and not much in it can substantiate the glorification of the Jewish people in Palestine at any stage. It would appear, rather, to be an ideological text that is being made to serve social and political ends.

p143
The first Zionists knew that there had been no exiling, and that the Palestinians were descended from the inhabitants of the land. They knew that farmers don't leave until they are expelled.

p145
Contemporary Jews do not have a common origin, that their Semitic origins are a myth. Jews have no origin in Palestine whatsoever, and therefore their act of so-called 'return' must be realised as pretext for a tribal expansionist invasion.

p145
Jewish identity is racially-orientated. Many Jews, even secular ones, continue to regard mixed marriage as the ultimate threat. Furthermore, in spite of modernisation and secularisation, the vast majority of secular Jews continue to enact the blood ritual of circumcision.

p145
The Jews, rather than being a race; comprise a collective of many people who have been hijacked by a national movement based on myths.

p148
Uri Avnery "Remember What? Remember How?", 3/19/05

Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Jewish philosopher

The Jewish religion died 200 years ago. Now there is nothing that unifies the Jews around the world apart from the Holocaust.

p149
The Holocaust religion embodies the essence of the liberal democratic worldview. It offers a new form of worship, having made self-loving into a dogmatic belief in which the observant follower worships himself or herself.

p150
The Holocaust religion signals the final Jewish departure from monotheism, for every Jew is potentially a little God or Goddess. Abe Foxman is the God of anti-defamation, Alan Greenspan the God of 'good economy', Milton Friedman is the God of 'free markets', Lord Goldsmith the God of the 'green light', Lord Levy the God of fundraising, Paul Wolfowitz the God of US 'moral interventionism'. AIPAC (the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee) is the American Olympus, where mortals elected in the US come to beg for mercy, forgiveness for being Goyim and for a bit of cash.

The Holocaust religion is the conclusive and final stage in the Jewish dialectic; it is the end of Jewish history, for it is the deepest and most sincere form of 'self-love'. Rather than requiring an abstract God to designate the Jews as the Chosen People, in the Holocaust religion the Jews cut out this divine middleman and simply choose themselves.

p150
The Holocaust religion ... allocates to Jews a central role within their own universe. The 'sufferer' and the 'innocent' march toward 'redemption' and 'empowerment'. God is out of the game, He has been sacked, having failed in his historic mission. He wasn't there to save the Jews, after all. In the new religion 'the Jew', as the new Jewish God, redeems himself or herself.

p169
Haim Saban, the IsraeliAmerican media mogul multibillionaire, interviewed in The New Yorker

[There are] three ways to be influential in American politics: make donations to political parties, establish think tanks, and control media outlets.

p170
Killing in the name of democracy is what Neocons call 'moral intervention'.

p177
Just three years after the liberation of Auschwitz (1945) the newly-formed Jewish state ethnically cleansed the vast majority of the indigenous population of Palestine (1948). Just five years after the end of World War Two, the Jewish state brought to life racially-discriminatory return laws in order to prevent the 1948 Palestinian refugees from coming back to their cities, villages, fields and orchards. These laws, still in place today, were not categorically different from the notorious Nazi Nuremberg Laws.

p183
American and British politicians insist on a banal and simplistic historic tale to do with WWII, Cold War, Islam, 9/11 etc. Tragically, the criminal AngloAmerican genocide in Iraq and Afghanistan, AKA 'The War against Terror', is a continuation of our self-inflicted blindness. Since Britain and America failed to grasp the necessary message from the massacres in Hamburg and Dresden, Nagasaki and Hiroshima, there was nothing that could stop English-speaking imperialism from committing similar crimes in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq... Western political leadership is totally detached from humanist thinking or judgments that involve ethics.

p183
Western political leadership is totally detached from humanist thinking or judgments that involve ethics.


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