Palestine Think Tank

A brief introduction to Gilad Atzmon’s “The Jewish Experience”Gilad Atzmon’s Abencerraje or How the Fulfillment of Desire Disables Hope

Desperation tires until it becomes true,
and hope until its desire is realized.
The Story of Abencerraje and the Lovely Jarifa

Today, Gilad Atzmon is no stranger to the Spanish language audience. In 2003, when by chance, I came across an article of his, published in Counterpunch, that was not the case. Since at the time, I still followed certain forms of “netiquette,” before translating the article into Spanish, I wrote him respectfully, requesting permission. Of course he granted it immediately and that first article was published in Rebelión, “Los errores más habituales del pueblo israelí [The Most Common Mistakes of Israelis],” marking not only the beginning of his ascendance among lucid and rigorous readers such as himself, but also, our friendship.

There’s something in his writing that attracted me immediately. Being as he is, an almost mono-thematic author (although at times he writes about jazz – music is his “official” profession – the majority of his articles deal with the conceptual roots of this extremely complex conflict implanted in the Middle East by the United Nations with the artificial creation in 1948 of the State of Israel), his conclusions are always pointed, but never pamphleteering. I must say right away, that in principle, I have nothing against pamphlets. Indeed, I believe I’ve already publicly stated that in these ideologically decaffeinated times, the pamphlet fills a necessary political function, even if everything that it gains in spontaneity and incisive power is lost in reflection. Gilad Atzmon is, primarily, a thoughtful author. Not for nothing did he study philosophy before making the decision to devote his life to jazz.

With him, I’ve learned (and his readers as well) to move through the intricate conceptual jungle of Zionism, without falling for the trick of turning two terms that have nothing to do with one another into synonyms – anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism – and above all, to analyze Jewishness from the point of view of identity, a concept that immediately eliminates any kind of racial notion and deactivates the “anti-Semitic trap” that Zionism extends to anyone who dares to criticize the criminal acts committed – deceitfully, in the name of Judaism – by the racist State of Israel (a State only for Jews, lest we forget).

The article that I translate and comment on today, “The Jewish Experience,” is a new twist in the Atzmonian analytical process of deconstruction of Zionism. Specifically, it sheds a different light on this up until now insoluble problem. The hypothesis that Atzmon has decided to classify as Jewish experience, is at the same time, simple and revolutionary, like all great ideas, and is based on a simple premise, masterfully described in an anonymous Moorish novel from sixteenth century Spain: The Story of Abencerraje and the Lovely Jarifa. Abencerraje, hopelessly in love with Jarifa, recounts his moods in the absence of his beloved. The phrase I’ve excerpted: “Desperation tires until it becomes true, and hope until its desire is realized,” is the literary equivalent of the millennial nostalgia that the Diaspora Jew feels against the absence of the Promised Land. Gilad Atzmon has done nothing more than apply common sense in order to arrive at a surprising conclusion: if every human being knows that once any kind of desire is fulfilled, the prior anxiety over the unfulfilled desire vanishes, it’s logical to deduce that when Zionism made it possible to realize the old collective dream of the Diaspora by creating the State of Israel from scratch, the Israelis – who by being born there do not possess the desire, but are rather, citizens with passports for a country – have nothing to yearn for: the dream has become reality. This means then, a rupture between the Diaspora Jews, who continue being Zionists, because the desire to return to Zion remains in their unconscious, and the Jews born in Israel, who are already just Israelis, since they live in Zion. The interaction between those who desire and those who have ceased to be desirous is what Atzmon describes as contemporary Jewish experience.

From the standpoint of psychological reasoning, the hypothesis seems brilliant to me. Another very different thing is that the not very large body of authors reflecting on Zionism and its consequences has come to accept it. The mere fact of affirming that Israelis are not Zionists supposes a paradigm shift so transcendental that many will refuse to adopt it as a premise. It’s still too early to put the idea into practice, if it manages to be accepted, and I’m referring specifically to the famous Leninist concept: “What is to be done?” What tactics should militant anti-Zionists use who want to do away once and for all with Israel’s apartheid and the slow genocide being practiced against the Palestinians by a “state only for Jews”? Will it be necessary to design two separate strategies of struggle, one for those who still idealize Israel from afar, and another for those who want to escape from the hell it has become? Atzmon doesn’t say in this essay, but I have no doubt that he’ll continue reflecting and in the near future the results of his thinking will assist us.

Translated from the Spanish by Machetera
Manuel Talens and Machetera are members of Tlaxcala, the network of translators for linguistic diversity.