Many people reading Mary Rizzo’s 'The Gatekeepers lose another one' which has been placed on numerous sites, must have wondered what the article was about. Someone had tried to censor Gilad Atzmon, for some unknown reason, and this had been rebuffed by the Indymedia Collective. Perhaps an explanation is in order.

Last summer in Britain, a series of different union conferences – the National Union of Journalists, the University College Union, the public service UNISON and Transport & General Workers Union - passed motions concerning a boycott of the Israeli state and its institutions. This sent the Zionist movement into a frenzy. Starving the people of Gaza into submission is one thing, but interfering with the ‘academic freedom’ of Israeli academics is quite another. No matter that Israeli universities are complicit to the highest degree in the oppression of the Palestinians, that Dan Halutz, Chief of Israel’s Defence Staff and war criminal praised Haifa University, in its February 2006 newsletter, for tailoring its courses to meet the needs of the security services.  http://research.haifa.ac.il/~eden/newsletter.pdf and in its March 2007 newsletter Haifa boasted that the heads of all 4 security agencies were Haifa graduates.  http://media.haifa.ac.il/images/nl_mar07_eng.pdf

The reason that there was wall to wall establishment opposition to a Boycott, with everyone from Alan Dershowitz to Tony Blair and George Bush denouncing the idea, was because it called into question a state that is built on giving privileges to its Jewish citizens and denying them to the Palestinians. For the first time ever 4 out of 6 Israeli University Presidents issued a statement, on the day of the academic boycott debate, calling for restrictions on Palestinian students to be lifted. The prospect of an academic boycott achieved more, in terms of getting Israeli academics to speak out, in 1 month than had been achieved in 40 years.  http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/worldwide/story/0,,2091528,00.html

I was privileged to speak at the conference of UNISON, Britain’s largest public service union, in support of the Boycott. I spoke not just as a union member but as someone who is Jewish. Why? Because when the Zionists accused supporters of the Palestinians of being anti-Semitic it makes sense for Jewish members to be the first to reject this libel. But according to Gilad Atzmon this was just another example of how it is ‘Jews and only Jews who engage in racially orientated peace campaigning.’
 http://www.gilad.co.uk/html%20files/Dialectic.htm and even worse ‘since acting politically under a Jewish banner is in fact the very definition of Zionism, it is reasonable to deduce that all Jewish left activity is in practice not more than a form of left Zionism.’ It is a strange argument that says if Jewish people stand up and say they oppose Zionism, because they are Jews, they are actually Zionists!
 http://www.gilad.co.uk/html%20files/3rd.html The obvious implication is that all Jews are Zionists, which is just what the Zionists themselves say!

When Zionist accusations of anti-Semitism against their opponents have started to lose their impact, Mary Rizzo and Gilad Atzmon seem determined to prove that the Zionists are right after all. How else are we to judge statements such as “we must begin to take the accusation that the Jewish people are trying to control the world very seriously…. …. American Jewry makes any debate on whether the 'Protocols of the elder of Zion' are an authentic document or rather a forgery irrelevant. American Jews do try to control the world….”(Atzmon has replaced ‘Jewish people’ by Zionists but the meaning remains the same)
 http://www.gilad.co.uk/html%20files/onanti.html or ‘it looks as if Zionist lobbies control American foreign politics. After so many years of independence, the United States of America is becoming a remote colony of an apparently far greater state, the Jewish state.’  http://www.gilad.co.uk/html%20files/protocols.html. The idea that Israel, rather than being the watchdog of imperialism and its attack dog is in fact controlling US foreign policy smacks of Jewish conspiracy theories. Even the very term gatekeeper is derived from Atzmon’s assertion that Jews are holding back support for the Palestinians. ‘In spite of the fact that it is the 'Jews Only State' that we struggle against, we allow a bunch of self-appointed Jewish leaders and activists to become our gatekeepers.’  http://www.counterpunch.org/atzmon11222006.html And these are but a few examples of Atzmon’s writings.

The notion that anti-Semitism has anything to do with solidarity with the Palestinians is absurd. Historically anti-Semitism was the other side of the Zionist coin. As Isaac Deutscher explained of the Jewish workers in pre-war Poland ‘To them anti-Semitism seemed to triumph in Zionism, which recognised the legitimacy and the validity of the old cry ‘Jews get out!' The Zionists were agreeing to get out’. 'The Non Jewish Jew ' & Other Essays- pp.66/7. But the founder of political Zionism, Theodore Herzl had operated on the basis that ‘the anti-Semites will be our most dependable friends... our allies.’ (Diaries, pp. 83/4). From Czarist Russia to Nazi Germany Zionism collaborated with anti-Semitism, which it saw as the natural reaction of non-Jews to the Jews in their midst. Without anti-Semitism there would have been no Zionist settlers. The only effect of a growth of anti-Semitism today would be a new wave of settlers emigrating to Israel.

This is the reason that I wrote to Indymedia, a radical, anti-racist and anti-imperialist site asking that Atzmon’s ‘Saying no to the hunters of Goliath’ be taken down. There are plenty of right-wing and conspiracy web sites, including Ms Rizzo’s own, which are carrying this article, but for pro-Palestinian sites to do so is grist to the Zionist mill. The article speaks of a ‘world Judaic view’ and explains that ‘the Jewish state and the sons of Israel are at least as unpopular in the Middle East as their grandparents were in Europe just six decades ago.’ This is ‘the real meaning’ of the Nazi holocaust. It wasn’t fascism or crazy ideas of racial supremacy that led to Auschwitz, it was that the Jews and presumably the Gypsies, Slavs and gays were ‘unpopular’. By the same logic the Palestinian’s situation can also be blamed on their ‘unpopularity’.

This is a classic example of blaming the victim yet Ms Rizzo tells us that Palestinians remain ‘the absolute priority.’ When Atzmon openly supports the Deir Yassin Remembered group, which includes holocaust deniers such as Board Member Israel Shamir who openly states that Auschwitz was ‘an internment facility’ as opposed to an “industrial extermination factory”…’  http://www.israelshamir.net/English/Who_Needs.htm it is clear that there is another agenda here

When the Boycott campaign was at its height, at the Board of Deputies of British Jews meeting ‘deputies also gave vent to their anger – particularly at Jews who supported the move (for boycott).’ the Jewish Chronicle (22.6.07.) ‘Blair adds his backing - The Boycott Battle ’ Just as in South Africa, where the apartheid regime detested white opponents of apartheid, so Zionist leaders villify their Jewish opponents as ‘self haters’. Yet ironically Gilad Atzmon seems to take a special delight in attacking Jewish anti-Zionists.

So when Mary says that the primary concern must be justice for the Palestinians I agree. But why, when the campaign for an academic boycott was forcing Israelis to come to terms with their actions, did Gilad Atzmon oppose that boycott? In an interview with Ms Rizzo, when asked whether he supported a boycott, he replied that: ‘Yet I have some serious reservations, which I am inclined to mention…. I truly believe in freedom of speech and oppose any form of Maccarthyism or intellectual censorship of any sort. Thus, interfering with academic freedom isn’t exactly something I can blindly advocate. Unlike some of my best enlightened friends, I am against any form of gatekeeping or book burning. But it goes further, I actually want to hear what Israelis and Zionists have to say. I want to read their books. I want to confront their academics.’
 http://peacepalestine.blogspot.com/2007/07/gilad-atzmon-interview-tangling-with.html

So there we have it. An academic boycott is ‘book burning’ and no doubt the hundreds of Palestinian orgnisations calling for a boycott were book burners too. Book burning, let it not be forget, was a speciality of the Nazi regime. The real reason for Atzmon’s opposition was that among the leaders of the Boycott campaign were those who had been most critical of Atzmon, such as Birmingham University lecturer, Sue Blackwell, or exiled Israeli Professor Moshe Machover of Matzpen.

Gilad Atzmon and Mary Rizzo are entitled to indulge in anti-Semitic rhetoric. What they are not entitled to do is wage their battles in the name of the Palestinians. And incidentally Indymedia have not rejected the request to hide the Goliath article on their site. They have yet to make a decision.

Tony Greenstein is a founder of Palestine Solidarity Campaign (UK) and Jews Against Zionism and a shop steward for UNISON. He is also a legal adviser and has written extensively about Zionism and its relationship to anti-Semitism.