Islington Council has decided to prevent me from performing with the Blockheads at our annual London Christmas concert on 21 December. This ludicrous decision by the Council was in response to pressure from a single pro-Israel campaigner who said he would not attend the concert if I were on stage.

To sign a petition in support of Gilad click here.

The Blockheads have twice written to the Council demanding its decision be reversed. I have played with the Blockheads for 25 years, we’ve performed more than a thousand concerts, including at least two in Islington, without incident. I appealed to the Council to reconsider, submitting two detailed letters that countered each claim made against me. In return the council shifted its claimed rationale for banning me and answered my appeals with a blitz of misquotes from my work and claims about me that were at best insulting and at worst slanderous, all of which were suspiciously similar to Zionist sources.

Of course, I have never uttered nor been charged with hate speech. Despite my spotless record, the Council decided to ban me, in defiance of my free speech rights and interfering with my obligation to earn a living. Bearing in mind the bizarre reasoning the Council used to ban me from playing the saxophone, I am left wondering if I may still use a public toilet in Islington Council controlled territory or just drive through the borough on my way to a concert at the Vortex Jazz Club on the other side of town.

The war against me has clearly stepped up: pro Israel pressure groups have been hard at work trying to bankrupt me by preventing me from pursuing my music and literary careers. I guess that this means I must be doing something right.

And this isn’t all bad news. In the course of this battle, the Council managed to provide me with some precious materials. In the coming days we will examine them closely and see what they reveal about the level of Zionist occupation within British local authorities and the Islington Council in particular.

When I landed in Britain in 1994, Britain was a wonderful free and tolerant space. Sadly, Britain has gradually been reduced to an authoritarian society. As Jeremy Corbyn and his many supporters discovered, unless you adhere to certain pro Israel politics, your right to speak your mind or even to make a living is endangered. I guess that Orwell’s 1984 was not just a work of fiction but a prophetic text and a prescient description of present day England.

Support Gilad’s legal battle

To express your disgust with the council’s decision: [email protected]

To lodge a complaint with the council click here

Contact the Council: +4420 7527 2000

On Tuesday, CNN published a survey of anti-Semitism in Europe. The poll revealed that “more than a quarter of Europeans surveyed believe Jews have too much influence in business and finance. One in five say they have too much influence in media and politics. In some countries the numbers are often higher: 42% of Hungarians think Jews have too much influence in finance and business across the world.”

In my recent book, Being in Time, I argue that Jewish power is the power to silence opposition to Jewish Power. CNN’s poll supports my thesis. That some Jews enjoy significant influence in politics, culture and finance is not a matter of ‘opinion,’ it is an established fact as reports in the Jewish and mainstream media reveal on a daily basis. Jewish prominence in certain areas is a frequent boast of renowned Jews such as Alan Dershowitz. Yet only one of five Europeans is brave enough to admit that in the open.

CNN’s poll suggests that 80% of those who dwell in Europe are either lying, blind or, most likely, terrified of the truth. They have good reason to be scared. They have seen the onslaught of revenge from Jewish institutions against artists, writers, comedians, politicians, activists and academics including: Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, Richard Falk, Alison Weir, Norman Finkelstein, David Icke, Jeremy Corbyn and yours truly. Telling the truth about Israel, Zionism or expressing any form of criticism of Jewish politics subjects the teller to an immediate and colossal smear campaign. The CNN poll suggests that 80% of Europeans seem to have accepted the present tyrannical and authoritarian conditions. But this isn’t exactly a stable situation. It is only a question of time before the genie pops out of the bottle as has happened far too many times in the past.

By now it has become clear that the more Jewish institutions ‘fight’ anti-Semitism, the more the opposition is directed against Jewish politics and Israeli brutality. The same applies to the holocaust; the caravans of Jewish youngsters visiting Poland didn’t kill anti-Semitism nor did it revive the memory of the holocaust. In Poland, according to the CNN poll, “50% of people think that Jews use the Holocaust to advance their position.”

What can Jews do about anti-Semitism? Simple– look in the mirror– introspect.

If Jews want to be loved or simply just ignored, then :(1) maybe The European Jewish Congress should seriously consider the possible consequences of its ‘demand’ that “the Bible and the Koran use ‘trigger warnings’ to highlight anti-Semitic passages,” (2) The French Jewish organisations might want to reconsider their relentless campaign to decimate the artistic career of France’s most popular comedian, or (3) It might not be a great idea for Britain’s Jewish institutions to interfere with British national politics by smearing Britain’s number one anti racist.

If Jews want to rid the world of antisemitism, Jewish bodies should carefully self reflect and take responsibility for their own actions instead of blaming the Goyim…

After the Pittsburgh Synagogue shooting, I posted a short news item about Cherev Gidon, an ‘Israeli Tactical Training Academy’ in Pennsylvania. The Israeli-style military school teaches American Jews some of the IDF commando’s essential manoeuvres. Yonatan Stern, Cherev Gidon’s founder, contacted me a day later. He said that my report had been balanced. He wrote an open and intellectually engaging note. I replied, asking whether he would agree to an interview. We met earlier this week in a kosher pizzeria in Monticello, a small town in the Catskills of New York.

Those who follow my work know that despite my sharp disagreements with Zionism, Israeli politics and West Bank setters in particular, I find more honesty in Right Wing Zionism than in the entire spectrum of the Jewish Identitarian Left. Although I probably agree on many crucial political matters with JVP activists and Mondoweiss readers, I see the Jewish left as an inherently duplicitous project. My point is that notwithstanding my almost complete ideological differences with right wing Zionists, their frankness about their principles allow our disagreements to be honestly debated. Unlike the Jewish Left that speaks of universal principles but thinks and acts tribally, the Jewish nationalist position is as coherent as it is immoral.

At the Kosher pizza place in Monticello, I met a nice and friendly young man. Yonatan’s political views were well developed: authentic, rational and totally consistent with his core beliefs. He had no gated enclaves, no ‘no go’ zones that he attempted to keep out of our discussion.

Yonatan was born about 100 miles outside of New York City, not far from where we were in the Catskill mountains. His parents made Aliyah when he was a child. The family settled in Kiryat Arbah, in what was probably the most radicalised, belligerent West Bank settlement. The second Intifada caught Yonatan when he was 16 years old. He was practically living in a war zone for the next seven years, and according to him, it was this extended experience that shaped his worldview. “I spent my formative years from ages 16 to 23 in Hebron during the 2nd intifada. You saw gun battles day after day, you saw people being hit.” In his early twenties, Yonatan left Israel and returned to the United States.

In a recent Israeli TV interview, Yonatan explained that he was motivated to form an Israeli military training school in America by the March in Charlottesville. The chants of “Jews won’t replace us” reminded him of the rise of the Nazis. But he doesn’t like the leftists either. The Antifa evokes in him bad memories of Stalin’s antisemitsm. So I asked Yonatan why Jewish history repeats itself. How is it possible that Jews are once again opposed by both the right and the left? The ex settler’s answer may take some readers by surprise.

“In your work” he said, “you, Gilad, argue that Jews need to do introspection. Rather than saying ‘the world hates us,’ we should ask whether there is anything we are doing to provoke this antisemitsm. This is an essential question that Jews both left and right refuse to ask themselves. It is the one question you [Gilad] ask, it is the one question I ask.”

I was thrilled that Yonatan was familiar with my writings. I mentioned that I didn’t invent this question. The theme was thoroughly explored by early Zionists who tried to grasp the logos in the anti-Semitic argument.

“There is a very good reason history repeats itself,” Yonatan continued. “Antisemitsm is not about evil goyim who want to kill us. A lot of Antisemitsm is a result of actions Jews take which cause antisemitsm. We cannot effectively counter antisemitsm just by the ADL shaming people who say things about Jews, I don’t support this approach at all. I believe in freedom of speech. I don’t even support laws against holocaust denial and as a grandson of a holocaust survivor I know how real the holocaust was… I believe that Jews play a large part in antisemitsm and in order to fight antisemitsm we have to fight it in two ways and I am fighting it in both ways: I am reacting physically to the symptoms but I also try to challenge the basis of antisemitsm by speaking out, telling Jews that the root of a lot of antisemitsm in America is the adoption by many Jews in the last century of multi-culturalism, leftism, socialism, cultural Marxism, communism, all these evil ideologies of the left which started with Karl Marx and even before him. All these ideologues corrupted Jews to the core.”

Yonatan is clearly not a liberal Jew.

“You, Gilad, speak about Jewish exceptionalism. We [Jews] are supposed to be a light to the nations, but we do the opposite… When Jews promote open borders they actually undermine the nations in which they live. When the average white Christian American sees Jews pushing for thousands of Islamic terrorists and Somali refugees and Latin American criminals and members of cartels to come into the country and pushing for affirmative action and a homosexual agenda and they do all of it in the name of Judaism… What they do, they tell people , ‘this is Judaism, we exploit your gratitude, we are coming to your country, we are undermining it from within, [we] cause the country to collapse on itself and if you call us ‘dirty Jews’ we will say you are a ‘filthy anti-Semitic Nazi’.”

Yonatan, an ultra Zionist Jew, is presenting what many liberals may identify as the core right wing anti-Semitic argument. Although it would be practically impossible for a goy to survive after making such statements, I somehow don’t think that Yonatan suffers any form of exclusion for saying what he thinks about his people.

“You seem to have predicted the synagogue shooting; you saw it coming, how?” I asked him.

“For decades now so many liberal Jews have been pushing for cultural Marxism. So many Jewish political leaders are behind this. The movement is funded by George Soros who is clearly a Jew. But I consider him the opposite of a Jew. I see him as a malevolent force and other Jews who are in government and the Left … all of it really started with Saul Alinsky who set the foundation for the Antifa. They have been pushing it for 50 years. Of course, not all Jews subscribe to these ideas. There are many orthodox Jews who believe in the complete opposite. But because these people do it in the name of Judaism [so naturally] we all get pushed into the same boat. It was obvious that at some point somebody would snap…. the only question was when.. someone on the right would have to take action to respond to what they see as an assault on American heritage.”

Yonatan asked to make it clear that he was by no means justifying the attack on the synagogue. What he did, instead, was to attempt to understand the rationale that led to the Pittsburgh attack. Yonatan further predicted that “the next attack will come from the Left. They are very violent, subversive in the spirit Lenin and Trotsky.”

In the Israeli TV item about Cherev Gidon, Yonatan mentioned that the goal of his training unit is for “every synagogue to have an armed Jew ready to defend it.” I asked Yonatan if he believes that American Muslims should be entitled to explore the same right. Should they also train with submachine guns and automatic riffles and be ready to defend their mosques?

In 1994 I enrolled in a postgraduate course in philosophy at a British University. On my first day at the University I had to complete a few routine administrative duties such as registering my name with the philosophy department and meeting my supervisors. I was also told that I had to join the student union. Being a subservient type, I walked over to the Student Union hall where I soon realized that the task was slightly more complicated than I had expected. There were a plethora of student unions to choose from: The Black Student Union, The Asian Student Association, The Socialist Students, The Gay Student Society and more. Confused, I asked for assistance. They asked where I was from. When I told them “Israel,” I was told that the “Jewish Student Union” was my home.

It was then, at the Student Union Hall, that I first encountered the identity split between Israel and the Jewish Diaspora. It would take some time before I was able to define this binary tension in philosophical or post political terms and before I understood the Jewish dilemma in terms of Nationalist/Identitarian dialectics. Two decades later, the political battle now going on in America is basically an extension of that internal Jewish debate.

Back in 1994 I didn’t see any reason to join the Jewish Student Union. I had never identified ‘as a Jew’ and Judaism meant little to me. Israel was my place of birth. My ‘identity’ as I then saw it was geographically oriented. Fortunately, I managed to complete my postgraduate course without becoming a ‘union member.’ But my thoughts about that morning at the student union hall have evolved into a few controversial books and hundreds of papers on ID politics and the current Identitarian dystopia.

In 2011 I wrote The Wandering Who? A Study of Jewish Identity Politics. The premise of the book was that if Israel defines itself as the ‘Jewish State’ then we have to dissect the meaning of the J-Word. We have to grasp how Judaism (the religion), Jews (the people) and Jewishness (the spirit, ideology and culture) relate to each other and how these terms influence Israeli politics and the activities of the Jewish Lobby around the world. Instead of studying ‘Zionism,’ an archaic term that is not relevant to most Israelis, my book focused on Jewish identifications. I did not address the problematic question of ‘who and what Jews are,’ I tried instead to find out what those who call themselves Jews identify with.

While this question is certainly germane to an understanding of Israel and the Middle East conflict, it is also crucial to an understanding of the current American dystopia. Instead of asking ‘who Americans are’ let us explore what Americans identify with.

In the post-political era, America is divided into two camps, let’s call them Americans and Identitarians. Americans see themselves primarily as American patriots. They often subscribe to a nationalist populist ideology and, like the Israelis, identify with a piece of geography. On the other hand, Identitarians are primarily liberals and progressives. They identify themselves in biological and sociological terms, and they see themselves first as LGBTQ, Latino, Black, Jewish, feminist etc. Their bond with the American nationalist ethos is at most secondary and often non-existent.

This division in America between ‘nationalism’ and ‘identitarianism’ is similar to the dichotomy I observed at the student union hall in 1994. In fact, Israel has become a prime model for American nationalists. Similarly, it is Jewish progressive ideology that inspires Identitarians globally and in America in particular. It is the pervasiveness of Jewish ideologies within both nationalist and Identitarian discourses that sustains the dominance of Jewish and Israeli political institutions in American politics.

The Israeli Lobby’s hegemony over American foreign policy and its force in advocating policies that favor Israel has been widely recognized. Numerous studies on the topic have been published, such as: The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Polic^y (Prof John Mearsheimer and Prof Stephen Walt), The Power of Israel in The United State (Professor James Petras). Alison Weir’s website, If Americans Knew routinely presents a devastating chronicle of Israeli intervention in American politics. The Washington Report on the Middle East Affairs has been producing outstanding work as well. The crucial question is, why have Americans let this happen?

My study of Jewish ID politics suggests that America isn’t just influenced by one Jewish lobby or another. The entire American political-cultural-spiritual spectrum has been transformed into a internal Jewish exchange. Most American do not see the true nature of the battle they participate in and, for the obvious reasons, their media and their academics do not help. It is more convenient to keep Americans in the dark.

America is rapidly moving towards a civil war. The divide isn’t only ideological or political. The split is geographical, spiritual, educational and demographical. In a Vox article titled, “The Midterm Elections Revealed that America is in a Cold Civil War,” Zack Beauchamp writes, “This is a country fundamentally split in two, with no real room for compromise.” Of the midterm election Beauchamp reports that “American politics is polarized not on the basis of class or even ideology, but on identity… One side open to mass immigration and changes to the country’s traditional racial hierarchy, the other is deeply hostile to it.” He correctly observes that “Republicans and Democrats see themselves as part of cultural groups that are fundamentally distinct: They consume different media and attend different churches; live in distinct kinds of places and rarely interact with people who disagree with them.”

Despite this American schism, Israel and its Lobby are somehow able to influence both sides, managing to finding pathways to the secluded corridors of both parties. Although Democrats and Republicans can no longer talk to each other, it seems that both are happy to talk to Israel and the Lobby. And it is at AIPAC’s annual conference that these political foes compete in their eagerness to appease a foreign state. This anomaly in American politics demands attention.