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Atzmon was born in a secular Jewish family in Tel Aviv, Israel, Ashkenazi on his father's side,[15] and grew up in Jerusalem.[16] His great-grandmother was a victim of World War II, but he refuses to assign her death a special Holocaust status.[17] His grandfather was, he states, a commander in the paramilitary Irgun during the period of the British Mandate in Palestine, who subscribed to the doctrines of Ze'ev Jabotinsky, hated Germans, despised the British, was angry with Palestinians for living on land that God had given to Jews, and loathed Jewish leftists.[18] For Atzmon he was a 'veteran Zionist terrorist', and he himself grew up in what he describes as a 'happy childhood'[19] imbued with a spirit of 'militant enthusiasm.'[18]
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Atzmon was conscripted into the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in June 1981. He began his service as a combat medic and participated in the 1982 Lebanon War. Aztmon was transferred to a position within the Israel Defense Forces Orchestra and spent most of his military service in the Israeli Air Force orchestra. He explains this as a reflection of the fact that '’(p)laying scales at the speed of light seemed to me far more important than killing Arabs in the name of Jewish suffering.’ Three weeks before the end of his military service, in the wake of the war, his troupe visited an IDF detention camp at Ansar, Lebanon. He later wrote that this was a 'life-changing' experience, coming into direct contact with the conditions of captured Palestinians, some locked in solitary confinement in what he took at first to be 1 metre square concrete boxes for guard dogs. During a guided tour, he states that, as he peered across the barbed wire at the POWs, he felt that ‘the place was a concentration camp. The inmates were the 'Jews', and I was nothing but a ‘Nazi’.'[18] After he was demobilised, he travelled to Europe in December 1984, living as a busker.[18]
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In 1994,[21] disenchanted with the implications of the Oslo Accords, Atzmon emigrated from Israel to London, attending the University of Essex,[22] earning a master's degree in Philosophy,[3], while landing a residency as musician at the Irish Black Lion pub in Kilburn.[18]
He has lived subsequently in the UK,[4] becoming a British citizen in 2002[1] and renouncing his Israeli citizenship.[2] He has defined himself as "a British, Hebrew Speaking Palestinian"[23] and a "proud self-hating Jew".[24][25]
Here is one of the shorter vids on his YouTube channel that would introduce a number of his most provocative ideas to folks who aren’t familiar with him.