JUST who is Gilad Atzmon? A cheesy question, but the answer truly depends on who you ask.

One critic described his saxophone playing as personifying the agony and struggle of a generation at war. His 2003 album Exile grabbed album of the year the BBC jazz awards.

But he's also been accused by zionists of being a Holocaust denier, an anti-semite and self-hating Jew - all charges which he has articulately rebutted. His website, for example, features a section entitled 1,001 lies about Gilad Atzmon, where he has systematically argued against the claims levelled at him.

He was raised in a right-wing zionist Israeli family, but he is now a passionate supporter of the Palestinian cause. He describes himself as an ex-Israeli and an ex-Jew.

Speaking to Atzmon at his north London home, it seems that, while he knows what he isn't, he is not quite certain who he actually "is," apart from being a human being.

"I'm a jazz musician. I play the saxophone. I don't feel hatred at all," he says. "I just don't think in blood categories. I'm not interested in it."

Many of us would probably share his opinion, but, in the paranoid and often aggressive hothouse that surrounds the question of Israel and the concept of Jewishness in the 21st century, identity is an issue that he is forced to confront daily. His prolific writing and statements on the identity of zionism and Judaism continue to provoke controversy, as well as extreme hostility from some quarters.

But why does he keep on doing it, when he knows the reaction that he's going to get?

"I believe that, if I'm not entitled to resist Israel, global zionism and Jewish supremacy, then no-one is," he says.

"I grew up there, along with the band, served in their idiotic army. No-one is allowed to open their mouth. This explains what happened in Lebanon.

"Right-wing zionists have a clear interest to shut me up. The may succeed, but, the more they fight, the more they convice me that we should get louder."

Atzmon recalls a conversation with a friend. "He said: 'Why don't you talk about the rest of the Middle East? It's fucked up.' I replied: 'I talk about my people, because these are the only people I know.'

"You can never say anything, but we have to say something. Because Lebanon was flattened and, while Lebanon was flattened, Palestine was rocked, man," he sighs, shaking his head.

A deep vein of disgust runs through Atzmon's writings. Perhaps this has a lot to do with his past, his zionist upbringing and subsequent discovery that the folklore and ideology that underwrote his identity was based on lies and ethnic cleansing. "I don't believe anything any more," he confesses.

"At a certain stage, I was a zionist. I grew up in a right-wing family, I was looking forward to joining the army, I was sure that I had to kill as many Palestinians or Arabs as I could to prevent the next Holocaust. Then, I started to ask more and more questions.

"I realised that I was living on Palestinian land in a state that doesn't respect the indigenous population and the only way to stay there was to be a colonialist of one form or another. I said: 'No thanks. Bye bye. I'm out'."

He confides that that instinct to run is returning - this time, from his adopted home in Britain.

"How can we wake up in the morning and look ourselves in the mirror?" he asks.

"Six hundred and fifty thousand Iraqi civilians and it gets one day on the front page of the Guardian. This is genocide.

"I said to my wife: 'We cannot live here any more.' I left Israel for far less. Unless there's a change here, I will have to move out for a while. We are involved in a crime on a mass scale.

"Since I've been here, this country has been involved in every war. I've started to think it's me," he jokes.

"But where do you go in this world, you know? The only places left for me are Baghdad and Kabul," he says, breaking into manic laughter.

"But there is a big difference between Britain and Israel," he muses. "The people here don't support it while, in Israel, they're so devastated by defeat in Lebanon that only 5 per cent support the prime minister!

"I ask: 'How was it a defeat? You've managed to destroy a country, you've killed 1,000 civilians, what else do you want? To kill 20,000?"

One person that Atzmon definitely isn't - well, not completely - is the bizarre alter ego at the centre of his new project, Artie Fishel.

Beneath comedy glasses and a Jewfro wig, he grins freakishly out from the album cover against a backdrop of the balls of flame and stars and stripes that are all too familiar in the Middle East, circa 2006. The album is laced with the icons of Jewish identity, bagels sprinkled liberally throughout the artwork.

It turns out that Artie, a crazed klezmer player convinced that jazz originates from the Jewish people, was born from an aborted project of a different nature.

"I have this friend who's a computer engineer," explains Atzmon. "I said to him: 'Why don't we build a website with an artificial zionist?' I know the arguments, I know how they think.

"The idea was to make an intelligent machine. I really wanted it to be funny, so, whenever it doesn't know the answer, it would say: 'Are you an anti-semite or what?' - whenever it doesn't know the answer, it goes for the zionist diversion!

"We were lazy. So, before we had the machine ready, I started to hear a lot of music. I thought: 'Let's make him into a klezmer artist - Artie Fishel!'"

And so a freak was born. The album marks a stylistic departure for Atzmon, who assembled a gang of Jewish klezmer players to help with the project.

Listeners should prepare themselves for an uncomfortable listen, as "Judaised" versions of jazz standards - Watermelon Man becomes What A Mellow Goy, Bye Bye Blackbird morphs into Hoy Hoy Hoy Hoy Blackbird, well, you get the picture - are mashed up with electronic soundscapes and caustic and often disturbing tracks showcasing Artie's vocal "talents." While the musicianship is superb, Atzmon is the first to admit that he's no singer.

"In the gigs, I sing as horrible as I can," laughs Atzmon.

"Don't you like my singing?" he adds in Artie mode, with anarchic energy. "Are you an anti-semite? Do you really listen to my voice? Be honest with yourself!"

He cackles wildly, becoming Atzmon once more.

"Artie fits very well into the British sense of humour - it's self-mockery. You take a character and make a character as pathetic as you can and you throw him to the wolves."

The intention behind Artie, Atzmon explains, was to take a comedy swipe at the extreme reactions that his anti-zionist sentiments have provoked.

"I did everything I could to clean the album and tracks from anything that may be seen as an offence. I did my very best!" he maintains.

It seems that this wasn't good enough, though, and Atzmon reveals that the Board of Jewish Deputies has already protested about it.

"They haven't even heard the album. They don't know what they're attacking," he complains.

"I'm not full with rage. I say to the Jewish Chronicle, send someone. Maybe, you know, he will call you every 15 minutes to assure you he's still alive," he adds with a wicked grin.

While he waits for the call from the JC, Artie is touring the country. Atzmon admits that, at times, he wonders why he's taking the risk musically. "I don't know myself. I'm doing Artie Fishel and I have the gig and I'm going: 'What the fuck am I doing? I had a nice career as a good saxophonist'."

He pauses for a moment, searching for an answer to his own question. Then, he muses: "There is something about jazz musicians. Jazz is jihad. You love the fucking music without being able to capture it. You keep refreshing it and reinnovating until you die. This is jihad."

As for those who might not fancy in a night in with uncle Artie, Atzmon offers comfort.

"Everybody's afraid of Artie," he says. "Then Artie comes and makes everybody happy!"

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