'I thought music could heal the wounds of the past. I may have got that wrong'

Such moments of mournful beauty include the introduction to the album's longest track, The Burning Bush, when this consummate reedsman sounds on sax as if he's blowing some plangent folk clarinet – a duduk or a zurna or such like. In contrast, Spring In New York rumbles along belligerently, Atzmon's sax squalling over jangling keyboards in a manner reminiscent of Weather Report, who, he says, were once an inspiration, while Burning Bush itself accelerates between sampled mutterings and cries into a wild and dance-like climax – Middle-Eastern bebop.

Atzmon and the Ensemble (Frank Harrison, piano, Yaron Stavi, bass and Asaf Sirkis, drums), who won a 2003 Radio 3 Best Album award for their album Rearranging the 20th Century, pick up glowing reviews for their live performances, as audiences can hear for themselves next Wednesday and Thursday, when they play Edinburgh and Aberdeen respectively. Apart from his OHE activities, Atzmon has recently been playing with and producing the emerging London jazz vocalist Sarah Gillespie, and has also played with the powerful Palestinian singer Reem Kelani (who plays the CCA, Glasgow, on Friday), while an eclectic career over the years has seen him associated with Robert Wyatt, Sinad O'Connor and Ian Dury and the Blockheads.

Born in Israel in 1963 but living in self-imposed exile in London for the past 14 years, Atzmon, who is also an author and music educator, prefers these days to describe himself as "a Hebrew-speaking Palestinian", and if his eclectically inclusive music prompts rave reports, his stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and his intensely anti-Zionist polemic have provoked outrage, not least among some other anti-Zionists, and he has been condemned as an anti-semite and even a Holocaust denier.

Ask him about such claims and he sounds cheerfully, indeed pugilistically, unrepentant. He refutes accusations of Holocaust denial – although elsewhere he has described his attitude to that human catastrophe as "complicated", arguing that it should treated as historical fact rather that what he described as "religious myth". So far as being labelled in some quarters as a "self-hating Jew", he responds: "Self-hating Jew is almost correct. I would say a proud self-hating Jew," and continues, unabashed, "I would remind you that great thoughts have been contributed by Jews who were self-hating – Christ, or Marx, or Spinoza… whenever you come across a mega-Jewish thinker, there's always this element of anger against oneself.

"It's true that I manage to enrage quite a few political Jews," he chuckles, "and I'm not sorry that I did. At the end of the day my argument is simply that Israel defines itself with the Jewish faith. If this is the case, considering the crimes committed in the name of this faith. It is our duty to ask who are the Jews, what is Judaism and what is Jewishness?

"Let's get some things very clear. I never attack Jews, I hardly criticise Judaism – I never criticise people for their beliefs. But I can criticise conduct."

His attitude stems from his period of national service with the Israeli army during the 1982 conflict in Lebanon: "Watching my people destroying other people left a big scar. That was when I realised I was completely deluded about Zionism." Hence his condemnation of Jewishness as "very much a supremacist, racist tendency". But an anti-semite? "Considering the fact that I'm from Israel, my wife is Jewish and I have three Jews in my band, am I an anti-semite? Naaaw… that just doesn't work."

He agrees, however that he has, in effect renounced his Jewish identity, although, he adds, he grew up in a secular Jewish environment: "So I'm probably very loud and rude at times. You can take the Jew out of Israel but you cannot take Israel out of the Jew."

Discoursing further on this fraught identity, he says that most of his late work, including his music, is very "self-reflective": "When I criticise the Jews, in many cases I'm criticising myself. When I say that I'm a proud self-hater, I really mean it. But I don't have anything against Jews in particular and you won't find that in my writings."

Confused? Angry? Best return, perhaps, to his music in which, with its mercurial swerving between the poignant and the wildly impassioned, one is tempted to detect something more conciliatory. In his sleeve notes to Refuge, he states that when he founded the OHE in 2000, he did so in the belief that music could bring people together. "I was totally convinced," he writes, "that music could heal the wounds of the past. I was sure that music was a message of peace… Eight years later, I must admit I may have got it wrong."

Music, he concludes is the message

Is he disillusioned, then? "Not really," he tells me. "I now realise that music is much too important to give to a political cause. It can serve a political cause, but it is really very effective when the listener is manipulated by it, without any intended intervention. We are playing music for the Palestinian cause, but you can feel for the Palestinian people without me telling you what you're supposed to feel."

Gilad Atzmon and the Orient House Ensemble play the Jazz Bar, Edinburgh, on 27 February and the Blue Lamp, Aberdeen, on 28 February