By Donald H. Harrison
LA JOLLA, California – One day, there will be a Palestinian Embassy in Israel and an Israeli Embassy in Palestine and Jerusalem residents will be able to walk from one to the other, novelist Amos Oz predicted Thursday evening, Nov. 12, at the San Diego Jewish Book Fair.
Oz, author of some 20 books and winner of the Israel Prize for literature, surprised some in the packed house by not plugging any of his books that were offered for sale in the lobby and corridors of the Lawrence Family Jewish Community Center. Officially, he was there to discuss his latest, Rhyming Life & Death, as well as the Amos Oz Reader.
Instead, Oz delivered a low-key, often humorous, talk that, but for the large size of the audience, might have been a graduate course in history and sociology at Ben Gurion University in Beersheva, where he teaches. To some, who agreed with his soft-left positions, he may have sounded like a biblical prophet, in keeping with his first name. To those who thought his positions completely out of touch with hard political reality, he may have seemed a character from the land that shares his last name.
The Israeli author’s speech did not appear calculated to change many opinions. It began with a survey of how independently every Israeli—“a nation of seven million people … seven million prime ministers”—seems to approach the solution to any problem.
Oz said that when Israel was being established, some dreamed that it would become again the nation of David and Solomon; others wanted on a larger scale the shtetl of Eastern Europe; some wanted central Europe with “red tile roofs, good manners and no work from 2 to 4”; some were Marxists who dreamed that Stalin himself would come to a kibbutz to learn how Communism really should be practiced; others were social anarchists with a love for nature; and still others were social Democrats who admired everything Scandinavian.
These dreams obviously were in conflict, producing endless debate and argument among Israelis –as it turned out, a very good thing, Oz said.
He said that for Israel’s own welfare, peace with Arab neighbors and ending the occupation of the West Bank should be prime objectives. At least as it applies to the West Bank, he said, the Arab-Israeli conflict is not a question of one side being right, the other being wrong; rather it is “a clash between right and right and wrong and wrong.”
He showed less equanimity about Hamas-controlled Gaza with which, he said, there can be no compromise because Hamas does not recognize that Israel should be a state. What is there to compromise, he asked rhetorically. Should there be an “Israel only on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays?”
For Palestinians who live in the West Bank, the outlook is different in Oz’s estimate. There was once a time that Zionists had a slogan, “an empty land for a landless people” That, and similar sentiments, according to Oz, ignored the reality that “Palestinians have been in Palestine 14 centuries” and that they do not feel part of any greater Pan-Arab polity. They have been “mistreated by Syrians, Lebanese, Egyptians, Kuwaitis … they are not going anywhere,” said Oz.
The same might also be said of the Jews, he added; Jews are not going anywhere else. In all of history, Jews never had another homeland.
So, the New Jersey-sized nation that is Israel will have to be divided with two populations living side by side, Oz said. “We can’t be one happy family—we’re not one, and we’re not family.”
What gives him hope, he said, is if you poll all the people who live between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River—both Jews and Arabs—and ask them what is the most likely outcome of the Arab-Israel conflict, 80 percent answer that eventually there will be a two-state solution. They may not like the idea of two states, but in their own minds, two states are inevitable; “they are unhappily ready for this,” Os said.
He likened the eventual division of Israel into two separate lands to the “divorce that the Czechs and the Slovaks conducted” following the collapse of Communism throughout Eastern Europe. “The difficulty about this divorce is no one is moving out.”
Speaking of the nation that will remain Jewish, Oz said, there is a vast difference between the Israel he knows and the “Israel of CNN.”
The latter looks like a “gloomy, violent place,” whereas the Israel he knows is in the midst of a “cultural and scientific golden age” with advances in “literature, cinema, theatre, visual arts, science, technology and high-tech” – developments that grow out of what he described as the “Jewish culture of doubt, argument and debate.”
In a question and answer session, Oz was asked if Americans should speak out about Israel. “Why the hell not?” he concluded his answer.
Given the warfare and rocketing following pullouts from Lebanon and Gaza, wouldn’t partition—especially of Jerusalem—bring about even more tsuris, asked another questioner.
Oz reminded the audience that Israel also withdrew from the Sinai Desert, and has a “stable peace, not a love affair” with Egypt. Lebanon seems more stable now, Oz said, then added: “If Israel stays on the West Bank, it makes out of Israel a colonial monster.”
Asked what impression he had of the “Islamization of Europe,” he responded that the solution to the plight of the third world will not be solved by the third world moving north. At the same time, he cautioned the audience against associating Muslims with fanaticism, saying in his experience there are many Muslim communities in Europe that are peace loving and, similar to immigrants everywhere, are struggling with ways to retain their identity.
The final questioner from the audience wanted to know what would happen to the Holy Places in Jerusalem under a partition plan. “Let no flag wave over those Holy places,” he responded. “Make arrangements for everyone.”
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World.