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EXCERPTS FROM COMMENTARY - see more below on the left
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Avraham Burg:
Oz, as a fanatic supporter of the two-state solution, tramples everything on the way to his expired solution. A single Arab state is inconceivable, and his opinions of the Arabs peer out here and there – and they aren’t exactly flattering. A shared state for Israelis and Palestinians, one secular and democratic – absolutely not. A Jewish dictatorship – of course not. A federation and a confederation – maybe someday in the vague and distant future.
….
The third thought, “Dreams Israel Should Jettison Quickly,” is devoted entirely to the malignant occupation. Oz is right in saying that this is the life-and-death issue for Israel’s future. But on his way there he’s once again tainted by the condescension and limited vision of the Zionist left, the group that played an integral role in creating the situation.
Gideon Levy
How can you love a person so much whose views express everything you hate about the Zionist left? How can you love a sworn Zionist so filled with a piercing faith in the justice of Zionism?
….
The Prophet Amos in 1989: “So messianic, ignorant and cruel, arising from a dark corner of Judaism, it threatens to destroy all that is dear and holy to us, to cast upon us a mad ritual of bloodletting …. Nablus and Hebron are only the means, only stations on Levinger and Kahane’s path toward spreading their mad control over Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Dimona.”
And the Prophet Amos, in the same speech: “If you don’t stand up – you Mr. Shamir, and you, too, Mr. Rabin … and call murder murder, even you won’t be immune from the murderers’ bullets.”
He wasn’t right about everything. He believed that the Jews and the Palestinians must divorce, as he put it, taking a symmetrical approach to both peoples, a symmetry that never existed in any way. In one of his last lectures, which went viral with more than 100,000 views on YouTube, he attacked the one-state solution, which his good friend Yehoshua had embraced, and said there could never be a binational state but only an Arab state with a Jewish minority.
In that speech he also came out against my descriptions of apartheid. The last of the moral Zionists couldn’t believe that the situation had grown so grave and incorrigible.
Yes, Oz was the last of the moral Zionists. Exactly as he believed the other day that we would meet for coffee, he believed that the country would be divided. Neither happened. They apparently never will happen. How sad, how very sad.
Amotz-Asa-El
With a battery of literati like S.Y. Agnon, Natan Alterman, and Haim Hazaz demanding that Israel retain its newly conquered territories, the 28-year-old Oz wrote in summer 1967: “We should tell the inhabitants of the occupied territories … we do not desire your land …we will sit and rule here until the signing of a peace agreement. A year, a decade, or a generation, and when the day comes – the choice will be yours.”
Years, decades, and three generations have elapsed, and many who once were attentive to this message became disillusioned. Not prophet Amos. Like Jeremiah in the face of Jerusalem’s war party, and like sidelined politician Shealtiel Abarbanel in his Judas (2014), Amos Oz never gave up on peace.
Hatim Kanaaneh
“May God reward him/her in proportion to his/her good deeds.” Somehow, that seems an appropriate way to express my own sense of loss at receiving the news of the death of the star Israeli writer, Amos Oz. I have to admit to his superior literary skill but do have my reservations about his commitment to peace in our shared birth colony of mandatory Palestine.
….
Leading news media across the globe have eulogized Oz as a prizewinning writer and a fearless peace activist. In the first two days after the official announcement of his departure, Haaretz, the liberal Israeli daily, published nearly a dozen glowing commentaries about his life, literary achievements and ‘enlightened’ political views.
….
Alas, throughout his public life he functioned as the literary equivalent of the oxymoronic Shimon Peres, a Nobel Peace prize laureate who introduced nuclear weapons to the middle East. In similar fashion, Oz used his superior skill to apologize for Israel’s aggressions and war crimes, witness the following gem in which he eloquently shared his government’s talking points with the international media during Israel’s 2014 war on Gaza:
“What would you do if your neighbour across the street sits down on the balcony, puts his little boy on his lap & starts shooting machine gun fire into your nursery?”
Every single word and every little brushstroke in the eloquent sentence are selected to maximize the mpact of juxtaposing the peaceful Israeli with the terrorist Palestinian without ever using the specific terms.
….
To the majority of the Israeli public, Amos Oz is known for his persistent campaign in support of the Israeli “peace movement” that advocates for a two-state solution to end the political morass of the Israeli occupation and of the defunct Oslo Accords. Soon after the 1967 war (in which he had fought) Oz started campaigning for an end to the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Yet, at the bottom of such peace sentiments lurked the less-than-innocent ethnic separation monstrosity that Zionists have planned and practiced in Israel from its first inception as a dream in the late nineteenth century. Regardless how he felt about the recently passed Jewish Nation State Law, such Apartheid practices were the inevitable culmination of those racial separation designs.
….
Oz lived, produced and prospered for a good part of his life in Kibbutz Hulda in our coastal plain. The fact that the original Palestinian farming community by the same name was erased and his kibbutz, along with other Israeli settlements, took over its space, its farming land and even its name, didn’t seem to impact his conscience in advocating for a peaceful ethnic separation of Palestinians from Jewish Israelis. The Nakba of 1948 was a done deed and the place for the Palestinian refugees, if they have to be considered at all, was among their kind on the other side of an agreed border.
….
Amos Oz’s departure is a significant loss to the literary field and to the cause of Israeli liberal Zionism. To non-Zionist peace advocates, his light shined dimly at a distance. May other pure lights continue to shine in our skies.
Marc Ellis
In Oz’s commentaries, Israel is decidedly flawed, its occupation of the Palestinian territories is politically wrong-headed, but Israel, as essential to Jews, is fundamentally sound. What Jews need and deserve is a state of their own. Palestinian rights are secondary to those of Jewish Israelis; Palestinian politics and culture are questioned in their honesty and depth. To Oz and his liberal Zionist contemporaries, Palestinians are less deserving than Jews and sometimes their descriptions of Palestinians are worse. Critics of Israeli policies toward Palestinians are viewed in the same light. Those to the Left of Oz and liberal Zionists in general are seen as either on the side of Israel’s destruction or perilously close.
….
Without the narrative of Jews being innocent in suffering and empowerment and, if flawed, at least liberal and democratic, what does it mean to be Jewish? And why should Jews and, as importantly, Christians in the West, European governments and the international community, support Israel as it systematically violates Palestinian human rights? If the veneer of liberal Zionism is worn thin, and the memory of the Holocaust becomes increasingly seen as an enabler of injustice against Palestinians, do Jews and others simply accept Israel as what some increasingly identify as a colonial settler state?
Like Wiesel, Amos Oz was a witness to the destruction and reemergence of Jewish life in the formative events of the Holocaust and the birth of the state of Israel. What they also experienced but couldn’t fathom was the formative event of Palestinian freedom as a demand on Jewish history. In missing the next question of Jewish life, while trying to deflect and demean those who did, Oz’s liberal Zionist witness became tarnished and, like Wiesel’s Holocaust consciousness, fated.
Amos Oz, a pillar of Israeli societyfor much of his
life and one of Israel’s most widely read and
acclaimed writers, died 28 December 2018
at the age of 79. Though he was popularly
credited with an equally illustrious record as a
peace activist, the appraisal by some of today’s
leading advocates for Palestinian rights as well
as political analysts see a more conflicted political
record that includes Oz’ lifelong support for the
Zionist ideology and planning that perpetrated the
Nakba (“catastrophe” in Arabic”), the ethnic cleansing of Palestine to create a Jewish-majority state of Israel, as well as his rationalization of Israel’s repeated military assaults on Gaza.
HIS LIFE AND LITERATURE
His impressive body of work, translated into more than 45 languages, consists of 35 books that include novels, short stories, and children’s books and hundreds of articles on literature and politics. One of his most celebrated works was his 2002 memoir “A Tale of Love and Darkness,” which actress Natalie Portman brought to the big screen in a 2015 in her directorial debut.
Oz received numerous prestigious honors throughout his life including honorary doctorates, the Israel Prize, the Germany’s Heinrich Heine prize, Russia’s Tolsoy prize, the Bialik prize, the Franz Kafka prize, the French Legion d’Honeur, and the Goethe Prize, considered the world’s most prestigious literary award after the Nobel. He also was a frequent nominee and leading candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Amos Oz’ parents emigrated from
Eastern Europe to Jerusalem in the
30’s, where he was born in 1939.
After his mother committed suicide,
Oz rejected the right-leaning views
of his father and left home at the
age of 14, choosing life on a kibbutz
(a socialist agricultural collective)
and embracing the socialist-Zionist
ideology and endeavors that built
the early state of Israel. He also
changed his family name of Klausner
to Oz, which means “strength” in Hebrew.
He fulfilled his compulsory service in the Israeli Forces as a young man and returned to service during the Six Day War in 1967 and the Yom Kippur War of 1973. After his army experiences, Oz adopted a peace-oriented outlook and widely promoted the need for dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians and the necessity of ending Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories taken in the 1967 war, subjects on which he wrote frequently. In his rejection of the extremism he saw in militaristic leaders, Oz described himself as “fanatically moderate.”
After his initial army service and having earned a degree in literature at Hebrew University, Oz spent 25 years living on a kibbutz, writing, farming and teaching high school. In 1986, he left the kibbutz to teach literature at Ben Gurion University and was a visiting professor in Oxford, Princeton, Boston, and Berkeley, California.
PEACE ACTIVIST...ZIONIST APOLOGIST…OR BOTH
Dubbed a “pillar of Israel’s peace movement” along with fellow Israeli authors David Grossman and A.B. Yehoshua, Amos Oz was one of the earliest Israeli proponents for a Palestinian state for which some Israelis branded him a traitor, a label he called a “badge of honor.”
In 1978, Oz helped to found Peace Now (“Shalom Achshav” in Hebrew), one of Israel’s leading organizations opposing the Israeli occupation, and was an activist in the left-wing political party, Meretz. He also had a prominent role in the Geneva Initiative, an unofficial peace plan reached by leading Israeli and Palestinians in 2003.
Fearing what his country would become if it continued for long as an occupying power, Oz believed Israel should not use the occupied territories as bargaining chips, but rather should simply let them go. But his motivation may have derived at least as much from his low estimation of the Palestinians, revealed in telltale signs throughout his writings and statements, and his fear of Jewish Israelis living among an Arab majority, as it did from a genuine concern for the Palestinian people or a desire to redress what had been done to them during and ever since the founding of Israel.
Although, along with fellow authors and other society leaders, Oz publicly opposed the appalling Nation State Law of 2018, he seemed never to grasp the immorality of the racial discrimination, marginalization and dispossession that undergirds Zionism, was manifested in Israel’s founding, and all-too-predictably led to in such a law.
He also could not see that Israel’s siege and blockade of Gaza is the instigating aggression that precipitates resistance in the form of sporadic attacks on Israel. He employed his considerable word-smithing talent to diffuse criticism of Israel’s brutal military assaults on Gaza, with such statements as: “What would you do if your neighbour across the street sits down on the balcony, puts his little boy on his lap and starts shooting machine gun fire into your nursery?”
Judging from within the challenging political milieu of Israeli society and its relentless march to the reactionary right in recent decades, perhaps it is understandable that Amos Oz seems to shine as a luminary advocate for peace and justice with a prophetic message that could be Israel's salvation.
But in the broader context of indigenous peoples’ common historical struggles against settler colonialism and with the moral clarity provided by international law and the universal human rights it guarantees, while Oz’ early promotion and continuing support for the anti-occupation cause and the two-state solution may be appreciated as ground-breaking and valuable within their limits, they are certainly not the ultimate vision that a true and lasting peace demands, a peace based on freedom, justice and equality for all the people of Israel/Palestine.
See links in our READ MORE List, to see these at the source
Haidar Eid, Director of B'Tselem
Like most leaders of the soft Zionist “left,” Oz was an opponent only of the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and never condemned the original sin — the 1948 grand theft of Palestine. For him, a committed Zionist till the last moment, the 1967 occupation was the source of the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
….
In addition, Oz also defended Israel’s war crimes and crimes against humanity in a number of occasions including the massive Israeli attack on Lebanon in 2006, the 2008-2009 Gaza massacre, and, the mother of all surprises, he supported US president Donald Trump’s moving the US embassy to Jerusalem so much so that he thought that, “every country in the world should follow President Trump and move its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.”
Philip Weiss
He was a Zionist formed by the European experience of his forbears and insisted on the primacy of that experience. Jews are unsafe in the west. We need a place. This is the reason Roger Cohen embraced him so in the New York Times; because Cohen believes the same thing. Whether or not you think those attitudes are anachronistic, there is no doubt Oz was one of the last vibrant connections to the Shoah generation. He expressed their dreams and despair and fears as well as anyone, and on that basis his reputation is deserved.
The political burden will end up hurting his reputation, though. There are no full Palestinian characters in any of the works I’ve read,
….
Oz exalted Jewish bookish culture and was dismissive of Palestinian culture. That indifference and worse produced his famous and insistent metaphor, that Jews and Palestinians are living in the same house but they need a divorce. And it produced his caricatures of Palestinian political attitudes. Some Palestinians are against the occupation, and they’re good Palestinians, he wrote in Dear Zealots, before flattening the rest: “On the other hand, many Palestinians are waging a war of fanatical Islam, a war for their fervent aspiration to demolish Israel as the state of Jewish people and the state of all its citizens. (According to fanatical Islam, the Jews are too despicable to be considered a nation…) That is a
criminal war that any decent person must resist.”
….
I understand what a nobleman Oz was for liberal Zionists. He helped found Peace Now and come up with the Geneva initiative. J Street’s Jeremy Ben-Ami eulogized Oz as “an inspiration to all of us,” this “amazing man,” a “guiding light” who “blazed” a path. IfNotNow honored Oz as “of blessed memory.” Though his political views were actually not so progressive, Oz represented the very best of the nostalgic Israeli achievement, and now he is gone. Israel will never have his like again, and neither will Israel lovers. Oz anticipated that. His last book contains this prediction: "I see days not far ahead when mechanics in Amsterdam, Dublin or Madrid refuse to service El Al planes. Consumers boycott Israeli products. Investors and tourists stay away from Israel. The
Israeli economy collapses." We are already at least halfway there.
Danielle Alma Ravitzki
As an artist, I can say that art is never created in a vacuum. Artists in particular, and people in general, cannot fully separate themselves from their own political context
….
Oz serves as a great example of what the Israeli pseudo-left looks like. He, just like his readers, advocate for the existence of a Jewish state, and hence his writing demonstrates his support for a Jewish, white supremacy over an indigenous nation, and his support of a mendacious,
ethnonational, racist regime
….
The orchestrated lamentation of public Zionist figures (especially men) has become routine, demonstrating the Israeli liberals’ mechanized Pavlovian response to the passing of famous apartheid supporters. RIP Amos Oz, “peace activist” and “peace will be his eternal legacy,” as some eulogies touted. The same public response had happened with former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, and former President Shimon Peres. Both had committed war crimes, and deliberately incited against the Palestinians while deceitfully positioning themselves as progressive leaders for peace. In the context of Israeli society, they are all white, Jewish men. They say they call for peace (and their loyal followers believe them), yet they enjoy their supremacist position hypocritically. This, among other reasons, is why the political atmosphere in Israel and the Palestinian oppression cannot change from within Israeli society. It has to come from outside, by external force or circumstance, such as boycott, that will create this change internally.
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Amos Oz: Novelist, Peace Activist, Zionist Apologist
UMKR Newsletter
From the film "A Tale of Love and Darkness, based on Oz' memoir, directed by Natalie Portman (right)
READ MORE
OBITUARIES, SOME WITH COMMENTARY
Associated Press: Acclaimed author
Amos Oz dies at 79
by Josef Federman
Newsweek: Amos Oz, Celebrated Israeli
Novelist and Intellectual Dies at 79
BBC: Amos Oz: Acclaimed Israeli author dies at 79
NY Times: Amos Oz, Israeli Author and Peace Advocate, Dies at 79
by Isabel Kershner
Washington Post: Amos Oz, Israeli novelist who wrote of striving and struggle, dies at 79
by Matt Schudel
The Guardian: Amos Oz obituary
by Julia Pascal
Jerusalem Post: Death of a prophet: A tribute to Amos Oz
by Amotz Asa-El
NY Times: Amos Oz, a Writer Who Loved the Dream of Israel and Charted Its Imperfect Reality
by Gal Beckerman
The Economist: A torn Israeli: Amos Oz died on December 28th
Ynet News: Israel's most famous author, Amos Oz, dies at 79
MORE COMMENTARY
The New Yorker: The Israel of Amos Oz
by Bernard Avishai
Haaretz: The Prophet Amos Oz Was the Last of the Moral Zionists
by Gideon Levy
Mondoweiss: A mixed blessing for Amos Oz
by Hatim Kanaaneh
Haaretz: Amos Oz, a Fanatic of the Two-state Solution
by Avraham Burg
Mondoweiss: Amos Oz was no dove
by Haidar Eid
Middle East Eye: Amos Oz: The enduring myth of the liberal Zionist
by Haidar Eid
Mondoweiss: Amos Oz was the wizard of liberal-Zionist zealotry
by Jonathan Ofir
Mondoweiss: What Amos Oz tells us about the Israeli Left
by Danielle Alma Ravitzki
Haaretz: 'Abolish This Sin': Amos Oz, David Grossman and Hundreds of Israeli Intellectuals Slam Nation-state Law