When Amos Oz, Israeli writer and supporter of a two-state solution to the Palestinian conflict, passed away last week, his daughter tweeted, “To those who loved him, thank you.” Oz, a respected voice worldwide who died of cancer at 79, was often derided at home by the nationalist right for having “betrayed” his people by suggesting a way out of the crisis that should take in the Palestinian viewpoint as well.
What did he write about?
Over 50 years, Oz accounted for every aspect of a “divided land” through novels, essays, a best-selling memoir, interviews — he wrote about his country’s rise following the Holocaust and life after, the struggles, contradictions, the push and pull between Jews and Arabs. In Dear Zealots (2017), he presents his case: “I am not sure we can end the fight with Arabs overnight. But we can try.” He argues that granting of statehood to Palestine is “a question of life and death for the State of Israel.” Last year, on the 70th anniversary of the birth of Israel, Oz told Deutsche Welle: “We cannot become one happy family because we are not one, we are not happy, we are not family. We are two unhappy families. We have to divide the house into two smaller next-door apartments.” Relations between the two are at its worst and with U.S. President Donald Trump recognising Jerusalem as the Israeli capital last year, it has put more obstacles on the road to peace.
Why did he join a kibbutz?
Oz was born Amos Klausner in Jerusalem to Eastern European immigrants, his father a right-wing academic, and mother a story-teller who suffered from depression and took her life when he was 12. At 15, he went to live in a kibbutz by himself, changing his surname to the Hebrew for “strength.” He worked as a canteen worker and tractor driver and held various other jobs, but his heart was on writing. His 1966 novel, Elsewhere, Perhaps , chronicles the kibbutz life, the “strict symmetry” of the buildings, adding a “dimension of weightiness” to the dwellers’ world. As a child he admits to being a “little Zionist-nationalist fanatic — self-righteous, enthusiastic and brain-washed,” but after fighting in the 1967 and 1973 wars, he realised that "there are two sides to a story; that conflicts are coloured not only in black and white.” The boy-narrator in his book, Panther in the Basement , is full of righteousness but soon learns that there are things in the world that can be seen in a different way.
Where does he stand?
Though he pushed for a two-state solution, Oz was wary about dealing with the hard-line Hamas in Gaza. “There is no point in even fantasising that after 100 years of bloodshed and anger and conflict Jews and Arabs will jump into a honeymoon bed and start making love, not war,” he said in the interview to Deutsche Welle. In Dear Zealots , he writes, “Now comes a little confession. I love Israel even when I cannot stand it.” The powerful stories, of loss and longing where the personal and political overlap, that enrich most of his books will be his legacy. Oz’s beautiful memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness , is the tragic tale of his mother’s suicide as also the city of Jerusalem in the 1940s, full of “open hearts and capacious souls.” His non-fiction goes straight to the point of his politics. Think Help us to Divorce: Israel and Palestine - Between Right and Right , which offers ways to resolve the problem.
Is there hope of a solution?
A deal seems remote since the U.S.-led negotiations stopped in 2014, and violence has escalated on the border along Gaza. Palestinian negotiator Hanan Ashrawi pointed out that Oz’s death “deprived Israel and the dwindling peace camp of another rarity,” while Israeli President Reuven Rivlin said his passing was a moment of “great darkness.”
