How to Cure a Fanatic

by Amos Oz

  That will be the time for coffee together. Moreover, I predict that, shortly after the partition solution is implemented, we shall be in a position to cook our meals together in the little kitchen, by which I mean shared economy. Perhaps a common Middle Eastern market. Perhaps a Middle Eastern currency. Of one thing I can assure Europeans: our conflict in the Middle East is indeed painful and bloody and cruel and stupid, but it’s not going to take us a thousand years to produce our equivalent of the Euro currency of the Middle East; we will be faster than you were, and shed less blood than you did. So, before you people look down at us, Jewish idiots, Arab idiots, cruel people, fanatical people, extremist people, violent people, be a little more careful in wagging your fingers at all of us. Our bloody history is going to be shorter than your bloody history. I know it’s very dangerous to make prophecies when you come from my part of the world. There is a lot of competition in the prophecy business over there. But, I can stick my neck out and predict that we are not going to spend hundreds of years butchering one another in the time-honoured European tradition. We will be quicker than that. How much quicker? I wish I could answer you. I never underestimate the short-sightedness and the stupidity of political leaderships on both sides. But it will happen.

  Moreover, the crucial first step ought to be, must be, a two-state solution. Israel must go back to what has been the initial Israeli proposition since 1948 and even before ’48, from the beginning: recognition for recognition, statehood for statehood, independence for independence, security for security. Good neighbourliness for good neighbourliness, respect for respect. The Palestinian leadership for its part must turn to its own people and say at last, loud and clear, something that it has never succeeded in pronouncing, namely that Israel is not an accident of history, that Israel is not an intrusion, that Israel happens to be the homeland of the Israeli Jews, no matter how painful this is for the Palestinians. Just as we Israeli Jews have to say loud and clear that Palestine is the homeland of the Palestinian people, very inconvenient as this may seem to us.

  The worst part of the Israeli-Arab, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not now, it’s in those many years, many decades, when the two parties could not even pronounce each other’s names. When Palestinians and other Arabs had a real difficulty pronouncing the dirty word Israel. They used to call it the ‘Zionist entity’, the ‘artificial creature’, the ‘intrusion’, the ‘infection’, ‘Al Daula al-Maz’ouma’ – the ‘artificial state’, or the artificial being. For a very long time many Arabs and most Palestinians maintained that Israel was some kind of mobile exhibition. If they protested loudly enough the world would take Israel and transplant it elsewhere, maybe in Australia or some other faraway place. They treated Israel like a nightmare, a ‘koshmar’, if they rubbed their eyes hard enough Israel would go away. They treated Israel like a passing infection, if they scratched it and scratched it, it would go somehow. And indeed they tried a couple of times, or actually several times, to undo Israel by military force. They failed and became very frustrated over this failure. But in the same years the Israelis were no better. The Israelis, for their part, failed even to pronounce the explicit words ‘Palestinian people’. We used to resort to euphemisms, such as ‘the locals’ or ‘the Arab inhabitants of the land’. We were more pan-Arabic than the Naser regime in Egypt, because if you happen to be pan-Arabic then there is no Palestinian problem. The Arab world is huge. For many years we Israelis blinded ourselves to the fact that the Palestinian people could not find a home even in Arab countries. We did not want to see and hear this.

  Those times are past. The two peoples now ought each to realise that the other is real; and most people on both sides now know that the other is not going to go away. Are they happy about it? Not at all. Is this a cheerful moment? Not at all. It’s a painful moment. It’s more like, for both sides, waking up in a hospital, after an anaesthetic slumber and finding out that you have been amputated. And this, let me tell you, is a bad hospital and the doctors are not wonderful, and the two families outside the operating theatre are cursing each other and cursing the doctors. This is the picture of the Middle East right now. But everybody at least knows, that surgery is unavoidable, everybody now knows, that the country will have to be partitioned somehow into two national states. One country which will be predominantly, not exclusively, but predominantly Jewish, because the Jews have a right to be a majority in one small land, which, after Israel’s withdrawal, will probably be one-third the size of a British county. But this will be a place, which will be recognised by Israeli Jews, by the whole world, even by our neighbours, as our national home. But the price for this must be that the Palestinian people will have the same right. They will have a homeland, one which will be even smaller than Israel, but it will be home, their home.

  But more urgent than the question of boundaries, more urgent than the question of the disputed holy places, more urgent than any other question, is the question of what to do about the tragedy of the Palestinian refugees of 1948. Those people who lost their homes, and who in some cases lost their homeland, lost everything, during Israel’s War of Independence in 1948. There is a deep disagreement on where to put the blame, or most of the blame, for this tragedy. You will find some modern Israeli historians who put the blame on Israel. I suppose in a few years eventually, and I hope to live to see this day, you will find some modern Arab historians who will put the blame on the Arab governments of that time. But regardless of who, finally, takes how much of the blame, this issue is urgent and immediate. Every single Palestinian refugee, who is homeless, and jobless, and country-less should be provided with a home and a job and a passport. Israel cannot admit those people, at least not in vast numbers. If it does, it will no longer be Israel. Yet Israel should be part of the solution. Israel should also admit part of the responsibility for their tragedy. What percentage of the responsibility is a very academic question and probably a very subjective question. But part of the responsibility lies with Israel. The other part lies with the Palestinian leadership of 1947 and with the Arab governments of ’48. Israel has to help to resettle the refugees in future Palestine, that is in the West Bank and Gaza, or elsewhere. Of course, Israel is perfectly within its rights to bring up the subject of one million Jewish refugees from Arab countries, who also lost their homes and their properties following the 1948 war. These Jews don’t want to go back to the Arab countries. But they, too, have left everything behind them – in Iraq, in Syria, in Yemen, in Egypt, in North Africa, in Iran, in Lebanon, as they were virtually pushed out of these countries, sometimes even forced out. So, all of this ought to be taken care of.

  If I were Prime Minister of Israel I would not sign any peace agreement which did not resolve the issues of the Palestinian refugees, by re-settling them in the state of Palestine. Because any resolution which doesn’t take care of the issue of the refugees is a time-bomb. Not only for moral reasons, even for selfish reasons of Israel’s security, this human and national problem must be resolved within the framework of the immediate peace process. Fortunately we are not speaking of the whole of Africa, or India. We are talking about a few hundred thousand homes and jobs. Not every Palestinian refugee is homeless and country-less right now. But those who are homeless and country-less and are rotting in inhuman conditions in refugee camps – their problem is my problem. If there is no solution for these people, Israel will have no peace and quiet even if it has an agreement with its neighbour.

  I want to propose the first joint project that Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs will have to initiate, as soon as the divorce between them is conducted and the two-state solution is implemented. The first joint project, for which we should take no foreign help at all and for which the two nations should make an equal investment, dollar for dollar, ought to be a shared monument to our past stupidities, to our past idiocies. Because everybody knows that when the peace treaty is finally implemented one day, the Palestinian people are going to get a lot less than they could have got fifty-five y
ears ago, five wars ago, one hundred and fifty thousand dead ago, our dead and their dead. If only the Palestinian leadership in 1947–48 had been less fanatic and one-sided and less uncompromising, if only it had accepted the UN partition resolution of November 1947. But the Israeli leadership will also have to contribute to that monument to stupidity, because we Israelis could have got ourselves a much better deal, a much more convincing deal, if we had been less arrogant, less power-intoxicated, less selfish and less unimaginative after our military victory in 1967.

  So, the two nations will have a lot of soul searching to do, about their past mutual stupidities. However, the good news is that the cognitive block is gone. If you passed a referendum now, or a public-opinion survey between the Mediterranean and the River Jordan, asking every single individual regardless of religion, or status, or politics, or passport or lack of passport – every individual – not what would you regard as a just solution, not what would you like to see, but what do you actually think is going to happen at the end of the day, I guess about eighty per cent would say: ‘a partition and a two-state solution’. Some people would immediately add: ‘and this will be the end of everything, and this will be a terrible injustice!’ On both sides people would say that. But, at least most of the people know now. The good news is that, I think, both the Jewish Israeli people and the Palestinian Arab people are ahead of their leaders, for the first time in a hundred years. When finally a visionary leader stands up on both sides and says: ‘This is it! This is it! Biblical dreams – you may all go on dreaming them, pre-’47 dreams, post-’67 dreams, these fantasies or those fantasies, you may go on dreaming, there is no censorship on fantasies. But the reality is roughly the 1967 lines.’ Give or take an inch here or there, by mutual agreement. And some open-ended formula for the disputed holy places, because only an open-ended arrangement can work there. In that moment, when the leaders on both sides are ready to say this, they will find the two peoples sadly ready for it. Not happily, but ready for it. More ready than ever before. Ready in the hard way, ready through pain and bloodshed, but ready.

  I want to make one last point. What can you do? What can public-opinion makers do? What can Europeans do? What can the outside world do, apart from shaking their heads and saying, ‘How terrible!’? Well, there are two things, perhaps three. One, public-opinion makers across Europe are in the miserable habit of wagging their index finger, like an old-fashioned Victorian headmistress, at this side, or at that side: ‘Aren’t you ashamed of yourselves?’ Too often I find in the papers in various European countries either terrible things about Israel or terrible things about the Arabs and about Islam. Simple-minded things, narrow-minded things, self-righteous things. I’m no longer a European in any sense, except through the pain of my parents and my ancestors, who left for ever in my genes a sense of unrequited love for Europe. But if I were a European, I’d be careful not to wag my finger at anyone at all. Instead of wagging your finger, calling the Israelis this name or the Palestinians that name, I would do anything I could to help both sides, because both are on the verge of making the most painful decision of their histories. The Israelis, by relinquishing the occupied territories, by removing most of the settlements, will have not only to retract their own self-image and face a serious internal clash and rift. They will be taking very serious security risks, not from Palestine, but from future extremist Arabic powers who may, one day, use Palestinian territory to launch an attack on Israel, which after the withdrawal will be only twelve kilometres wide right at the hip. It means that the boundary of the future Palestinian state will start about seven kilometres from our one and only international airport. Palestine will be within twenty kilometres of about half the Israeli Jewish population. Jerusalem will be on the border. This is not an easy decision for the Israelis to make and yet they have to make it. The Palestinians, on their side, will have to sacrifice parts which used to be their own before 1948, and this is going to hurt. Goodbye Haifa, goodbye Jaffa, goodbye Beer Sheva, and many other towns and villages, which used to be Arabic and are no longer and will never again be part of Palestine. This is going to hurt like hell. So, if you have an ounce of help or sympathy to offer, now is the time to extend it to the two patients. You no longer have to choose between being pro-Israel or pro-Palestine. You have to be pro-peace.

  HOW TO CURE A FANATIC

  How To Cure A Fanatic

  SO, HOW DO you cure a fanatic? To chase a bunch of fanatics through the mountains of Afghanistan is one thing. To struggle against fanaticism is another one. I’m afraid I don’t have any particular ideas on how to catch the fanatics in the mountains, but I do have one or two thoughts about the nature of fanaticism and about the ways, if not to cure it, then at least to contain it. The attack on America on September 11th was not simply about poverty versus wealth. Poverty versus wealth is one of the world’s most horrible problems, but we will misdiagnose such terrorist attacks if we simply think that this was an attack from the poor on the rich. It is not just about the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’. If the case were as simple as that, you would rather expect the attack to come from Africa, the poorest, and perhaps to be launched against Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, the oil-producing states, the richest. No, this is a battle between fanatics, who believe that the end, any end, justifies the means, and the rest of us, who believe that life is an end, not a meaning. It is a struggle between those who think that justice, whatever they would mean by the word, is more important than life, on the one hand, and those of us who think that life takes priority over many other values, convictions or faiths. The present crisis in the world, in the Middle East, in Israel/Palestine, is not about the values of Islam. It is not about the mentality of the Arabs, as some racists claim, not at all. It is about the ancient struggle between fanaticism and pragmatism. Between fanaticism and pluralism. Between fanaticism and tolerance. September 11th was not even about the question of whether America is good or bad, whether capitalism is ugly or evident, whether globalisation should stop or not. This was about the typical fanatic claim: if I think something is bad, I kill it along with its neighbours.

  Fanaticism is older than Islam, older than Christianity, older than Judaism, older than any state or any government, or political system, older than any ideology or faith in the world. Fanaticism is unfortunately an ever-present component of human nature; an evil gene, if you like. People who blow up abortion clinics in America, people who burn mosques and synagogues in Europe, differ from Bin Laden only in the scale but not in the nature of their crimes. Of course, September 11th evoked sadness, anger, disbelief, shock, melancholy, disorientation and, yes, some racist responses – anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racist responses everywhere. Who would have thought that the twentieth century would be immediately followed by the eleventh century?

  My own childhood in Jerusalem rendered me an expert in comparative fanaticism. Jerusalem of my childhood, back in the 1940s, was full of self-proclaimed prophets, Redeemers and Messiahs. Even today, every other Jerusalemite has his or her personal formula for instant salvation. Everyone says they came to Jerusalem, and I’m quoting a famous line from an old song, they came to Jerusalem to build it and to be built by it. In fact, some of them, Jews, Christians and Muslims, socialists, anarchists, world-reformers, actually came to Jerusalem not so much to build it, not so much to be built by it, but rather to get crucified, or to crucify others, or both. There is an established mental disorder, a recognised mental illness known as ‘the Jerusalem syndrome’: People come to Jerusalem, they inhale the wonderful lucid mountain air, and then they suddenly up and set fire to a mosque or to a church or to a synagogue. Or else, they simply take off their clothes, climb on the rock and start prophesying. No one ever listens. Even today, even in today’s Jerusalem, every line for a bus is likely to spark and turn into a fiery street seminar, with total strangers arguing about politics, morality, strategy, history, identity, religion and the real purpose of God. Participants in such street seminars, while arguing about politics and
theology, good and evil, try nevertheless to elbow their way to the front of the line. Everyone screams, no one ever listens. Except for me. I listen sometimes, that’s how I earn my living.

  Yet, I confess, that as a child in Jerusalem I was myself a brainwashed little fanatic all the way. Self-righteous, chauvinistic, deaf and blind to any narrative that differed from the powerful Jewish, Zionist narrative of the time. I was a stone-throwing kid, a Jewish Intifada kid. In fact, the first words I ever learned to say in English except for ‘yes’ and ‘no’, were the words: ‘British, go home!’, which is what we Jewish kids used to shout as we were throwing stones at the British patrols in Jerusalem. Talking about ironies of history – in my 1995 novel, Panther in the Basement, I described how the boy, Proffy by name, or by nickname, loses his fanaticism, he loses his chauvinism, up to a point at least, and he is changed almost in the space of two weeks through a sense of relativism, through the shock of relativism. He happens to befriend, secretly, an enemy, namely a very sweet, ineffectual British police sergeant. And they meet secretly, the boy and the British sergeant, and they teach each other English and Hebrew. And the boy discovers that women have no horns and no tail, which is almost as shocking a revelation for this boy as the discovery that British or Arabs have no horns and no tails. So, in a sense, the boy develops a sense of ambivalence, a capacity for abandoning his black and white views, but, of course, the price he pays is that by the end of this short novel he is no longer a child, he is a little grownup, he is a small adult. Much of the joy and the fascination and the zeal and the simpleness of life has gone away. And besides, he is getting to be nicknamed, to be called a traitor by his old friends. I am going to take the liberty of quoting from the first page and a half of Panther in the Basementfn1, because I think this is as close to myself, on the issue of fanaticism, as I could ever get.