by Amos Oz
If I could only compress a sense of humour into capsules and persuade entire populations to swallow my humour pills, thus immunising everybody against fanaticism, I might qualify one day for the Nobel Prize in medicine, not in literature. But just listen to me! The very idea of compressing sense of humour into capsules, the very idea of making other people swallow my humour pills for their own good, thus curing them of their trouble, is already slightly contaminated with fanaticism. Be very careful, fanaticism is extremely catching, more contagious than any virus. You might easily contract fanaticism even as you are trying to defeat it or combat it. You have only to read a newspaper, or watch the television news, and you can see how easily people may become anti-fanatic fanatics, anti-fundamentalist zealots, anti-Jihad crusaders. Eventually, if we cannot defeat fanaticism, perhaps we can at least contain it a little bit. As I have said, the ability to laugh at ourselves is a partial cure, the ability to see ourselves as others see us is another medicine. The ability to exist within open-ended situations, even to learn how to enjoy open-ended situations, to learn to enjoy diversity, may also help. I am not preaching a complete moral relativism, certainly not. I am trying to enhance the need to imagine each other. On every level, on the most everyday level, just imagine each other. Imagine each other when we quarrel, imagine each other when we complain, imagine each other precisely at the very moment when we feel that we are one hundred per cent right. Even when you are one hundred per cent right and the other is one hundred per cent wrong, it’s still useful to imagine this other. In fact, we do it all the time. My last novel, The Same Sea, is about a bunch of six or seven people who are scattered all over the globe and have between them almost mystical communion. They sense each other, they communicate with each other all the time, in telepathic ways, although they are scattered in the four corners of the earth.
The ability to exist within open-ended situations is, imaginatively, open to us all: writing a novel, for instance, involves among other burdens, the need to get up every morning, drink a cup of coffee and start imagining the other. What if I were she, what if you were he. And in my own personal background, in my own personal life story and family story, I can’t help thinking, very often, that with a slight twist of my genes, or of my parents’ circumstances, I could be him or her, I could be a Jewish West Bank settler, I could be an ultra-orthodox extremist, I could be an oriental Jew from a third-world country, I could be anyone. I could be one of my enemies. Imagining this is always a helpful practice. Many years ago, when I was still a child, my very wise grandmother explained to me in very simple words the difference between Jew and Christian – not between Jew and Muslim, but between Jew and Christian: ‘You see,’ she said, ‘Christians believe that the Messiah was here once and he will certainly return one day. The Jews maintain that Messiah is yet to come. Over this,’ said my grandmother, ‘over this, there has been so much anger, persecution, bloodshed, hatred … Why?’ She said, ‘Why can’t everyone simply wait and see? If the Messiah comes, saying, “Hello, it’s nice to see you again,” the Jews will have to concede. If, on the other hand, the Messiah comes, saying, “How do you do, it is very nice meeting you,” the entire Christian world will have to apologise to the Jews. Between now and then,’ said my wise grandmother, ‘just live and let live.’ She was definitely immune to fanaticism. She knew the secret of living with open-ended situations, with unresolved conflicts, with the otherness of other people.
I began by saying that fanaticism often begins at home. Let me conclude by saying that the antidote can also be found at home, virtually at your fingertips. No man is an island, said John Donne, but I humbly dare to add to this: no man and no woman is an island, but everyone of us is a peninsula, half attached to the mainland, half facing the ocean; half connected to family and friends and culture and tradition and country and nation and sex and language and many other ties. And the other half wants to be left alone to face the ocean. I think we ought to be allowed to remain peninsulas. Every social and political system which turns each of us into a Darwinian island and the rest of humankind into an enemy or a rival is a monster. But at the same time every social and political and ideological system which wants to turn each of us into no more than a molecule of the mainland is also a monstrosity. The condition of peninsula is the proper human condition. That’s what we are and that’s what we deserve to remain. So, in a sense, in every house, in every family, in every human connection, in every human connection we actually have a relationship between a number of peninsulas and we better remember this before we try to shape each other and turn each other around and make the next person turn our way while he or she actually needs to face the ocean for a while. And this is true of social groups and of cultures and of civilisations and of nations and, yes, of Israelis and Palestinians. Not one of them is an island and not one of them can completely mingle with the other. Those two peninsulas should be related and at the same time left on their own. I know it is an unusual message in these days of violence and anger and revenge and fundamentalism and fanaticism and racism, all of which are loose in the Middle East and elsewhere. A sense of humour, the ability to imagine the other, the capacity to recognise the peninsular quality of everyone of us may be at least a partial defence against the fanatic gene which we all contain.
fn1 Translation by Nicholas de Lange (Vintage, London, 1997)
Postscript to the ‘Geneva Accords’
THE PROTESTS FROM those who oppose the ‘Geneva Accords’ are absolutely without foundation. The authors of these agreements know perfectly well that Sharon and his Cabinet are indeed the legitimate government of Israel. They know that their initiative, the fruit of years of negotiation conducted in the greatest secrecy, is no more than an exercise. And that its goal is only to offer to Israeli and Palestinian public opinion a window through which they can see a different landscape: no more car bombs, no more suicide bombers, no more occupations, no more oppression or expropriation, the end to endless war and hate. In their place, we propose a detailed, cautious solution, which does not skirt round any of the fundamental questions. Its central principle is this: we put an end to the occupation, and the Palestinians put an end to their war on Israel. We give up our dream of a Greater Israel, and they give up their dream of a Greater Palestine. We surrender sovereignty of certain parts of the Land of Israel which are dear to our hearts, and the Palestinians do likewise. The problem of the 1948 refugees, which is at the heart of our national security predicament, is to be resolved once and for all, and strictly outside the frontiers of the State of Israel, and with international assistance.
If these agreements are put into action, not a single Palestinian refugee camp, weighed down with its burden of despair, negligence, hate and fanaticism, will remain in the Middle East. In the document we have in our hands, the Palestinians accept, contractually, definitively and irrevocably, that they will not, either now or in the future, claim against Israel.
At the end of the conference, after the signature of the ‘Geneva Accords’ a representative of the Tanzim declared that perhaps one could now make out on the horizon the end to the hundred-years war between Jews and Palestinians. He added that this would be replaced by a bitter conflict between those on both sides who defend compromise and peace, and those on both sides who are mired in fanaticism. This conflict has already begun to rage. Sharon kicked it off, even before the ‘Geneva Accords’ were published. And the leaders of Hamas and of the Islamic Jihad rushed to echo him, using exactly the same discourse of hatred.
So what is it that is missing from the ‘Geneva Accords’? The ‘Geneva Accords’ have no teeth. The ‘Geneva Accords’ are no more than fifty pages of paper. But, on the other hand, if the two sides accept them, tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, they will discover that the foundations for the peace have already been laid. Right down to the last detail.
If Sharon and Arafat want to use this document as a basis for an agreement, its authors will not claim copyright. And if Sharon works out a better pl
an, different, more detailed, more nationalistic, and which is accepted by the other camp, what will we do? We will let him do it. We will even congratulate him. And though Sharon is, as everyone knows, a hefty figure of a man, we will carry him shoulder-high, my friends and I.
December 2003
Interview with Amos Oz
(2012)
It has been ten years since you first delivered the lectures in this book. A lot has changed in the past decade, but we don’t seem to be much closer to resolving the Israeli–Palestine ‘real-estate dispute.’ Do you feel gloomier about the prognosis than you did then?
The fanatics on both sides are hard at work trying to turn what I described as a ‘real estate dispute’ into a Holy War. They have a certain success, both among the Jews and among Arabs. This makes me more pessimistic about the prospect of an imminent Palestinian–Israeli compromise but not less committed: there is no alternative to a two-state solution, Israel next door to Palestine.
Maybe as a result of the lack of momentum, there has been a recent revival of interest in a ‘one-state solution,’ at least at an academic level. Do you think this could ever be realisable?
My role model is still the peaceful divorce between the Czechs and the Slovaks when they mutually agreed to dismantle Czechoslovakia into two nation states. The idea of a one-state solution strikes me as a lunatic idea because trying to push the Israelis and the Palestinians into a honeymoon bed together immediately after one hundred and twenty years of bloodshed, hatred and animosity is as absurd as the idea to turn Germany and England into one nation the day World War II ended.
A key element of your argument is that there is a widespread, if reluctant, realisation on both sides that a two-state solution is inevitable and that it’s the leaders who lack the political courage to make it happen. Do you feel that public opinion on both sides has shifted since you first delivered these lectures?
We all hear constantly the bad news from the Middle East but there is some good news too. And the good news is that according to public opinion surveys both in Israel and in Palestine, the majority of the Israelis and the majority of the Palestinians are still ready to accept a two-state solution as an historical compromise. They don’t trust each other on anything. They disagree on the partition lines between the two states, they disagree over Jerusalem, settlements, security and holy places but they both accept the principle of partition. This in itself is a big step forward if we think of many decades when the Palestinians and the other Arabs refused to recognise the existence of any Israel anywhere, while the Israelis refused to recognised the existence of a Palestinian people. All of this is over now: each party knows that the other is real, that the other is not going to go away and that the other is going to retain part of the disputed country.
You’ve spoken elsewhere about the ‘corrupting’ impact of the occupation in terms of embedding relationships of domination and submission, particularly for those undergoing military service. How profound do you think that is? Is it a significant barrier to peace?
The occupation of the West Bank is corrupting both the occupier and the occupied. It begets intransigence and racism on the Israeli side, humiliation and vindictiveness on the Palestinian side and reduces mutual confidence to almost zero. Yet in a strange way, the Israelis and the Palestinians know each other quite intimately and this is a ray of hope in itself.
You addressed How to Cure a Fanatic to a European audience, asking in part for a more nuanced media treatment of the conflict. After Gaza and after Lebanon, it’s hard not to feel that the European perception of Israel’s public policy has actually worsened since you wrote your essay. What are the images of Israel that you feel we’re missing most in Europe?
I wish Europe would learn to see the ambiguity of the Israeli–Arab conflict rather than painted in black and white, always asking who are the good guys and who are the bad guys as if it were a Western movie. While Israel is occupying and oppressing the Palestinians on the West Bank, hundreds of millions of zealot Muslims are committed to the destruction of Israel. If you zoom in on Israel and Palestine, then Israel is the ruthless Goliath and Palestine is the heroic David, but if you increase the picture and watch one billion Muslims aiming at the destruction of little Israel, you get a different idea about who is David and who is Goliath.
We have seen enormous changes across the Arab world in the past couple of years. As we begin to see how the consequences of the ‘Arab Spring’ play out across the region, what do you think the implications are for a resolution of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict?
The term ‘Arab Spring’ is false and misleading. It was born out of the naive assumption that what happened in the Soviet bloc is going to repeat itself in the Arab world. The dictatorships will collapse like dominos and democracy will prosper. But actually there is no ‘Arab Spring’. What is happening in Tunisia is entirely different than what is happening in Egypt and what is happening in Syria is again completely different than what is not yet happening in Saudi Arabia, which might be entirely different than in all the other Arab countries. By and large we see a rise of fundamentalist militant Islam and it’s too early to celebrate the birth of democracy anywhere in the Arab world. For many of the Islamic movements, democracy simply means free elections, one man, one vote … once.
In particular, how do you think the changes in Egypt may affect the situation?
There has been a cold peace between Israel and Egypt for three decades. I’m afraid it’s going to turn now into a frozen peace but I don’t think either Israel or Egypt is likely to erase the agreements or to take military actions against each other.
One of the side effects of the ‘Arab Spring’ has been the popular movements against inequality – the movements of the indignados, the occupiers – that have sprung up in many countries. Israel’s protests were larger than most, starting with tents being raised in Tel Aviv as a protest against homelessness. What was your immediate reaction to the protests? And is it significant that the protesters’ most prominent demands were about housing, privatisation and tuition fees – but not peace?
What happened in the streets of Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities last summer was a powerful demonstration of the strength of the civil society in Israel. Half a million Israelis demonstrated in the streets of Tel Aviv which is the equivalent of roughly five million Brits and there was not a single shattered window, not a single episode of violence. It’s beginning to look different this summer because the demonstrators are more frustrated. They demonstrate still about housing and about the cost of living and not about peace because of a certain fatalism, because of a widespread feeling that there is no real partner for peace in the Arab world at this time. In 2006, Israel withdrew unilaterally from the Gaza Strip uprooting 26 Jewish settlements and removing its military, handing every grain of sand back to the Palestinians. We all hoped to get some peace and quiet but, instead, came about 10,000 rockets and missiles on Israeli towns and villages. This is a harsh blow to the Israeli Peace Now Movement who had claimed for many years, ‘Let’s evacuate the Occupied Territories and we will have peace’. It is very hard for the Peace Movement in Israel to go on advocating ‘land for peace’ after the Gaza precedent.
It’s interesting that in How to Cure a Fanatic you touch on the apolitical nature of late capitalism (‘selfish, hedonistic, gadget oriented’) as part of the overall problem. Do you think that the lack of social solidarity you have criticised may now be changing?
In some Western countries, including Israel, there are first signs of a certain renewal of a sense of social solidarity. The results of the elections in France may point in this direction but it’s too early to tell whether we are actually confronting a universal revival of social solidarity.
One of the recurring themes of your two essays is poor leadership, hampered by short-term political considerations or a lack of courage. Famously, the kinds of new political movements we’re been seeing have a very different relationship to leadership, rejecting hie
rarchy. Could this suggest a way of breaking the impasse? Do you think it is fair to say that we are seeing a return of idealism in politics, at least at the level of mass mobilisation? What distinguishes the idealist from the fanatic, in your view?
The difference between idealism and fanaticism is the distance between devotion and obsession. For the fanatic, but not for the idealist, ‘the end justifies all the means.’
There’s another strain in your work that sees the desire to change the world as laden with disappointment – this certainly seems to be the case for many of the characters in Between Friends. Are today’s idealists doomed to failure?
The main error of many generations of world reformers lies in their mission to change human nature in one blow or through one revolution. Human nature doesn’t seem to change. The only difference between lovemaking in the days of King David and lovemaking today is the cigarette afterwards.
Is there anything of early Israeli idealism left? Do you feel that current developments represent a revival of that old optimism, or are they a manifestation of something completely different?
There are certain genes of the idealism of the founding fathers and mothers of Israel still strongly present on the contemporary Israeli scene: the argumentativeness, the certain code of latent anarchism ‘no one knows better than me.’ We are still a nation of eight million citizens, eight million prime ministers, eight million prophets and messiahs. Everyone shouts at the top of their voices, no one ever listens except for me. I listen sometimes. That’s how I make a living. So the founding fathers and mothers bequeathed to us their restlessness, their dynamism and their perpetual quest for world reform.
