In the Land of Israel (Harvest in Translation) by Amos Oz

Author:Amos Oz [Oz, Amos]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 1993-10-31T04:00:00+00:00

Yes, I admit that I have used the fable of the plank and the drowning man in order to explain the justness of Zionism. But I imposed upon myself a strict separation of the internal motivations for Zionism and its external justification. Memory, the historical attachment to the land, the persecutions, and the yearning are the motivations for Zionism. Its justification in terms of the Arabs who dwell in this land is the justness of the drowning man who clings to the only plank he can. (Why this precise plank? The explanation is entirely within the realm of the motivations: the Jews would not have come to any other place to renew their independence and become a nation again.) And the drowning man clinging to this plank is allowed, by all the rules of natural, objective, universal justice, to make room for himself on the plank, even if in doing so he must push the others aside a little. Even if the others, sitting on that plank, leave him no alternative to force. But he has no natural right to push the others on that plank into the sea. And that is the moral difference between the "Judaization" of Jaffa and Ramla and the "Judaization" of the West Bank. And that is the moral justification for partition of this land between its two peoples, without going into the question of partition lines (I have not sworn allegiance to the Green Line). We must remember that the early Zionists confronted not the legions of Rome here, those who had exiled our forefathers, but an Arab population, which neither destroyed the Second Temple nor sent us into exile. And the confrontation with Zionism is what created the outlines of a separate national identity in that population.

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