Israel, Palestine and Peace by Amos Oz

Author:Amos Oz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mariner Books

Interview, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 3 May 1990

(Translated by Jenny Chapman)

Peace and Love and Compromise

THE PROPHET ISAIAH says: ‘The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, and the lion shall eat straw like the bullock; and dust shall be the serpent’s meat. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain, saith the Lord.’ (Isaiah 65, 25)

Aside from this celestial peace, the Bible also deals with temporal, prosaic peace: ‘And Abraham said to Lot [his nephew]: Let there be no conflict between me and you or between my herdsmen and your herdsmen, for we are brothers. Behold, the whole land is before you, please part from me. If you go left I will turn right, and if you turn right I will go left.’ (Genesis 13, 8–9)

And this, I think, is a model of pragmatic peace in an imperfect world: precisely in order for people to remain on brotherly terms with each other, it is sometimes necessary to define their respective places. While aspiring to a loving union, we must nevertheless work within the boundaries of our human limitations.

One hundred and forty four years ago, more than five hundred people assembled in this church to create a democratic Germany. Had they succeeded, not only might the destiny of Germany and of Europe have been different, the destiny of my people and of my own family would have been different.

In the early nineteen-thirties, my family left Eastern Europe for Jerusalem, carrying with them a wound that never healed: they had regarded themselves as Europeans while most of Europe regarded them as unwanted cosmopolitans. They used to speak Russian and Polish with each other, read German and English for culture, dreamed in Yiddish, but me—they taught only Hebrew. Perhaps they feared that if I knew European languages I might be seduced by the deadly charms of Europe, from where my parents were virtually kicked out through anti-Semitism and persecution. And yet, throughout my childhood, my parents used to say to me, with pain and longing in their voices, that one day our Jerusalem will become a ‘real city’. For them it meant a city with a river, with a cathedral in the middle, and with forests round about. They ached for Europe as much as they feared it. Now I know that such a mixture of emotions is called unrequited love. In the twenties and in the thirties, while my parents regarded themselves as Europeans, almost everyone else in Europe was pan-Germanic or pan-Slavic or a Bulgarian patriot. The Europeans in Europe at that time were mostly Jews like my family.

The creation of modern Israel is, among other things, an outcome of the sad realization in the hearts of many Jews, including my family, that even though in some times and in some places there existed a deep and creative relationship between guest and host, it was time to return home and to rebuild it. The original hope was to build this home on the foundations of peace and justice. The

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