Under This Blazing Light by Amos Oz

Author:Amos Oz [Oz, Amos]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780521443678
Google: 4LRQF38vuzEC
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 1995-03-08T16:00:00+00:00

* * *

* * *

The discreet charm of Zionism

(Based on a radio interview)

Yes, there is a growing despondency, and lately people have stopped feeling ashamed of it and hiding it behind the usual mask of cheerful complacency. I myself share this despondency. I even felt it in the years between 1967 and 1973, when most people seemed to be living in a state of uninterrupted euphoria. But recently, specifically since the Yom Kippur War, I have had an intuitive feeling that deep down at least some of the pain is a symptom of recovery. I am less frightened now than I was, let us say, in 1969 or 1970.

Look, for the past three years, since the Yom Kippur War, this peculiar people has been tormenting itself with the question ‘What did we do wrong?’, on all sorts of levels, ranging from those who keep harping on the memory of our emergency arsenals, which were so badly neglected, to those who are preoccupied with the question of the historical, theological, symbolic, and metaphysical meaning of what happened to us. Other peoples do not keep picking at their sores so obsessively, so masochistically. Naturally, writers and thinkers and moralists of all kinds everywhere engage in soul-searching. But here everybody torments himself, with hardly an exception.

And after all, from what you could call the military point of view we were not defeated in the Yom Kippur War. On the contrary, we won a great victory. We recovered from a sudden invasion by armies not far off the total strength of the combined NATO forces, and in a few days we went from a position comparable to Dunkirk to a situation similar to that of the Allied landings in Normandy, on two separate fronts, and it is well known that our subsequent advance was halted not by exhaustion but by outside pressure. And yet, despite this remarkable military achievement, the Israeli people is sitting in the ashes like Job, groaning and mortifying itself. Any other people in our position would surely have mourned its dead, taken the lessons of the war to heart, and then gradually gone about its normal business.

You will not find, here in Israel, the gloomy, torpid fatalism which you can observe in London or other Western cities, where you have the impression that history has come to an end and everything is gently decaying among the monuments of bygone ages.

Not so in Israel. Here we scrabble, we quarrel, we alternate as usual between fire-and-brimstone sermons and euphoric proclamations of imminent salvation and magical formulas of various kinds which are capable of severing any knot at a stroke.

Perhaps the reason is that here we have set our sights on standards which have no parallel in any other nation. Many of our agonies spring from the fact that the Zionist enterprise was bom out of monumental visions and not from some piecemeal attempt at minor reforms. ‘Here, in the land our fathers loved,’ we used to sing, ‘all our hopes will be fulfilled.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.