Israeli Yokes
Oz, Amos
Israeli Yokes IN THE LAND OF ISRAEL by Amos Oz Translated by Mauie Goldberg-Bartuna A Helen and Kurt Wolff book Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 257 pp. $12.95. Opposite the title page of In the Land...
...Jew calls Jew "Hitlerite...
...They want to eat us up alive...
...But these voices are exceptional...
...A Palestinian elder speaks well of a Jewish friend, an elderly Israeli celebrates the energy of both Sephardics and Arabs...
...Late in 1982, Lebanon is invaded...
...For this venomous Israeli, the massacres in Lebanon—too bad that Phalangists and not Israelis pulled the triggers, he muses-are a potential boon...
...Though less grisly, and more forthcoming about its author's politics, In the Land of Israel recalls Joan Didion's Salvador in its rejection of pat viewpoints, and in its sense of gravity...
...they stand opposed to the arrogant, European-rooted establishment...
...Ziad recants his remarks after they appear in the Israeli newspaper Davar...
...Opposite the title page of In the Land of Israel a map details the country...
...After all, several hundred thousand Israelis opposed the invasion of Lebanon, and some Palestinians have expressed good will despite the injustices they have suffered...
...Too few women of both tribes are represented in Oz's book...
...Everything we built here at such great sacrifice, everything we created here out of nothing...
...As with much in the Middle East, this book makes a case even before it begins...
...Israel is legitimate, he tells them...
...Yet novelist Amos Oz has gone beyond any particular polemic...
...You think the Arabs want a state in the West Bank...
...But they waffle when asked if the West Bank and Gaza would make a satisfactory state...
...The map is dotted with Hebrew-transliterated names of cities and kibbutzes...
...Idealistic Zionists have been replaced by Hasidic survivors of Europe's concentration camps...
...He begins in the Jerusalem neighborhood of his youth...
...Do they have anything like Peace Now...
...one complains...
...Begin is Peace Now...
...Eventually Oz makes his own speech to a gathering of Orthodox West Bankers...
...But posters in the Dawn office drip with blood, and Oz keeps probing at Ziad's declaration that he wants peace, not just to "turn the phonograph record over...
...These immigrants from Arab lands are pro-Begin...
...But it is in an older farming village that Oz meets his renegade Golem...
...Tens of years ago, tens of thousands of dead ago, this is what we had hoped to hear from the Palestinian Arabs...
...Don't the Arabs have enough countries...
...If there is someone with an answer, he would do well to stand up and speak...
...that bullshit about a 'Chosen People' and a 'Light unto the Nations.'" "Is it possible that Hitler not only killed the Jews but also infected them with his poison...
...On the West Bank, Hassan and Naif express hopes for peace...
...Oz meets Palestinians who are neither saints nor terrorists, but who also fail to cut the Gordian knot formed by two peoples inhabiting the same land...
...The Gaza strip, Judea and Samaria, the Golan Heights are cross-hatched to symbolize territories "held" since 1967...
...Abe Peck (Abe Peck teaches in the graduate program at Northwestern University's MedillSchool of Journalism...
...It is a Peace Now map of Israel, in line with author Amos Oz's beliefs...
...Patience, I say, there is no shortcut...
...Israel, the land of impossible dreams, is full of voices, and Oz allows the often-jarring sounds of reality to drown out slogans of Hadassah bliss or mad-dog war-monger-ing...
...In his first non-fiction work, this kibbutznik, war veteran, and peace activist travels Israel and the West Bank like an angry Diogenes, recording the spectrum of beliefs he encounters, searching for men and women who can solve the conundrum that is Palestine-Israel politics...
...In East Jerusalem, Ziad Abu Ziad, editor of the newspaper Al-Fajr—The Dawn— accepts compromise...
...The situation is not good...
...The Arab," one resident says, "would be a good-hearted, obedient creature if only nobody would incite him...
...Tragically, he finds only feeble elves...
...Aren't there any normal people left in this country, people who don't want to annihilate the Jews or exterminate the Arabs...
...And he'd better not tarry...
...those included are often more hawkish than the men...
...why did you suddenly decide to present our case with the rumblings of some fanatic here or some psychopath there...
...In Tekoa, a religious nationalist Gush Emunim settlement sparked by the seductive occupation of the West Bank after the 1967 Six-Day War, Oz encounters the callousness, the dehumanization, that the occupation has wrought...
...Yet I leave this book with memory of an earlier remark: "What will become of us all, I do not know," Oz writes...
...In the calm city of Ashdod, Oz does glimpse "release both from the bloodcurdling nightmares of the past and from delusions of grandeur...
...Oz asks...
...In an epilogue, a fellow kibbutznik criticizes Oz for sensationalism...
...annexation would endanger Western humanist justice and risk creating a "monster" such as Belfast and South Africa...
...The people whose words Oz conveys eloquently and at length are less upbeat Studs Terkelites than the mean, angry voices contained in John Gwalt-ney's Drylongso: A Self-Portrait of Black America...
...Words like this are, of course, music to my ears," Oz writes...
...Let the Palestinians go live in our houses in Morocco...
...One hopes that Oz's Horatio-at-the-bridge approach is misleading...
...An ordinary Danny seems special simply because he talks about live-and-let-live instead of kill-or-be-killed...
...Maybe we're finished once and for all with...
...Better a live Judeo-Nazi than a dead saint," "Z," a muscular, scarred, middle-aged man "with a certain reputation," says bluntly...
...In Bet Shemesh, a smaller, newer city, Oz drinks Coke and talks with supporters of the rightist Likud bloc, who may be "the voice of the mass, the outpouring of hearts in turmoil...
...The early builders of the state are now denounced as blasphemers of Messianic redemption...
Vol. 48 • March 1984 • No. 3
