Amos Oz – the sadistic oppression of his daughter, and of Palestinians

Galia Oz, the daughter of the celebrated late Israeli author Amos Oz, has just released a heart-wrenching autobiographical account of the abuse she suffered from her father, throughout her life. It is currently out only in Hebrew, titled “Something Disguised as Love”. Galia Oz is known in Israel as an author of children’s books, and some have also been translated to English. But this one is a very serious adult account, the first of its kind from her hand.

Before I appraise Amos Oz the person (as I have done in the past), let me start out with an outline of the story that Galia Oz tells in her book (my translations).

It starts out like this:

In my childhood, my father beat me, he cursed and humiliated me. The violence was creative: he dragged me from within the house and threw me on the doorstep outside. Called me filth. Not a momentary loss of senses and not merely an occasional slap on the cheek, but rather a routine of sadistic abuse. My crime was being me, and thus the punishment had no end. He needed to ensure that I would break.

In the book, Galia goes into considerable detail – concerning every one of the steps she was dragged down upon, the bruises that she covered with long sleeves etc. She also mentions in detail the beating of her mother, Nili – when Galia herself was already 20:

My mother faced my father and accused him of being a crazy person who insists to control everyone. He cooked up over a minute or so, and then charged at her. I stood about 3 meters away and saw how her head flies backwards, and over a second or two I refused to see what I was seeing, or that I didn’t understand what I was seeing, the choreography seemed strange to me, detached, my father’s palm was as if disconnected from everything, so where did the momentum and power come from, slap after slap, but it was worse than slaps, he used his right and left arms as if he was in the ring, facing a punch bag, and suddenly something lit up in the awareness as if the electric current had returned after a long break, and I understood that this wasn’t the first time, that I had already seen my mother getting beaten. I was about twenty, no longer a girl, and I wanted to interfere but I did not dare to move.

Galia later specifies that this beating involved punching with fists, if anyone was in doubt.

The domestic violence later turned into another form of abuse – denial. As Galia formulates it:

Later there were no more beatings, at least not in my field of vision. Suddenly we were all adults, city-dwellers, and we were a “family”. The trauma, as sometimes happens, fell asleep for thirty years. I was one of the tribe and was recruited like the rest to whitewash the past. But the balances of power in the family did not change, and the violence did not change but rather took on another form. Before meetings with my parents I was scared, after them depressed. The family sense was hollow, devoid of loyalty, flaccid. I was “on probation” – and the condition was that I would ignore insults, that we do not speak about the past, and especially that I would not stain the public image of my father.   

Those years were before Galia became about 50 (she’s now 55), and started taking the issue up again. She says there was an exception throughout those “supposedly-normal” years:

Only once throughout those supposedly-normal years I had asked him directly, why did you hurt me, I was after all just a little girl. And he answered because you were difficult. I was supposed to feel guilt, or at least responsibility for his acts.

But then, after those three “supposedly-normal” decades, Galia took the issue up more decisively. She was sitting with her mother and another close person, and Galia said that “it wasn’t easy growing up in our house”, without going into detail.

My mother denied it immediately. She said: You were born bitter, and I am not the only one in the family who thinks so. Amos had a tough childhood. You had a normal kibbutz childhood.  

This was a turning point. Galia had realized that now, after 30 years, the mere mentioning of the family dysfunction had brought “the far past back to life and taken over my life agenda. Not only me, she said, other people in the family say.”  After two sleepless nights, Galia called her mother and asked if she had really meant what she said before.

She answered with a strange apathy, did not recant and did not speak with me since then until today. At once she became a stranger, gave up on me, retreated and disappeared.

This point was only the starting point of an onslaught on Galia by the family loyal to her father, and in fact went beyond that, with complete strangers being recruited to the mission of silencing her, even strange messengers appearing on her doorstep, with a whole lot of gaslighting.

A few months after that conversation with the mother, her father also disconnected. It went on for some months, but then came a letter from him. The letter accused her of revenge (“your revenge succeeded much, much more than you had hoped”, he wrote). Amos actually admitted to the violence in the letter, yet somehow played it down and presented in a detached, impersonal way:

You were hit a few times. I hit you. You were expelled from the house a few times. A back was turned on you.

Galia reflects:

Yet he detaches himself when he applies obscure language. Who are those who expelled me and turned their backs on me? It seems almost as if an anonymous, hidden element, hit me once in a while, a few times. The admission undermined itself, denied itself cunningly.

Then there was victim-blaming by her father in his letter:

You actually, without saying it, demanded of me to punish your mother. More than that, sometimes (apparently without awareness) you made me choose between you and mother.

Galia:

When and how was I involved in incitement against my mother? When did I try to separate them? Never, not once. Where is the proof for the conspiracy I supposedly conspired between them? Unfortunately I work in the dark, in silence and without awareness, and therefore there are no witnesses to my despicable acts.

And then there was this from Amos to Galia:

You loved me more than how girls need to love their father.

Galia is not saying that her father was a pedophile. But the mental pattern is there, and it’s chilling. She reflects:

These frightening words charged at me from the page, echoing in a despairing way the known claim of the pedophile that blames a girl who supposedly seduced him. Maybe his mind wasn’t clear when he put a stamp on an envelope and sent me these abominable words on Israeli post? No, true to his manner he was always as sharp as a razor. He formulated this mad sentence only in order to throw crap on the girl I once was, who had no one to protect her.  

The family response

Now, this is obviously a shocking moment for the many who have admired Amos Oz as a kind of great humanist. Having read Galia’s full account and followed the interviews with her, I, for one, believe her fully. Many may apply denial, as her two siblings as well as her mother do, in their response to her book, as appears to be the case in international outlets such as The Guardian.

Galia’s older sister Fania Oz-Salzberger wrote on behalf of herself, her mother, and her brother Daniel:

We have known all our lives a very different Amos, a warm and affectionate man who loved his family deeply and gently. He devoted heart and soul to us. The vast majority of Galia’s accusations against Amos squarely contradict our three lifetimes of loving memories of him. To his deathbed, Amos tried and hoped to talk with Galia again, to listen, to understand, to grasp even the claims that contradicted reality as he and we saw it. Galia’s pain is palpable and heartbreaking. But we remember differently. Astoundingly differently.

“Astoundingly differently” – but how so? Galia tells of how her father admitted to beating her, but played it down with obscure language. At another point he admits to the beating incident of Nili as described, yet plays it down in “murmuring” that it was “only that one time”. In an interview with Dana Weiss, Galia says:

Part of the language of the abuse is the false narrative: “It didn’t happen”, “it’s not true”. Why is it not true and it can’t be true? Because he’s a good person….

[T]he symbol of morality. He can actually do whatever he wants. He does what he wants. He abuses, he applies revenge, he beats – and instantaneously it is erased. There is this kind of eraser that erases this at the same time that it happens. That’s why I’m saying, there is no war of narratives here, Dana, there are facts, there are facts.

Fania is not frontally contradicting Galia’s actual accounts, some of which Amos already admitted to. Fania’s defense is that it just different, “astoundingly different”, because despite, or in denial of all that Galia describes, Amos was a gentle and affectionate man, and not, God forbid, a sadistic and violent man.

This supposed countering is not surprising – it would be following a well-known pattern of family abuse, a pattern which Galia describes as having persisted throughout her life, and ever more acutely in the past few years, when she began to face that past and this present.

The response from Fania, herself an author, implicitly suggests that Galia is hateful and vengeful, but it does not have to spell that out – because if the father was all about gentle love and affection, then there is no other conclusion, It is Galia who is supposedly the hateful one.

Amos Oz, the sadistic Zionist hypocrite

I realized years ago that Amos Oz is a particularly hypocritical, populist Zionist propagandist. I want to make clear that I am not drawing a straight line here between Zionism and domestic abuse, certainly not. I think there are many Zionists who are very kind and caring towards their families (Palestinians might be a whole other universe – that’s how tribalism often works). Yet there is a certain pattern here which I will elaborate upon, which cuts through the space between the home and the political sphere. Amos Oz was not just alleged to be a sadistic abuser of his daughter, he was also a sadistic abuser of Palestinians. And just like with Galia, he was using the veil of humanism to hide and give liberal credence to his violent advocacy against Palestinians.

In 2014, Oz served as an Israeli national propagandist in manufacturing consent for the Gaza onslaught. I wrote about this over 4 years ago:

On July 31st, 2014, at the midst of Israel’s unprecedented assault on Gaza, Oz gave an interview to the Deutsche Welle. He opened the interview defensively by stating two questions of his own, defying world opinion:

“Question 1: What would you do if your neighbor across the street sits down on the balcony, puts his little boy on his lap and starts shooting machine gun fire into your nursery?

“Question 2: What would you do if your neighbor across the street digs a tunnel from his nursery to your nursery in order to blow up your home or in order to kidnap your family?

With these two questions I pass the interview to you”.

Oz was thus, in his eloquent rhetoric capability, voicing two widespread Israeli fictitious myths, disseminated from the Prime Minister’s office itself: That Hamas uses the population (particularly young children) as human shields, and that it has “terror tunnels” that lead to Israeli nurseries.

The first myth hardly deserves mentioning, in that Israel systematically obliterated whole families with over 30 members in Gaza 2014, because a wanted Hamas member was amongst them. To regard those family members, including babies, as human shields, deserves nothing but contempt. As Amira Hass notes in her introduction to the project Obliterated Families: “Behind every erased Gazan family is an Israeli pilot”.

The second myth, of Hamas “terror tunnels” leading to kindergartens in nearby villages, was a deliberate lie disseminated by the Prime Minister’s office and widely circulated in international media, serving as an important hysteria-creator and means of manufacturing consent for the ground invasion, when the actual casus belli, which was missing before that, became these tunnels. But this myth was debunked shortly after.

Later on, in 2017, Oz gave one of his last lectures. This lecture was widely circulated following his death in December 2018. In it, Oz demonstrates a sadistic, racist hypocrisy. I have analyzed this lecture in detail just over two years ago.

You need a big stick in order to inhibit and subdue aggressiveness. Aggressiveness is the mother of all violence in the world. And therefore I have never believed ‘make love not war’ [said in English], ‘we’ll turn the other cheek’, ‘all you need is love’ [said in English].

This is crazy. In one go, Oz is both the bully with the big stick, and yet the moderate who stands as a bulwark against barbarism – protecting against “aggressiveness”, which is the “mother of all violence”, as he mocks the idea of pacifism. Who is being hit by this “big stick”? Palestinians, of course. And yet, as one holds the big stick, one can speak words of peace, language of “healing wounds”, so that one doesn’t have to move a “single caravan” of the colonialist Jewish settlers, not one:

Language of healing wounds begins with you saying to your opponent, to your enemy, the simple words: ‘I know, you’re hurting a lot, I understand’. Not the words of ‘you’re right and I’m evil’, not the words of ‘take everything, I’m sorry for whatever I’ve done to you’, not the words of ‘I’m ashamed of everything’, but these simple words, ‘you’re hurting, I know, I also hurt, let’s seek something’. These are simple, easy words. You do not need to even remove one caravan in a settlement – you need to say these words, and say them properly.

See, Amos Oz will speak to you with the big stick in his hand, say “you’re hurting, I know”, and you’ll feel much better.

And these Palestinians, per Amos Oz, are often just sick. They suffer something called “reconstritis”. Oz describes how he spoke with a “Palestinian intellectual” in Paris, who expressed his desire to return to the ethnically cleansed town of Lifta near Jerusalem:

You are ill, I told the man… with Reconstritis. You are seeking in space, what you have lost in time.

Oz has a solution for the man:

If you miss Lifta so much, write a book. Make a film. Write a play. Write up a research. Seek what you have lost in time, not in space… You miss your childhood? That’s OK, but if you start behaving like a 5-year old child [Oz is literally shouting here] because of your childhood longings, you need to be hospitalized!

One begins, I hope, to see the violence inherent in Oz. This is an egregiously arrogant, patronizing colonialist rant. But this rant also reflects something well beyond Oz the person. It is quintessentially Zionist.

Oz did wonder if Zionists were not also suffering from Reconstritis, in desiring to return to Jerusalem after 2000 years, but he concluded that Zionism wasn’t born of this desire, but of actual persecution in Europe. He shouted:

IF THEY [Jews] WERE NOT PERSECUTED, AND TORTURED, AND HUMILIATED, AND MURDERED, THEY WOULD HAVE SAID IT FOR ANOTHER TWO-THOUSAND YEARS!

Which is to say, Palestinians are not tortured and humiliated and murdered.

Between Zionism and domestic violence

Oz uses this fervor, shouting (hitting us with words, one could say), as a means of overriding the contradiction which he himself has reached. Trying to be an advocate for colonialist violence while trying to portray oneself as a humanist is the contradiction, and his way out of it is to hammer the role of the victim down the listener’s head. It’s not enough to argue it, it needs to be slammed in.

This is where I go back to Galia’s story. She said in interviews that he needed an outlet for his outrage, and she was it. She tells in the book of the last call she had with him, in 2018, when he called. He told her:

I don’t speak badly about you with people anymore.

Galia asked:

Why did you speak badly about me with people at all? You’re my father.

Galia describes that instead of answering, he stubbornly continued:

When people ask me about you I say that I hurt.

Do we begin to see the common pattern here? With the “hurt”, as if trying to “heal wounds”, but the wounds only belong to Amos Oz! He is the victim!

Galia reflects:

In real time, I was not able to deconstruct this linguistic trap, and only later had it occurred to me that it’s strange: He admits that he spoke badly about me, and yet he identifies himself as the hurt party. He defames, yet declares that he is hurting.

In that last telephone conversation, Galia faced Amos with what was done to her:

You destroyed me. You said that I was born bitter, that psychologists incited me, that I demanded of others to cut ties with you…

People commit suicide because of such things,

And he just answered:

I understand, a little bit.

She writes:

What is I understand a little bit? Do you understand or not?

This is the kind of “understanding” Zionists can generally afford the oppressed Palestinians. A “little bit”, but not too much. They can’t really understand that they were and are being colonized, ethnically cleansed, besieged and seasonally massacred. They understand it “a little bit”, but in the end, they are the ultimate victims. That’s the idea that Nili, Amos’s wife, was trying to inculcate in Galia in their last conversation, that Amos had a “tough childhood” and that Galia had a “normal kibbutz childhood”. Anyone reading the book will understand that Galia’s kibbutz childhood was not really normal, not even for kibbutzniks. I know, I’ve experienced it. The point here is to create a sense of monopoly on victimhood, where it was always Amos, the father (whose mother committed suicide when he was 12) who had it. Under that monopoly, he could victimize others, and use a kind of cultish mechanism of silencing and denial to keep it going.

Think about it. Palestinians are like abused children in the hands of the Zionist masters, even as they are adults. The founding violence is perpetuated through various means and morphs into more ‘civil’, often ‘bureaucratic’ means of domination, yet betrays its violent core in eruptions. Some of the eruptions are beatings and torture, which occur on a daily basis, some are extrajudicial executions, some are seasonal massacres (boasted about even by the ‘liberals’ such as Netanyahu rival Benny Gantz).

Galia wrote at the beginning of the book:

In the house there was terror and constant keeping of appearance towards strangers. I write the word terror because the threat of violence always stood in the air, and it was enough in order to plant fear and achieve domination. The intimidation and the keeping up of appearance were intertwined: our family microcosmos, where grave occurrences chased each other, did not exist merely to satisfy some cruel urge in my father, but so that there would always linger some threat above the heads, so that no complaint would leak out into the world. And there was this something which disguised itself as love, portrayed as a finished fact publicly and in the family circle, which erased all doubts and silenced any dissenting thought. Until today it’s hard for me to believe how efficient and hermetically sealed this construct was. I was a girl but had no childhood. Decades passed until I understood that the violence did not disappear when I became an adult, but rather took on another form. That this pattern of intimidation and denial did not change until the day of my father’s death.

That is heartbreaking. My heart does go out to Galia. But I cannot see this in mere isolation from the grand-scale Zionist abuse of Palestinians. We should listen to Galia and to many other victims of domestic abuse. But we should also listen to the abused Palestians. Not a little bit, but a lot.