Amos Oz sought to portray himself as a humanist and yet routinely rationalized Israeli violence against Palestinians because Israel was the victim. This logic is also inherent in the justifications he had for his abuse of his daughter Galia that she relates in her new memoir of her father.
Dershowitz says Peter Beinart seeks a “Final Solution” for the destruction of the Jewish state, “from the river to the see,” and that typo is just the beginning of a torrent of foolish mistakes by the Israel apologist.
“Amos Oz eroticized the land and language of Israel, and it gave me permission to do the same.” Nearly a year after the writer’s death, Liz Rose reflects on the ways that Oz fostered her youthful excitement about liberal Zionism. And how she looks on his writing now that she opposes Zionism.
In a far-ranging interview, Palestinian author Raja Shehadeh relates how annoyed he is when American media read from the Zionist script and demand that he defend Hamas. He also talks about how difficult it is to maintain human relationships with Israelis when Israelis cannot confront the past of ethnic cleansing. And how the late Amos Oz patronized him…
Joe Biden has praised racist Israeli leaders Benjamin Netanyahu and Golda Meir on many occasions, but don’t expect Kamala Harris to score points off him for it, as she did over his fondness for southern racists. She has had a warm meeting with Netanyahu, refused to criticize Israel’s human rights record, and told the rightwing pro-Israel group AIPAC that she raised money for Israel as a girl and Israel’s story reminds her of the civil rights struggle in the U.S.
The late Israeli author Amos Oz thought that Palestinians who wanted to return to the homes their grandparents were forced to flee in Israel suffered from a disease called “Reconstritis,” as did settlers who sought a biblical transformation of the West Bank. At a Washington memorial service for the author, his daughter Fania Oz-Salzberger cited the malady in extolling Zionism as a force that saved millions of Jewish lives.
Back in 1983, a settler leader explained to the writer Amos Oz that Defense Minister Shimon Peres had allowed the settler movement to thrive in the West Bank and they only needed to get to 100,000 settlers in five years to end the possibility of a Palestinian state “for good.” So why has the US establishment ignored this truth — there will not be a two-state solution — for 30 years?
Amos Oz was a great storyteller, and the last vibrant connection to the Shoah generation. In his work, he sought to ennoble Israel’s creation by using his parents’ story of fleeing Europe to show how unsafe Jews are in the west. He was an Israeli provincial, and his death is a great blow to Zionism, which has few idealistic lights left to uphold.
The late Amos Oz’s lecture from last year, translated and analyzed by Jonathan Ofir, is a summary of his political credo: Palestinians suffer from the “illness” of “Recontritis,” the desire to return to a land that has disappeared. And Zionists must use violence to maintain their own place on that land.