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.
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Haider Eid reflects on Amos Oz, the Israeli writer who died at age 79: “Through his glorification of the kibbutz regardless of the fact that it is built on a stolen land belonging to native Palestinians, he became an active participant in, and defender of, the aggressive colonialist politics of his country. In his work Palestinians are (mis)reprepresnted as marginalized and passive characters, they are never active agents. Oz’s literary work was truly a fusion of literature and Israeli ideology.”
US writers in intellectual journals bash Zionism. “It is anathema to say so,” Nathan Goldman writes in the Baffler, but Zionism is ethnonationalism, which is the opposite of liberal democracy; while Molly Crabapple writes in the New York Review of Books, “Jewish ethno-nationalism is a poison like all ethno-nationalisms.”
Avigail Abarbanel calls on liberal Zionists such as Rabbi Daniel Zemel to stop pretending to be nice and say clearly and unequivocally that they believe that the Jewish people have more right to survive than the Palestinian people, that Zionist forces were justified to kick 750,000 Palestinians out of their homes to create Israel.
Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak loved Donald Trump’s warning that in a one-state solution, the Israeli Prime Minister would be named Mohammed. It goes to show that liberal Zionists are just as racist when it comes to Palestinian rights as rightwing Zionists are.
The Jewish Nation-State law is making it hard to be associated with Israel, without being openly associated with an Apartheid regime. How will Daniel Barenboim handle it? By continuing “dialogue” with Israel, or finally boycotting the regime?
“I didn’t know anything,” Danish journalist Herbert Pundik says of the Tantura massacre in Israel in 1948. Herbert Pundik has been authoritatively shaping Danish public on Israel. But he was a Mossad spy whilst being a journalist and leading editor, and was serving in the Zionist army when an Israeli town was ethnically cleansed in 1948. He turns 90 and is celebrated by Danish media.
Here in Israel we’re experts in Muslim bans. We’ve banned Palestinians, who we said didn’t even exist, from returning to their homes, for 7 decades. We just had to. Jewish State, you know. We’ve banned Palestinians from reunifying families. We’ve banned them from being full citizens. And liberal Zionists hold the bag for us.