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Friday September 14, 2007

Amos Oz’s latest offers little to solve giant problem

by morton teicher
correspondent

Amos Oz — novelist, Peace Now activist and Israeli public intellectual — is offering a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In the literally tiny (4-inch-by-6-inch) “How to Cure a Fanatic,” Oz presents two well-written essays, “Between Right and Right” and “How to Cure A Fanatic,” as well as a September 2005 interview conducted on the telephone with Brigitta van Rheinberg of the Princeton University Press. The book also has a brief introduction by novelist Nadine Gordimer who lauds Oz as “the voice of sanity.”

The small size and the brevity of the book are symbolic of the author’s oversimplified belief that “the battle between Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs is not a religious war… not a war of cultures, not a disagreement between two traditions, but simply a real estate dispute.” Oz compares it to a divorce where both parties stay in the same apartment so that “it will be necessary to decide who gets bedroom A and who gets bedroom B,” and there will need to be special arrangements about sharing the living room, the bathroom and the kitchen.

Moreover, says Oz, “once this divorce is conducted and partition created, I believe Israelis and Palestinians will be quick to hop over the partition for a cup of coffee together.”

Oz presents his thesis wittily and lucidly. He acknowledges that both sides have “shattered dreams and broken illusions and injured hopes and blow-up slogans,” but he is insistent on his spare and uncomplicated solution. Readers familiar with the complexity of the Israeli-Palestinian situation will quickly recognize that Oz is guilty of the illusion that perplexing and complicated phenomena can be explained by a single principle.

Our society feels the need to find crisp and clear answers to difficult questions. We are conditioned by courtroom dramas where cross-examiners badger witnesses, insisting that the question be answered “yes or no.” We prefer “yes or no,” “right or wrong,” “black or white” responses. We have little patience for “yes and no,” “yes, but …” or for shades of gray. However, life teaches us that wisdom does not reside in simplistic answers, such as reducing the Israeli-Palestinian problem to a real estate conflict.

Hamas’ recent election victory signals the irrelevance of the battle about borders. Is it simply a real estate conflict when Muslims, such as those in Hamas, consider converting from Islam to Christianity to be a sin punishable by death? Or when Syrian and Lebanese supporters of the Palestinians say that an American whose passport shows a visit to Israel cannot enter their countries? Or when Hamas proclaims that “we are a nation that drinks blood, and we know that there is no blood better than the blood of Jews?”

Radical Islam, of which Hamas is an integral part, has declared a religious war on the West. The president of Iran, in addition to saying that “Israel must be wiped off the map,” asserted that it is an “oppressor against the Islamic world.” Oz is naïve to characterize the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a struggle over real estate when it is increasingly clear that we are dealing with what has been called a “clash of civilizations.”

No matter how well-intentioned Oz may be, he has essentially tried and failed to make complicated matters simple. Ironically, his own recognition of this fallacy is revealed by his statement that the lack of a solution to the problem of the Palestinian refugees “is a time bomb.” This is obviously not a matter of real estate.

Oz deserves some credit for his effort. He tried vigorously, but his approach must be rejected as a misfire. This book should be read as a strained and ingenuous approach to an intractable problem.

“How To Cure A Fanatic” by Amos Oz

(104 pages, Princeton University Press, $12.95).

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