Scorning zealotry, he [Amos Oz] also believed Jews should never abandon contentious debate, the “intergenerational quizzing that ensures the passing of the torch,” as he put it in “Jews and Words,” written with his daughter Fania Oz-Salzberger. He believed Jews need a homeland, Israel. His father, as a young man in Lithuania, endured the refrain: “Jews go home to Palestine.” Now, plenty of people scream, “Jews get out of Palestine.” Enough said.But then how this?:
Or not quite enough said. Jews will be just fine in a binational state shared with the Palestinians! Jews will be just fine as anti-Semitism rises again! Jews will be just fine forgetting the millennia of persecution and insult in the diaspora! Jews will be just fine trusting those they have no cause to trust!
Oz, who fought in two wars, did not believe it. I do not believe it. As he once said to me of that most sacred of Palestinian principles, “The right of return is a euphemism for the liquidation of Israel.”
At the same time, Oz was cleareyed about the insidious corruption of Israel through more than a half-century of the occupation of the West Bank. How it has gradually blinded Israelis to the humanity of millions of Palestinians. How it has made the oppression and humiliation of another people somehow acceptable. How it has ingrained habits of arrogance. How it has fed the rightward lurch that has buried in messianic nationalism the dream of a two-state peace and ensconced a leader, Netanyahu, who made it his foul business to bury Yitzhak Rabin’s push for that peace.It strikes me that being against settlements on the west bank is in some way being against diversity and multiculturalism. Or at least, anti-semitic by demanding a land that is "judenrein". Why cannot jews and palestinians live together on the west bank, as we are told they can live together in two contiguous countries.
Oz told me Netanyahu was a “coward,” the anti-Rabin in his inability to have a big or generous thought.
More: how many times -- ten? twenty? -- have the palestinians been offered all they asked for, only to have their intransigent leaders refuse the deal. Many, many times.... And they -- especially Hamas -- still hate Jews with genocidal hatred. It's right there in the Hamas Charter. In short:"Palestine shall be free, from the River to the Sea". Even the 2017 amended Covenant calls for the "liberation of all palestine".
So, in the end, this is more of the same, blaming the jews for everything, no matter what the patina of "bravery" or "honesty" is put on it by Oz and Cohen.
Cohen, by the way, it strikes me, is becoming more anti-Israel to the point even of being anti-jew. I may be wrong, but I do have that feeling from having read him regularly over the decades.
Amos Oz’s Rebuke to Cowardice [The New York Times artile today]
