No Illusions About the Land of Oz

In 1982, after his country’s invasion of Lebanon, Israeli novelist Amos Oz began a personal survey of the psychology of political extremism he sensed gaining currency in the Jewish state.

The resulting book, “In The Land Of Israel” (1983), offered a disturbing and controversial portrait of a country and a dream, both of which seemed to Oz to be mutating beyond recognition.

Although never intended as a reflection of the country as a whole, the book exposed Oz to charges of deliberately confusing fact and fiction. Even by the worrisome standards of the day, critics argued that people Oz interviewed, such as the self-proclaimed “Isranazi,” an Israeli extremist, were unlikely to exist except as composites or even fabrications.

Oz is without doubt Israel’s best-known writer (although in terms of talent he says he may rank last in a triumverate, the members of which he won’t name for fear of sparking a brouhaha), and he is revered in Europe and in Japan. He has written more than half a dozen novels--notably “My Michael,” “A Perfect Peace” and “Sumchi”--several collections of short fiction, and three compendiums of essays, articles, addresses and editorials, the latest of which, “The Slopes of Lebanon,” was published last month by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. In recent years, however, Oz has sustained numerous assaults on his credibility as both journalist and novelist.

His 1988 novel, an epistolary exercise called “Black Box,” was denounced by Israeli critics as arcane and unwieldy. His latest effort, the as-yet untranslated “To Know Woman,” was condemned for being too blatantly commercial. For many Israeli critics, this did not jibe with the author’s well-known devotion to ideological socialism, or to the communal and egalitarian values of kibbutz life.

In fact, Oz recently left Kibbutz Hulda, his home since 1954. His 9-year-old son suffers from asthma; because of this, the family moved to the Negev desert town of Arad. Oz’s kibbutz, however, retains title to the literary rights to most of his highly lucrative output.

Oz was born in Jerusalem in 1936. His mother, who came involuntarily from the western Ukraine, suffered painful yearnings for her native country, and was, recalls Oz, somewhat of a failed poet. Oz’s father, Yehuda-Aryeh Klausner, was a Russian-Polish refugee with a doctorate in comparative literature who found himself in Jerusalem at a time, says Oz, “when there were more potential professors of comparative literature than students.”

Oz inherited his parents’ and a philosopher-uncle’s love for poetry and literature. In 1954, however, the young man moved to Hulda, one of the country’s oldest communal settlements, situated roughly halfway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

“This really was the October Revolution of my life,” says Oz. “My father was was a right-winger, so I became a left-winger. He was a scholar, so I aspired to become a tractor driver. It proves, of course, that all rebellions tend to go full circle. I ended up sitting at a desk, writing novels.”

Despite initial difficulties in finding his niche in the rugged, Spartan, ofttimes unpolished kibbutz life style, Oz eventually became a member of Hulda and an outspoken enthusiast for the kibbutz way of life, which he continues to regard as “potentially wonderful.”

In 1961, after serving for 2 1/2 years in an armored unit, Oz published his first short story. A year later, he went to Jerusalem to study literature and philosophy at the Hebrew University. In 1965, Oz returned to Hulda, dividing his time between teaching at a local high school and writing the stories and novels which, critics would later maintain, revolutionized Hebrew literature.

Oz’s literary predecessors--the writers of the so-called Palmach (the fighting branch of the Haganah (underground)) Generation--believed Hebrew literature ought to purvey the heroic qualities of the Zionist endeavor. A veteran of the 1967 war and the horrendous tank battles waged on the Golan Heights during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Oz has found little to love in battle, preferring to write about solitary, angst-ridden characters trying to find their ways in a turbulent, colorless, frequently violent society. He has found cause for gratification, he says, in the burgeoning number of Hebrewreaders worldwide.

“When I was a youngster,” he said, “there were maybe 600,000 Hebrew speakers in the world. Now there are 6 million, among them several hundred thousand Arabs, many of whom read my books.”

Oz is no pacifist. Nor does he maintain illusions about what he perceives as the deep-seated Palestinian desire--whatever the recent pronouncements of Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization--to be rid of the Jewish state in its geographical entirety.

Desires are one thing, however, Realpolitik quite another. Israelis and Palestinians alike, Oz believes, are realizing they must subordinate their grandiose dreams to the more niggardly demands of the present. What is required, he says, is a divorce--a physical separation between the two peoples.

“For many Americans,” Oz recently told a group of Peace Now supporters in Los Angeles, “there exists the long-standing notion--which has deep roots in Christianity--that the word ‘peace’ is synonymous with reconciliation, compassion, goodwill and brotherhood.

“Actually, it is not. The opposite of war is not love--it is peace. Our agenda is not to make love with the Palestinian people. There is far too much anger for that. It is to make peace by a separation of land and assets in a two-state solution.”

Despite the wrath that underscores “The Slopes of Lebanon,” Oz says he is more hopeful now than he has been in years that an end to the conflict may soon be in the offing.

In November, Oz embarked on a monthlong speaking tour in the United States timed to coincide with the publication of “The Slopes of Lebanon.” In Los Angeles, he gave a reading from “Black Box” at USC, and met with supporters of the local chapter of Peace Now.

Oz has vigorously supported that grass-roots Israeli movement since it was established in 1978 by Israeli combat reservists calling for the aggressive pursuit of a peace agreement with Egypt.

Oz and the organization, at least in Israel, continue to suffer from a reputation for elitism. Both have been been slow to pick up support among non-European constituents, who today constitute the majority in Israel. Both, however, have made recent attempts to broaden their bases. Peace Now has established a presence, for the first time, in largely Sephardic Israeli development towns. Before leaving Israel for America, Oz himself ended a three-year, self-imposed embargo of the local media. One particularly sardonic Israeli columnist commented on that occasion that “finally, at long last, God himself has decided to climb down from his mount and speak.”

Oz’s refusal to engage in interviews is said to have stemmed from a conviction that he had simply talked himself out. And not only in the company of journalists, but also in a series of essays and articles he had written since 1982.

These articles are contained in “The Slopes of Lebanon,” which Oz regards as a sequel to “In The Land of Israel.” They offer, in bits and snatches, as trenchant an analysis of the current Israeli scene as the two-year lag between its appearance in Hebrew and the publication of an English-language edition could permit. But his assessment in “The Slopes of Lebanon” of what Israelis call ha’matzav --the situation--may prove as discomfiting in the short term to those who wish the Jewish state well as his first book may have been.

Israel, argues Oz, has in its short history become a backward-oriented society at grave risk of stagnation. Although a wistful yearning for the past--both distant and recent--had always been an integral part of the Zionism, excessive pining for past glories has been held at bay by the pragmatic, forward-looking and often utopian Zionist enterprise.

The events of 1982, however, when Israel sought to rid Lebanon of the PLO and thus ensure its own hegemony over the West Bank and Gaza, snapped the tense equilibrium between these two competing inclinations. According to Oz’s analysis, Menachem Begin’s ill-fated military adventure grew not out of an attested desire to secure peace for the relatively tranquil Galilee, but out of the premier’s neurotic compulsion to avenge the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust that had afflicted him, his family and his people.

Unfortunately, among the victims of Lebanon, wrote Oz, was the nature of his country: “the Land of Israel, small and brave, determined and righteous.” What remained in its place was a country which, though by no means beyond redemption, faces an upward struggle to retain a meaningful vision of itself and its mission in the world, Oz says.

These days, however, Oz places the onus for the war--and for the seemingly interminable Palestinian uprising that came in its wake--on a leadership he views as “cowardly and dishonest.”

The Israeli public, he believes, has not been provided with the information it needs to formulate and debate a realistic strategic defense posture.

“Most Israeli leaders know, in their heart of hearts, far more than they are willing to say to their people about the prospects of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza,” says Oz. “It is not generally known, for instance, that it is possible to defend the country against a small, demilitarized Palestinian state the size of Bermuda. Such a state, in itself, will not alter the balance of power in the Middle East.

“I don’t necessarily buy or endorse the PLO, of course. I have always regarded that organization as one of the most extreme and uncompromising national movements in the history of the 20th Century,” Oz says. “But the recognition is growing among more and more Israelis that this is the enemy, and that the Palestinian issue is the key to the (Arab-Israeli) conflict.”

“How can one therefore explain,” wrote Oz in an editorial in 1988, “the amazing fact that Israel would rather fight another ferocious war, and another, and yet another, against all of the Arab states--including Iraq with its 50 battle-hardened divisions, Syria with its hundreds of new fighter planes and thousands of tanks, and Saudi Arabia with its monumental arms stockpiles and endless resources--than make peace with a tiny Palestine?

“Israel behaves as though it is ready to withstand protracted conflict against the entire Third World, against the Communist Bloc, the European Common Market, and perhaps even, one day, the United States--as long as it does not have to coexist with a tiny Palestine.”

The key to a settlement, says Oz, at least in Israel, lies in the hands of the Sephardic Jews, who are now a new and politically powerful Israeli middle class. These people, Oz believes, have received a bum rap, especially in America.

“The Israeli Sephardic element is gravely misunderstood due to certain simplifications in the Western press. This is not necessarily out of malice, though there is much of that. It is simply very convenient to picture every Sephardic Jew as a chauvinistic zealot, an Arab-hater and a West Bank settler.

“This happens not to be true. The ultra-Orthodox are not Sephardic--they are Ashkenazic, European Jews. The ultra-nationalistic are Ashkenazi, many of whom, lately, tend to be imported from Brooklyn. The Sephardim are hawkish--far more than I might like. But they are not fanatic.

“Among most Ashkenazi hawks I find fear. To many Israelis of European descent, especially those who were traumatized by the Holocaust, the Arabs are Cossacks who wrap themselves in keffiyehs or, worse, believe there is a Hitler under every Arab mustache.

“Among Sephardic Jews, though, you find anger. And anger, I have learned, is easier to diffuse than fear. The Sephardic Jews will soon reconsider the occupation of the West Bank not for moral reasons or public relations concerns but, rather, for practical reasons. Is is a good deal, they will ask, or a bad deal? If they have to chose between maintaining the occupation and their newly acquired second-hand cars, they will chose the latter.

“For this reason, I think we may well be watching the final storms before the lull. I would not want to be held to a timetable, but I think the conflict between Israeli and Palestinian may be on the ebb. The intellectual and political mobility in Israel today is greater than it has ever been. People are reassessing their positions.

“Israel is still split down the middle between those who favor a territorial compromise and those who don’t. But if the left gains one Likud supporter for every three people the Likud loses to the far right, we will have won the battle.”