ISRAEL, PALESTINE AND PEACE: Essays by...

ISRAEL, PALESTINE AND PEACE: Essays by Amos Oz, translated from the Hebrew by Amos Oz, Maggie Goldberg-Bartura, Ora Cummings and Nicholas de Lange (Harcourt Brace: $11; 129 pp., paperback original). In a lecture given in 1992, Amos Oz dryly proposed that when peace is finally established in the Middle East, the first Israeli-Palestinian project should be “a monument to our mutual stupidity.” For more than two decades, Oz has been an outspoken advocate of the two-state solution. Dismissing the endless cycle of accusation and blame, he states: “It is not necessary for Israelis and Palestinians to reconcile the contradictory versions of their past histories in order for them to live peacefully side by side in the future. There is no need to establish whose fault it was, whose blindness caused the tragedy. What we need is to find a way out of the mire.” In a climate of overheated rhetoric, his essays offer a compelling vision of tolerance and sanity.