How to Cure a Fanatic Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Amos Oz

  Title Page

  Foreword by Nadine Gordimer

  Publisher’s Note

  Between Right And Right

  How To Cure A Fanatic

  Postscript to the ‘Geneva Accords’

  Interview with Amos Oz

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Internationally acclaimed novelist Amos Oz grew up in war-torn Jerusalem, where as a boy he witnessed first-hand the poisonous consequences of fanaticism.

  In How to Cure a Fanatic Oz analyses the historical roots of violence and confronts truths about the extremism nurtured throughout society. By bringing us face to face with fanaticism he suggests ways in which we can all respond.

  About the Author

  Born in Jerusalem in 1939, Amos Oz is the internationally acclaimed author of many novels and essay collections, translated into over 30 languages, including his brilliant semi-autobiographical work, A Tale of Love and Darkness. He has received several international awards, including the Prix Fémina, the Prix Méditerranée Étranger, the Israel Prize and the Frankfurt Peace Prize. He lives in Arad, Israel.

  ALSO BY AMOS OZ

  Fiction

  My Michael

  Elsewhere, Perhaps

  Touch the Water, Touch the Wind

  Unto Death

  The Hill of Evil Counsel

  Where the Jackals Howl

  A Perfect Peace

  Black Box

  To Know a Woman

  Fima

  Don’t Call It Night

  Panther in the Basement

  The Same Sea

  A Tale of Love and Darkness

  Rhyming Life and Death

  Suddenly In the Depths of the Forest

  Scenes from Village Life

  Non-fiction

  In the Land of Israel

  The Slopes of Lebanon

  Under this Blazing Light

  Israel, Palestine & Peace

  Foreword by Nadine Gordimer

  AMOS OZ IS the voice of sanity coming out of confusion, the lying, hysterical babble of world rhetoric about current conflicts. In the brilliant clarity of ‘How To Cure a Fanatic’ he analyses the twisted historical roots that produce the evil flower of violence, seeded again and again. He brings us to face the nature of fanaticism, its evolution. He doesn’t offer a cure-all.

  But, he convinces irrefutably that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is ‘Not a religious war, not a war of cultures, not a disagreement between two traditions, but simply a real-estate dispute over whose house this is.’ And he is not afraid to stake his vision and politico-moral integrity in the belief that the dispute can be resolved. ‘Between Right and Right’ is a down-to-ground solution for which he advocates the necessity of imagination in what human beings in certain situations basically need in order to begin to define and respect each other’s space. The ironic humour with which he illuminates the vitally serious makes it all the more telling.

  Publisher’s Note

  THESE ESSAYS WERE originally delivered as speeches in Germany in 2002. They have been edited here for the English-language edition. They are followed by a Postscript written in 2003, on the publication of the ‘Geneva Accords’ and which formed part of an article that appeared in a slightly different version in the Guardian, 17 October 2003.

  BETWEEN RIGHT AND RIGHT

  Between Right And Right

  WHO ARE THE good guys? That’s what every well-meaning European, left-wing European, intellectual European, liberal European always wants to know, first and foremost. Who are the good guys in the film and who are the bad guys. In this respect Vietnam was easy: the Vietnamese people were the victims and the Americans were the bad guys. The same with apartheid: you could easily see that apartheid was a crime and that the struggle for equal, civil rights, for liberation and for equality and for human dignity was right. The struggle between colonialism and imperialism, on the one hand, and the victims of colonialism and imperialism, on the other hand, seems relatively simple – you can tell the good guys from the bad. When it comes to the foundations of the Israeli-Arab conflict, in particular the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts, things are not so straightforward. And I am afraid I am not going to make things any easier for you by saying simply: these are the angels, these are the devils, you just have to support the angels and good will prevail over evil. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not a Wild West movie. It is not a struggle between good and evil, rather it is a tragedy in the ancient and most precise sense of the word: a clash between right and right, a clash between one very powerful, deep and convincing claim and another very different but no less convincing, no less powerful, no less humane claim.

  The Palestinians are in Palestine because Palestine is the homeland and the only homeland of the Palestinian people. In the same way in which Holland is the homeland of the Dutch, or Sweden the homeland of the Swedes. The Israeli Jews are in Israel because there is no other country in the world which the Jews, as a people, as a nation, could ever call home. As individuals, yes, but not as a people, not as a nation. The Palestinians have tried, unwillingly, to live in other Arab countries. They were rejected, sometimes even humiliated and persecuted, by the so-called ‘Arab family’. They were made aware in the most painful way of their ‘Palestinianness’, they were not wanted as Lebanese, or as Syrians, or as Egyptians, or as Iraqis. They had to learn the hard way that they are Palestinians, and that’s the only country which they can hold on to. In a strange way the Jewish people, just as the Palestinian people, have had a somewhat parallel historical experience. The Jews were kicked out of Europe; my parents were virtually kicked out of Europe some seventy years ago. Just like the Palestinians were first kicked out of Palestine and then out of the Arab countries, or almost. When my father was a little boy in Poland, the streets of Europe were covered with graffiti, ‘Jews, go back to Palestine’, or sometimes worse: ‘Dirty yids, piss off to Palestine’. When my father revisited Europe fifty years later, the walls were covered with new graffiti, ‘Jews, get out of Palestine’.

  People in Europe keep sending me wonderful invitations to spend a rosy weekend in a delightful resort with Palestinian partners, Palestinian colleagues, Palestinian counterparts, so that we can learn to know one another, to like one another, to drink a cup of coffee together, so that we will realise that no one has horns and tails – and the trouble will go away. This is based on a widespread sentimental European idea that every conflict is essentially no more than a misunderstanding. A little group therapy, a touch of family counselling, and everyone will live happily ever after. Well, first I have bad news for you: some conflicts are very real, they are much worse than a mere misunderstanding. And then I have some sensational news for you: there is no essential misunderstanding between Palestinian Arab and Israeli Jew. The Palestinians want the land they call Palestine. They have very strong reasons to want it. The Israeli Jews want exactly the same land for exactly the same reasons, which provides for a perfect understanding between the parties, and for a terrible tragedy. Rivers of coffee drunk together cannot extinguish the tragedy of two peoples claiming, and I think rightly claiming, the same small country as their one and only national homeland in the whole world. So, drinking coffee together is wonderful and I’m all for it, especially if it is Arabic coffee which is infinitely better than Israeli coffee. But, drinking coffee cannot do away with the trouble. What we need is not just coffee and a better understanding. What we need is a painful compromise. The word compromise has a terrible reputation in Europe. Especially among young idealists, who always regard compromise as opportunism, as something dishonest, as so
mething sneaky and shady, as a mark of a lack of integrity. Not in my vocabulary. For me the word compromise means life. And the opposite of compromise is not idealism, not devotion; the opposite of compromise is fanaticism and death. We need a compromise. Compromise, not capitulation. A compromise means that the Palestinian people should never go down on its knees, neither should the Israeli Jewish people.

  I’m going to discuss the nature of such a compromise, but right at the outset I should tell you that this compromise will be very painful. Because both peoples love the country, because both peoples, Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs, have equally deep, different historical and emotional roots in the country. One of the components of this tragedy, one of the aspects which has a certain irony about it, is the fact that many Israeli Jews don’t recognise how deep is the Palestinian emotional connection to the land. And many Palestinians fail to recognise just how deep is the Jewish connection to the same land. However, this recognition comes in a painful way and as a painful process for both nations. It is a route paved with shattered dreams and broken illusions and injured hopes and blown-up slogans from the past on both sides.

  I have worked for many years for the Israeli ‘Peace Now’ movement. In fact, I worked for an Israeli-Palestinian peace long before ‘Peace Now’ was established in 1978. Back in 1967, immediately after the Six Day War, I was among the very first and very few Israeli Jews who immediately advocated the idea of negotiating the future of the West Bank and Gaza not with Jordan or Egypt but with the Palestinian population and with the Palestinian leadership and yes, with the PLO, who at that time refused even to pronounce the word Israel. It was a strange experience in those days.

  At this moment, the Israeli peace movement is injured. But let’s be very clear that the Israeli peace movement is not a twin sister of pacifist movements in Europe, or in America, during the years of the Vietnam War or more recently. We are not of the idea that if Israel pulls out of the occupied territories, everything will be solved overnight. Nor are we of the simple idea that Israel is the bad guy, certainly not the only bad guy in this story. We are pro-peace, but not necessarily pro-Palestinian. We are very critical of the Palestinian leadership. I personally am as critical of the Palestinian leadership as I am of the Israeli leadership. And I will come to that later. But the argument between ourselves and some European peace movements cuts even deeper. I have been personally on the battlefield twice in my life, for the first time as a reservist soldier with a tank unit on the Egyptian front in Sinai in 1967 and again on the Syrian front in the 1973 war. It was the most horrible experience of my whole life, and yet I’m not ashamed of fighting in those two wars. I’m not a pacifist in the sentimental sense of the word. If once again I felt that there was a real danger of my country being completely wiped off the map and my people being butchered, I would fight again, although I’m an old man. But I would only fight if I thought it was a matter of life and death, or if I thought anybody was trying to turn me or the next person into a slave. I would never fight – I would prefer to go to jail – over extra territories. I would never fight for an extra bedroom for the nation. I would never fight over holy places or holy sights. I would never fight over so-called national interests. But I would fight, and fight like the devil, for life and for freedom and for nothing else.

  Now this may create a certain gap between myself and the regular European pacifist, who maintains that the ultimate evil in the world is war. In my vocabulary war is terrible, yet the ultimate evil is not war but aggression. If in 1939 the whole world except for Germany had maintained that war was the worst of all evils in the world, then Hitler would have been lord of the universe by now. So, when you recognise aggression, you have to fight against it, wherever it comes from. But only over life and freedom, not over extra territory or extra resources.

  When I coined the phrase ‘Make Peace Not Love’, I was not, of course, preaching against making love. But I was, to some extent, trying to remove the widespread sentimental ‘mish-mash’ of peace and love and brotherhood and compassion and forgiveness and concession and so on, which makes people think that if only people would drop their weapons, the world would immediately become a marvellous, loving place. Personally, I happen to believe that love is a rare commodity. I think a human being, at least in my experience, can love ten people. If he’s very generous he can love twenty people. A lucky human being, a very lucky human being, may even be loved by ten people. If he’s exceedingly lucky, he may be loved by twenty people. If someone says to me that she loves Latin America, or he loves the Third World, or they love humanity, it is too thin to be meaningful. As a popular song lamented, many years ago, ‘there’s just not enough love to go round’. I don’t think love is the virtue by which we solve international problems. We need other virtues. We need a sense of justice, but we also need common sense, we need imagination, a deep ability to imagine the other, sometimes to put ourselves in the skin of the other. We need the rational ability to compromise and sometimes to make sacrifices and concessions, but we don’t need to commit suicide for the sake of peace. ‘I’ll kill myself so that you will be happy.’ Or, ‘I want you to kill yourself because that will make me happy.’ And those two attitudes are not dissimilar; they are closer than you think.

  In my view, the opposite of war is not love, and the opposite of war is not compassion, and the opposite of war is not generosity or brotherhood, or forgiveness. No, the opposite of war is peace. Nations need to live in peace. If I see in my lifetime the State of Israel and the State of Palestine, living next door to each other as decent neighbours without oppression, without exploitation, without bloodshed, without terror, without violence, I will be sated even if love does not prevail. And, as the poet Robert Frost reminded us, ‘Good fences makes good neighbors.’

  One of the things which makes this conflict particularly hard is the fact that the Israeli-Palestinian, the Israeli-Arab conflict, is essentially a conflict between two victims. Two victims of the same oppressor. Europe, which colonised the Arab world, exploited it, humiliated it, trampled upon its culture, controlled it and used it as an imperialistic playground, is the same Europe which discriminated against the Jews, persecuted them, harassed them, and finally, mass-murdered them in an unprecedented crime of genocide. Now, you would have thought that two victims immediately develop between themselves a sense of solidarity – as, for instance, in the poetry of Bertolt Brecht. But in real life, some of the worst conflicts are precisely the conflicts between two victims of the same oppressor. Two children of the same cruel parent do not necessarily love one another. Very often they see in each other the exact image of the cruel parent.

  And this is precisely the case not just between Israeli and Palestinian but between Jew and Arab. Each one of the parties looks at the other and sees in the other the image of their past oppressors. In much contemporary Arabic literature, though not in all of it (and I have to make a reservation here: I can read Arabic literature only in translation, as unfortunately I do not read Arabic) the Jew, especially the Israeli Jew, is often pictured as an extension of the white, sophisticated, tyrannising, colonising, cruel, heartless Europe of the past. These are the colonialists, who came to the Middle East once again, this time disguised as Zionists, but they came to tyrannise, to colonise and to exploit. These are the same people – we know them. Very often Arabs, even some sensitive Arab writers, fail to see us as what we, Israeli Jews, really are – a bunch of half-hysterical refugees and survivors, haunted by dreadful nightmares, traumatised not only by Europe but also by the way we were treated in Arabic and Islamic countries. Half the population of Israel are people who were kicked out of Arabic and Islamic countries. Israel is indeed one large Jewish refugee camp. Half of us are actually Jewish refugees from Arab countries, but Arabs don’t see us this way; they see us as an extension of colonialism. By the same token we, Israeli Jews, don’t see the Arabs, particularly the Palestinians, as what they are: victims of centuries of oppression, exploitation, colonialism and humilia
tion. No, we see them as pogrom-makers and Nazis, who just wrapped themselves in koffias and grew moustaches and got sun-tanned, but are in the same old game of cutting the throats of the Jews for fun. In short, they are our past oppressors all over again. In this respect there is a deep ignorance on both sides: not political ignorance about the purposes and the goals, but about the backgrounds, about the deep traumas of the two victims.

  I’ve been very critical of the Palestinian national movement for many years. Some of the reasons are historical, some of the reasons are not. But mostly I have been critical of the Palestinian national movement for failing to realise how genuine the Jewish connection to the land of Israel is. Failing to realise that modern Israel is not a product of a colonialist enterprise, or at least failing to tell it to their people. I should tell you immediately that I’m equally critical of generations of Israeli Zionists, who failed to imagine that there is a Palestinian people, a real people, with real and legitimate rights. So both leaderships past and, yes, present are guilty of either not understanding the tragedy, or at least not telling their people.

  Well, I don’t believe in a sudden burst of mutual love between Israel and Palestine. I don’t expect that, once some miraculous formula is found, the two antagonists will suddenly hug one another in tears in a Dostoyevskian scene of long-lost brothers reconciled – ‘O my brother, will you ever forgive me, how could I be so terrible, take the land, who cares about the land, just give me your love.’ Unfortunately, I don’t expect anything like this. I don’t expect a honeymoon either. If anything, I expect a fair and just divorce between Israel and Palestine. And divorces are never happy, even when they are more or less just. They still hurt, they are painful. Especially this particular divorce which is going to be a very peculiar divorce, because the two divorcing parties are definitely staying in the same apartment. No one is moving out. And the apartment being very small, it will be necessary to decide who gets bedroom A and who gets bedroom B and how about the living room; and the apartment being so small, some special arrangement has to be made about the bathroom and the kitchen. Very inconvenient. But better than the kind of living hell which everyone is going through now in that beloved country. A country where Palestinian men, women and children are daily oppressed, haunted, humiliated, deprived by the cruel Israeli military government. A country where Israeli people are daily terrorised by ruthless indiscriminate terrorist attacks on civilians, men, women, children, schoolboys, teenagers, shoppers in a mall. Anything is preferable to this! Especially, a fair divorce. And eventually perhaps, after we have conducted this painful fair divorce by creating two states, divided roughly according to demographic realities – and I’m not going to try to draw a map here, but I can tell you, in a nutshell, that essentially the lines should be similar to the pre-1967 lines, with some mutually agreed modifications and some special arrangements for the disputed holy places in Jerusalem – once this divorce is conducted and a partition is created, I believe Israelis and Palestinians will be quick to hop over the partition for a cup of coffee together.