Review of In the Land of Israel

This is a collection of interview articles which novelist Amos Oz conducted in October and November, 1982, while writing for the newspaper Davar. The titles given in the citations are those of the articles, which are also the titles of the collection's chapters.

1. "I'll tell you what shame is: they gave us [Mizrahi migrants to Israel] houses, they gave us the dirty work; they gave us education, and they took away our self-respect. What did they bring my parents to Israel for? I'll tell you what for, but you [Amos Oz] won't write this. You'll think it's just provocation. But wasn't it to do your dirty work? You [non-Mizrahi Israelis] didn't have Arabs then, so you needed our parents to do your cleaning and be your servants and your laborers. And policemen, too. You brought our parents to be your Arabs." Unnamed resident of Bet Shemesh. Quoted in "The Insult and the Fury", pg 36

2. "When you [left-wingers] were on top, you hid us away in holes, in moshavim and development towns, so the tourists wouldn't see us; so we wouldn't stain your image; so they'd think this was a white country. But that's all over now, because now we've come out of our holes. [...] Who built this country? Siegel or Bouhbout? Ashkenazi or Sephardi? A hundred years ago -- they said on TV -- the Alignment people came from Russia, and the first thing those Labor Party people did was bring a bunch of Yemenites from Yemen to do their dirty work. Only after that they made up all these stories." Unnamed resident of Bet Shemesh, pg 40-41

3. "That's the situation between the Jews and the Arabs here. It's like two people standing on a roof stuck tight together: if they don't want to fall off the roof together, they have to be careful. They have no choice -- they're stuck together very tight." Naif, a Palestinian from Ramallah. Quoted in "Just a Peace", pg 83

4. "Tell me yourself, do the bad guys really have it so bad in this world? Do they lack for anything? If anybody tries to lay a finger on them, they cut off his arms and legs. And sometimes they do the same for the people who haven't even tried anything. If they feel like eating something, and they can catch it and kill it, that's what they do. And they don't suffer an upset stomach afterward or any divine retribution. So from here on in, I want Israel to be a member of this club." "Z", a pseudonym. Quoted in "The Tender Among You, and Very Delicate", pg 89

5. "[...] we could have put all that [hypothetical violence] behind us and by now become a normal nation with prissy values, with humanistic neighborly relations with Iraq and Egypt, and with a slight criminal record -- just like everybody else. Like the English and the French and the Germans and the Americans -- who've already managed to forget what they did to the Indians -- and the Australians, who almost totally eliminated the aborigines. They've all done it. What's the big deal? What's so terrible about being a civilized people, respectable, with a slight criminal past?" "Z", pg 96

6. He [Z] replied calmly, "Listen, friend, if that celebrated Jewish mind had spent less time saving the world [...] and instead had hurried up a bit, only ten years, and set up a tiny, Lilliputian Jewish state [...] and invented in time a teeny-weeny atom bomb for the state -- if they'd only done those two things -- there would never have been a Hitler. Or a Holocaust. And nobody in the whole world would have dared to lay a finger on the Jews." "Z", pg 99

7. "I think that the positions of [Gush Emunim](https://www.knesset.gov.il/lexicon/eng/gush_em_eng.htm)[^1] really do constitute an irritating and alarming threat to the legitimacy of this secular, hedonistic 'Israeli-ism.' The existence of Gush Emunim disturbs your [secular Israelis'] experience of modern Western existence, including permissiveness and pacifism and internationalism; it interferes with your attempt to 'adjust' our society to fashionable Western values. You have been trapped by a multifaceted threat: first of all, in terms of Zionist fulfillment, you are no longer the pioneers. Second, you've been tangled up in a war you don't really believe in. Third, what you view as injustice is being done to Arabs in your name." Yisrael Harel, Chairman of Council of Jewish Settlements in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza [the occupied territories]. Quoted in "An Argument on Life and Death (A)", pg 115

8. I have stated many times that Zionism is not a first name but a surname, a family name, and this family is divided, feuding over the question of a "master plan" for the enterprise: How shall we live here? Shall we aspire to rebuild the kingdom of David and Solomon? Shall we construct a Marxist paradise here? A Western society, a social-democratic welfare state? Or shall we create a model of the petite bourgeoisie diluted with a little Yiddishkeit? Amos Oz, in a speech given to members of the Ofra settlement. Quoted in "An Argument on Life and Death (B)", pg 128

9. The controversy between "hawks" and "doves" is fundamentally not about the future of the territories. It is a controversy over the nature of Zionism and even the meaning of the Jewish destiny. The hawks maintain that there is some ancient, mysterious curse of fate because of which we are doomed to eternal conflict with an inimical, alien world, no matter what we do, and therefore we had better slough off the image of the "nice Jewish boy" and become the big bad wolves for a change -- they are not going to love us anyway, but maybe they will fear us. Some wolf: with claws made in the United States and jaws donated by charity. Whereas the doves maintain that there is a certain correlation between our acts, our behavior, and the support we garner. He who shuts his eyes and sings ecstatically, "All the world's against us" forgets, for instance, the broad, vital, and fateful support we had in [1948] and again in [1967], despite the oil and assorted other delicacies the Arabs had to offer anyone who would line up against us. Amos Oz, pg 146

10. "It was a little strange. It annoyed me. The Zionists should be soldiers! Let them be a brutal enemy! They're not supposed to look like the old people of Nablus! And then I saw little children playing in the street. And then I saw an elderly Jewish laborer drag an ice box and load it onto his cart, which was drawn by a donkey. All of a sudden it became difficult to hate them. They looked too much like human beings. That trip caused a small crisis in me. Perhaps something similar happens to a Jew who comes to Germany for the first time and suddenly finds that the streets are not filled with uniformed Nazis with jackboots and whips, but that there are old people, poor people; that there are lovely children; that there are human beings without horns and tails. It was hard!" Ali "Abu Haled" Al-Halili[^2], a literature editor at Palestinian newspaper Al-Fajr. Quoted in "The Dawn", pg 175

11. "Look, we've learned something from you. We want to be an open, pluralistic, democratic society. And that is not about to happen so soon with Jordan. We still remember King Hussein, all right. I, for one, am willing to state openly and out loud today: the Jews have a historical claim to part of Palestine. Your forefathers were here, along with our forefathers. Your suffering grants you rights, as does our suffering. I accept that. Do you know what the hardest thing for me to accept, the hardest thing for me to swallow? That we are two similar peoples. That our fate is interlocked. Am I happy about it? No, not at all. You are not happy about it, either. But nothing can be done about that any more: we are linked together. You are our destiny. We are your destiny. Our respective disasters, yours and ours, for decades in this land -- these very disasters have welded us together. And that's it. Either we will continue our stubbornness until we destroy each other completely, or we will recognize each other and recognize the tie between us, and then, maybe, there will be an end to the suffering. Perhaps. My tears in Haifa that I told you about -- perhaps it was my hatred that wept then, because it was dying. My hatred is dead. Now I have only bitterness and anger, but no more hatred. There's nothing we can do about it: here in this land we are welded together, Jews and Arabs, forever." Ali "Abu Haled" Al-Halili, pg 177

12. "My dream is -- before my time comes, they should give me two minutes on the television Friday night, when everybody is listening, and I will tell the young people what everybody should be saying here every morning and night, should say thanks God for everything what we got here in this country: the army, the ministers by the Knesset, the El Al, the income tax even, the streets, the kibbutzim, the factories -- everything! What is this?! They forgot how we had it in this country in the beginning? There wasn't nothing! Sand and enemies! Now, thanks God, we got the State and everybody has what to eat and clothes and education -- not enough yet, the education -- and we even got a lot of luxury! What did we have in the Diaspora? We had bubkes, that's what!" Unnamed Rumanian resident of Ashdod. Quoted in "At the End of that Autumn: A Midwinter Experience", pg 224

[^1]: A 1970s-1980s political-religious Israeli movement which aimed to settle the occupied territories. [^2]: Al-Halili later accused Amos Oz of misrepresenting the former's beliefs. For more, see the explanatory note "Some Reactions to In the Land of Israel", at the end of that book.