by GABRIEL POLLEY
While Oz became an increasingly lonely voice in Israel calling for a two-state solution, Said was a spokesman for the cause of Palestinian liberation
This month marks the second anniversary of the death of Amos Oz, perhaps Israel’s most internationally recognised cultural figure.
On the surface, Oz occupied a position somewhat parallel to that of the late Edward Said (who died in 2003) in Palestinian society. Both were respected literary figures, regarded as spokespeople for their respective political causes: in Oz’s case liberal Zionism, and in Said’s the struggle for Palestinian liberation.
Both criticised their respective national leaderships, with Oz called a traitor by the Israeli right and Said’s books getting banned by the Palestinian Authority in the 1990s. Both also had reputations – deserved or undeserved – as voicing humanistic positions, able to see the shared humanity of “the other”.
Said and Oz were both born in western neighbourhoods of Jerusalem in the twilight years of the British Mandate – Said in 1935, Oz in 1939. While British colonialism and mass Jewish immigration provoked a Palestinian uprising from 1936 to 1939, the Jerusalem of Said’s and Oz’s childhoods was still one of coexistence. As Said notes in his memoir Out of Place, he was delivered by a Jewish midwife.
The young Said and Oz might have unknowingly passed each other on King George V Street, the thoroughfare connecting the neighbourhoods of Talbiya, with its elegant Palestinian villas like Said’s family’s, and Kerem Avraham, where Oz grew up among Russian Jewish immigrants.
Yet, any shared experience of childhood was torn apart by the Nakba, the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. Close to 800,000 Palestinians fled their homes, including in what became Israeli-controlled West Jerusalem, to overcrowded and impoverished refugee camps.
Oz noted in his semi-autobiographical A Tale of Love and Darkness that Palestinian homes in West Jerusalem would “fall empty, intact, into the hands of the Jews and that new people would come and live in those vaulted houses of pink stone and those villas with their many corniches and arches”.
Yet, Oz chose to dwell upon the “dancing, revelling, drinking, and weeping for joy” in Jerusalem’s Jewish neighbourhoods, rather than on Palestinians’ dispossession – and he continued to defend the events of 1948 throughout his life.
Losses in the Nakba
In contrast, Said wrote of the pain he felt “that the very quarters of the city in which I was born, lived and felt at home were taken over by Polish, German, and American immigrants who conquered the city and have made it the unique symbol of their sovereignty, with no place for Palestinian life”. Said did not return until 1992 through the privilege granted to him by an American passport.
Oz lived in Israel his whole life, citizen of a country that systematically denied the right of return to the Palestinian refugees of 1948 and their descendants.
Middle East Eye for more