Raw Israeli attitudes

Press, 14 April 1984, Page 20

Raw Israeli attitudes

In the Land of Israel. By Amos Ox. Fontana paperbacks, 1983. 244 pp. glossary. $8.95 (Reviewed by Joan Curry) In 1982 the author took a trip through his own country, Israel, in order to find out what the people were thinking and saying and doing about the problems of their new nation. He presents a record of his encounters in a series of impressionistic conversations that illustrate a whole range of raw and volatile opinion. He found people all over the country far from complacent and ready to argue about what to do with the Arabs, the Zionists, the anti-Zionists, the Left, the Right, and all the in-betweens. Everyone it seems had a point of view, a theory on what was wrong with the world, and a personal solution to its problems. Many expressed themselves passionately and pressed for radical, and often contradictory, courses of action. Even allowing for the fact that Israelis are fighting, quite literally, for their survival, it is disturbing that so many of them are accepting the need for, and even advocating, violent solutions. There seems little point in marching for peace and preaching brotherly love in such a climate. One man, identified for his protection only as Z, offered an

extremist view that Israel should have taken what she needed by force right from the beginning and not bothered about playing fair. “It’s a crying shame — we could have put all that behind us and by now become a normal nation with prissy values, with humanistic neighbourly relations with Iraq and Egypt, and with a slight criminal record — just like everyone else.” On publication of the book the author received many letters accusing him of inventing “Z” for the sake of putting an unacceptable viewpoint, and also received many letters from people identifying themselves with that same viewpoint. The author, whose own statement is also given a place in the book, is a pluralist who recognises the validity of several different principles and urges the co-existence of all shades of opinion. He sees the dangers of any one faction prevailing over the rest, given the heat generated by the problems of settling a new state with a predominantly immigrant population, and threatened on the borders by resentful neighbours. As one contributor put it, in the context of the Arab/Israeli question: “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.”