Amos Oz saw it coming in 1982

The Israeli reporter was a realist in a society awash with messianic dreams.

Israeli paratroopers at the airport in Beirut, Lebanon. 4 August 1982. Wikimedia/Israeli army spokesman

Israel’s strategic situation on October 6, 2023 was as good as it gets.

Locally, the Palestinian movement was divided and incapable of exerting any kind of coordinated pressure. Regionally, Iran was enough of a menace to push Arab states to seek alliances with Israel, but too weakened and cornered to threaten that alliance. (The Arab Spring and the Saudi-Iranian proxy war also lowered the salience of the Palestinian issue and made it easier to suppress Arab public opinion.) Internationally, the United States had an almost religious (or sometimes literally religious) devotion to keeping the Middle East this way.

The October 7 attacks were a total surprise, yet in hindsight, the arrangement was obviously vulnerable to a shock. American leaders’ utopian visions for the Middle East were increasingly out of step with the American people’s disinterest in the region; Washington would only get away with its bluffs and promises as long as the public was unaware. Iran was regaining its strength and the Arab states were eager to mend ties. The slow-motion regime collapse in the West Bank was creating a renewed, more aggressive Palestinian nationalism. And Israel itself was getting radicalized, with factions in power waiting for a crisis to carry out drastic measures.

Almost immediately after October 7, the Israeli government started toying with the idea of ethnically cleansing Palestinians from Gaza. The Israeli army ordered 1 million Palestinians out of their homes while the United States and others lobbied Egypt to accept the refugees. With the post-October 7 revenge fever wearing off, and most of the Palestinian population staying inside Gaza for now, the Israeli military brass seems to have caught buyer’s remorse. Top generals and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant have demanded that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanayhu come up with a new plan for postwar governance in Gaza. Given the amount of destruction that Israel has inflicted on Palestinian society, any such plan might require heavy lifting by foreign peacekeepers.

Here and There In the Land of Israel (the English edition is just In the Land of Israel) was written at a similar time in Israeli history. In 1982, Israel launched an invasion of Lebanon that was supposed to have squashed the Palestinian movement. Instead, it left Israelis with new enemies and fresh traumas. In the Land of Israel is a collection of gonzo journalist essays by Amos Oz, published between late 1982 and early 1983, just as the story of the Sabra and Shatila massacre was breaking and the Israeli peace movement was gaining steam.

Oz, an old-school socialist-Zionist par excellence, decided to survey all the others with whom he shared the Holy Land: traditionalist Orthodox anti-Zionists, the conservative Mizrahi (Middle Eastern Jewish) working class, right-wing settlers, and of course, Palestinians. Although the essays are supposed to be philosophical and humanistic rather than political, Oz uses them to make the case for a two-state solution and Palestinian independence, which was surely a radical proposition for an Israeli to adopt in 1982.

The most politically relevant part of the book is the debates in Tekoa and Ofra, two West Bank settlements. The settlers try to frame Oz as a squishy vegetarian who doesn’t understand the necessity of strength. But it quickly becomes clear that Oz is the one thinking about the realities of power, including its limits. The settlers’ oh-so-realist vision, meanwhile, is quite detached from material reality: an unlimited racial holy war against the Arab world — or maybe the whole world — to bring about spiritual redemption.

An American-Israeli settler in Tekoa named Harriet tells Oz that:

“Maybe the Arabs will realize one day that this land belongs to the Jews. Maybe the whole world will realize. But only on the condition that first of all we realize it ourselves. That we unite. That people from among us stop trying to undermine our right to the land. That they stop playing into the hands of the Arabs and the goyim [outsiders]. In general, if we take into account what the goyim might say, we’ll have nothing. We have a lot of power, and now power is what should talk. The goyim understand power.”

And can Israel ignore the goyim? Where will the aid come from? And the arms?

“The aid!” Harriet bursts out. “It should stop! Totally! It’s because of the aid that we have all this crookedness! They buy us! They drive us crazy with their gold!”

And the arms?

“Weapons aren’t what win a war! Men win wars! Faith wins! God almighty wins! The world has to realize that. In the Six-Day War, and the Yom Kippur War, too, we should never have stopped. We should have gone on, brought them to total surrender! Smashed their capital cities! Who cares what the goyim were yelling?” After some thought she adds, “But that wouldn’t have brought peace, either. Maybe it would have given us some quiet, but not peace. Because this is a religious war! A holy war! For them and for us! A war against all of Islam. And against the goyim.” (“Holy war” and “capital cities” she says in English.)

Says [her Yemeni-Israeli husband] Menachem, “But in their heart of hearts, the Moslems all know very well that this land is ours. It’s even written in their books—in the Koran. Eventually they’ll have to admit it.”

And live under our sovereignty? And do the dirty work for us?

“Why not?” asks Harriet. “Isn’t that the way it is in the Bible? Weren’t there hewers of wood and carriers of water? [Now therefore ye are cursed, and there shall none of you be freed from being bondmen, and hewers of wood and drawers of water for the house of my God. - Joshua 9:23] For murderers that’s very light punishment! It’s mercy!”

And is there no point in trying to compromise?

“With the goyim? Whenever we gave in to them we had troubles. That’s the way it was in the Bible. King Saul lost his whole kingdom because he took pity on Amalek. The goyim are bound to be against us. It’s their nature. Sometimes it’s because of their religion, sometimes it’s out of ideology, sometimes out of anti-Semitism, but actually it’s all God’s will. God hardens Pharaoh’s heart and then He destroys him. It’s them or us.”

Oz’s host in Ofra offers him a diet version of the same ideas, dressed up in more practical justifications:

And now I want to tell you something with far-reaching implications: even if the Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] prolongs the war with the Arabs, I accept it. Because the alternative to persistent battle is creeping retreat. Gnawing away. If tomorrow, God forbid, there were no Ofra, then the day after there would be no Hulda [the kibbutz where Oz lived]. Psychological retreat begets political and territorial retreat. And there “is nothing to prevent that retreat except the willingness to do battle out of faith. The trouble with the ‘Israelis’ is that they don’t believe in any absolute truth. Just as, in Western culture, everything for you is relative and there are two sides to every coin, and so forth. You’re only willing to fight a total war when you see a threat to your comfortable life style, to your personal materialistic accomplishments, to individual freedom. And of course you’re angry when someone drags you into total war over a matter of faith or principle, or even a battle for the existence of the Land of Israel and the fulfillment of the Zionist idea. Look, Zionism has always stood up against overwhelming odds, on the brink of lunatic daring. Perhaps the real argument between us is about the limits of Zionist potential. But when the Israeli resolve shrivels and folds, the potential also shrinks.

It’s the same attitude that fake realists in America often take: everything is a matter of willpower. There is no debate to be had about scarce resources or unintended consequences; the other side is just cowardly or squeamish. The smart thing to do happens to be the one that feels good.

This idea that Oz was too comfortable to understand war — especially relative to his settler counterparts — is ridiculous. Oz grew up during the 1948 war, and fought in three subsequent wars with a NAHAL unit. Menachem was displaced from Jerusalem in 1948 and did perform army service, but moved to Britain and sat out the 1967 war, only returning after Israel conquered the West Bank. And Harriet, like many of the other settlers Oz met, was an American who jumped into the conflict much later in life.

Oz disagrees with the settlers’ practical vision for the conflict, but he is also repulsed by the kind of nationalism they want Israel to exhibit. He calls the people of Ofra, to their faces, a “prime example” of “moral autism.” They want the rights of a nation-state without any of its responsibilities, and they want Israelis to shed any sentimentality towards Palestinians while demanding the same sentimental feelings from the outside world. Oz sees this contradiction in:

First of all, the attitude toward the Arabs here: the demand that you make of them to agree to live with a status we would never accept for ourselves. Second, in the peculiar attitude toward the “outside world”: on the one hand we demand to be judged by a special standard, in that our enormous contribution to culture be remembered as well as our terrible suffering and the guilt of the gentiles, and so forth and so on…at the fringes of our political spectrum a sniveling wish is being sounded to be granted a license for savagery “like everyone else”: not to be accepted into the family of nations which enabled us to stand on our feet but, rather, to join the family of savage nations, so that we will be allowed to do what Brezhnev and Assad are allowed to do.

Ironically, the attitude that Oz sees in the more-Zionist-than-thou settlers echoes the attitudes that he sees in the anti-Zionist religious community of Jerusalem. The anti-Zionists take the same stance towards the State of Israel that the settlers take towards the outside world: it’s just another enemy in a line of enemies that God ordained, and the Jewish religion will outlive it, as God ordained. At the same time, Oz writes, the anti-Zionist community is willing to secure aid and protection from its Zionist enemy through emotional blackmail:

with its secret weapon, with the guilt feelings it generates and emanates. A bubbling fountain of scorching guilt feelings. Guilt feelings in mass production. A nuclear reactor of guilt feelings. You? You would dare to challenge us?! To persecute us?! To attack, or even to criticize us?! After what Hitler did to us?!

The book ends with an essay on Ashdod, a “pleasant city, unpretentious…A city planned by social democrats…living entirely in the present tense.” There Oz feels a sense of warm camaraderie between Israelis, with neither isolationism nor arrogance towards the foreign, but a sense of Israel’s small place in the world. “You will find no Light unto the Nations here, but also no ghetto or slum,” Oz writes. A pleasant little vision for a pleasant little country, which can only be realized if Israelis agree to “take smaller bites, relinquish the totality of the Land for the sake of internal and external peace.”

While there is plenty to criticize in his dismissal of religion and religious people, what may be more interesting is how Oz is afflicted by many of the same hangups he dislikes in others. Oz tries to draw a line between the ethnic cleansing during the Israeli war of independence, and the ethnic cleansing that the settlers want — between “the ‘Judaization’ of Jaffa and Ramla and the ‘Judaization’ of the West Bank” — by claiming that the former was done by “a drowning man who clings to the only plank he can.” But isn’t that how the settlers justify themselves, too? Don’t they claim that the alternative to expansion is defeat?

Oz also recognizes that Palestinians have a legitimate nationalism, a proposition that was (and still is) no small thing for an Israeli to accept. Yet he cannot fully accept Palestinian nationalism as an organic movement. Oz hedges his comparison by claiming that the Palestinians are backed by “the power of the Islamic bloc, the resources of the Soviet alliance, the masses of the third world,” while the early Zionists were just “a few hundred desperate visionaries, full of suffering and dreams.” (So much for the aid that Oz had tut-tutted to settlers about.) And he claims that his moderate Palestinian interlocutors adopted their humble demand for independence “only after decades of savage attempts to throw Israel into the sea, in blood and fire.”

In a postscript to later editions of the book, written at the beginning of the Oslo peace process, Oz complains that Western leftists simply don’t understand the “legitimate fears and apprehensions” of the Israeli side. Israel, he writes, has “lived out the experience of a collective Salman Rushdie.” It’s the same cognitive block that Oz lambasts the settlers for: the Israel he sees is not a nuclear-armed state and a regional military power, but a human-sized victim of persecution. It may be understandable that someone of Oz’s generation with Oz’s traumas would see himself in those terms. But at some point, Israelis have to come to terms with why the situation looks different to everyone else.

And as an answer to this Israeli anxiety, Oz lays out the formula that has caused the two-state solution to fail: “the fulfillment of Palestinian national rights will be deployed over a period of several years and delivered not mile by mile but one attribute of sovereignty after another…Israel will have the time necessary to find out if this check is valid: Are the Palestinians and the Arab nations able to deliver peace?” Although he acknowledges that self-determination is “not a decoration for excellent behavior or for a wonderful record,” he proposes putting exactly those conditions on Palestinian statehood.

The next three decades seemed to prove Oz’s entire worldview wrong. For Palestinians, goodwill did not beget goodwill and limited sovereignty did not bring full independence. Instead, it lightened the load on Israel while continuing to expose Palestinians to all the dangers that sovereignty was supposed to prevent: killing, arrest, expulsion. The settlements grew from a few thousand people in the 1980s to nearly half a million today. For Israelis, the Second Intifada seemed to prove that compromise only invites violence, and the Iron Dome era did show that repression brings security. Despite all the hand-wringing, liberal human rights concerns did not materially affect U.S. aid. Oz himself defended, however reluctantly, the Israeli invasion of Gaza in 2014.

Now, six years after Oz passed away, his warnings seem to be coming true. Israelis thought they could get away with holding onto all of Palestine, but the conflict came back into Israel proper instead. The settler right is discovering that it does actually care about, to borrow Harriet’s phrasing, “what the goyim are yelling.” The threat of losing foreign support is more serious than ever. Nor is Israel’s international predicament just a matter of mushy Western humanitarianism; Israel is starting to be treated as an irritating liability by China, a rising superpower with no sentimental feelings towards any side of the conflict, and the United Arab Emirates, the most cynical actor in the whole region.

After all these tribulations, the two-state solution is still a plausible eventual outcome. While the Israeli nuclear arsenal has secured the state from physical destruction, mass expulsion will not silence the Palestinian issue. Egypt and Jordan have also made it clear that they will not accept or assimilate a new Palestinian refugee wave. (In Jordan’s case, the entire point of having a peace treaty with Israel was to avoid that outcome.) The hardening of Israeli and Palestinian society may be an obstacle to a one-state solution or binational federation, but it is no obstacle to an unhappy divorce. Israeli troops left Lebanon, after all, not because a peace treaty was signed but because Lebanese insurgents inflicted a high enough cost on them.

Israelis will likely have far less control over a future partition than they did over the Oslo process. The loss of U.S. interest or ability to intervene in the region, the increasing importance of Arab allies to Israel’s security, the de-containment of Iran, and the unfreezing of the conflict in the West Bank will all undermine the secure position that Israel has taken for granted. While settlers may help expand Israel’s borders on the margins, their dispersal among Palestinian population centers (especially any future settlements in Gaza) will also present a huge liability. Foreign powers, fed up with a constant source of regional instability, could decide to carve out a separate State of Palestine regardless of what people on the ground (least of all Israelis) want, finishing what the British Empire and United Nations never could. 

Oz, at least, recognized that the end to the conflict would not have to be a kumbaya moment. “Neither the Palestinians nor the Israelis are lucky enough to have the privilege of choosing their enemy. And it is your enemy you must make peace with — not because he is ‘nice,’ not necessarily because you feel you have wronged him any more than he has wronged you,” the postscript to In the Land of Israel states. “You make peace with your enemy simply because he is your enemy.”