Amos Oz, an internationally acclaimed Israeli author and a leader in the Israeli peace movement for more than 25 years, drew a full house to his lecture last Wednesday at the Medical Sciences building.
“This is a voice that is long overdue here,” said Tilly Shames, Director of Israel Affairs for Hillel, before the event. “He is coming from a literary perspective, a left-leaning perspective, a moderate perspective and a Zionist perspective, all together.”
Oz was introduced by his friend of 34 years, Professor Nicholas De Lange of Cambridge University. De Lange, who has translated all of Oz’s books into English, opened by saying that Amos Oz “has long enjoyed a reputation not only as a spellbinding storyteller, but also as something of a prophet. That is, a licensed critic of authority.”
The title of Oz’s lecture was “How to Cure a Fanatic: Bringing Peace to the Middle- East.” Oz said that “fanaticism begins at home,” and that fanatics have a “burning desire to force other people to change” and “uncompromising righteousness.” Eventually, Oz said that fanaticism is not curable, as the title of the lecture indicated, but that it is containable.
“We’re not one,” he said of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “We’re not happy, and we’re not even a family. We are two families”. He said that the conflict is territorial and used the metaphor of a house to describe the land of Israel and Palestine, and compared Israelis and Palestinians to a couple ready to divorce.
Oz told the predominantly North American audience that getting to know one another is not the answer.
“Rivers of coffee drunk together won’t extinguish this tragedy,” he said “It is a clash of right and right”, he said, illustrating that both sides are equally correct in many of their arguments and that this is the source of the conflict.
Oz’s solution was simple. “Compromise is life,” he said. “I mean trying to meet somewhere halfway. The opposite [of compromise] is not idealism and devotion… The opposite is fanaticism and death”.
“Some [of what was said], I would agree with,” said Mughir Hindi of the Palestinians’ Right to Return Coalition after the lecture. “And I see a positive kind of a new discussion coming out.” However, Hindi added that he disagreed with much of Oz’s interpretation of the history of the conflict.
“It was an outstanding lecture,” said professor Derek Penslar, director of U of T’s Jewish Studies department. “It laid out that although his particular proposal of a two-state solution may not be acceptable to many in our campus community, all the alternatives are worse.”
Oz said his reason for coming to Toronto to speak was simple: “I came to share with people in Toronto some of my perspective. I hope I made people think, reconsider and re-imagine the situation.
“If I’ve done that, I’ve earned my bread.”
