BDS's next man of the year, Amos Oz

...I feel sorry for Amos Oz. I feel sorry for the camp which used to be a peace camp. It has failed to bring peace closer, but has succeeded in bolstering the Palestinian rejectionist camp and the campaign for Israel's destruction.

While the leftist camp has failed to
bring peace closer, it has succeeded
in bolstering the Palestinian rejectionist
 camp and the campaign for Israel's
destruction (Photo: Gil Yohanan)

Ben-Dror Yemini..
Israel Opinion/Ynet..
09 November '15..

Amos Oz will win the BDS campaign's man of the year award. It's strange, because the Israeli author is against the BDS movement. But he recently announced that he would boycott state-sponsored events around the world.

There is nothing original about this move. Oz is joining a new trend of a small and noisy minority among US Jews: We love Israel, we are Zionist, but we are basically joining the boycott against Israel. It's true that the leaders of the boycott campaign are against peace, it's true that they are against two states, it's true that they object to the actual existence of the State of Israel, it’s true that they mainly identify with Hamas - but does that really matter? Intellectuals, as much as others, must join trends. Now Oz is one of them, and it's sad.

It's sad because the Zionist Oz - an Israel lover, not an Israel hater - symbolizes the tragedy of the Israeli Zionist left.

During Operation Protective Edge, Oz made sensible comments which angered the radical left. Oz delivered two important lectures this year and combined them into one article, in which he laments what we are going through. He does not share the left's illusions on the Palestinians. He does not disregard the right's fears over what will happen here if there is an agreement. And he reaches the conclusion that there is no escape from pursuing an agreement and a separation. For our sake, he argues, for our sake. It’s a national interest. I support almost every sentence in the article. Occasionally, maybe not as often as I should, I write it myself.

And this is where the tragedy lies: Because the voice is Jacob's voice, but the hands are the hands of Esau. You can’t make rebuking comments of a loving person, which can be accepted by most Israelis, including a large part of right-wing voters, and at the same time join Israel haters' operation pattern.

And that's the exact story of a large part of the Israeli left: It's okay to criticize the government. It’s okay to warn of wrongs. It's okay to equip hundreds of Palestinians with cameras, so that once in a few months someone will be able to catch a soldier beating or cursing a Palestinian. But when this "criticism" is mainly used by the campaign for Israel's destruction - you become part of it.

Amos Oz and his coterie of Canaanite prophets

...The next time Amos Oz and his coterie of Canaanite prophets offer us their opinions as semi-prophets, we should keep in mind that the overwhelming majority of Israeli Jews reject their message. However it will end up looking, our Judaism and our Jewish identity is both vital and flourishing. On the contrary, it is Oz’ utopian cosmoplitanism that belongs in a museum.

Jeffrey Woolf..
Times of Israel..
25 May '14..

For the second time in as many weeks,novelist Amos Oz has favored us with his wisdom. Last week, he declared to Israel and the world (urbi et orbi, as the Catholics put it) that the Hilltop Youth, who he assumes to be responsible for the ‘Price Tag’ attacks, are nothing less than Neo-Nazis. Today, Professor Oz summarily dismissed Prime Minister Netanyahu’s insistence that any agreement with the Palestinians include a declaration acknowledging Israel’s right to exist as the nation state of the Jewish People as ‘superfluous.’ One gets the sense from his statement, moreover, that he judges the Prime Minister’s demand to be nothing more than a tactical move to avoid making peace.

Both of these assertions can be addressed, and taken down, separately. Indeed, Oz has already drawn a tremendous amount of criticism for the first (despite the fact that such attacks, whoever perpetrated them, should be duly prosecuted). As to the second, more recent pronouncement, there is also a plethora of articles cogently defending the absolute necessity for such an Arab/Muslim recognition, from both right and left.

I would like, here, to call attention to the fact that the Oz’ two assertions are really connected. They are both acute expressions of his integrated worldview. Oz is the foremost, living representative of an established tradition in modern Hebrew literature that espouses the total elimination of Israel’s Jewish identity, and cultural and religious character. The tradition can be traced back to Yosef Haim Brenner, through the Canaanite movement of the 1950′s and 1960′s, down to Oz and his compatriot A. B. Yehoshua (among others).

I first realized this fact almost twenty years ago, at the Israel Conference of the Wexner Heritage Foundation in 1995. It was the halcyon days of Oslo when the mainstream thought that peace was around the corner, and the organizers invited Oz to engage in a dialogue with the right wing activist and thinker, Elyakim Haetzni on the future of Israel. Upon arriving, Oz adamantly refused to sit next to Haetzni, or even to acknowledge his presence. The moderator, Professor Arnold Eisen, was forced to sit between them. (Oz’ pointed refusal to even look at Haetzni shocked the Israelis who were present. The Americans didn’t realize what was transpiring.)

In his remarks, Oz laid out his vision for Israel’s future. He took the city of Jerusalem as an allegory. The city, he said, is divided into the New City and the Old City. The former is full of life, progress, and intoxicating vitality. Living there, with its energy and drama, is like living in a world of Live Theatre. The Old City, by contrast, is a place of the past. Living there is like living in a museum, a tribute to a long lost, dead world. ‘No one,’ he concluded, ‘wants to live in a museum.’

In the Land of Oz by Sarah Honig

...Put bluntly, our opinion-molders of the Oz prototype somewhat identify with the point of view of those who viscerally hate us. In the Land of Oz, we deserve no better. In the Land of Oz, it’s probably all our fault anyway. Seen that. Been there. End of story.

Yigal Tumarkin’s
portrait of his friend
Amos Oz, entitled
“Oz in a mask of Oz.”

Sarah Honig..
Another Tack..
15 May 14..

Meretz’s grand guru Amos Oz has told us that, being “a man of words,” he carefully considers his every utterance and its possible nuances. This was his practice, the novelist attests, ahead of his recent 75th birthday gala where he berated “Hebrew neo-Nazis.”

No inadvertent slip of the tongue, it was Oz’s premeditated refinement of Prof. Yeshayahu Leibowitz’s infamous “Judeo-Nazis” denigration. That bilious barb against Israeli soldiers – also calculated and never retracted – cost Leibowitz his Israel Prize in 1993 (when then-premier Yitzhak Rabin threatened to boycott the ceremony).

But Oz doesn’t stand to lose by his provocation. Quite the contrary, the Neo-Nazi defamation can do him nothing but a whole lot of good.

If anything, it has given a major boost to his tireless campaign to at long last win the Nobel Prize for literature. Oz, already the darling of literati and glitterati in Germany – the Nazis’ original homeland – can only win hearts and minds in Israel-bashing Europe if he seems to join Europe’s crusade against his compatriots.

The more he dissociates himself from the Israeli majority and the greater the zest with which he whacks it, the more Oz appears to cleanse himself of our Jewish sins. The more assiduously he cleanses himself, the more Oz gets to bask in the ambiance of European approval. He’s generously showered with accolades from latter-day Judeophobes parading as righteous critics of villainous Israeli policies.

In the Nobel Committee context, the very semblance of post-Zionist enlightenment can jack up a pretentious author’s junk bonds to hot-issue stock. Hence Oz has done his Nobel quest no disservice by charging that assorted graffiti-scrawlers are scary Neo-Nazi fiends.

The progeny and/or veiled torchbearers of actual Nazis cannot but be thrilled to quote a native of the Jewish state carping about the presence therein of “Hebrew Neo-Nazis.” This surely can help facelift more than a little European ugliness and for that favor Oz will doubtless be handsomely recompensed.

To be sure, this by no means is Oz’s first inflammatory taunt. At a June 8, 1989 Peace Now rally, Oz decreed that “Gush Emunim is a messianic sect, closed-minded and cruel, a band of armed gangsters, perpetrators of crimes against humanity, sadists, pogromists and murderers who crept out of a dark corner of Judaism, from the cellars of bestiality and defilement, in order to impose their bloodthirsty mad ritual.”

The above was a mere forerunner of further invective. Oz has regularly spouted similar vitriol over the quarter of a century that separates his two mouthfuls.

And there was plenty more besides meticulously-phrased revilement. Oz, for example, visited convicted murderer Marwan Barghouti in prison and later sent him the Arabic translation of his book A Tale of Love and Darkness, replete with the following personal dedication:”This story is our story. I hope you read it and understand us better, as we attempt to understand you. Hoping to meet soon in peace and freedom…”

For those who may have forgotten, here’s a reminder of whom Oz dreams of freeing. Barghouti, one-time commander of the particularly vicious Fatah offshoot of Tanzim, is doing five life terms and another 40 years for attempted murder. He was found guilty by an Israeli civilian court on May 20, 2004 of five counts of murder, including commissioning and organizing the attack on Tel Aviv’s Seafood Market restaurant, where three guests partaking in a bachelorette party were shot to death.

Yet inexplicably Barghouti boasts numerous leftwing Israeli fans, who unstintingly advocate his release on the unsubstantiated grounds that he alone can revive the moribund peace process. In their eyes, Barghouti’s goodwill is trustworthy and irreproachable.

Dear Palestine – Jews Will Not Be Suckers Anymore

David Singer..
J-Wire..
01 February '13..

Amos Oz represents the perfect example of a writer of stories and tales who should stick to writing and not trade on his unrivaled excellence and international recognition in that field to try and influence the course of Israeli politics.

This becomes embarrassingly evident when considering his political opinions disclosed in an article written for the New York Times by Roger Cohen on 28 January.

His introductory remarks to Cohen are indeed promising:

“Most Israelis would wave goodbye to the West Bank but they don’t want to be suckers, they don’t want the Gaza scenario to repeat itself”

Israelis were really taken for suckers after unilaterally evacuating Gaza in 2005 – receiving in return the indiscriminate firing of thousands of rockets into Israeli civilian population centres as thank you presents since then.

Israelis will not be suckered into suffering a repeat performance of such war crimes emanating from any areas of the West Bank ceded by them to the Arabs.

IMRA Weekly Commentary: Israeli doves failed mission

– apologists for the Palestinians instead of defenders of agreements

Dr. Aaron Lerner
IMRA
Weekly Commentary
18 August '11



A reminder from the past:

"... WHAT if they cheat? What if they take whatever we give them and demand even more, still exercising violence and terror? Within the proposed settlement, Israel will be in a position to close in on Palestine and undo the deal...

Once peace comes, Israeli doves, more than other Israelis, must assume a clear-cut "hawkish" attitude concerning the duty of the future Palestinian regime to live by the letter and the spirit of its obligations. ...”
Amos Oz - "From Battles To Bridges", The Jerusalem Post, September 3, 1993

Did Amos Oz, who has consistently avoided criticizing the Palestinians for failing to honor the Oslo agreements, abandon his commitment to press for Palestinian compliance?

Here’s the trick: Amos Oz wrote about “[O]nce peace comes”.

That’s final status “peace” not the interim Oslo agreements.

And there is an internal logic to this if one subscribes to the secular messianic belief that the day Israel withdraws to the ’67 lines that we will enjoy utopian peace with the Arabs.

Because the flip side of blindly embracing that “ending the occupation brings utopian peace” is that what the Arabs say or do before that day is not relevant for policy making.

Are the Amos Oz’s of the world really so embarrassingly silly in their belief system?

It could be.

But here is the catch.

These secular messianics are a miniscule minority in Israeli society.

Their ideas may get support and funding from overseas, but at the end of the day, they have to convince rational Israelis to support a deal with the Palestinians.

Rational Israelis do indeed care about what the Palestinians say and do before the “end of the occupation.”

And thus, even the secular messianics have a vested interest in pressing for Palestinian compliance today in order to garner the support of rational Israelis.

This would not be the first time that the messianic camp took the rational Israelis into account

This was the logic behind Beilin-Mazen, the Geneva Initiative and other similar projects aimed at coming up with verbiage that at least superficially could be used in order to prove to rational nonbelievers that a “deal” indeed could be struck.

To paraphrase Oz: Israeli doves, more than other Israelis, must today assume a clear-cut "hawkish" attitude concerning the duty of the Palestinians to live by the letter and the spirit of their obligations.

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Navon - Twilight of the Idols

Emmanuel Navon
For the Sake of Zion
14 June '11

http://navonsblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/twilight-of-idols.html

Israel’s intellectuals are worried. The Israeli Holy Trinity (Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua, and David Grossman) is getting old. The Hebrew University’s Pantheon (Martin Buber, Yehuda Magnes, and Yeshayahu Leibowitz) belongs to History. Avraham Burg tries to mimic Leibowitz, but it is hard to inherit the Lithuanian brainbox when you didn’t finish college. As for Shlomo Sand, Moshe Zuckermann and Ilan Pappé, only European neo-Marxists are willing to attend their lectures and to publish their books.

“It used to be that … they would call me from Army Radio” complains Moshe Zuckermann to Ofer Aderet from Ha’aretz (“The Shrinking of the Israeli Mind,” June 7, 2011). So what happened? “The people have been silenced. They tried to strangle them –and they’ve succeeded” he says. Zuckermann doesn’t specify whom he means by “they” but Daniel Gutwein blames “market forces.” You see, explains Gutwein, “The market … ensures there is no intellectual discussion.” As for Shlomo Sand, he blames the Universities themselves: “To become a professor” he says “you have to be cautious.”

One only has to look at the political makeup of Israel’s social science faculties to wonder (or, rather, to understand) what Sand means by “cautious.” As for “market forces” being the enemy of intellectual discussion, I bet Bernard Henri-Lévy would beg to differ: he flies a privet jet and yet has quite an audience both at home and abroad (including in Israel). He is mostly excused for his buffoonery because, at the end of the day, he is knowledgeable, writes well, and keeps renewing his stock.

Most Israeli intellectuals, by contrast, are provincial and fossilized. Nowhere but in Israel have I seen academics and journalists who still think that mentioning Foucault and Derrida is cool. Those people have been living off the same tired mantras for decades: the occupation is the source of all evil; religion is for retards; the advent of peace depends on Israel alone. It is not that Israelis have become “anti-intellectual” or that’s they have been “strangled.” It is just that they are tired of hearing the nonsense of hypocritical conformists.

One noticeable exception is Yehuda Shenhav. A sociology professor at Tel-Aviv University, Shenhav expresses unorthodox views and has no qualms about being a dissident. His last book, Bounded by the Green Line (Am Oved, 2010), exposes the intellectual hypocrisy of Israel’s Ashkenazi establishment. By blaming “the occupation” for Israel’s problems, Shenhav argues, the Zionist left is lying to itself. Shenhav goes further: the Zionist left’s obsession with “the occupation” has less to do with liberalism than with nostalgia for the secular and Ashkenazi pre-1967 Israel. But for the Palestinians (and indeed, for Shenhav himself) the “original sin” is not 1967. It is 1948.

Shenhav is no right-winger trying to demonstrate the absurdity of the Oslo paradigm. He rejects this paradigm precisely because he claims that Israel was violent and racist before 1967. While tenants of the “pre-1967 cosmology” would have us believe that the Six Day War transformed Israel from “Little House on the Prairie” to “The Terminator,” Shenhav argues that “The model created in 1948 transformed Israel, for all intents and purposes, into a racial state.” Thus does he call for a return to “pre-1948” Israel, to an acceptation of the Palestinian “right of return,” and to the establishment of a Jewish-Arab federation.

I found Shenhav’s diagnosis and prognosis appalling. Pre-1967 Israel was not a “racial” state. It was (and still is) a nation-state that grants cultural preference to the dominant nation while guarantying equal civil rights to minorities, just like other democratic nation-states such as France, Japan or Sweden. And calling for a pastoral brotherhood between a Jewish minority and an Arab majority in a loose federation simply ignores History. Jews were persecuted and mistreated second-class citizens in Arab lands. Most pre-WWII Arab national movements were fascist. The first Palestinian leader, Hadj-Amin al-Husseini, was a Nazi collaborator who was personally responsible for the Jewish pogroms in Palestine in 1929 and 1936. The establishment of Israel in 1948 was more the result than the cause of Arab animosity and violence. The fact that The Protocols of the Sages of Zion and Mein Kampf are best sellers in Arab capitals and that Palestinian media and preachers describe Jews as “sons of pigs and monkeys” does not bode well for stateless Jews in Dahr el-Islam.

But Shenhav has the merit of recognizing that “the occupation” is a delusional excuse for the absence of peace, and that it is Zionism itself that the Arabs reject.

So the choice is not between occupation and peace but between Zionism and peace. Many former believers in the “pre-1967 cosmology” realize this. Some are so attached to peace that they have become post-Zionistic. Others are so attached to Zionism that they have opted for steadfastness.

Avi Shlaim and Benny Morris are the perfect examples. Both self-proclaimed “new historians” separately published a history of the Arab-Israeli conflict shortly before the implosion of the Oslo process (The Iron Wall and Righteous Victims). Both authors welcomed the election of Ehud Barak in 1999, predicting he would soon prove their theory to be right. The very opposite happened. Shlaim reacted by rejecting Zionism, Morris by rejecting the Oslo paradigm. While Shlaim now says that “Zionism today is the real enemy of the Jews,” Morris declares that “we are doomed to live by the sword.”

Morris even compares himself to Albert Camus. "He was considered a left-winger and a person of high morals, but when he referred to the Algerian problem he placed his mother ahead of morality” Morris declared to Ari Shavit in his famous 2004 interview. And so, Morris declares: “Preserving my people is more important than universal moral concepts." Boaz Neumann, a history professor at Tel-Aviv University, has used the same metaphor and has made the same point.

“Twilight of the Idols” is not only a famous book by Friedrich Nietzsche. It is also a central tenet of Judaism. Idolatry is an abomination because the worshiper knows he is lying to himself. That some Israeli intellectuals are sobering is a sign of hope. Who knows: even the Israeli Holy Trinity might eventually recognize the Holy One.

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A tale of darkness: Marwan Barghouti, Amos Oz, and Haim Oron

Seth J. Frantzman
Terra Incognita/JPost
29 March '11

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=214328

Terra Incognita: The next time someone decides to invite Oz or Oron to speak, they shouldn’t waste time; they should cut to the chase and invite Barghouti himself.

Assaf Harofeh Medical Center did something strange recently. It invited an author who dedicated and sent a copy of his book to a terrorist to speak at a ceremony for outstanding doctors. The doctors at Assaf Harofeh have often treated victims of terror.

On September 9, 2003 eight soldiers were killed and 32 wounded in a suicide bombing near the hospital entrance. So how did it come to invite a speaker who consorts with terrorists whose victims the doctors might treat? The answer is not simple. The author happens to be the country’s most famous writer, Israel Prize laureate Amos Oz. On March 16 Yediot Aharonot reported that Oz had sent a book to convicted Palestinian terror leader Marwan Barghouti. He had become aware that Meretz MK Haim Oron was in the habit of visiting Barghouti in prison, and Oz asked him to take a copy of his 2002 book A Tale of Love and Darkness. The book is a namedropping account of the author’s early life on Kibbutz Hulda, where he met many lions of the early Zionist movement. It also discusses his family’s successes, failures and passions.

Oz sent Barghouti an Arabic translation with the inscription: “This story is our story. I hope you read it and understand us better, as we attempt to understand you. Hoping to meet soon in peace and freedom.”

On March 24 it was announced that Assaf Harofeh had cancelled the affair. Reports noted that “a senior doctor threatened to disrupt the ceremony” if Oz attended. After the cancellation the “free speech” alarm was sounded. Haaretz reported that a senior doctor claimed“it is hard to believe that because of one doctor who has certain political opinions, they revoked Oz’s invitation to the conference... That’s political interference in hospital matters.”

Gideon Levy condemned the “really sick” hospital’s “censorship” and Soviet-style “witch-hunt,” adding: “Heaven forbid if Oz wants Barghouti to get to know us better. But in 2011 Israel, this was enough to provoke aggression and censorship. Now it isn’t just Barghouti who is labeled as a monster, but Oz, too.”

Israel’s immoral novelists

David Grossman

Giulio Meotti
Israel Opinion/Ynet
22 March '11

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4046028,00.html

Op-ed: Italy journalist says likes of Grossman, Oz promote vicious distortions about Israel

Israeli authors have never been shy. They have always commented on their governments and always speak about politics in their novels. But the best-selling Israeli writers are now captives of a dangerous syndrome. One can legitimately criticize Israeli governments, their errors and deafness. But a dark malaise is now driving these authors to toe the line with the worst emotions of global public opinion.

This is the same public opinion that in essence boycotted the tragic news about a large, beautiful and caring Jewish family destroyed in a minute, when terrorists burst into their home in Itamar with one aim in mind: To murder as many Israelis as possible.

There is now a deep chasm between the pretension of the "good conscience" of these writers and the crude realism of history. This is even sander and more significant because we are not talking about writers who hate Israel or novelists who pontificate against the Jewish State from abroad, but rather, about locals.

Amos Oz

Amos Oz and David Grossman, Israel’s most popular authors, have a track record of genuine Zionist endeavor. But Oz just got in touch with Marwan Barghouti, the Palestinian terrorist leader convicted of murdering five Israelis and planning several terrorist attacks. The Israel Prize recipient sent the Palestinian prisoner one of his books with a personal inscription wishing him a speedy release from prison: “This story is our story. I hope you read it and understand us better, as we attempt to understand you. Hoping to meet soon in peace and freedom.”

Indeed, the gap between these authors and the guillotine threatening Israel grows larger every day. David Grossman, whose son Uri was killed in the Second Lebanon War, was the first Israeli writer to explore the psychology of the Israeli occupation after 1967. Since then, Grossman’s paradigm, simply put, was always the same: Israel must end its role of occupier and oppressor if the horror of terrorism is to end.

Israel deserves better

It seems as though Grossman’s conscience as an intellectual hasn't been shaken by the Twin Towers attack, by the 1,600 Israeli civilians killed in terror attacks, by a decade of rockets on southern Israeli cities or by Iran’s atomic death cult.

Why some Israeli liberals lose perspective

"One can only express profound regret that the hubristic inclinations of some talented Israelis have encouraged them to employ their gifts to damn their own without regard to the consequences of their actions."


Amos Oz

Isi Leibler
Candidly Speaking from Jerusalem
16 June '10

(For myself, as a latecomer, I have never shared the appreciation for Amos Oz or David Grossman, that others have. However, there are still any number of points to be drawn from this piece. Y.)

It is surely ironic that simultaneously with the emergence of a broad consensus endorsing a centrist position and the marginalization of extremist left- and right-wing factions, a number of Israeli intellectuals – mainly writers and academics – are intensifying their public condemnation of their country at a global level.

I am not relating to post-Zionists or demented lunatics who hate their country, but to those with a track record of genuine Zionist endeavor, national icons like Amos Oz, one of our most gifted writers, who, one assumes, loves Israel.

There was a time when Oz would resolutely refuse to condemn Israel to the global media or when he was in a foreign country. I recollect while visiting Australia 20 years ago, his response to media questioning his attitude to the Shamir government was “I am a proud Labor Zionist and while in Israel I can passionately criticize my government. But when I travel abroad, I regard myself as an ambassador for my country and leave political differences behind me.”

This contrasts starkly to the approach Oz currently adopts. With the country isolated as never before and the entire world applying double standards and pouring venom upon us, Oz, who shares the frustration of most Israelis with the botched Gaza flotilla imbroglio, contributed an op-ed to the Guardian and The New York Times which extended far beyond the issue of the flotilla. He told Americans and British readers that “power has intoxicated us,” that we are “fixated by the concept of military force” and that we abuse this power not for reasons of self-defense but to “squash ideas and smash the problems” confronting us with brute force.

In a widely circulated US blog, his daughter, Fania Oz-Salzberger, a distinguished professor of political science at the University of Haifa and Australia’s Monash University, conveyed similar sentiments. She said, “Every true Israeli patriot ought… to apologize very humbly to the dead and injured of the ‘Free Gaza Movement’ flotilla, to the Turks, to the international community. And while we are at it, also to the innocent majority of Gazans.” Her message to the international community was “your almost unanimous condemnation is spot on. As a private citizen, I join it. As a habitual Israeli patriot, I am ashamed.”

(Read full article)

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Questions for Amos Oz

I'm sure you are aware that throughout history wars have been waged not only because of conflicting interests, but also opposing ideas that carried the masses on each side.


Dina Porat
Haaretz
13 June '10

Dear Amos,

I must confess I was surprised by your op-ed "Israeli Force, Adrift on the Sea" (published in Haaretz Hebrew Edition June 2), and I would be grateful if you could clarify some of your central arguments.

You note that "Hamas is not just a terrorist organization. Hamas is an idea." What kind of an idea is Hamas? The Hamas charter, which was issued in August 1988 and has never since been altered, sums up the movement's ideology quite bluntly. Among other things it says: "Leaving the circle of conflict with the Zionists is a major act of treason and it will bring curse on its perpetrators"; "Israel will remain erect until Islam eliminates it" since the land is sacred to Islam and cannot be compromised; and the banner of Jihad will be raised "to extricate the country and the people from the [Zionists'] desecration, filth and evil."

From Hamas' perspective, the Jews are a cruel enemy, comparable to the Nazis, with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion providing sufficient proof of this. I'm sure this is not the idea you had in mind, Mr. Oz, so which idea was it?

(Read full letter)

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