In the Land of Israel

By Amos Oz. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983. 257 pp. $12.95

Reviewed by Grace Halsell

I always come away from a visit to Israel feeling that the Jewish state probably would not last very long without its wars with the Arabs. The enemy "outside" glues together the inhabitants within. This book seems to confirm my own impression.

Israeli writer Oz, notepad in hand, talked with a variety of Israelis and his interviews reveal a clash in viewpoints between European Jews (the "Ashkenazim") and Oriental Jews (the "Sephardim"), and between hawkish "religious Jews" and the secular ones who want to trade occupied territories for peace.

First, Oz listens to the Sephardim who immigrated to Israel from the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern countries. One Sephardi—speaking of the Ashkenazim, who have been the ruling establishment of Israel since the beginning—says they "hid us away in holes, in moshavim and in development towns, so the tourists wouldn't see us; so we wouldn't stain (Israel's) image; so they'd think this was a white country."

How to Keep the Help

The Sephardi says that he and other Oriental Jews supported former Prime Minister Menachem Begin because Begin vowed never to relinquish the West Bank, which provides a labor force of Palestinian Arabs who cross into Israel daily and work for the Israelis at low wages. If the Palestinians get an independent state, the Sephardi explains, they will stop being a labor force for the Israelis and he says—addressing himself to the Ashkenazim, of which Oz is one—"then and there you'll put us back into the dead-end jobs, like before. If for no other reason, we won't let you give back the territories."

A Sephardi also makes it clear that the Oriental immigrants believe that they are being made the scapegoat for all that is wrong with Israel and are tired of it: The Ashkenazi Jews are "running all over the world saying, 'It's them! This isn't us. This filthy country is Begin's but us, we're clean!' Goody-goodies! Pure hearts! You want the world to think that Israel was once a beautiful, civilized country but now Begin and his niggers have taken over.

The Sephardi ends his conversation by telling Oz he knows Ashkenazim are also Jews, but to make peace with Orientals, then "come without that arrogance of yours."

Oz visits Tekoa, one of the Jewish settlements in the West Bank, and a woman from the United States—who has kept her American passport—tells him there's hardly any immigration into Israel now, but that it could come with a large scale war. Oz asks: You hope for another war? Well, she explains, peace will not bring enough immigration. According to another settler, transplanted from Brooklyn: "We should not wait. We should open with a preventive attack!" And the Arabs? The settler replies to Oz in astonishment: "Who cares about the Arabs?"

In another chapter, we meet an Israeli whom Oz identified as simply "Z", who tells Oz that even if he gave him mathematical proof that the Israelis did not accomplish any of their goals in Lebanon, "it will still have been worth it ... And do you know why? Because it seems there's a good chance that this war has turned the whole self-appointed civilized world against us again. This time for good. So now maybe we've finished once and for all with that crap about the Jewish monopoly on morality, about the moral lesson of the Holocaust and the persecutions, about the Jews who were supposed to have emerged from the gas chambers pure and good. We've done with all that garbage. That little destruction job we did in Tyre and Sidon, the job in Ein Hilweh (too bad we didn't wipe out that maggots' nest for good) and the nice, healthy bombing of Beirut ... all those blessings and good deeds have finished off that bull about a 'Chosen People' and a 'Light unto the nations."

War for Breakfast

The ardent Zionist adds that the world should be aware that "we are capable of starting, suddenly, just for the hell of it, before breakfast, World War Three."

Oz also has a couple of chapters in which he relates going into Arab Jerusalem and also into Ramallah in the West Bank and sitting down at coffee tables to chat with Palestinians. He asks probing questions about how to achieve peace. But these chapters are his weakest. They smack somewhat of the patronizing attitude of a master with a boot on the neck of a prone slave, who asks his victim, "What can we do about 'our' problem?"

Many Israeli writers, however, are far out front of American Jewish and non-Jewish writers in showing up Israeli society as racist, and oppressive of the Arabs. Amos Oz, who was born in Jerusalem in 1939, has done his readers a favor—simply by allowing the Israelis to speak for themselves. He concludes: "What will become of us all, I do not know. If there is someone with an answer, he would do well to stand up and speak. And he'd better not tarry. The situation is not good."

Grace Halsell is the author of 12 books, the most recent being Journey to Jerusalem (Macmillan).