Danske aviser er blandt dem, der svælger i myten om den “progressive” og “forsonlige” israelske forfatter Amos Oz, som – hans forfatterskabs litterære kvaliteter ufortalt – gerne markedsføres som et eksempel på en “progressiv” israeler, der “vil araberne det godt”, en eksponent for en israelsk “fredslejr”, hvis omfang ganske uhæmmet overdrives.
Ved at acceptere denne rolle kommer Amos Oz ret beset til at fungere som en legitimering af de sidste mange års nådesløse bosættelses- og besættelsespolitik, en slags jernnæve med et menneskeligt ansigt. Måske derfor, at reelle kritikere som Gideon Levy og Amira Hass tilsyneladende nægter at indtage en sådan position.
En mere ligefrem karakteristik af Amos Oz finder vi hos As’ad AbuKhalil, den vrede araber:
They want to make of Amos Oz a friend of the Arabs, by force. They want to crown him a king of peace. Those who included a secret clause about normalization with Israel in the Thomas Friedman-Abdullah initiative, they rush to try and vainly influence the political culture of the Arab world. Al-Saud liberal princes enthusiastically promote Amos Oz and his counterparts. They believe him to be a symbol of the “Israeli peace” camp. They try to convince the Arab people of the rightness of Zionism in their midst. That is their desire.
Amos Oz is a lie. And this lie is a part of a bigger lie about the “Israeli peace camp”. The lie was invented by Arafat’s team (led by Mahmoud Abbas at the time) in the seventies to justify the scrambling behind the freak of a Palestinian mini-nation, surrender to the enemy and to toss the arms very far away. Israeli commentator Gideon Levy exposed them recently in “Haaretz” when he said: “The Israeli peace camp didn’t die. It was never born in the first place”. There is no Israeli peace camp. All of this was a fabricated propaganda by normalization Arabs to convince the Arab people that they need to stop the resistance. And Amos Oz is dear to the heart of Western liberals. They honour him sometimes too much for his own liking. He roams and moans in front of an audience that observes the movement of his eyelids. He mentions the Holocaust in a sentence and the Palestinian “terrorism” in the next one.
I saw Amos Oz in 1992 in America. I was at the beginning of my teaching career at “Colorado College”. Oz was invited to deliver a public lecture. They came from all over the state to see him. Liberals flocked in the hundreds. I sat in an unobtrusive back seat and I could hear their moaning, and I felt the pain: I could almost hear the audience reach their climax. How grave my exile felt on that long day. I remember that only one British student understood my suffering. She sat next to me and said sympathetically even before Oz started talking: “What’s wrong? I read the expressions of your face”. I said: “If Mahmoud Darwish came to this university, none of these people would show up”. She said: “Don’t be unfair to me”. I was unfair to that student. Then Oz proceeded with a speech that he never tires of repeating in his articles and lectures. I grew more annoyed. I felt suffocated. I remember I kept reciting to myself what poems I memorized about Palestine: even that annoying poem of “Al-Akhtal As-Sagheer” (“The desert came alive complaining its nakedness, then we engulfed it with roar and smoke”, while the Arab armies were reluctant to fight, or were shooting at each other). Amos Oz captured the neediness of the audience. I almost burst. He bragged that he was never non-violent, and that he was proud of his fighting in the army of the enemy in the different wars. And then he invoked the Holocaust (as the Zionists always do and as does Ahmadinejad) in his speech, and he spoke of the signs of the collapse of the Nazi society, and how it started with the abuse of the language. They applauded him long in a standing ovation. Then came my turn, or rather, I stole a turn. I stood up and faced the audience, not him (in my unequivocal commitment to boycotting the enemy), without an invitation from anyone, except from Iyad Noureddine Al-Moudawwar, my martyr and my comrade. I said: he talked to you about the abuse of language but he did not know that I was counting the times where he attached the word Palestinian with the word terrorist in the sequence of his phrases: more than 27 times in full. And isn’t that of the indicators to the collapse of Israeli society and its aggressive intentions? And I asked them about terrorism: I told them about Israeli terrorism in 1982 and my eyewitness accounts of it, and how the enemy’s army killed more children than any organization which is classified by U.S. as “terrorist”, and then I concluded by mocking the honouring of his ilk in America. Oz came to me and tried to shake my hand – this is one of their games trying to appear as pacifist in front of the Western public – I got up from my chair and left the room. […]
Reading, any reading, is of course useful, in any language and of anyone. And brilliance (in music, art or philosophy) might come from political enemies (Wagner, Bob Dylan, Hannah Arendt, Martin Buber, Frank Sinatra). And the feat writer Albert Camus who cannot be ignored, was sympathetic to the French occupation of Algeria (David Carroll’s new book, “Albert Camus The Algerian” published by Columbia University, will not save the reputation of the man). But there is the principle of absolute boycott. The translation of Oz’s works in “Dar Al Jamal” or the publication of a book of Abba Eban in Dar-es-Saqi mean a financial contribution in support of the soldiers and institutions of the usurping entity. These get a commission on their books. I saw, for example, the film «Waltz with Bashir», but I was keen to acquire a pirated copy (Seek the movie even if from China), so as not to support the Zionist entity (even though my taxes here in America go, to my pain, to support the entity). The Piracy and online publishing of the mentioned books is possible if you’re keen to read Oz. I will own copies of Hebrew literature, and I will read them on the balcony of a house in the village of Galilee on a red and green bed, but after the liberation of all Palestine, and not before.