Angelique Chrisafis, arts correspondentAugust 13, 2002Amos Oz, Israel's leading novelist, yesterday called Israeli and Palestinian leaders gutless cowards and said that the Middle East would eventually be divided "into two separate family units, like a semi-detached house".
The award-winning writer and essayist, once described as Israel's conscience, told the Edinburgh International Book Festival that the Israeli government had closed its ears to the impassioned protests of leftwing intellectuals.
The Palestinian leadership was "lousy, politically shortsighted and fanatic" and neither side had the courage to resolve the "clash between right and right, wrong and wrong".
"I only write journalism and essays from rage, when I want to tell the government what to do or where to go," said the 63-year-old bestselling novelist, a former tank soldier in two Israeli wars.
"Roughly every two weeks I tell them to go to hell, though they never listen to me, which means they are bad readers and they don't understand what I mean. Sometimes I scream with rage."
He added: "In Israel, I can scream and yell day and night. It doesn't help.
"Each time you tell the government where to go you get an invite for coffee with the prime minister. All [writers] have been through this procedure. He will tell you he's a great admirer of your ideas, language and style but he is against your politics.
"Just once in my life I'd like him to say my ideas are lousy, my style stinks, but I have a point. Anything not to be completely ignored."
Oz said he carried two different coloured pens, one for storytelling, one for railing against Middle East politics.
He was in Edinburgh to discuss his latest novel, The Same Sea, inspired in part by the suicide of his mother when he was 12. Once called "a kind of Zionist Orwell", he writes in Hebrew and has been known to sell 10,000 copies in a single day in Israel.
He complained that critics always looked for political allegory in his writing, when he only sought to portray mundane Israeli life - "away from the Israel of CNN", but against a political backdrop.
Oz said: "The good news is that almost everybody in Israel and Palestine now knows what will happen at the end of the day.
"If you took a referendum between the Mediterranean and the sea of Jordan, 80% will say there will be two neighbouring states.
"These will be two independent states, organised roughly demographically. Jerusalem will be two capitals, not necessarily divided by a barbed wire fence. The Jewish settlements in occupied Palestine will have to go, and there will be no massive resettlement of Palestinians inside Israel.
"It will be like a semi-detached house with two separate family units. It is painfully simple.
"There will be an Israeli embassy in Palestine in east Jerusalem, and there will be a Palestinian embassy in Israel in west Jerusalem, probably five miles apart."
Neither Palestinian Arabs nor Israeli Jews had anywhere else to call home. "They have to become neighbours, they can't live like a happy family." He added: "On both sides, there is a cowardly leadership. The patient is about ready for the painful surgery, but the doctors are cowards. That is what is delaying the unavoidable solution."
In response to rightwing critics in Israel, he said that there could be no such thing as a Jewish state. "A state is a vehicle, an instrument, it can't be Jewish, Christian, Muslim or Hispanic. I don't want, or aspire to, a Jewish Israel."
He added: "I want a democratic, open, peaceful state in which I hope, for a change, the Jews will be the majority cul ture without undermining the minority cultures."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/edinburgh2002/story/0,12262,773677,00.html
