EDINBURGH,
August 13 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Amos Oz, Israel's
leading novelist, accused the Israeli government Monday, August 12, of
closing its ears to the impassioned protests of leftwing
intellectuals, saying there eventually will have to be two states,
Israel and Palestine: "two separate family units, like a
semi-detached house."
"I
only write journalism and essays from rage, when I want to tell the
government what to do or where to go," the 63-year-old
bestselling novelist, a former tank soldier in two Israeli wars, told
the Edinburgh International Book Festival, the British daily
newspaper, The Guardian, reported.
"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 colored pens, one for storytelling, one
for railing against Middle East politics.
"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 neighboring states.
"These
will be two independent states, organized 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 neighbors, 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 culture without
undermining the minority cultures."
Oz
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.
