Mini-Review #1 of 2025: In the Land of Israel by Amos Oz
A divided country, both now and then
The third book I’ve finished so far this year was In the Land of Israel by Amos Oz (a larger review of Platform by Houellebecq is coming). I found this in a Free Little Library in Baltimore where I live and picked it up because I lived in Israel in 2019 and heard good things about the author, Amos Oz who is a famous fiction writer in Israel. This isn't your usual Amos Oz book, or even a work of fiction. Rather, it is a group of roughly transcribed interviews of Jews and Arabs across the territory of Israel, including the occupied West Bank, in the aftermath of the 1982 Lebanon War, and the phalangist massacre of Palestinian refugees in Beirut1 (for more on this war I would recommend the Israeli film Waltz with Bashir: I have never seen an animation style like it, and it also follows a similar interview format to this book).
These interviews serve to highlight the diversity of opinion and culture among the Jews and Arabs of Israel and the occupied territories. The book opens with a description of the ultra-orthodox demographic takeover of the old city of Jerusalem, follows a winding route through the newly occupied West Bank (where Jewish settlements have already sprung up), the Galilee, and endsin the city of Ashdod on the Medditerranean Sea. Oz is an anti-nationalist former Labour Party member who favors a two (and eventually one) state solution, but he honors the opinions of all the people he interviews (even the crazy, unnamed Z who advocates for explicit genocide against all Arabs, not just the ones in Palestine) by transcribing their words truthfully, and not distorting their arguments with his own judgements. Everyone, including the afformentioned Z, came off as rational under the strokes of Oz’s pen, and at least somewhat sympathetic.
This book should shatter your conceptions of the entirety of Israel or the Jewish people as some kind of elite mastermind class controlling global events or a people who want to take over the entire Middle East. There are certainly some Jews who advocate for that: the citizens of the newly minted Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria, as well as Z, certainly do so. Others, like the Ultra-Orthdox in Jerusalem have no interest in such worldly things, or frankly anything other than studying Torah. Kibbutzniks2, like Oz and the “Cosmic Jew” he interviews in the last chapter of the book, are more distraught about the influence of American money and weapons on destroying the original agrarian character of the Zionist movement, while still others, many who live in Tel Aviv, basically just want to party and be secular Westerners.
In the 40 years since this book was written, many things have changed. There is now a wall between Israel and the West Bank, settlements have sprung up all over Judea and Samaria, and slowly but surely all the people of Gaza are all being killed. Yet the same divisions exist in Israeli society (or did in 2019 when I was there), and none of these fundamental problems are any closer to being solved3. This, I think would sadden Oz. It certainly saddens me: Israel is a beautiful country, and its seems like the biggest threat to its continued existence is not Hamas or other Arab countries, but civil war.
I’m going to start posting all my book reviews (or at least the ones that will generate a good amount of discussion; there’s no need to talk about Harry Potter for the billionth time on this platform) as articles. I’m trying to move away from the Notes feature on Substack, as I find it to be just as insidious of a time waster as twitter and instagram.
If you enjoyed this article, you can sign up for my mailing list by subscribing. I blog about language learning, biology, the science and art of learning, and many other things.
Josh
The war started after Islamists assinanted the Lebanese Christian President Bachir Gemayel. His followers, the phalangists, were the ones who perpetrated the massacre of the Palestinians, who they thought were responsible for his murder. Israeli guilt mainly stems from turning a blind eye to this behavior.
The Kibbutz were (and are) a socialist offshot of the Zionist movement that focused on self-suficient small settlements. They were vital for the Israeli victory in the 1948 war, but have since declined in relevancy because of the fall of the Soviet Union and other economic issues. I wrote an extensive essay on the Kibbutz on my old blog here
Some are worse, like the Ultra-Orthodox demographic situation.