Twice in conversation, Israeli author Amos Oz invokes the metaphor of medicine to describe his approach to peace in his homeland. It is an apt usage. In speech, as in text, Oz possesses the precision of a surgeon's hand.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is deadly, it is inflammatory, but its essence is simple: "Whose land?" Oz asks. The answer lies in compromise, a "reasonable partition" of land that will leave neither side happy, but alive.
Israel is the patient in the operating room. "The surgeons are cursing each other, which is not a good thing, and the angry families outside the operation theater are cursing each other and cursing the doctors. But (the illness) is no longer neglected," Oz said.
Novelist and political essayist Oz (pronounced like "goes") will speak Tuesday at the University at Albany in a series sponsored by the New York State Writers Institute. The Institute's fall roster of writers includes up-coming visits by Don DeLillo, Jessica Hagedorn, James Salter and Cary Reich.
Oz has authored nine novels, most recently "Don't Call It Night" and "Panther in the Basement" (Harcourt Brace & Co.), as well as collections of short stories, essays, articles and a children's book.
Oz's parents and grandfather had dreamed of a peaceful, cosmopolitan Jerusalem. At 14, Oz fled that tormenting wish, and a city flush with fanaticism, to a kibbutz. There, schooled in free socialism, he rejected radical ideolo gies of any kind. "I see this as an achievement," he wrote in the autobiographical note to "Under This Blazing Light" (Cambridge University Press), an essay collection.
There he also began to write in earnest. He wrote about a "longing for the absolute," his roots, the persecution of Jews.
"I write " Oz said in a telephone interview from Princeton University, where he is a guest lecturer, "so as not l despair nor to yield to thee temptation to return hatred for hatred." Once a reserve soldier in the 1967 Six Day War, he became, and remains, a leading peace advocate in Israel.
His consistent message of compromise has been greeed, at times, by hostility in his country. After the Israel-Arab Six Day War, while Israel was euphoric because of its victory, Oz proposed compromise. "Almost everybody said, 'You must be out of your senses. Why give them half the land? We have won.'
Now, 30 years later, I would say that probably a small majority of the Israeli people and probably a small majority of the Palestinian people are unhappily ready to accept such a solution."
Imagine Oz. today, at 58, contemplating the desert from his present home in Arad in the Negev desert in Southern Israel.
The desert's great, ancient calm is Oz's perspective—and perspective builder.
"Each time I take my morning walk and look at the hills and ravines—totally unchanged, not a single trace of human life—it's easier to me to remind myself that you don't heal an injury by blowing a horn, that reconstruction and curing is a slow and patient job," he said.
They are familiar words to readers of Oz. The desert is the setting of his novel, "Don't Call It Night," the story of the uneasy relationship between Theo, a 60-year-old engineer, and a younger schoolteacher, Nota, who becomes consumed by a dubious plan to build a drug rehabilitation center.
As Theo sees it, the desert is "all in black and white. Everything is in its place. Forever. All present and silent. To be at peace means to be as much like the mountains as possible: silent and present. Vacant."
Oz is a watchman for peace, and his patience and rationality have not been exhausted.
"There are two basic, possible responses. One is to explode with anger, collapse in despair. The other one is to imagine you are a doctor and imagine that this nasty occurrence is a car accident. Do you express and manifest your shock? Do you run away or faint? Or do you tend to the patient and do as much as you can do? ... I have been using this doctor's (analogy) each time I have felt like despairing or exploding."