Preface

THE THREE ESSAYS that follow were written not by a scholar or an expert, but by a person living through and grappling with the situation. The essays’ common thread is my desire to take a personal look at a number of extremely controversial issues, some of which strike me as matters of life and death.

This book does not purport to describe every aspect of every disagreement or to elucidate all features of the landscape, and certainly not to have the last word. Rather, it seeks the listening ear of those whose opinions differ from my own.

Amos Oz

Dear Zealots

HOW DOES ONE cure a fanatic? Setting off in pursuit of a gang of armed zealots in the mountains of Afghanistan, the deserts of Iraq, or the cities of Syria is one thing. Fighting zealotry itself is quite another. I have nothing new to suggest regarding desert and mountain wars, or their online counterparts. But here are a few thoughts about the nature of fanaticism and the ways we might curtail it.

The attack on the Twin Towers in New York, on 11 September 2001, much like dozens of attacks on urban centres and bustling sites around the world, did not stem from the poor being angry at the rich. Wealth disparity is an age-old injustice, but the new wave of violence is not solely, or primarily, a response to that disparity. If it were, the onslaught of terrorism would have originated in African countries – the poorest – and landed in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states – the wealthiest. This war is being fought between fanatics convinced that their ends sanctify all means, and everyone else – all those who hold that life is an end and not a means. It is a struggle between people who believe that justice, whatever that term may mean to them, is more important than life, and those who maintain that life takes precedence over other values.

Ever since the political scientist Samuel Huntington defined the current worldwide battlefield as a ‘war of civilisations’ being fought primarily between Islam and Western civilisation, the prevalent world view has been a racist picture that portrays a clash between ‘savage terrorist’ Easterners and ‘cultured’ Westerners. This was not Huntington’s characterisation, but such is the predominant sentiment aroused by his writings.

The Israeli government, for example, finds it convenient to lean on this trite Wild West formula, because it allows it to dump the Palestinians’ fight to cast off Israeli occupation into the same junkyard from which fanatic Muslim murderers regularly emerge to commit horrors around the world.

Many people forget that radical Islam does not have a monopoly on violent fanaticism. The destruction of the Twin Towers and the bloodshed that continues in various parts of the world are not necessarily tied to the questions: Is the West good or bad? Is globalisation a blessing or a monster? Is capitalism loathsome or self-evident? Are secularism and hedonism enslavement or freedom? Is Western colonialism over and done with or has it simply taken on new forms? These questions can have different and even contradictory answers, without any of them being fanatic. The fanatic does not argue. If something is wrong in his view, if it is clear to him that something is wrong in God’s view, it is his duty to destroy the abomination, even if that means killing anyone who just happens to be around.

*

Fanaticism dates back much earlier than Islam. Earlier than Christianity and Judaism. Earlier than all the ideologies in the world. It is an elemental fixture of human nature, a ‘bad gene’. People who bomb abortion clinics, murder immigrants in Europe, murder Jewish women and children in Israel, burn down a house in the Israeli-occupied territories with an entire Palestinian family inside, desecrate synagogues and churches and mosques and cemeteries – they are all distinct from al-Qaeda and ISIS in the scope and severity of their acts, but not in their nature. Today we speak of ‘hate crimes’, but perhaps a more accurate term would be ‘zealotry crimes’, and such crimes are carried out almost daily, including against Muslims.

Genocide and jihad and the Crusades, the Inquisition and the gulags, extermination camps and gas chambers, torture dungeons and indiscriminate terrorist attacks: none of these are new, and almost all of them preceded the rise of radical Islam by centuries.

As the questions grow harder and more complicated, people yearn for simpler answers, one-sentence answers, answers that point unhesitantly to a culprit who can be blamed for all our suffering, answers that promise that if we only eradicate the villains, all our troubles will vanish.

‘It’s-all-because-of-globalisation!’ ‘It’s-all-because-of-the-Muslims!’ ‘It’s-all-because-of-permissiveness!’ or ‘because of the West!’ or ‘because of Zionism!’ or ‘because of immigrants!’ or ‘because of secularism!’ or ‘because of the left wing!’ All one needs to do is cross out the incorrect entries, circle the right Satan, then kill that Satan (along with his neighbours and anyone who happens to be in the area), thereby opening the gates of heaven once and for all.

More and more commonly, the strongest public sentiment is one of profound loathing – subversive loathing of ‘the hegemonic discourse’, Western loathing of the East, Eastern loathing of the West, secular loathing of believers, religious loathing of the secular. Sweeping, unmitigated loathing surges like vomit from the depths of this or the other misery. Such extreme loathing is a component of fanaticism in all its guises.

For example, concepts that only half a century ago seemed innovative and exciting – multiculturalism and identity politics – quickly morphed, in many places, into the politics of identity hatred. What began with an expansion of cultural and emotional horizons is increasingly deteriorating into narrower horizons, isolationism and hatred of the Other. In short, a new wave of loathing and extremism assails us from all sides.

*

Perhaps my childhood in Jerusalem gave me some expertise in comparative fanaticism. In the 1940s there was no shortage of open hearts and capacious souls in Jerusalem. But there were also a lot of self-appointed prophets, saviours and messiahs. To this very day, almost every second or third Jerusalemite has his or her own private formula for instant salvation. Of course, lots of people claim to be in Jerusalem in order ‘to build and be built in it’, as the old Zionist refrain would have it, but many of them – Jews, Muslims, Christians, revolutionaries, radicals, world-healers – came to Jerusalem not to build and be built, but to crucify or be crucified.

A well-known mental illness has garnered the medical diagnosis ‘Jerusalem syndrome’: no sooner do people breathe in the crisp mountain air (‘clear as wine’, in the words of one famous Hebrew song) than they set off to burn a mosque or blow up a church or destroy a synagogue, to kill heretics or believers, to ‘eradicate evil from the world’. Most sufferers of ‘Jerusalem syndrome’, however, make do with stripping down, climbing atop a rock, and prophesising.

Although they have few believers, these prophets are numerous, spanning from one end of the spectrum to the other. Their common denominator is an urge to fulfil a simple salvation formula, and sometimes to point to the villains from which the world must be purified in order to hasten redemption. Redemption itself, according to most of these prophets, is easily crammed into a short slogan.

As a child in Jerusalem, I myself was a little Zionist-nationalist fanatic – self-righteous, enthusiastic and brainwashed. I was blind to any argument that deviated at all from the Jewish-Zionist story we were told by almost the entire adult world. I was deaf to any reasoning that challenged that story. Like all the children in the Kerem Avraham neighbourhood, I also threw stones at the British vehicles that patrolled our little street. Along with the stones, we hurled almost our entire English vocabulary at the soldiers: ‘British, go home!’ All this happened in 1946 or 1947, as the British Mandate over Palestine was nearing its end, in the days of the original intifada – the one instigated by us Jews against the British occupation. This, too, I suppose, is another example of the irony of history.

*

In my novel Panther in the Basement, I retold the experiences that revealed to me, as a child, that sometimes there are two sides to a story; that conflicts are coloured not only in black and white. In the last year of the British Mandate, when I was about eight, I befriended a British policeman who spoke ancient Hebrew and had memorised almost the entire Bible. He was a fat, asthmatic, emotional man, and perhaps a slightly muddled one, who fervently believed that the Jewish people’s return to its ancient land heralded redemption for the world at large. When the other children discovered my friendship with this man, they called me a traitor. Much later, I learned to take comfort in the thought that, for fanatics, a traitor is anyone who dares to change. Fanatics of all kinds, in all places at all times, loathe and fear change, suspecting that it is nothing less than a betrayal resulting from dark, base motives.

The boy-narrator in Panther in the Basement begins the story as a Zionist fanatic, afire with his sense of righteousness; but within weeks he learns, to his astonishment, that there are things in the world that can be seen one way but can also be seen in a completely different way. This discovery signals the character’s loss of innocence, but he gains a larger world, along with a certain expertise in comparative fanaticism. He comes to learn that blind hatred often turns the haters on either side of the fence into almost identical personas.

The term ‘comparative fanaticism’ is no joke. Perhaps the time has come for every university, school and educational institution to introduce a course or two in comparative fanaticism, because fanaticism is closing in on us, here in Israel and in many other places in the world, east and west, north and south. And we are certainly not talking only of extreme Islam: in many places, at this very moment, there are dangerous waves of Christian religious fanaticism (in the United States, Russia and a few Eastern European countries), murky tides of Jewish religious fanaticism, dark surges of isolationist and xenophobic nationalism in Western and Eastern Europe, and an increasing flood of racism in more and more societies.

The fanaticism in almost all of Jewish-Israeli society, of various shades and types, arrived in Israel with the Jews of Europe. From Eastern Europe we received the revolutionary fanaticism of the founding pioneer generation, bent on remoulding the Jewish people and erasing the abundance of heritages of those who came from other diasporas, in order to rebuild a ‘new Hebrew’. Europe was also the source of our nationalist fanaticism, with its worship of militarism and all sorts of delusions of imperialist grandeur. Also from Europe: ultra-Orthodox fanaticism, which secludes itself inside a walled ghetto and defends itself against anything different. Jewish immigrants from Eastern countries, conversely, brought a generations-old heritage of moderation, relative religious tolerance, and the custom of living in good neighbourly relations even with those who are different. Indeed, right before our eyes the various forms of ‘European’ fanaticism are now erasing the moderation of Eastern Jews.

One of the reasons for the increasing waves of fanaticism, then, might be the growing desire for simple, decisive solutions, for salvation ‘in one blow’. Another reason is that we are increasingly distancing ourselves from the horrors that occurred in the first half of the twentieth century: Stalin and Hitler, unintentionally, seem to have invested the two or three generations that followed with a profound fear of any extremism and a measure of restraint towards fanatical urges. For a few decades, thanks to the greatest murderers of the twentieth century, racists were a little bit ashamed of their racism, haters moderated their hatred slightly, and fanatic world-healers were careful not to get too revolutionary. Perhaps not everywhere, but at least here and there.

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