Summary
The Israeli novelist presented in Makdisi’s Coda as one of the best-known exponents of left-wing Zionism: seeking peace with the Palestinians only on the basis that Israel remains a Jewish state, and a leading resister of the One-state solution (Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation, PDF p.351-354).
Details
- “The Zionist enterprise,” according to Oz, “has no other objective justification than the right of a drowning man to grasp the only plank that can save him”; there is “a vast moral difference between the drowning man who grasps a plank and makes room for himself by pushing the others who are sitting on it to one side, even by force, and the drowning man who grabs the whole plank for himself and pushes the others into the sea” — for Oz, the difference between making Jaffa and Nazareth Jewish and making Ramallah and Nablus Jewish (PDF p.351).
- Palestinians answer that making Israel Jewish in 1948 also involved pushing people into the sea, so separating 1948 from 1967 is a false distinction; the plank, now a joint homeland, should be shared equally, with no one left in the sea (PDF p.352-353).
- Oz’s resolution is a distinctly unequal partition: Israel retaining 78 percent of historic Palestine as a Jewish state, the Palestinians 22 percent; what matters most to left-leaning Zionists like Oz is the separation of a Jewish from a non-Jewish state, a characteristic shared with right-wing Zionism (PDF p.353).
Related pages
Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation, One-state solution, Zionism, Ghassan Kanafani