Amos Oz prescribed curiosity and humour against fanaticism

Person: Amos Oz
Lived: 1939–2018
Field: Novelist and essayist
From: Israeli

The story

By the early 2000s Amos Oz had spent more than three decades arguing for peace between Israelis and Palestinians. He had come to see fanaticism, whether religious, nationalist or political, as one of the great dangers of the age, in his own society and around the world.

He set out his thinking in two lectures, later published in English in 2006 by Princeton University Press as How to Cure a Fanatic. The title essay first appeared in 2004. In the first part, Oz argued that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was not a war of religions, cultures or traditions but a dispute over real estate between two peoples, each with a legitimate claim to the same small piece of land. It would be settled not by greater understanding but by painful compromise: two states, divided roughly according to where people actually lived.

Oz compared that compromise to an amputation that would hurt both sides. He also stressed the need to provide homes and jobs for the residents of the Palestinian refugee camps as part of any lasting settlement.

In the second part he turned to the fanatics on both sides who reject any compromise. His remedies were simple and demanding. He recommended imagination, the effort to really see the world through the eyes of the other side, and a sense of humour, qualities he saw as the natural enemies of fanatical certainty. The book closed with an interview conducted by Brigitta van Rheinberg of Princeton University Press.

Oz returned to the theme in his final collection, Dear Zealots: Letters from a Divided Land, published shortly before his death in 2018. There he argued that zealotry can be found among all peoples and religions, and suggested that the fear of extremism left by the Holocaust and Stalinism was fading with time. He again urged a two-state solution, which he likened to a duplex shared by two families.

Why it matters

The book gave readers a compact, humane guide to resisting extremism, and its call for imagination and humour remains widely quoted in debates on tolerance.