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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   2788 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 12, 2025

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Just finished In the Land of Israel by Amos Oz 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 Beirut (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. Kibbutzniks, 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 solved. 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.

Now I'm reading Solaris (or really listening to it) by Stanislaw Lem. One of the most genuinly creepy science fictions stories I've read. It's about a research station on a sentient planet where the planet communicates with the researchers by reflecting their worst memories back at them in a manner that's impossible to avoid. In Spanish I'm reading Las Palabras Rotas by Luis Garcia Montero. It's a mixture of poetry and prose that's reflecting on how certain words have become corrupted by our politics and needed to be reclaimed personally, if not on a societal level.

Now I'm reading Solaris (or really listening to it) by Stanislaw Lem. One of the most genuinly creepy science fictions stories I've read.

Have you read the other three "foreign intelligence" novels of his?

No this is the first Lem book I've read. Would you recommend?

Return from the Stars was my favourite, though it has been a decade.

This sounds like Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora which I have been meaning to read for a while.

Well, Eden, The Invincible and Fiasco to complete the quadrilogy.

Robots Trurl and Klapaucius and Ijon Tichy are fan favorites.

But Pirx the Pilot is my personal favourite.

slowly but surely all the people of Gaza are all being killed

Ahem.

I have never seen an animation style like it

You may like Waking Life by Richard Linklater. He used a similar style for his adaptation of Philip K. Dick's novel A Scanner Darkly, but Waking Life is vastly superior.

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