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Amos Oz (born Klausner), for years an activist in Peace Now, is a novelist with an international reputation. He is one of those Zionists whose appearance of sensibility has provided a veneer of acceptability to the Israeli state.
However, the veneer is starting to wear thin. In June 2005, Yediot Ahronot reported (see this article) that Tom Segev is claiming that Oz, in this 1970 book, censored and faked testimonies of Israeli soldiers about war crimes in the 1967 war -- for example, a soldier told Oz that they got an order to kill every person trying to return to the West Bank from the East Bank of the Jordan but Oz just said that they were told to prevent people crossing the Jordan.
Oz was born in 1939 in Jerusalem. At the age of 15 he went to live on Kibbutz Hulda, where he remained from 1954 to 1985. He studied philosophy and literature at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and was visiting fellow at Oxford University, author-in- residence at the Hebrew University and writer-in-residence at Colorado College. He has been named Officer of Arts and Letters of France. An author of prose for both children and adults, as well as an essayist, he has been widely translated and is internationally acclaimed. He has been honoured with the French Prix Femina and the 1992 Frankfurt Peace Prize. He lives in the southern town Arad and teaches literature at Ben Gurion University of the Negev.
Gideon Spiro reports:
He did not win -- and that's a good thingAmong those laying odds on the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Literature for 2009, the name of Amos Oz featured prominently. That troubled me, and so I sent the following message to the members of the Prize Committee by e-mail:
Honorable Committee members,I do not claim that my e-mail prevented Oz from receiving the prize. There may have been others besides me, and cumulatively we may have had an effect. It should be assumed in the run-up to the awarding of the prize in 2010 that Oz's name will come up again, and maybe also those of his friends David Grossman and A.B. Yehoshua, who also endorsed those two wars. It would be appropriate to organize a global campaign to send thousands of e-mails to the members of the Prize Committee, as well as oral conversations with leaders of public opinion in Sweden, in order to prevent the awarding of the prize to Israeli writers who supported those two wars in which war crimes were committed, as long as they have not recanted of that support. To acknowledge a mistake is important, even after the fact.
Since the writer Amos Oz is mentioned as a candidate for the 2009 Nobel Literature Prize, I find it important to inform you that Amos Oz supported the 2 latest wars initiated by Israel: The Gaza war (December 2008 January 2009) in which war crimes were committed (as reported just recently in the UN Goldstone report) and the Second Lebanon war (July August 2006 - see Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch reports).
Awarding the prize to Amos Oz, especially so close to those events, contradicts the spirit of Alfred Nobel, and is a slap on the face to Israeli human rights activists and war resisters, as well as being an insult to the Palestinian victims, including hundreds children.
Respectfully,
Gideon Spiro
Tel Aviv
His parents were Fania Mussman, Yehuda Arieh Klausner.
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