Renowned writer Amos Oz, Israel's most-translated author, a passionate peace advocate and a supporter of the two-state solution, has died in Tel Aviv. Dignitaries and admirers are expected at his funeral on December 31.
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Israeli author Amos Oz died on Friday at the age of 79, his daughter announced.
"To those who love him, thank you," Fania Oz-Salzberger wrote on Twitter.
Following a public memorial service in Tel Aviv on December 31, Oz will be buried at the Hulda kibbutz, where he spent more than 30 years of his life.
Oz was born as Amos Klausner on May 4, 1939 in Jerusalem and grew up in a district dominated by Jewish immigrants of Eastern European descent. His father's family had fled the Russian Revolution of 1917 from Odessa to Vilnius. In 1933 they emigrated to Palestine.
Following the suicide of his mother, Oz joined the kibbutz of Hulda at age 15. To the chagrin of his father, he replaced his family name with the name "Oz," which in Hebrew means "force" or "strength."
Surrounded by books and languages
Oz's father, who came from a family of Zionist scholars, was a librarian and literary critic and spoke 12 languages, his mother spoke seven. They taught their son only Hebrew, but in a roundabout way he managed to return to multilingualism: His works have been translated into more than 40 languages, making him Israel's most-translated author.
From 1960 to 1963, Oz studied literature and philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. After graduating, he began teaching literature and philosophy. He continued to live with his wife and family at the kibbutz Hulda, but in 1986 moved to Arad in the Negev Desert.
From 1987 to 2005 he taught Hebrew literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beersheba. He took the prestigious Agnon Chair in Contemporary Hebrew Literature in 1993. In 2014, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland.
"The great character writer of our time" — as the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung called him — won many awards and distinctions, including the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the Goethe Prize, the Heinrich Heine Prize and the Siegfried Lenz Prize.
International breakthrough
The microcosm of kibbutz society, the tensions and uncertainties in the young state of Israel and the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians are central themes in Oz's extensive work, starting with his first collection of short stories, Where the Jackals Howl, in 1965.
The author achieved global fame in 1968 with his second novel, My Michael. It tells the story of a young woman who, after the failure of her marriage, escapes in her dreams to two handsome Arab twin brothers. Although she is not particularly interested in politics, the formation of the young Jewish state is reflected in her personal fate. My Michael broke long-standing taboos in the relations between Jews and Arabs.
A two-state solution
Following the Six-Day War of 1967, Oz became an early advocate of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and went on to co-found Peace Now, an organization that seeks to achieve that.
"My suggestion is to accept the terms which the whole world knows for a two-state-solution and coexistence between Israel and the West Bank: two capitals in Jerusalem, a mutually agreed territorial modification, and removal of most of the Jewish settlements from the West Bank," Oz told DW in a 2014 interview.
He went on to say that he would like to see "Israel removed once and for all from the front pages of all the newspapers in the world and instead conquer, occupy and build settlements in the literary, arts, music and architecture supplements. This is my dream for the future."
Oz's support for a two-state solution was not widely popular in Israel. His nomination for the Israel Prize for Literature in 1998 met with heated controversy.
A history of the Middle East peace process
For over half a century, disputes between Israelis and Palestinians over land, refugees and holy sites remain unresolved. DW gives you a short history of when the conflict flared and when attempts were made to end it.
UN Security Council Resolution 242, 1967
United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, passed on November 22, 1967, called for the exchange of land for peace. Since then, many of the attempts to establish peace in the region have referred to 242. The resolution was written in accordance with Chapter VI of the UN Charter, under which resolutions are recommendations, not orders.
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Camp David Accords, 1978
A coalition of Arab states, led by Egypt and Syria, fought Israel in the Yom Kippur or October War in October 1973. The conflict eventually led to the secret peace talks that yielded two agreements after 12 days. This picture from March 26, 1979, shows Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, his US counterpart Jimmy Carter and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin after signing the accords in Washington.
Image: picture-alliance/AP Photo/B. Daugherty
The Madrid Conference, 1991
The US and the former Soviet Union came together to organize a conference in the Spanish capital. The discussions involved Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and the Palestinians — not from the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) — who met with Israeli negotiators for the first time. While the conference achieved little, it did create the framework for later, more productive talks.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/J. Hollander
Oslo I Accord, 1993
The negotiations in Norway between Israel and the PLO, the first direct meeting between the two parties, resulted in the Oslo I Accord. The agreement was signed in the US in September 1993. It demanded that Israeli troops withdraw from West Bank and Gaza Strip and a self-governing, interim Palestinian authority be set up for a five-year transitional period. A second accord was signed in 1995.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/A. Sachs
Camp David Summit Meeting, 2000
US President Bill Clinton invited Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat to the retreat in July 2000 to discuss borders, security, settlements, refugees and Jerusalem. Despite the negotiations being more detailed than ever before, no agreement was concluded. The failure to reach a consensus at Camp David was followed by renewed Palestinian uprising, the Second Intifada.
Image: picture-alliance/AP Photo/R. Edmonds
The Arab Peace Initiative, 2002
The Camp David negotiations were followed first by meetings in Washington and then in Cairo and Taba, Egypt — all without results. Later the Arab League proposed the Arab Peace Initiative in Beirut in March 2002. The plan called on Israel to withdraw to pre-1967 borders so that a Palestinian state could be set up in the West Bank and Gaza. In return, Arab countries would agree to recognize Israel.
Image: Getty Images/C. Kealy
The Roadmap, 2003
The US, EU, Russia and the UN worked together as the Middle East Quartet to develop a road map to peace. While Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas accepted the text, his Israeli counterpart Ariel Sharon had more reservations with the wording. The timetable called for a final agreement on a two-state solution to be reached in 2005. Unfortunately, it was never implemented.
Image: Getty Iamges/AFP/J. Aruri
Annapolis, 2007
In 2007, US President George W. Bush hosted a conference in Annapolis, Maryland, to relaunch the peace process. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas took part in talks with officials from the Quartet and over a dozen Arab states. It was agreed that further negotiations would be held with the goal of reaching a peace deal by the end of 2008.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/S. Thew
Washington, 2010
In 2010, US Middle East Envoy George Mitchell convinced Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to agree to and implement a 10-month moratorium on settlements in disputed territories. Later, Netanyahu and Abbas agreed to relaunch direct negotiations to resolve all issues. Negotiations began in Washington in September 2010, but within weeks there was a deadlock.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/M. Milner
Cycle of escalation and ceasefire continues
A new round of violence broke out in and around Gaza in late 2012. A ceasefire was reached between Israel and those in power in the Gaza Strip, which held until June 2014. The kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers in June 2014 resulted in renewed violence and eventually led to the Israeli military operation Protective Edge. It ended with a ceasefire on August 26, 2014.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa
Paris summit, 2017
Envoys from over 70 countries gathered in Paris, France, to discuss the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Netanyahu slammed the discussions as "rigged" against his country. Neither Israeli nor Palestinian representatives attended the summit. "A two-state solution is the only possible one," French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said at the opening of the event.
Image: Reuters/T. Samson
Deteriorating relations in 2017
Despite the year's optimistic opening, 2017 brought further stagnation in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. A deadly summer attack on Israeli police at the Temple Mount, a site holy to both Jews and Muslims, sparked deadly clashes. Then US President Donald Trump's plan to move the US Embassy to Jerusalem prompted Palestinian leader Abbas to say "the measures ... undermine all peace efforts."
Image: Reuters/A. Awad
Trump's peace plan backfires, 2020
US President Donald Trump presented a peace plan that freezes Israeli settlement construction but retains Israeli control over most of the illegal settlements it has already built. The plan would double Palestinian-controlled territory but asks Palestinians to cross a red line and accept the previously constructed West Bank settlements as Israeli territory. Palestinians reject the plan.
Image: Reuters/M. Salem
Conflict reignites in 2021
Plans to evict four families and give their homes in East Jerusalem to Jewish settlers led to escalating violence in May 2021. Hamas fired over 2,000 rockets at Israel, and Israeli military airstrikes razed buildings in the Gaza Strip. The international community, including Germany's Foreign Ministry, called for an end to the violence and both sides to return to the negotiating table.
Image: Mahmud Hams/AFP
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Literature is more than politics
During a series of lectures held at the University of Tübingen in Germany in 2002, published later in the book How to Cure a Fanatic, Oz tackled what he considered misconceptions about the Israeli peace movement.
This situation in his country could not be paralleled to the German peace movement, he said, and he was "not a pacifist in the sentimental sense of the word." He fought in the Six-Day War in the Sinai Desert, and took part in the Yom Kippur War of 1973 in the Golan Heights. He also spoke out in favor of the Second Lebanon War in 2006 and supported Israel's actions during the 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict.
Though he held strong political opinions and was publicly vocal about them, Oz did not want his literary works to be reduced to a political message.
He emphasized that he did not trace the problems in human relationships back to the living conditions in a particular political context, but to a much deeper level of the human soul — saying he aimed to write not only about life in the context of the Middle East conflict, but about life itself.
