5 ideas
In a café in the development town of Beit Shemesh, Oz is berated by residents of Moroccan origin, who treat him as a stand-in for the Ashkenazi Labor and kibbutz establishment. Some argue that returning the occupied territories would end Arab labor and push them back to the bottom rung, so their hawkishness rests on grievance and social status more than on ideology about land.
An anonymous interviewee, identified only as 'Z.', offers to be the 'Judeonazi' whose generation commits the massacres and expulsions needed to secure the state. In his account, the next generation can then afford to be humane and liberal on ground already cleared. The argument turns atrocity into a one-time investment, recasting moral corruption as a sacrifice for descendants who will be spared having to perform it.
Oz argues that 'Zionism' is a family name shared by incompatible ideologies, including religious-messianic, socialist, liberal and security-nationalist ones. It does not name one program. Asking whether someone is 'a Zionist' therefore settles almost nothing, and the real political argument is over which first name, meaning which vision of the state, prevails.
They regard Torah and the diaspora community as permanent, and they see a political state as having usurped a role reserved for the Messiah. Viewed this way, a state its founders consider the culmination of Jewish history looks shallow-rooted to the people it claims to embody.
Oz frames the Israeli-Arab conflict as a clash between two valid claims to the same land, a tragedy rather than a morality tale of good against evil. On this view, the only decent resolution is an unsatisfying partition in which each side gives up part of what is justly theirs. The zealots on every side are dangerous because they all refuse to accept half a right.