Johann Hari: Israel’s Voice of Reason? An Exclusive Interview With Amos Oz
Oz is sitting in the coffee shop of Joseph’s bookstore in Golder’s Green, north London, looking older and more fragile than his vigorous black-and-white author’s picture. He is 70 now, his hair wispier and whiter. He greets me with a gravelly voice, and we order black coffees. It seems far away and long ago, but Oz once dreamed of bombing this city. He was once a child of what he calls “the Jewish intifada” – the stone-throwing, death-defying Jewish rebellion against British occupation. He believed the state that would emerge from the rubble would be a model of justice and idealism for all mankind. If you were a child in Gaza now, Mr Oz, would you be dreaming the same dreams against Israel? “I don’t even have to imagine the answer to this question – I know it,” he says. “Because I was a kid in Jerusalem in ’48 when the city was besieged, shelled, starved, [and] the water supply [was] cut off. And I know the horror, and I know the despair, and I know the hopelessness, and I know the anger, and I know the frustration.” He says he was “not so much a child as a bundle of self-righteous arguments, a brainwashed little fanatic, a stone-throwing chauvinist. The first words I ever learnt to say in English were ‘British, go home!'”
For full article, visit http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/israels-voice-of-reason-a_b_176724.html
Assad: Israel’s new government is against peace
Assad underlined the need for continued resistance, a reference to anti-Israeli militant groups like the Palestinian Hamas, which Damascus supports.
“Resistance is a national and patriotic and moral duty and it is the only option,” he said. “Peace cannot be achieved with an enemy who does not believe in peace without it being imposed on him by resistance.”
For full article, visit http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1074919.html
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