Amos Oz in A Tale of Love and Darkness

This paper looks at the call for a dialogue underlying Amos Oz’s autobiographical novel A Tale of Love and Darkness.1 As a peace activist,2 Oz depicts the Arab Palestinian under Israeli military occupation as a victim and reintroduces himself as a new, unorthodox Jew. In this context, the paper approaches the author-narrator’s message calling for a dialogue with the Palestinian other, albeit through a Chekhovian solution to an existentialist conflict entangling both the Arabs and the Jews over the Question of Palestine. Thanks to the complicity between the Western Colonial Project3 and the Zionist plan to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine, most of the Palestinian population was expelled and dispossessed. Oz condemns that complicity and stands out as a Jewish voice for peace. His narrative discourse implies that he is crossing a minefield while trying to help resuscitate the current stale-mate peace process in the Middle East.