‘Current Liquidisations Ltd.’: Israel’s ‘Mediterranean’ Identity in Amos Oz’s The Same Sea

This chapter examines the role that the Mediterranean Sea came to play in Israel’s national identity from the 1990s onwards. Through a reading of Amos Oz’s The Same Sea (1999), it counters claims that a turn to the Mediterranean offered a ‘post-ideological’ identity appropriate to the era of the Oslo Accords. It shows instead that the phenomenon of ‘Mediterraneanism’, or Yam Tikhoniut, was continuous with earlier Zionist goals, notably in reaffirming Israel’s affiliation with Europe and its distance from the ‘Orient’. Oz’s novel is further identified as depicting the arrival of global capitalism in Israel through its portrayals of tourism, and through its use of liquid metaphors and formal techniques that connect economic growth at home to underdevelopment abroad.