Politics & Power Quote by Amos Oz

Amos Oz is quietly picking a fight with the world’s preferred version of Israel: the one that arrives prepackaged as crisis footage, ideology, and slogans. “Precisely in this Israel” is a pointed insistence on location and scale. He’s not denying history or conflict; he’s rejecting the way international attention flattens a living society into a single, exportable argument. The phrase “never makes it to the news headlines anywhere” is less complaint than diagnosis: media logic doesn’t merely report reality, it edits it into a morality play where ordinary life becomes irrelevant background noise.

The intent is artistic and political at once. Oz stakes out the novel as a counter-medium, capable of restoring depth where the headline trades in speed. By foregrounding “everyday people,” he’s defending the ethical importance of the mundane: the private compromises, petty kindnesses, domestic hurts, and small absurdities that don’t translate into breaking news but do constitute a nation’s interior life. That choice is also a rebuke to identity scripts. “Far removed from fundamentalism, fanaticism nationalism, or militancy” reads like a roll call of the categories outsiders use to sort Israelis into understandable types. Oz wants characters who resist that sorting, who won’t serve as stand-ins for a cause.

The subtext carries a sharper edge: when a place is only legible through extremity, moderation becomes invisible, and invisibility becomes its own political fate. Oz is making room, on the page, for a Israel that is not an emblem but a society - messy, contradictory, human - and arguing that this, too, is real enough to matter.