Love Quote by Amos Oz

Normal life is the most unnerving thing Oz can describe. By placing Israelis "on the slope of a volcano", he refuses the melodrama that outsiders (and sometimes insiders) expect from a country perpetually framed as emergency, conflict, and prophecy. The volcano is obvious: political violence, war, history that can erupt without warning. What matters is the sentence that follows, the stubborn drumbeat of "one still". Oz insists that catastrophe doesn’t cancel the petty and the tender; it just makes them look strangely brave, even faintly absurd.

The repetition works like a moral argument disguised as anthropology. Love, jealousy, careerism, gossip: not heroic virtues, not even particularly admirable. Yet their persistence becomes a kind of proof of personhood. Oz is pushing back against the flattening gaze that turns Israelis (and Palestinians, by implication) into symbols, spokespeople, or victims-in-waiting. He’s also needling a local temptation: to treat the national crisis as an all-purpose alibi, excusing cruelty or postponing self-scrutiny. If you can still angle for a promotion, you can’t claim you’re made of pure tragedy.

Contextually, this sits inside Oz’s lifelong project: portraying Israel not as a mythic idea but as a crowded apartment building of competing desires, fears, and banalities. The subtext is political without being programmatic. He’s arguing that peace begins with recognizing the neighbor not as a volcano, but as the person gossiping beside you while the ground trembles.