Education Quote by Amos Oz

Oz is pitching a politics of grudging adulthood: the kind of peace that doesn’t feel like redemption, just a ceasefire you can live inside. The repetition of "unhappy" is the tell. He’s not romanticizing reconciliation or laundering trauma into uplift; he’s arguing that, in certain conflicts, insisting on emotional satisfaction becomes a luxury the future can’t afford. Compromise here isn’t a betrayal of justice but a recognition of limits: two peoples, two narratives, one strip of land, no clean moral exit.

The line’s engine is containment. Oz treats "our burned sense of injustice" like radioactive material: real, dangerous, and incapable of being wished away. "Contain" doesn’t mean deny; it means manage. The subtext is a critique of absolutism on all sides - the belief that history will finally crown one story and erase the other. He’s warning that moral maximalism, however righteous, can become a death drive when it refuses to stop "somewhere". The vague "somewhere" matters too: he’s not prescribing a particular border or agreement as much as a psychological boundary, a decision to halt the infinite escalation of grievance.

Context does a lot of work. As an Israeli novelist and public intellectual associated with the peace camp, Oz spoke from inside a society shaped by existential fear, and about a Palestinian reality marked by dispossession. His insistence on "unhappily coexist" is a refusal of purity politics: you don’t wait for the perfect partner, perfect apology, or perfect symmetry. You choose a flawed arrangement over a "doomed state" - the collapse into perpetual war that makes everyone’s justice impossible.