"In many ways, I regard Sharon and Arafat as birds of a feather"
About this Quote
Calling Ariel Sharon and Yasser Arafat "birds of a feather" is Amos Oz at his most disquietingly even-handed: a moral provocation disguised as a shrug. Oz isn’t flattening history into a cheap both-sides punchline. He’s doing something sharper and more irritating to loyalists on either camp: insisting that the conflict’s most dominant figures often mirror each other in method, temperament, and political incentive, even while claiming opposite destinies.
The phrase works because it steals a folk idiom - cozy, almost comic - and drops it onto two men treated as national symbols. Sharon, the hawkish general-turned-politician, and Arafat, the revolutionary-turned-state-builder, both cultivated ambiguity as a weapon: each could signal pragmatism to outsiders while keeping a militant mythos intact for their base. Both understood that power in a siege narrative rewards hardness, not nuance. Oz is pointing to a shared political ecology where compromise reads as betrayal and maximalism pays.
Context matters: Oz, a longtime Israeli peace advocate tied to the two-state camp, wrote from inside a society exhausted by terror, occupation, and failed negotiations. The subtext is less "they are equally guilty" than "they are structurally alike": leaders shaped by violence, sustained by it, and rhetorically dependent on the idea that the other side only understands force. It’s an argument against hero-worship - and against the comforting fantasy that replacing one villain fixes the machine.
The phrase works because it steals a folk idiom - cozy, almost comic - and drops it onto two men treated as national symbols. Sharon, the hawkish general-turned-politician, and Arafat, the revolutionary-turned-state-builder, both cultivated ambiguity as a weapon: each could signal pragmatism to outsiders while keeping a militant mythos intact for their base. Both understood that power in a siege narrative rewards hardness, not nuance. Oz is pointing to a shared political ecology where compromise reads as betrayal and maximalism pays.
Context matters: Oz, a longtime Israeli peace advocate tied to the two-state camp, wrote from inside a society exhausted by terror, occupation, and failed negotiations. The subtext is less "they are equally guilty" than "they are structurally alike": leaders shaped by violence, sustained by it, and rhetorically dependent on the idea that the other side only understands force. It’s an argument against hero-worship - and against the comforting fantasy that replacing one villain fixes the machine.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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