The New Year Quote by Amos Oz

Oz is doing what he did best: using a punchline-shaped exaggeration to smuggle in a bleak diagnosis. The image is absurd on purpose. An earthquake is the least political event imaginable, a brute act of geology, so blaming Israel for it is not just wrong but cartoonishly wrong. That’s the point. By pushing the accusation to the edge of the ridiculous, Oz argues that anti-Israel reflexes in international forums can become self-sustaining narratives, detached from evidence and even from plausibility.

The mechanics of the hypothetical vote matter as much as the insult. “Probably have a majority” sketches the UN as a stage where blocs behave predictably, less a court of facts than a theater of alignment. Then comes the familiar choreography: the U.S. veto as muscular loyalty, Britain and France abstaining as cultivated ambivalence. In a single sentence, Oz turns geopolitics into a grimly reliable script, one in which moral judgment is pre-decided and responsibility is allocated by habit.

The subtext is defensive, but not triumphalist. He’s not saying Israel is beyond criticism; he’s saying criticism often arrives prepackaged, and that this distorts both diplomacy and moral language. Coming from an Israeli novelist and peace advocate, the line carries extra bite: it’s a lament about the international conversation becoming so warped that even the legitimate arguments get drowned in the noise. The joke lands because it’s close enough to recognizable patterns to feel less like comedy than like reportage with sharpened edges.