Parenting & Family Quote by Amos Oz

Oz frames the Israeli-Palestinian conflict less as an ancient blood feud than as a psychological trap: the trauma of one generation becomes the lens through which the next reads every gesture. The “cruel parent” is a deliberately elastic metaphor. It can be history, empire, Europe’s antisemitism, the Holocaust, the Nakba, occupation, dispossession, repeated wars - the whole machinery that produces victimhood and then demands someone else pay for it. By making both sides “children,” Oz shifts the moral grammar from villain-versus-hero to damage-versus-damage.

The subtext is pointed, and risky. Calling both Jews and Arabs “victims” refuses the clean satisfactions of propaganda. It insists that each community’s fear is real even when it’s weaponized, and that each community’s power can coexist with its pain. That’s the sting: victimhood isn’t innocence; it’s a political resource and a psychological habit. When you “see… the image of the cruel parent” in the other, you stop encountering a neighbor and start encountering your own nightmare in human form. Negotiation becomes impossible because every compromise feels like returning to the original scene of abuse.

Context matters: Oz wrote as an Israeli literary figure associated with the peace camp, arguing for partition and mutual recognition. His metaphor is not neutral sympathy; it’s an intervention aimed at his own society as much as anyone else’s. He’s trying to disarm the most seductive story nations tell themselves: that suffering grants unlimited permission.