Amos Elon, the Israeli journalist and author who died in Italy on May 25 at age 82, was described for decades as Israel’s leading public intellectual — the writer who, more than any other, explained Israelis to themselves and to the world. And yet, he spent his final years in self-described “exile” in Italy, despairing of Israel’s future. His passing received more notice in Europe and America than in Israel.
A Haaretz staff writer for five decades, Elon was one of the first Israeli journalists to chronicle the lives of neglected Sephardic immigrants in the 1950s and to describe the emerging challenges of Palestinian nationalism and the West Bank settler movement in the 1970s. He wrote the definitive biographies of Zionist founding father Theodor Herzl and of banking patriarch Mayer Rothschild. His best-known book, “The Israelis: Founders and Sons,” an international best-seller in 1971, permanently changed the way Israel was discussed at home and abroad.
“He was a journalist who was also a fine writer,” respected Yediot Aharonot columnist Nahum Barnea said. “In the Israeli journalism of the 1950s and 1960s, there was very little writing that combined well-informed opinion with literary grace. Amos was the best.”
Elon was also a secular, liberal-minded Western intellectual steeped in the mannered culture of his native Vienna and the socialist, freethinking Tel Aviv lifestyle of his childhood. The nationalist and religious trends that came to dominate post-1967 Israel left him disappointed and alienated.
In his last decades “he became distant,” Barnea said. “His outlook became more and more critical, and further from the Israeli mainstream. But at that point, he was no longer writing for an Israeli audience.”
Elon was born in Austria in 1926 and moved with his family in 1933 to what was then Palestine. As a teenager, he became involved with Tel Aviv’s literary and café society, where he came to the attention of Haaretz editor Gershon Schocken. Elon joined Haaretz as a reporter in 1951.
During the 1950s, he won acclaim for his coverage of Israel’s leading dramas, including the mass North African immigration and the traumatic 1952 schism in the kibbutz movement. Later he served as a correspondent in Paris and Washington, where he met his American-born wife. A posting in Bonn, the capital of West Germany, resulted in his first book, “Journey Through a Haunted Land: The New Germany,” published in 1967. It sympathetically depicted Germany’s struggles with its past, leaving many Israelis outraged.
The publication of “The Israelis” in Hebrew in 1970 and in English in 1971 marked the turning point in Elon’s career. His early writings celebrated the new Jewish state and its values. After the 1967 Six Day War left Israel in control of the West Bank and Gaza, he began writing probing critiques of Israel’s new triumphalist nationalism.
“The Israelis” depicted a Jewish state in transition, from the passionately ideological founding generation, led by Eastern European-born Zionist pioneers like David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir, to the generation of their Israeli-born children, pragmatic soldier-politicians like Moshe Dayan and Yigal Allon. The book’s other central theme was the obliviousness of founders and sons alike to Palestinian Arab frustration.
Elon’s depiction of generational transition profoundly affected Israeli thinking. “He put a name on a moment in history,” Barnea said. “It was a heroic book. It was assigned as reading in schools. You wouldn’t see schools today assigning a book like that.”
The book’s second theme, about Israeli shortsightedness toward the Palestinians, drew far less attention in Israel. But for readers abroad, especially liberal Jews, that was the book’s main message.
“It was extremely important to have Jewish Israelis writing about what was happening from a point of view that didn’t dismiss the Arab Palestinian community or the PLO itself,” said left-leaning American journalist Victor Navasky, publisher of The Nation magazine, which occasionally published Elon’s writing. “He was among the most thoughtful of those voices, and in a funny way, the easiest to accept. It was very important — particularly within the Jewish community — to have someone like him saying what he said.”
“The Israelis” pinpointed a transition not just in Israel, but also in Elon himself. His writing was shifting away from the patriotic outlook of his early work toward a deeply critical take on Israeli society. “If you read the earlier writings now, you would not believe it was the same Amos Elon,” Barnea said.
Lionized worldwide because of “The Israelis,” Elon left Haaretz in 1971 to lecture and to write books. A chance meeting in late 1973 with Sana Hassan, daughter of the Egyptian ambassador in Washington, resulted in a series of conversations that was published in 1974 as “Between Enemies: A Compassionate Dialogue Between an Israeli and an Arab,” causing a new sensation. He also wrote the Herzl biography during this period.
In 1978, however, Elon returned to Haaretz, turning out increasingly sharp commentary on the settlements and the West Bank-Gaza occupation. In 1986, he again cut his hours at the paper to focus on writing books and essays. He resigned from Haaretz formally in 2001, exactly 50 years after first joining it.
During the 1990s, he began spending much of his time at a second home in the Tuscany region of Italy. In a series of gloomy essays and reviews in overseas publications, mainly the left-leaning New York Review of Books, he criticized both Israelis and Palestinians but reserved most of his barbs for Israel.
During this period, too, he produced a stream of well-regarded books, including an acclaimed history of Jewish life in pre-Holocaust Germany, “The Pity of It All.” Tellingly, most were published first in English and only afterward in Hebrew. In 2004, he sold his home in Jerusalem and settled in Italy for good.
Before leaving Israel, he delivered what amounted to a farewell address in a Haaretz interview with reporter Ari Shavit. He said he was leaving because he was “disappointed” and at times “horrified” at what Israel was becoming, and he was tired of being a “lone voice in the wilderness.”
“It’s impossible to live here without feeling some unease,” he said. “And this unease grows the worse the situation gets.” In Italy, he said, he could live as “a pensioner sitting on a mountain and gazing at the gorgeous view.”
Still, he acknowledged, “I miss my friends in Israel very much.”
“Here is where I kissed a girl for the first time,” he said. “And what is a homeland if not the place where you kiss a girl for the first time?”
Contact J.J. Goldberg at goldberg@forward.com.
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His book on Germany during the Weimar period amounted to a white washing of antisemitism.
His thesis was that "it could have been different."
Intellecetuals need to talk about what was and what is not about what could or might have been.
What I object to is the lionization of this man who in my opinion was not a friend of Israel or the Jewish people. In his interview with Ari Shavit, he expresses regret that his mother forced the family to move to Palestine in 1933 rather than to France, as his father favored. Had he moved to France, he would likely have been killed by the nazis. Thus, moving to Eretz Yisrael saved his life. He lacks gratitude for this. The inability to say thank you is particularly irritating, and is characteristic of other parts of the Middle East. I see now reason why Mr Elon deserves any more commemoration than the thousands of anonymous victims who died in the Eastern Congo or Darfur on a daily basis. We dont know the accomplishments of these anonymous victims. In regards to Mr Elon and the Jewish people, we know that his net negatives balance out his net positives for a sum of zero
In Italy, he said, he could live as “a pensioner sitting on a mountain and gazing at the gorgeous view.”
So when will Akiva Eldar be settling permanently in Italy to gaze at the mountains given his putative role model Elon had it there were no pressing problems there worthy enough to cause moral unease. In the end, it appears that Elon turned out to be a blinkered and ethnocentric shmuck who didn't seem to give a damn about contributing anything (like his supposed lofty moral integrity) to Italy.
The previous comments on Elon just illustrate how right he was, and are typical of the hateful and arrogant self-righteousness that saddened him so much.
"The previous comments on Elon just illustrate how right he was, and are typical of the hateful and arrogant self-righteousness that saddened him so much."
Nonsense, David. Elon wasn't "saddened," like you he was a professional Israel hater, unlike you he made a good living of it.
Lbnaz: "In Italy, he said, he could live as “a pensioner sitting on a mountain and gazing at the gorgeous view.”
As if Italy didn't have any problems, no hatred and oppression of Gypsies no corruption and no racism.
The guy was a joke.
He reminds me of Gore Vidal another professional hater.
David, I agree that self-righteousness and indignation ("look how they mistreated us") will not bring peace, and it saddens me that Israelis seem unwilling to contemplate treating the pain of Palestinians with the compassion they extend to the pain of Jews.
Not only Elon, but other Jewish intellectuals like Buber, Levinas, and David Grossman addressed the ethical challenge of meeting the other as equal to oneself. And for peace to be possible, of course the Palestinians too would need to agree to treat Israelis with equal ethical rigour. As psychoanalysts such as Vamik Volkan and Fakhry Davids have said, when nations drop the paranoid-schizoid thinking (ie the enemy is them, not us) and reach the more mature "depressive position" (ie we are the same), peace has a chance.
"Not only Elon, but other Jewish intellectuals like Buber, Levinas, and David Grossman addressed the ethical challenge of meeting the other as equal to oneself."
Toby, Levinas who was critical of Buber's philosophy was pro-Israel all his life. Buber lived in the Jewish State as does Grossman.
This is a far cry from the self righteous Elon who exchanged one flawed country for another.
You can't psychoanalize countries or people's without falling into psychobabble.
You want Israelis to treat Palestinian Arabs with the same compassion they treat other Jews? That will happend when these same people stop killing Jewish women and children. Stop sending suicide bombers and stop talking quoting from the Protocols of the Elder of Zion.
Paul Solomon (is that your real name?) you write as if the Arab Israeli conflict was the most lethal in the world and the most dangerous. It isn't. Here are some figures:
Let's put the Arab Israeli conflict in some perspective:
“Despite the media's obsession with the Mideast conflict, it has cost many fewer lives than the youth bulges in West Africa, Lebanon or Algeria.
In the six decades since Israel's founding, "only" some 62,000 people (40,000 Arabs, 22,000 Jews) have been killed in all the Israeli-Arab wars and Palestinian terror attacks.
During that same time, some 11 million Muslims have been killed in wars and terror attacks -- mostly at the hands of other Muslims.
In Arab nations such as Lebanon (150,000 dead in the civil war between 1975 and 1990) or Algeria (200,000 dead in the Islamists' war against their own people between 1999 and 2006),”
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123171179743471961.html
Let's get real, Paul Solomon.
Jacob, Paul Solomon is my real name, and I lived in a kibbutz from 1964-65, and served in Nachal 1965-67. Yes, in fact you can psychoanalyze peoples, and minimising language (ie "psychobabble") is an uninformed and superficial fear-based attack on looking deeply into emotional realities. Stick to statistics if you prefer, Jacob, but no matter the numbers, every soul suffers.
I'm writing about only the Israel-Palestine conflict because that's the one in which I have been personally involved: my remarks apply equally to the psychology of most other conflicts. I hope that's real enough.
Well Paul Solomon, I still don't agree with this view:
"As psychoanalysts such as Vamik Volkan and Fakhry Davids have said, when nations drop the paranoid-schizoid thinking (ie the enemy is them, not us) and reach the more mature "depressive position" (ie we are the same), peace has a chance."
Nations don't make peace because they drop "paranoid schizoid thinking." They make peace for diverse reasond most often because they lose a war which is to say "peace in imposed on them."
The rest is wishful thinking.
Europe may be at peace right now, but there is a grwoinf zenophobic movement from Moscow to London and from Amsterdam to Milan.
Open borders is allowing skinheads and others to cross them with impunity.
Compare the obituaries of Amos Elon vs Si Frumkin. SI Frumkin made lives better by helping them escape the USSR. Elon was a famous navelgazer who made no contribution to mankind. The contrast could not be more stark