I'd fight again and again if it would be a matter of life and death for the nation. I would not fight, though, for any other cause. I would not fight… - Amos Oz

(What are your memories of Israel's Independence Day? You write that your father told you to take it all in because this is something you'd be talking about to your children, to your grandchildren.) OZ: Yes. This was a euphoric night for me. I was about a 9-year-old when the General Assembly of the United Nations, then in Lake Success, resolved by a two-thirds vote to divide Palestine into two sovereign states - Palestinian Arab states and Israeli Jewish states. This, in brackets, is going to be the bottom line of several decades of conflict. In the end, Israelis and Palestinians will come back to a two-state solution, closed brackets. Now, for me that night is a memory which I will carry for the rest of my life. Never in my life, either before or after, have I seen such a burst of public euphoria - euphoria combined with fear of the future. No one was certain of the results. No one was certain whether we are going to survive the impending battle with the Arab world. But this euphoria that the Jews will become an independent nation for the first time in 19 centuries since the eradication of ancient Israel by the Roman armies - by the Roman Empire - that once again, there will be a Jewish regime, a Jewish government and the Jewish law, a Jewish sovereignty. That kind of vindication of people who have always been an oppressed and loathed minority wherever - everywhere except, perhaps, in the United States of America - but everywhere else, the feeling that at last, we are going to have a home; it may be very small; it may be a home the size of a handkerchief or a postal stamp on the map of the world. But nonetheless, it's going to be our home. This euphoria of that night - the singing, the dancing in the street, the hugging between total strangers, the tears, the vows - this I'll never forget, just as I will not forget the deep, sad silence which dawned on the Arab neighborhoods. Our joy was their catastrophe. Their fear and trembling and despair and anger and bewilderment - I will never forget how while half Jerusalem celebrated with fireworks and singing and dancing, the other parts of Jerusalem were erupting darkness, silence and sadness.

(In the book (Dear Zealots: Letters from a Divided Land), you describe your childhood as a “little Zionist-nationalist fanatic.” Your attitude changed because of your friendship with a British policeman. What happened?) Amos Oz: He shared with me different perspectives. He taught me to ask questions: If I were a Palestinian Arab whose family lived here for many, many generations, how would I feel about the influx of Jewish immigrants armed with the Bible and claiming exclusive rights to the land? How would I feel if I were a British [man] who shed his blood in order to beat Hitler, and now he is being labeled by militant Israelis, militant Zionists, as a continuation of the Nazis? Those conversations were eye-openers for me, because this was a kind of language I hadn’t heard spoken around me.

For thousands of years, we Jews had nothing but books. We had no lands, we had no holy sites, we had no magnificent architecture, we had no heroes. We had books, we had texts, and those texts were always discussed around the family table. They became part of the family life, and they traveled from one generation to the next — not unchanged, not unchallenged, but reinterpreted in each generation and reread by each generation.