Dear Zealots Quotes

“A prominent israeli writer, Sami Michael, once told of a long car journey with a driver. At some point, the driver explained to Michael how important, indeed how urgent, it is for us Jews “to kill all the Arabs.” Sami Michael listened politely, and instead of reacting with horror, denunciation, or disgust, he asked the driver an innocent question: “And who, in your opinion, should kill all the Arabs?”

“Us! The Jews! We have to! It’s either us or them! Can’t you see what they’re doing to us?”

“But who, exactly, should actually kill all the Arabs? The army? The police? Firemen, perhaps? Or doctors in white coats, with syringes?”

The driver scratched his head, pondered the question, and finally said, “We’ll have to divvy it up among us. Every Jewish man will have to kill a few Arabs.”

Michael did not let up: “All right. Let’s say you, as a Haifa man, are in charge of one apartment building in Haifa. You go from door to door, ring the bells, and ask the residents politely, ‘Excuse me, would you happen to be Arabs?’ If the answer is yes, you shoot and kill them. When you’re done killing all the Arabs in the building, you go downstairs and head home, but before you get very far you hear a baby crying on the top floor. What do you do? Turn around? Go back? Go upstairs and shoot the baby? Yes or no?”

A long silence. The driver considers. Finally he says, “Sir, you are a very cruel man!”

This story exposes the confusion sometimes found in the fanatic’s mind: a mixture of intransigence with sentimentality and a lack of imagination.”
― Amos Oz, שלום לקנאים

“As the questions grow harder and more complicated, people yearn for simpler answers, one-sentence answers, answers that point unhesitatingly to a culprit who can be blamed for all our suffering, answers that promise that if we only eradicate the villains, all our troubles will vanish.”
― Amos Oz, שלום לקנאים

“Fanatics tend to live in a black-and-white world, with a simplistic view of good against evil. The fanatic is in fact a person who can only count to one. Yet at the same time, and without any contradiction, the fanatic almost always basks in some sort of bittersweet sentimentalism, composed of a mixture of fury and self-pity.”
― Amos Oz, שלום לקנאים

“Self-sacrifice can sometimes be a well-honed weapon that the fanatic wields for destructive emotional purposes. Moreover, those who are eager to sacrifice themselves will not find it difficult to sacrifice others.”
― Amos Oz, שלום לקנאים

“In addition to curiosity and imagination, another effective antidote to fanaticism might be humor, and especially the ability to make fun of ourselves. I, for one, have never met a fanatic with a sense of humor. Nor have I ever known anyone capable of making a joke at his own expense become a fanatic. Humor engenders a curvature that allows one to see, at least momentarily, old things in a new light. Or to see yourself, at least for a moment, as others see you. This curvature invites us to let hot air out of any excessive importance, including self-importance. Moreover, humor usually entails a measure of relativity, of abasing the sublime.”
― Amos Oz, שלום לקנאים

“The fanatic loathes an open-ended situation. Perhaps he does not acknowledge such situation. He always has an urgent need to know what the 'bottom line' is, what the inevitable conclusion is, when we will finally 'come full circle.' Yet history, including the private history of each of us, is usually not a circle but a line: a winding line with retreats and bends, which sometimes changes course and intersects with itself and occasionally draws loops, but nevertheless, a line and not a circle. Being immune to fanaticism entails, among other things, a willingness to exist inside open-ended situations that do not come full circle and cannot be unequivocally settled. A readiness to live with questions and choices whose resolutions hide far beyond the hazy horizon.”
― Amos Oz, שלום לקנאים

“This war is being fought between fanatics convinced that their ends sanctify all means, and everyone else - all those who hold that life is an end and not a means. It is a struggle between people who believe that justice, whatever that term may mean to them, is more important than life, and those who maintain that life takes precedence over other values.”
― Amos Oz, שלום לקנאים

“More and more commonly, the strongest public sentiment is one of profound loathing - subversive loathing of 'the hegemonic discourse,' Western loathing of the East, Eastern loathing of the West, secular loathing of believers, religious loathing of the secular. Sweeping, unmitigated loathing surges like vomit from the depths of this or that misery. Such extreme loathing is a component of fanaticism in all its guises.”
― Amos Oz, שלום לקנאים

“In my novel 'Panther in the Basement,' I retold the experiences that revealed to me, as a child, that sometimes there are two sides to a story, that conflicts are colored not only in black and white. In the last year of the British Mandate, when I was about eight, I befriended a British policeman who spoke ancient Hebrew and had memorized most of the Bible. He was a fat, asthmatic, emotional man, and perhaps a slightly muddled one, who fervently believed that the Jewish people's return to its ancestral land heralded redemption for the world at large. When the other children discovered my friendship with this man, they called me a traitor. Much later, I learned to take comfort in the thought that, for fanatic, a traitor is anyone who dares to change. Fanatics of all kinds, in all places at all times, loathe and fear change, suspecting that it is nothing less than a betrayal resulting from dark, base motives.”
― Amos Oz, שלום לקנאים

“There are varying degrees of evil in the world. The distinction between levels of evil is perhaps the primary moral responsibility incumbent upon each of us. Every child knows that cruelty is bad and contemptible, while its opposite, compassion, is commendable. That is an easy and simple moral distinction. The more essential and far more difficult distinction is the one between different shades of gray, between degrees of evil. Aggressive environmental activists, for example, or the furious opponents of globalization, may sometimes emerge as violent fanatics. But the evil they cause is immeasurably smaller than that caused by a fanatic who commits a large-scale terrorist attack. Nor are the crimes of the terrorist fanatic comparable to those of fanatics who commit ethnic cleansing or genocide.

Those who are unwilling or unable to rank evil may thereby become the servants of evil. Those who make no distinction between such disparate phenomena as apartheid, colonialism, ISIS, Zionism, political incorrectness, the gas chambers, sexism, the 1 percent's wealth, and air pollution serve evil with their very refusal to grade it.”
― Amos Oz, שלום לקנאים

“One of the distinct hallmarks of the fanatic is his fervent desire to change you so that you will be like him. To convince you that you must immediately convert, abandon your world, and move into his. The fanatic does not want there to be any differences between people. He wants us all to be as one. He desires a world with no curtains drawn, no blinds shuttered, no doors locked, no shadow of a private life, for we must all be one body and one soul. We must all march together in threes on the path ascending to redemption, whether this redemption or the opposite one.

The fanatic strives to upgrade and improve you, to open your eyes so that you, too, can see the light. Indeed, in that sense the fanatic is a wondrously altruistic and extremely unselfish creature: he is interested in you far more than he is in himself. Day and night he yearns to save your soul, to unshackle you, to take you out of darkness into the light, to redeem you once and for all from error and sin. Here he comes to hug you, sick with worry about your condition, bubbling with goodwill to change your prayer habits (or lack thereof), your voting or smoking habits, your eating habits, your preferences, your entire lifestyle, which is so harmful to you. All the fanatic wants is to take you in his arms and hug you, to raise you from the lowly spot you are stuck in and place you in the sublime place he has discovered, where he has since been basking and to which you must ascend immediately. For your very own good.”
― Amos Oz, שלום לקנאים

“The fanatic is always in a hurry to fall on your neck to save you, because he loves you. He loves you unconditionally. But, conversely, he might grab you and strangle you if he discovers that you are beyond redemption. Lost. And if that is the case, he is obliged to hate you and rid the world of you.”
― Amos Oz, שלום לקנאים

“Like all types of zealotry, violent Islam is not limited to a gang of sadistic, bloodthirsty fanatics. At its foundation stands an idea. A bitter, desperate idea, a distorted idea. However, it is worth remembering that one can almost never vanquish an idea, twisted as it may be, simply by using a big stick. There must be a response; there must be an opposing idea, a more attractive belief, a more persuasive promise. I am unopposed to using a big stick against murderers. I do not believe in turning the other cheek, nor do I share the prevalent opinion whereby violence is the absolute evil. To me, the most extreme evil is not violence but aggression. Violence is the manifestation of aggression. It is often essential to curb aggression with a big stick, as long as the stick is accompanied by an appealing, convincing idea. Absent such an idea, fanatics of one kind or another will step in to fill the void.”
― Amos Oz, שלום לקנאים

“Fanaticism... is contagious: a person may catch it even as he fights to cure other people of it. There is no shortage of anti-fanaticism fanatics in the world. All sorts of crusades to stop jihad, and jihads to subjugate the new crusaders. This includes the zeal so prevalent in Israel and in the West these days to deliver a knockout blow that will finish off all the bloodthirsty fanatics and anyone like them once and for all. To eradicate every last bastion of zealotry.”
― Amos Oz, שלום לקנאים

“To imagine the inner world, both intellectual and emotional, of the other. To use our imagination even in times of strife. To use it also, primarily, in moments when we feel a surge of fury, insult, loathing, righteousness, and the certainty that we have been wronged and that justice is entirely on our side. Perhaps also to ask, once in a while: What if I were her? Or him? Or them? To step, for a moment, into the other's shoes and under his skin, not in order to cross the river or be 'reborn,' but simply to understand, to sense, what is there. What is beyond the river? What do they have in their head? How do they feel over there? And what do we look like from there? Perhaps also to try to find out how deep the dividing river is. How wide? How and where might we build a bridge? This curiosity will not necessarily lead us to a conclusion of sweeping moral relativity, nor to self-abdication in favor of the other's selfhood. It will lead us, sometimes, to an exhilarating discovery, which is that there are many rivers, each of whose banks can show us a different landscape that may be fascinating and surprising. Fascinating even if it is not right for us; surprising even if it does not appeal to us. Perhaps, indeed, in curiosity lies the prospect of openness and tolerance.”
― Amos Oz, שלום לקנאים

“Curiosity and imagination are bound together. The age-old human urge to peek behind other people's drawn shutters, the eagerness to compare one's own intimate secrets with the secret intimacy of others, is an urge that may serve as an antidote to the fanatic's lust to murder the difference between himself and others. Or to kill anyone who refuses to change and declines to be exactly like him.”
― Amos Oz, שלום לקנאים

“Literature and gossip are closely related. People who are curious and imaginative long to know 'what it's like for other people.' This longing can be satisfied in its basest, most banal form through gossip, just as it can attain a more refined and complex gratification in art. Both gossip and literature, each in its own way, are capable of offering a partial antidote to fanaticism, because they both relish the fascinating differences between people.”
― Amos Oz, שלום לקנאים

“Contending with fanaticism does not mean destroying all fanatics, but rather cautiously handling the little fanatic who hides, more or less, inside each of our souls. It also means ridiculing, just a little, our own convictions; being curious; and trying to take a peek, from time to time, not only through our neighbor's window but, more important, at the reality viewed from that window, which will necessarily be different from the one seen through our own.”
― Amos Oz, שלום לקנאים