Amos Elon

1926–2009

Amos Elon, who has died of leukemia at 82, was probably Israel’s most famous public intellectual. A sharp-eyed interpreter of Jewish life, he was renowned for his writings about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which blended sympathy for his nation with pointed dissent of many of its policies. So critical could Elon be that when someone asked him, “Are you one of those self-haters?” he shot back, “No, I don’t hate myself. I just hate Jews like you.”

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Born in Vienna, Elon and his family moved to Palestine in the early 1930s as the threat from the Nazis mounted, said the Forward. After serving in the Haganah, Israel’s pre-state army, he joined the Tel Aviv–based newspaper Ha’aretz in 1951. “His early writings,” which focused on such issues as the kibbutz movement, “celebrated the new Jewish state and its values.” But the Six-Day War of 1967 against Syria, Jordan, and Egypt fundamentally changed Elon’s outlook as “he began writing probing critiques of Israel’s new triumphalist nationalism.”

Elon made his reputation with his 1970 volume The Israelis: Founders and Sons, “an affectionate but unsparing portrait of early Zionists,” said The New York Times. “Israel’s founders, Elon argued, had failed to properly acknowledge the people living on the land that the Zionists had come to reclaim.” More common now, Elon’s take “was rare then, particularly coming from the pen of an Israeli.” Buoyed by the volume’s success, Elon left Ha’aretz to concentrate on books. His 1975 work Herzl was a well-received biography of the founder of the modern Zionist movement, and his last book, The Pity of It All (2002), “was a portrait of German Jewry from the mid-18th century until the rise of Hitler.” Though “widely admired, he was not an easy man to love,” especially when discussing such subjects as the religious nationalists who drove the development of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. “At their core,” Elon wrote, “is a group of fanatical nationalists and religious fundamentalists who believe they know exactly what God and Abraham said to each other in the Bronze Age.”

Elon, who is survived by his wife and daughter, moved from Jerusalem to Tuscany, Italy, in 2004. “It’s in my blood,” he said of Israel, “but my feeling was that everything had already been said.”