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Remembering Amos ElonThe historian who explained Israel to itself.

By Christopher HitchensUpdated Tuesday, June 30, 2009, at 3:33 PM ET

Photograph of Amos Elon. Amos ElonIn a week of apocalyptic news from the Korean peninsula and from Pakistan, those two notorious examples of the horrible failure of partition, I still felt very affected by the death of Amos Elon, whose life and work so deftly tracked the fault lines of another partition—in Palestine.

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Amos was one of those people whose life stories are uncomfortably close to the 20^thcentury. He was born in Vienna in 1926 to a family that exemplified the success of Jews in Mitteleuropa. But the fragility of their historic achievement was demonstrated seven years later, when his parents decided to remove themselves from Europe and start again in Palestine. (To have made this decision as soon as Nazism took power in Germany, and not to have waited as even Sigmund Freud did until after the Austrian Anschluss, argues that they had a good dose of that premonitory or seismic intuition that some Jews are held to possess.)

Related in Slate

Adam Shatz parsed the furor over a Holocaust historian's controversial thesis, for which Amos Elon provided context. In 1997, Frank Foer took the Weekly Standard to task for taking Elon to task for his critique of Zionism. Christopher Hitchens celebrated Israel's 60^th birthday by considering its future. Hillel Halkin and Tom Segev discussed some of the new works on Elon's subject matter.

Still, as Amos was himself later wryly to concede, if the Jews had been all that smart and all that keen on self-preservation, they might have thought two or three times before moving to a hotly contested British colony where Arab nationalism was on the rise. As he never failed to put it—he the biographer of Theodor Herzl and historian of the early Zionist founding fathers—the key and indispensable insight was to appreciate that non-Jews cared about this land just as much Jews did.

For many years Amos was the best-known writer about his country, both inside and outside it. As an ironic and lucid and mordant essayist for the daily paper Haaretz, he wrote about Israel "proper," about the territories it had seized after 1967, about the Germany where he lived for many years, and about the United States, with which he also had a kind of love-hate understanding. Herewith, some vignettes.

Many Israelis didn't like Amos' book about the federal republic, because he wrote about Germany and Germans as if the thing could be done without hyperbole or hysteria. I once watched him pass a very exacting test of this attitude. It was in early 1992 in Berlin, where over dinner he mentioned to Ian Buruma and me that he had received an invitation to "preview" the new museum at the Wannsee villa. This was the lakeside house where the barons of the Nazi empire had met half a century earlier in January 1942, under the leadership of Reinhard Heydrich, to discuss the details of the Endlossung, or "Final Solution." We could, he said, accompany him if we liked.