HOME / fighting words: A wartime lexicon.

Remembering Amos ElonThe historian who explained Israel to itself.

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

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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.

Not an easy afternoon to forget: We had the place to ourselves and saw the house much as those attending the murder-summit must have seen it. I remember saying to Ian, look, this is where their chauffeurs must have parked the staff cars while they had a smoke. Inside, amazingly courteous and helpful young Germans helped us to find our way about. Then we noticed that Amos had done a slight fade. He returned to view after an interval. He had been consulting the brand-new computer database of names of victims, looking for kin. And had he found any? "I think one or two, yes. Maybe three." I didn't ask how close they had been: His manner of understatement was unsurpassable.

His lifetime as an Israeli journalistic insider gave him the most extraordinary sources. One day in Washington several years ago, as it became obvious that things in Baghdad were becoming hellish for the American-led coalition in the Iraq war, he told me the following story. In the run-up to the intervention in Iraq, the United States had approached the Israelis and asked how many citizens they had who spoke "Iraqi Arabic"—i.e., who had lived in Iraq before they had left or been expelled and who understood the local idioms and vernacular. The answer was that there were still quite a few. A group of these was put aboard an AWACS plane that flew high over Iraqi airspace and asked to listen in to radio traffic between Iraqi officers as the date of the Bush ultimatum to Saddam drew nearer.

When debriefed, all the former Iraqi Jews were of one opinion: Saddam's army would not fight, and many of its soldiers had already decided to melt away when the attack began. I thought this was a mildly interesting anecdote and indeed told him so, on the Watergate balcony where we happened to be standing. He was exasperated with me. "Don't you see?" he said. "This means that all the 'shock and awe,' all the damage to Baghdad, all of that, was completely needless? We could have brought down Saddam without smashing Iraq." I have been brooding on this ever since.

But it was his lifetime as an Israeli political outsider that came to define him. He was one of the first to denounce the occupation of the post-1967 territories and to predict moral and military disaster if the settlement and colonization persisted. He became more outraged and disgusted as time went on, even telling his old newspaper Haaretz in late 2004 that Israel was pulling out of Gaza mainly to escape responsibility for the social explosion among the 1.3 million refugees that its policies had made inevitable. In the same interview, he used the term quasi-fascist to describe the religious fanatics in Israel who "are dictating our fate without any democratic process." At our last meeting, however, in New York, he was hardly less cutting about those who thought of Hamas and Hezbollah as a reincarnation of the Algerian revolution against France.

In the result, he actually did become a true outsider, abandoning his home in Israel and moving back to Europe to rejoin the Diaspora—in which, he concluded, Jews had just as good a chance of surviving and prospering as they did as settlers in Palestine. He didn't actually go back to his ancestral lands, the ones he described in his book The Pity of It All, which described the amazing success of German Jewry between 1743 and 1933. Instead he lived in Tuscany, which caused him to be laughed at but which is hard to blame a man in his 80s for deciding to do. There was nothing risible about Amos. For him, there was a vitally necessary thread that bound the Jewish people to internationalism and to the Enlightenment, and his life and work both witnessed amply to the connection.