AHEAD OF HIS TIME:

Remembering Amos Kenan (David Twersky, August 11, 2009, JTA)

I write in memory of Amos Kenan, the Israeli artist, playwright and columnist who died Aug. 4 in Tel Aviv at the age of 82. [...]

Kenan was a rebel, starting with his youthful membership in the Stern Gang, properly Lehi. He flirted with the non-Zionist Canaanites, a grouping of intellectuals who saw Israel as a radical break with the Jewish world. Kenan lived in Paris from 1954 to 1962, where he sat at the table with Sartre at the Left Bank’s Le Cafe Flore, sipping coffee spiced with the heady fumes of existentialist thought, cultural modernism and political revolution.

Almost immediately after the Six-Day War, Kenan was proposing that Israel should focus on the Palestinian dimension and, as in 1947, agree to the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel as the best of a bunch of bad outcomes. Much of his weekly column, “A Letter to All the Good People,” was by now a familiar critique of the left’s anti-Israel view. But it was not familiar then; it broke new ground.

His stand put him at odds with the New Left and the Israeli establishment at the same time. His proposal was quite a departure from the establishment line: the nascent “doves” argued for a deal with Jordan. No one among the Israelis or Palestinians was talking about a Palestinian state alongside Israel except for Kenan and some fringe voices on the Israeli left. (Aryeh Eliav, the secretary general of the Labor Party and card-carrying member of the establishment, would soon join Kenan, at the price of his party leadership position.)

Kenan’s column ran in the Friday Yediot, appearing on the same page as a column by a fellow Lehi veteran, Boaz Evron, who had similar sympathies. The page was called “Fatah-land” -- Israeli slang for southern Lebanon -- a reference to the writers’ perceived Palestinian sympathies.