TORONTO — The vast majority of Israelis and Palestinians are ready for “a compromise solution” to the Arab-Israeli conflict,  says Israeli novelist and journalist Amos Oz, left.

“Compromise means the partition of the land, which is painful but necessary,” said Oz, delivering the first Gerald Schwartz/Heather Reisman lecture of the season at Holy Blossom Temple last week. “There is simply no alternative.”

Oz, who has long favoured a two-state solution to resolve Israel’s struggle with the Palestinians, described the conflict as a “real estate dispute” rather than as a “holy war.”

One of Israel’s most distinguished writers and a founder of Peace Now, Oz claimed there is no “essential misunderstanding” between Israelis and the Palestinians, because both want and need a land of their own.

“What’s needed is a livable compromise,” he said, noting that Israelis and Palestinians are weary of fighting each other. “Many conflicts have been resolved due to fatigue and exhaustion, and that leads to compromise.”

In his vocabulary, compromise is sy-nonymous with life, while the alternative leads to death.

He added, “I know something about compromise, having been married to the same woman for 49 years.”

Most Israelis and Palestinians al-ready  roughly know what a peace accord would entail, said Oz, whose no-vels have been translated into some 30 languages.

An agreement should be based on Israel’s 1967 borders, with mu-tual territorial swaps to allow Israel to retain some settlements in the West Bank.

Palestinian refugees would be resettled in a Palestinian entity and not in Is-rael, and western and eastern Jeru-sa-lem would respectively serve as the ca-pital of each state.

“One day, there will be an Palestinian embassy in Israel and an Israeli embassy in Palestine, both within walk-ing distance of each other,” he predicted.

Neither Israel nor Palestine would claim sovereignty over Jerusalem’s holy places, but Israelis and Palestinians would have free access to them.

Arguing that Israel and the Palestinians have no alternative but to terminate the conflict, Oz noted that fanatics on both sides will try to derail a possible agreement.

In a dire warning, Oz said that if Is-rael persists in occupying the West Bank, the Palestinians there will demand voting rights, with the international community supporting them, and this would signify “the end of Israel.”

Calling Israel’s conflict with the Pa-lestinians tragic, Oz said that Jews and Palestinians have been victimized by European oppression.

Jews were the object of anti-Semitic persecution, while Palestinians were subjected to western colonialism.

Yet Arabs regard Israeli Jews as colonialists instead of former refugees from European anti-Semitism, while Jews see Arabs and Palestinian as latter-day Cos-sack oppressors rather than as “fel-low victims.”

Oz, whose topic was “Telling the Zi-onist Story Anew: Israel Explains Itself to the World,” said the Jewish state was born out of “mutually exclusive dreams and master plans.”

Some Jews wanted to build a capitalist or a Marxist state, while still others dreamed of building a super shtetl or a social democratic welfare state in Israel.

Oz admitted he dislikes some of these master plans, but is glad that Israel is a pluralistic marketplace of competing visions.

Taking a swipe at the “distorted perspectives” of the mass media, Oz talked about the “huge difference” between the “real” Israel and the Israel portrayed by the CNNcable news network.

On CNN, undue emphasis is placed on depicting Israel as a nation dominated by fanatic Jewish settlers and gun-toting soldiers manning checkpoints restricting the movement of Palestinians.

In CNN news reports, Israel is also seen through the filter of Jerusalem.

But in the “real” Israel, a country with “painful pockets of poverty,” 70 per cent of its inhabitants – a pushy, generous, noisy and energetic people, in Oz’s characterization – live on the Med-iterranean coastal plain.

In a reference to his parents and grandparents, whose country of origin was Poland, Oz said that the only true Europeans in the 1920s and 1930s were Jews like them.

Rather than considering themselves  Poles or Lithuanians, Jews saw themselves as Europeans. They loved the culture, music and landscape, but Europe didn’t “like them back,” perceiving them as rootless cosmopolitans and marginalizing them through anti-Semitism.

So unbearable was the anti-Semitism that they left Europe, bound for Palestine after being rejected by other countries.

The Land of Israel was thus a “life boat” for European Jewish immigrants.

Describing contemporary Israel as “an assemblage of screaming voices,” Oz said that Israeli society is open, democratic and argumentative.

“We’re a nation of seven million prophets,” he mused, savouring his words.

But if Israel is to prosper, he said, it must resolve its conflict with the Arabs and eradicate poverty.