Understanding the Other -- through literature

The best way to overcome stereotype is to encounter the other -- to see the other as they really are. Whether it is understanding someone who is gay or who is of another ethnic group, getting to know them makes a big difference. The question is how?

Amos Oz, an Israeli novelist suggests, in an LA Times op-ed piece, that literature has the power to build the bridges. He uses as an example the seemingly intractable divide between Israeli Jew and Arab. What literature has the power to do is invigorate the imagination.

Part of the tragedy between Jew and Arab is the inability of so many of us, Jews and Arabs, to imagine each other. Really imagine each other: the loves, the terrible fears, the anger, the passion. There is too much hostility between us, too little curiosity.

Jews and Arabs have something essential in common: They have both been handled, coarsely and brutally, by Europe's violent hand in the past. The Arabs through imperialism, colonialism, exploitation and humiliations. The Jews through discrimination, persecution, expulsion and ultimately mass murder on an unprecedented scale.

One would have thought that two victims, and especially two victims of the same oppressor, would develop between them a sense of solidarity. Alas, this is not the way it works, neither in novels nor in life.

Peace depends on two peoples see each other in a new way, to see each other as in so many ways being similar. Both are, as Oz notes, victims of others actions, isn't that a start? Perhaps Oz is on to something!