By: JTA
Published: May 12th, 2014
Israeli author Amos Oz
Photo Credit: Tomer Neuberg /Flash 90
A West Bank-based organization filed a police complaint charging Israeli author Amoz Oz with incitement to racism.
The complaint by the Samaria Residents
Committee was filed in the West Bank settlement of Ariel two days after
Oz called Israelis who carry out “price tag” attacks “Hebrew neo-Nazis,”
the Times of Israel reported Sunday.
Oz made the statement Friday at an event in honor of his 75th birthday.
“‘Price tag’ and ‘hilltop youth’ are sweet,
sugary nicknames, and the time has come to call this monster by its
name,” he said in a speech recorded by Israel’s Channel 2. “We wanted to
be like all other nations, we longed for there to be a Hebrew thief and
a Hebrew prostitute — and there are Hebrew neo-Nazi groups.”
Oz is considered a candidate for a Nobel Prize in Literature.
Defending his words Sunday in an interview with Israel Radio, Oz said he made the statement in order to “shock.”
“The comparison that I made was to neo-Nazis
and not to Nazis,” he said. “Nazis build incinerators and gas chambers;
neo-Nazis desecrate places of worship, cemeteries, beat innocent people
and write racist slogans. That is what they do in Europe, and that is
what they do here.”
On Friday, hours before Oz’s speech, price
tag attacks were discovered on a Jerusalem church and an Arab home in
the Old City of Jerusalem, part of a recent uptick in attacks against
such sites.
Price tag refers to the strategy adopted by
extremist settlers and their supporters generally to exact retribution
for settlement freezes and demolitions or Palestinian attacks on Jews.
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