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Novelist, teacher, and activist Amos Oz of Ben-Gurion University expressed his passionate love of Israel as well as his commitment to a negotiated solution between Israelis and Palestinians during the 10th annual Biderman lecture at Princeton University, titled "Israel: Peace and War" March 25.

Speaking to a crowd of more than 200, Oz opened by weaving a tapestry of the varied, sometimes contradictory dreams that form Israel's essence. "Countries are usually born out of geography, out of history, out of demography, and out of politics," he said. "Israel is an exception. It was born out of a dream, and because it was born out of a dream, it is disappointing."

But Israel's history is more complex than a simple dream that turns out to be tougher than imagined when faced with reality. "Israel was born not out of a dream but out of a bunch of dreams, blueprints, master plans, and visions," said Oz, "many of which were mutually exclusive, conflicting, and contradictory." He then reviewed a long list of the different dreams Jews had about what Israel would become: a biblical nation of toilers, soldiers, and priests; a replica of a Jewish shtetl in Eastern Europe; a middle-European paradise replicating Austria-Hungary; a Marxist paradise to which Stalin would take a bow; a Northern-European type of social democracy; and a loose federation of independent rural communities, whose religious experiences would come not through synagogues but by way of a constant connection with nature, toiling on the land, sharing everything, and living like one extended family.

After threatening to one day write a trilogy about these various dreams and blueprints, Oz asked, "What became of these dreams?" Then he answered his own question: "Many are still alive and struggling with each other fiercely and ferociously under different banners; others are almost fulfilled; some are forgotten; and some have turned into nightmares."

But this picture of an Israel alive and diverse -- an Israel that is secular, hedonistic, noisy, passionate, pushy, argumentative, middle class, very Mediterranean, and a string of other adjectives -- is not what viewers see on CNN, which Oz said is a monolithic picture of 80 percent ultra-religious fanatics, 19 percent ruthless soldiers at roadblocks, and 1 percent intellectuals like himself who are struggling for peace.

The snapshot Oz offered of a vibrant and diverse country, he said, is the Israel of the coastal plain rather than the Israel of Jerusalem and the settlements. "When I describe the Israel of the coastal plain," said Oz, "you can decode that I love Israel. I should make the confession right away so you don't expect that I am unbiased. I love it even when I don't like it. I love it even when I can't stand it."

To offer a sense of the lively diversity he treasures, Oz described how every bus line is a venue for strangers arguing about strategy, politics, or the real purpose of God -- a veritable street seminary -- whose participants nonetheless are elbowing their way to the front of the line. Israel, he said, is neither a country nor a nation, but rather a fiery collection of arguments. It is home to prophets, messiahs, and redeemers.

But not many outsiders understand what Israel is or why it has to be. Many, for example, wonder about whether the entire Zionist project was justified -- a question Oz judged to be based on ignorance. He then describes his parents' experience making their way from Europe to Palestine. "My parents were violently kicked out of Europe in the early '30s when anti-Semitism became physically violent; they were lucky to have been kicked out in the '30s, because, if not, they would have been murdered in the '40s," he said.

And they had absolutely no other place to go, he said, describing how his grandfather was told by the Americans that it would take 17 years to get a visa and was turned down by France and Great Britain. Canada and Switzerland felt at that time that one Jew was too many, and Australia wanted to keep out Jews so as not to import sordid, disgusting anti-Semitism by letting in Jewish refugees. So his grandparents and his father ended up in Israel, a place that "struck them as not European enough for their liking," he said. "They went to Jerusalem unhappy, with a broken heart, carrying the injury of unrequited love for Europe."

Oz concluded, "There was no other place at that time; Israel was a lifeboat for hundreds of thousands of Jews who otherwise would have been murdered."

Another question Jews from the outside ask that Oz finds difficult to understand is "What is Jewish about Israel? Israelis don't speak Yiddish, and most don't keep kosher." To this Oz has two answers: "One answer is the Hebrew language. We live every moment of over lives, even in our dreams, in a Jewish language," he said.

His second answer harks back to Abraham arguing with God and the talmudic rabbis arguing with one another. "The other answer is precisely the diversity and enormity of disagreements," said Oz. "It was always an open-ended game of interpretation, reinterpretation, and counter-interpretation between the rabbis over the right interpretation of scripture."

Oz did add a couple of caveats to his love for Israel's diversity of people, ideas, and opinions -- the diversity cannot express itself through violence, and people should not force their opinions or beliefs on others through legislation. As long as these are true, diversity is a source of spiritual, cultural, and creative riches.

Having established the basis of both his love for Israel and the need for a Jewish state, Oz turned to the conflict with the Arabs and with the Palestinians in particular. "The clash between Israel and the Palestinians is a tragedy, a clash between right and right," he said. "It is not a Western movie with good guys and bad guys." Unfortunately, he continued, many well-meaning people view every military conflict as just that -- the colonists and the colonized; the North and South Vietnamese; or the two sides of apartheid -- and they run to sign petitions supporting the good guys and demonstrating against the bad guys.

Oz was quick to emphasize that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict does not fit this good guy/bad guy paradigm. "Palestinians are in Palestine because it is their homeland, and they have no other country," he said, pointing to their marginalization in refugee camps by Egyptians, Syrians, Lebanese, and Jordanians. "Israeli Jews are in Israel for the same reason; Jews throughout their history have never had as a nation any other country they could call home."

Oz uses literary metaphors to suggest two potential conclusions for this tragedy: One is Shakespearean, where at the end the stage is full of dead bodies, and the other is Chekhovian, where everybody ends up alive, but disappointed, bitter, disillusioned, sad, and melancholy. "My colleagues in the Israeli peace movement are not working for a happy ending, a magic formula, a cheerful reconciliation and brotherly love," said Oz. "They are fighting for a Chekhovian solution, which means compromise. I know this sounds rotten to some young, raving idealists, who think it is dishonest, lacks integrity, and is sneaky, but in my vocabulary the word 'compromise' is synonymous with life."

Oz ended his discussion of the conflict on a mildly positive note, stating that today a vast majority of Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs know that ultimately two states will exist side by side. They even know the likely terms of an agreement -- that the states will be divided roughly on the 1967 armistice lines, with some land swapping; that a solution will be found for all refugees within the state of Palestine, with a symbolic number allowed to come into Israel; and Jerusalem will be the capital of the two nations.

But two significant obstacles remain in the way of a negotiated solution, Oz suggested. One is the determination of fanatics on both sides to derail a compromise, and the other is "the cowardice of the leaders on both sides to do what must be done, what we know in our hearts will be unavoidable."

Oz added that he did not believe in taking military action against Iran, both because Iran possesses the nuclear know-how and bombing installations will only postpone the inevitable and move the installations into mountain strongholds. Furthermore, bombing would likely alienate the Iranian citizenry.

He also urged the audience to take note that even in the midst of Israel's grief over the current conflict, Israel's insecurity, and its internal rivalry and perhaps because of it, Israel is today in the midst of a golden age of "spiritual, intellectual, and scientific creativity."

Another questioner asked Oz what he sees as the future for Israeli Arabs in the context of the two-state solution he had described. Oz responded that they will be Palestinian citizens of the state of Israel, but that they needed to become fuller citizens than they are now. He said, "Today they are formally, but they are in a very tragic position." He quoted a friend and former government minister who formulated the predicament of Israeli Arabs as "My country is at war with my people." Oz added that it would probably take two or three generations to fully integrate Israel's Arab population in terms of "emotion and feeling."

Referring to Oz's memoir "A Tale of Love and Darkness," one attendee asked him to talk about his reference to Israelis and Palestinians as being brothers, sons to the same abusive father of European colonialism, and how this idea would play itself out in a peace process. "You would have thought that two victims of the same oppressor automatically become brothers," said Oz, "but in real life some of the worst conflicts are between two victims of the same oppressor, for example, children of the same abusing parents often see in each other the image of abusive parents."

The result, he explained, is that Arabs looking at Israel "don't see us as what we are, a bunch of half-hysteric refugees," but rather as an extension of white, colonizing, oppressive Europe. Similarly, Israelis look at Arabs not as fellow victims of Europe, but rather as new incarnations of Europe and the Nazis, "in the same game of cutting Jewish throats for fun."

Although the mutual misunderstanding and fear may extend for decades, Oz said he is not looking for a perfect meeting of the minds. "Through history, nations have signed peace treaties with clenched teeth and sometimes ill intentions," he said, and it may take generations to deescalate tensions.

Oz's grandson -- in the audience because his parents are in Princeton this year, Fania Oz-Salzberger as visiting professor in the University Center for the Study of Human Values and Eli Salzberger as visiting research scholar and visiting professor at the Woodrow Wilson School -- asked Oz what he thought of the current prime minister of Israel, Binyamin Netanyahu. After saying, "He's not my hero, and it's no secret that I haven't voted for him," Oz noted that human nature is enigmatic and in Israel's past were several examples of formerly right-wing officials following left-wing policies.

When asked how the United States and the Arab world would benefit from peace in the Middle East, Oz answered, "Peace between Israel and the Palestinians, and between Israel and the Arab countries will be a harsh blow to fanaticism, which will be the common burden of all good people in the 21st century."