How to Cure a Fanatic was published by Princeton University Press in 2006, based on two lectures Oz delivered at the Tübingen Poetik-Dozentur in Germany. The book is slim — fewer than a hundred pages — but it contains the essence of Oz’s political thought, distilled from decades of engagement with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and with the broader question of how human beings can live together when their narratives, grievances, and identities seem irreconcilable.
Oz’s central argument is that fanaticism — political, religious, ideological — is a failure of imagination. The fanatic cannot imagine himself as the other: cannot imagine that his enemy has a family, fears, legitimate grievances, a perspective that is not evil but different. Literature, Oz argues, is the cure because literature requires precisely this act of imagination: to read a novel is to inhabit another consciousness, to see the world through eyes that are not your own, and this practice — repeated over a lifetime of reading — makes fanaticism psychologically impossible.
On the specific question of Israel and Palestine, Oz advocates what he calls a “sad compromise” — two states for two peoples, neither of which gets everything it wants, both of which sacrifice part of their narrative for the sake of coexistence. He acknowledges that compromise is unglamorous, that it satisfies no one fully, and that it requires the abandonment of maximalist positions on both sides. But he insists that the alternative — the pursuit of total justice for one side at the expense of the other — is the definition of fanaticism, and that fanaticism produces only suffering.
Collecting How to Cure a Fanatic
First edition (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2006): Hardcover with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $15–$30
- Very good: $8–$15