Amos Oz
Amos OzFlash 90

Leftist Israeli author Amos Oz on Friday launched a scathing attack against the perpetrators of so-called “price tag” attacks and referred to them as “neo-Nazis”.

Oz was subsequently answered by a bereaved father who reminded Oz that he has in the past dedicated a book to arch-terrorist Marwan Barghouti.

“I cannot stand to hear that term ‘price tag’, and even more so I can’t stand to hear the term ‘hilltop youth’,” Oz said at his 75th birthday celebration, according to Channel 2 News.

“It's time we look at this monster straight in the eye. ‘Price tag’ and ‘hilltop youth’ are just sweet nicknames for a monster that is time to call by its name,” he continued, adding that those who carried out these vandalism attacks were “Jewish neo-Nazi groups.”

"There is nothing that the neo-Nazis in Europe do and these groups do not do,” charged Oz. “Time to call them by name. Perhaps the only difference is that the neo-Nazi groups enjoy the backing of quite a few nationalist, even racist legislators, as well as rabbis who have given them a pseudo-religious basis.”

It did not take long for a response to Oz’s remarks, and they came from Tzion Sviri, who lost three family members in a terrorist attack in 2001.

"Amos Oz is the last one who can preach after he went to visit Marwan Barghouti, the murderer of my loved ones, in prison and another time sent him a book with a personal warm dedication,” said Sviri.

“With all the seriousness of price tag acts, one cannot compare them to the Nazism that murdered six million of our people, and dedicating a book to this murderer is much more serious than drawing graffiti on a wall,” he added.

Barghouti, a member of Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah movement, is serving five life sentences for his role in planning suicide terror attacks. He was behind some of the deadliest terror attacks against Israel during the Second Intifada, also known as the Oslo War.

Oz was among a group of leftist Israeli authors and poets who last year wrote a letter to Samer Issawi, a terrorist who was arrested by Israel and launched a hunger strike, urging him to call off his hunger strike.

Oz’s remarks come amid the recent uproar in Israel over the rise in the so-called “price tag” attacks.

While these attacks are mostly blamed on Israelis from Judea and Samaria,  an Arutz Sheva report in January revealed that in at least some of the cases, anti-Arab "price tags" were being systematically staged by Arab activists. 

There have also been numerous incidents of Arab "price tagging", including on the graves of Tannaic scholars on Tuesday in the north.

(Arutz Sheva’s North American Desk is keeping you updated until the start of Shabbat in New York. The time posted automatically on all Arutz Sheva articles, however, is Israeli time.)