Amos Oz, Israel's best-known author and an outspoken supporter of the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, died of cancer at the age of 79 on Friday, his daughter said.
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Born in Jerusalem to Eastern European immigrants, Oz moved to a kibbutz at 15 after his mother's suicide. He fought in the 1967 and 1973 Middle East wars, experiences that tinged his advocacy for territorial compromise with the Palestinians.
He has been outspoken against the Israeli occupation and has supported left-wing parties in Israel. Arab lawmakers in Israel said while they disagreed with some of his views on the conflict they still saw him as an ally who had called for end of the occupation in favor of peace.
In an interview with him last April, Oz told German television: “I don’t know what the future holds for Jerusalem but I know what should happen. Every country in the world should follow President Trump and move its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. At the same time, each one of those countries ought to open its own embassy in East Jerusalem as the capital of the Palestinian people.”
The current Palestinian leadership seeks to have East Jerusalem as the capital of a future sovereign Palestinian state on the pre-1967 border in the West Bank and Gaza as agreed on as part of the Oslo Accords.
However, successive Israeli right-wing governments have stalled the peace process and jeopardize it through increasing military presence in the West Bank, a military blockade against Gaza, multiple attacks on the Palestinian strip as well as a massive settlement expansion in the West Bank that has rendered the establishment of a Palestinian state almost impossible.
Over a 50-year career, Oz chronicled his country's rise from the ashes of the Holocaust and internal struggles among Jews and Arabs or rightists and leftists. He won international plaudits and was a bookies' favorite for the Nobel Prize for Literature, though his political views sometimes drew condemnation at home.
"To those who loved him, thank you," his daughter Fania Oz-Salzberger said in a Twitter post announcing his death. Among his books was "A Tale of Love and Darkness," a memoir that actress and director Natalie Portman adapted for the screen in 2016.
"It was a tale of love and light, and now, a great darkness," Israeli President Reuven Rivlin said in a statement eulogising Oz. "Rest in peace, dear Amos. You gave us great pleasure."
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