The Jew as a Symbol - Amos Oz

               The Jew in European civilization is not included within the general defini­tion of a national minority, a religious minority or a socio-economic problem. He is, and has been for generations, a symbol. Just as were the church spire and the cross, the devil and the Messiah, so was a Jew a structural part of the European spirit. Even if all the Jews had been assimilated into the European peoples, the Jew should have continued to be there. Somebody would have fished him out. He would have been, possibly, condemned to exist as a sort of archetype deep in the European conscience, fascinating and fearsome, to tolerate and cheat, an accursed abomination. That is why being a Jew in the diaspora has only some horrible significance such as 'Auschwitz was made for you.' It was made for you because you are a symbol. The symbol of the persecuted vampire and rightly so, or the symbol of the eternal victim unjustly persecuted but at all times, everywhere, you are not an individual but rather, the reflected image of a symbol.
                I am a Zionist because I cannot, and have no desire to, live like the reflected image of a symbol imprinted in other people's consciences. Neither as the symbol of a crafty and diabolic vampire nor as the symbol of a piteous victim to whom one must offer compassion and compensation, That's why there is no place in the world for me, other than in the country of the Jews. This doesn't cause me to escape my responsibility as a Jew, but it saves me from the nightmare of being a symbol within the psychology of other peoples.