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W E D N E S D A Y

In essay after eloquent essay during the last 20 years, novelist and Peace Now activist Amos Oz has made an argument that too few fellow Israelis and too few Palestinians are willing to accept. The conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is not a religious war, an ethnic clash, or a struggle for decolonization: It is, he writes pithily, “a dispute over real estate.” And this dispute, he adds, will only be settled by the construction of a “semidetached house”—two states where there is now only one. Oz discusses his new essay collection, Israel, Palestine and Peace, at 5 p.m. at George Washington University’s Marvin Center, 800 21st St. NW. FREE. (202) 699-5538. (David Plotz)