Israeli dissident and prolific writer, Roi Tov was born in South America and grew up as Reuven Schossen, in a tight-knit communist kibbutz along the Jordan Valley.

After four years of service in the Israeli Defense Force, Captain Schossen became a reservist and graduated with four degrees; three in chemical physics.

In Tov’s second book, The Cross of Bethlehem II: Back in Bethlehem he writes:

The year was 1983, but at school we were already studying Orwell’s 1984 a book which frightened us by its similarity to life in Israel.

The Lebanon War, which had begun a year earlier, was still called ‘the War for the Peace of Galilee’ by the government.

The Hebrew possessive contraction brought together the two words which sounded exactly like ‘War-Peace,’ creating a perfect Orwellian oxymoron.

We all skipped the obvious contemporaneous context of the book in our commentaries; such semantics could belong only to the enemy and we lived in an enlightened society.

Our government could not have made such an Orwellian choice consciously. And yet a little voice in my head told a different story, one that must be kept to myself. The glitch allowing such a subversive book to be on our reading list could only be interpreted as some inconsistency of the system.

However, a frightening alternative explanation was that “1984” had been placed on the Education Ministry’s official list of books intentionally, so that we would forever fear authority and behave. It was our first lesson in government manipulation of its people.

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This is a great interview he gave to Cristopher Bollyn, and this is a video of another interview with Daryl Bradford Smith in which he speaks.