Aryeh Lova Eliav

Aryeh Lova Eliav was born in Moscow on November 12, 1921.[7] Born Aryeh Lipshitz, he was brought by his family to Mandatory Palestine in 1924.[3][1] He grew up in Tel Aviv, completing his secondary education at the Herzliya Gymnasium in 1939.[7] He then enrolled at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, studying biology in 1940 before later returning to earn a Bachelor of Arts with honors in history and sociology in 1959.[7] In 1953 he supplemented his education with studies in agricultural economics and administration in England under a United Nations grant.[7]

From an early age Eliav was drawn into the defense and nation-building projects of the Yishuv. He joined the Haganah and the Jewish Settlements Police at age fifteen, in 1936.[3] When the Second World War broke out, he volunteered for the British Army, serving in the Middle East and Europe from 1941 to 1945.[1] After the war he joined the Palmach's naval company, the Palyam, and worked to bring Jewish refugees to Mandatory Palestine.[3][1]

Eliav commanded a ship carrying Jewish survivors of the Holocaust to Palestine. He brought about 2,000 Jews from Sweden as part of the post-Holocaust immigration movement.[8] Sources differ on the vessel's name—some identify it as the "Aloua" or "Oluoa," while a Globes profile names it as the "Hannah Szenes"—but accounts agree that Eliav met his future wife, Tanya, aboard the ship.[2][4] From 1946 to 1948 he helped organize clandestine Jewish immigration to Palestine.[1]

With Israel's declaration of independence in 1948, Eliav joined the Israel Defense Forces and served in the nascent Naval Corps during the War of Independence, eventually leaving the service in 1949 with the rank of lieutenant colonel.[3][1]

During the decade following independence, Eliav took leading roles in settlement and regional development. From 1949 to 1953 he served as assistant to the director of the Jewish Agency Settlement Department, working under Levi Eshkol, then head of the department.[1][2] From 1955 to 1957 he directed the Lachish regional development project in southern Israel, where large numbers of new immigrants were settled.[1][2] The plan included the development town of Kiryat Gat and twenty-five surrounding communities.[7]

During the 1956 Sinai Campaign, Eliav commanded rescue operations for the Jewish community of Port Said, evacuating them amid the fighting.[1][2] In 1961 he led the team that established Arad, the planned city on the eastern edge of the Negev above the Dead Sea.[9][2] A writer who knew him recalled that when government salaries for the Arad planning team were delayed, Eliav advanced money from his own modest savings, including to the team's two Druze guards, and insisted that the designers live on-site so they could know the land before laying out the town.[10]

Eliav also served as an agricultural emissary to Iran during the Shah's rule, work credited with helping build relations between the two countries and enabling the aliyah of a substantial proportion of Iran's Jewish community.[7] From 1960 to 1964 he led an Israeli aid and rehabilitation mission to Qazvin in northwestern Iran following a severe earthquake.[1] A later humanitarian mission took him to Managua, Nicaragua, shortly after the earthquake there around Christmas 1972, where he headed an Israeli team helping to build temporary housing.[1]

Eliav's posting as first secretary at Israel's embassy in Moscow from 1958 to 1960 doubled as a covert mission to reach Jews living under Soviet restrictions on Jewish religious and cultural life.[1][2] His embassy role served as cover for assisting Jews who sought to immigrate to Israel and for discreet outreach to the community.[8][4] He was also associated during this period with the Nativ immigration organization's operations among Soviet Jews.[4]

In a 1993 interview with The Jerusalem Post, Eliav described the clandestine nature of the work: "Our principal endeavor was to bring hope to Jews. We printed tiny Bibles, tiny prayer books, we brought tallitot (prayer shawls) by the thousands… avoiding the watchful eyes of the GPU."[8] Because the activity was secret, his book about the experience, "Between Hammer and Sickle," was published under the pseudonym Ben Ami.[4]

Eliav was elected to the Sixth Knesset in 1965 on the Alignment list, launching a parliamentary career that would span, with interruptions, from 1965 to 1979 and again from 1988 to 1992.[1][5] He served on several Knesset committees, including the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee and the Finance Committee.[2]

He held two deputy-ministerial posts during his first parliamentary period. From October 1966 to June 1967 he served as deputy minister of Trade and Industry, responsible for industrialization in development areas.[2][1] He then served as deputy minister of Immigrant Absorption under Yigal Allon, from August 1968 to December 1969.[2]

From 1969 to 1971 Eliav served as secretary-general of the Israel Labor Party, a position that placed him near the apex of Israeli political life.[1][5] Globes reported that during this period he was regarded by many as a possible successor to Prime Minister Golda Meir, alongside figures such as Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin.[4]

After leaving the secretary-generalship, Eliav stepped back from active politics to write Eretz HaTzvi, published in English in 1974 as Land of the Hart, an ideological work that included his analysis of Israel's relations with Arabs and Palestinians.[1] He ran on the Alignment list in the December 1973 elections to the Eighth Knesset.[1]

Eliav's departure from the Labor mainstream came in April 1975, when he left the Alignment and joined the Civil Rights Movement, forming the parliamentary group Ya'ad.[1] That year he also co-founded the Israeli Council for Israeli-Palestinian Peace.[1] In January 1976 he and Knesset member Marsha Freedman left Ya'ad over a dispute about policy toward the PLO and established the Social Democratic parliamentary faction.[1] He then co-founded the party Mahaneh Sheli and was elected to the Ninth Knesset on its list in 1977.[1] A 1977 National Library of Israel film record depicts Eliav, identified as a Sheli member, attempting to persuade passersby to support him in that election.[11] In 1979 he handed his Knesset seat to Uri Avnery and turned to teaching new immigrants and prisoners.[1]

Eliav returned to the Knesset on the Alignment list in 1988 and served until 1992.[1][5] From 1982 to 1985 he participated, on behalf of Prime Minister Menachem Begin, in contacts with the PLO and other Palestinian organizations in an attempt to secure the release of four Israeli prisoners in exchange for more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners.[1] He joined the International Center for Peace in the Middle East in 1982 and served as chairman of its board of trustees.[12] In 1993 he competed in the Labor Party's internal selection for president of Israel but lost the nomination to Ezer Weizman.[1][5]

Eliav used books and essays to advance political positions that placed him at odds with much of the Labor establishment. His 1972 work Eretz HaTzvi: Situation Assessment warned against continued Israeli control over the Palestinian population and proposed cooperation between the two peoples.[4] In an interview quoted in Globes, he recalled arguing that the Palestinian issue was central to the conflict and that Israel should hold the territories only in order to return them, avoiding settlement construction altogether; he acknowledged that the book's positions damaged his political career.[4]

At a Labor Party vote on the Galili document—which, by Globes's account, opened the territories to settlement construction—eighty party members voted in favor and Eliav was the sole opponent.[4] He illustrated his role as a political dissenter through what he called a "seagull" parable: a bird sees a ship heading toward disaster and cries out that it will sink unless it changes course. He wrote the parable two weeks before the Yom Kippur War and said, "If there is a home in Israel that is suffering, it is an obligation to cry out."[4]

In 2006 Eliav co-authored a Hebrew book with Yossi Alfi structured as an intimate dialogue about Israeli identity. The National Library of Israel's catalog describes the contrast between the chronology of a transit-camp child, Alfi, and that of the pioneer who absorbed him, Eliav.[13]

Beyond politics and planning, Eliav worked directly in education and hospital service. In the 1980s he volunteered in Tel Aviv hospitals and taught adults in Kiryat Shmona, Sderot, Or Akiva, and Ma'alot; he also held teaching roles within the Prison Service.[9][2]

In 1986 Eliav helped establish Nitzana on the Israel–Egypt border in the western Negev, realizing his long-held vision for a "school to teach respect for humanity and its place in developing the arid wilderness."[6][5] The community grew into a substantial campus encompassing a youth village, field school, immigrant absorption center, solar-energy park oriented toward science-minded youth, and a desalination facility.[4] By 2005, more than 150,000 young people—most of them immigrants from the former Soviet Union and Ethiopia—had passed through the community.[4] The Jewish Agency describes Nitzana, which it founded and built around Eliav's vision, as a residential learning center emphasizing tolerance, mutual understanding, and respect for people and the natural world.[6] Its programs have hosted Israeli young adults during a pre-army service year, participants in Hebrew-language and aliyah programs, students in a semester-long study and sports-training program, and Eritrean unaccompanied minors attending a boarding school.[6]

Eliav also played a direct role in Israel's response to natural disasters abroad. In addition to leading the earthquake-rehabilitation mission in Qazvin, Iran, he headed the Israeli aid mission to Managua, Nicaragua, following the devastating earthquake there in December 1972, supervising the construction of temporary housing for survivors.[1][2]

Eliav's contributions were recognized across several decades with some of Israel's highest honors. He received the Israel Prize in 1988 in the category of special contribution to society and the state.[5][2] In 2003 he received the Ben-Gurion Prize for a lifetime of work in immigrant absorption and development of the Negev, and in 2005 he was selected to light a torch at the Independence Day ceremony.[2] He was also a founding member of the Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion's Jerusalem Board of Overseers.[14]

Welfare and Social Services Minister Isaac Herzog, eulogizing Eliav after his death, called him "an example for our nation of pioneering service" and praised his understanding of Israeli society's complexities and the need to seek peace with neighboring peoples.[14]

A Jerusalem Post opinion writer who knew Eliav personally argued that after visiting the West Bank—known by its original, indigenous Jewish name of Judea and Samaria—and Gaza and speaking extensively with local residents following the 1967 war, Eliav concluded that a Palestinian state should be established in those territories. The author characterized that position as deeply unpopular among many Israelis in the 1960s and 1970s.[10] As chairman of the International Center for Peace in the Middle East, Eliav argued that the situation of Israeli Arabs and Arabs in the administered territories could not be treated as separate matters: "You cannot divide between Israeli Arabs and Arabs in the territories. It is one all-encompassing problem like all problems between two peoples."[12]

Eliav died in Tel Aviv in May 2010 at age 89, following a recent illness; he had suffered a stroke the previous year that impaired his speech.[5] Nitzana, Arad, and the Lachish regional development—including Kiryat Gat—remain tangible parts of the settlement, educational, and regional-development work he led.

Eliav's political positions—particularly his opposition to Israeli settlements in territories captured in 1967, his calls for full withdrawal from Judea and Samaria and Gaza, and his contacts with PLO representatives in 1976–1977—generated sustained controversy within Labor Party circles and Israeli politics more broadly.[1][2] Globes linked those positions to the political price he paid at a time when many regarded him as a possible successor to Golda Meir.[4]