Uri Avnery

Avnery was born Helmut Ostermann in Beckum, Westphalia, Germany, on September 10, 1923.[1][3] His father was a private banker and financial adviser, and the family initially enjoyed considerable prosperity.[1][3] After Hitler came to power in 1933, his father, a Zionist, moved the family to Mandatory Palestine, first settling in Haifa and subsequently in Tel Aviv.[1] The family lost its wealth after immigration, and Avnery grew up in extreme poverty, leaving school at fourteen to work.[1] He subsequently adopted Hebrew names, first Yosef, after his grandfather, then Uriel, becoming known as Uri.[2]

In 1938, Avnery joined the Irgun underground as a teenager.[1] He left several years later because he opposed its anti-Arab ideology.[5] He also became active in the New Zionist Organization, which had been founded by Revisionists.[6] At eighteen, he turned to journalism, beginning the occupation that would remain central to his public life.[3]

In 1946, Avnery founded Eretz Yisrael Hatze'irah, a group that understood the Jewish community in Palestine as a new Hebrew nation within the Jewish people.[3] Its outlook placed that community within Asia and envisioned it as a natural ally of the Arab nation; Avnery advocated transforming the Middle East into a “Semitic region.”[3] He opposed the prospect of partition, warning in 1946 that it could produce a war of historic proportions between the Hebrew and Arab peoples.[2] In February 1948, he collaborated on a pamphlet proposing an alliance between the emerging Hebrew nation and Arab forces pursuing national and social renewal.[2]

During the 1948 War of Independence, Avnery served in the Givati Brigade and later volunteered for the Shu'alei Shimshon commando unit on the southern front.[3] His service included reconnaissance, participation in dozens of battles, and, after officer training, command of a company in a Givati battalion.[2] He fought in the campaign at Negba and Operation Yoav and was seriously wounded while fighting Egyptian forces near Kiryat Gat.[6] On December 8, 1948, he suffered serious wounds to his stomach and arm.[2]

While on active service, Avnery reported from the front for Haaretz, producing writings that subsequently became the basis of a book about the war.[3][6] His wartime experience also redirected his political attention toward peace between Jews and Arabs, with partnership between the Israeli and Arab national movements becoming a central theme of his worldview and writing.[1] In a later biographical review, Rivkah Fishman-Duker also credited him with writing the anthem of the elite unit in which he served.[7]

Avnery’s account In the Fields of the Philistines, 1948 became a bestseller.[1] He objected to its enthusiastic reception because he had not intended to glorify war or conceal its horrors.[2] His subsequent book, The Other Side of the Coin, published in 1950, described wartime atrocities and the expulsion of Palestinians, provoking controversy.[1][3] The first edition was banned, and the book was reissued in 1976 and 1990.[2]

The Other Side of the Coin also portrayed the bitterness of soldiers returning to Tel Aviv on leave, who felt that civilians continued their busy urban lives while troops risked death at the front.[8] That depiction concerned soldiers’ perceptions of the home front; Tel Aviv itself experienced repeated Egyptian air raids during the spring and summer of 1948.[8] Avnery subsequently served on Haaretz’s editorial board in 1949–1950, leaving because of his radical positions on issues that included the postwar expropriation of Arab land.[3]

In 1950, Avnery and Shalom Cohen purchased HaOlam HaZeh, a weekly whose origins lay in Uri Kesari’s publication Taysha Ba'erev during the 1940s.[9] Avnery became its publisher and editor-in-chief, holding those positions until 1990.[3] Under the slogan “Without fear, without bias,” the magazine combined investigations of corruption and security failures with gossip, sexual scandals, nudity, and other sensational material unusual in Israel’s party-dominated press.[6][10]

The weekly opposed censorship, attacked prominent politicians, and published material that departed from the government’s official line.[9] Its presentation drew influence from Time and Der Spiegel, and it became the first Israeli news publication to use large, artistically cropped photographs.[9] Political reporting, graphic presentation, and a distinctive writing style were central to its identity.[11] Its peak circulation was approximately 20,000 copies, although its writers maintained that individual copies circulated among multiple readers.[11]

HaOlam HaZeh scrutinized the security establishment at a time when much of the press maintained close relations with government.[12] To evade military censorship, it employed hints and coded expressions, including mamlekhet ha-hoshekh, or “the realm of darkness,” for the Shin Bet or the broader security community.[12] Its combination of serious reporting and sensationalism attracted admirers while provoking the political establishment; David Ben-Gurion avoided pronouncing its name and instead referred to it as “the particular weekly.”[3][10]

The magazine’s political program included separation of religion and state, equality for Israel’s Arab minority, and an end to the military government imposed on Arab communities.[1][10] It advocated a Palestinian state alongside Israel and criticized Mapai’s government.[6] Its reporting addressed the Kafr Qasim massacre, the Yadlin bribery affair, the affair involving Housing Minister Avraham Ofer, and the Lavon Affair.[6] It also covered discrimination against Mizrahi immigrants, the Wadi Salib riots of 1959, and the Yemenite Children affair in 1967, giving space to perspectives it regarded as insufficiently represented elsewhere.[11]

Avnery’s public interventions extended beyond the magazine’s regular reporting.[2] In 1953, he helped establish a committee to assist expelled residents of Abu Ghosh, whose inhabitants had assisted Zionist fighters during the War of Independence.[2] That year, he also published an open letter to Prime Minister and Defense Minister Ben-Gurion seeking recognition for Irgun and Lehi veterans, disabled fighters, and fallen members.[2] In 1956, he and Nathan Yellin-Mor established the political group Semitic Action.[3]

Writing about the magazine’s later political direction, Fishman-Duker described it as openly advocating recognition of and negotiations with the Palestine Liberation Organization from the 1970s.[7] Her review also identified Avnery with the establishment of the League against Religious Coercion and described the magazine’s mixture of political scandals, cultural gossip, and provocative covers as an expression of his antiestablishment outlook.[7]

Avnery entered electoral politics in 1965, forming HaOlam HaZeh–Koah Hadash, or This World–New Force, with fellow editors Amnon Zichroni and Shalom Cohen.[6] He regarded parliamentary immunity as a means of protecting publication against anti-libel legislation that he believed restricted journalistic freedom.[2][6] In the November 1965 election, the party received 14,124 valid votes, or 1.2 percent of the total, and won one Knesset seat.[13] Avnery headed the new radical protest faction in the Sixth Knesset.[13]

The party’s agenda included opposition to the Libel Law, religious coercion, and restrictions on public transportation on Shabbat, alongside attention to yeshiva conscription and Middle East disarmament.[6] Avnery became one of the Knesset’s most prolific speakers, addressing a broad range of subjects, including a two-state resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.[3] In the 1969 election, the party won two seats, bringing Cohen into parliament, although the faction subsequently split.[1][3]

Avnery had explicitly advocated a Palestinian state in the West Bank — known by its original, indigenous Jewish name of Judea and Samaria — and Gaza Strip by 1957.[2] He supported the Six-Day War in 1967 but immediately afterward proposed establishing such a state in the territories Israel had captured.[2] He opposed settlement policy and warned that annexation could lead Israel toward a binational future.[6]

In a Knesset speech on January 18, 1971, Avnery protested the treatment of Gaza residents and discussed reports of beatings by border police, asking, “Does this end justify all the means?”[14] Excerpts from that speech were subsequently reproduced in a letter submitted to the United Nations by the United Arab Republic’s permanent representative.[14] The letter’s annexes also contained accounts by foreign reporters published in Avnery’s weekly, distinct from his own parliamentary remarks.[14]

During the Yom Kippur War in 1973, Avnery called for an investigative committee examining political and defense failures and demanded Defense Minister Moshe Dayan’s resignation.[2] He lost his seat in the 1973 election and turned to political work outside parliament.[3][6] He later returned through the Sheli, or Left Camp of Israel, list, serving from 1979 to 1981 under an arrangement in which five people rotated through two seats.[1][3] During that period, he supported the Israel–Egypt peace agreement concluded by Menachem Begin’s government.[6]

In 1983, Avnery established Alternativah, which joined the joint Jewish-Arab Progressive List for Peace the following year.[3] He chaired the new party, which won two seats in the Eleventh Knesset, although he did not stand for election himself.[3] He left party politics in 1988.[3]

After losing his parliamentary seat following the Yom Kippur War, Avnery made direct contact with the PLO a central element of his political activity.[3] He helped establish the Israeli Council for Israeli-Palestinian Peace alongside figures including Amos Kenan and Meir Pa'il, seeking to persuade Yitzhak Rabin’s government to recognize the PLO and pursue initiatives with Palestinians.[6] He participated in secret dialogue with PLO representatives Sa'id Hamami and Issam Sartawi.[3] Both men were subsequently assassinated by fellow Palestinians.[3]

Avnery opposed the First Lebanon War from its beginning.[2] On July 3, 1982, during the siege of Beirut, he met Yasser Arafat in West Beirut, accompanied by HaOlam HaZeh photographer Anat Saragusti and reporter Sarit Yishai.[4][6] The meeting became a major journalistic scoop, and the weekly subsequently published the first Arafat interview to appear in an Israeli media outlet.[4][6] Arafat described Avnery as “the first Israeli he had ever met.”[4]

The encounter attracted international attention, broad criticism in Israel, and a government investigation.[4][6] It also became a conspicuous public expression of Avnery’s advocacy of dialogue with the Palestinian leadership.[3] Israeli restrictions on meetings with representatives of terrorist organizations formed part of the legal and political setting for such contacts; the Prevention of Terrorism Ordinance was subsequently changed through legislation known as the “Meetings Law.”[6]

Avnery’s relationship with Arafat continued during the Second Intifada.[1] In 2003, he and Rachel served as human shields at Arafat’s besieged compound in Ramallah.[1] In an account published in the Gush Shalom bulletin on October 14 that year, Avnery wrote that, after a suicide attack in Haifa, ten Israeli activists had assembled within an hour and joined approximately thirty international activists at the headquarters.[4] He believed that Arafat’s killing would be a historic disaster for Israel and would further reduce the possibility of peace, calling the effort to prevent it “the most important, patriotic thing we can do.”[4]

In 1993, Avnery founded Gush Shalom, or the Peace Bloc, a left-wing movement advocating Palestinian statehood and equal rights for everyone in Israel.[1][6] Its emergence followed activism against the 1992 deportation of Palestinians to Lebanon, including protest tents outside Rabin’s home.[6] The movement organized demonstrations, often together with Palestinian activists, while Avnery continued writing a weekly column for its website.[2]

In 1999, he led approximately one hundred Gush Shalom activists to Orient House, the PLO’s headquarters in eastern Jerusalem.[10] There he delivered Faisal Husseini a declaration recognizing the Palestinian people’s right to the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem.[10] He also opposed Israel’s security barrier, which he argued could become a precursor to annexation, and participated in demonstrations against IDF activity in the territories captured in 1967.[10]

Avnery opposed the disengagement plan because he believed it was intended to freeze the peace process.[6] He also opposed Israel’s boycott of Hamas leaders in Gaza and the West Bank and continued meeting them.[6] Although he rejected Hamas’s ideology, he argued that peace could not endure if it excluded an organization representing a significant force in Palestinian society.[6] Fishman-Duker’s review described Gush Shalom as promoting boycotts of products from Jewish settlements in the West Bank.[7]

In 2011, Avnery and Gush Shalom petitioned the High Court of Justice against the Boycott Law.[10] The petitioners argued that the legislation damaged democratic principles and restricted a legitimate political tool.[10] In a 2013 interview, Avnery maintained that a Palestinian state was necessary both for peace and for preserving a democratic Israel with a Jewish majority.[15] He warned that continued settlement expansion could produce either an apartheid state under Israeli rule or a binational state with equal rights, comparing Israel’s course to a ship heading toward an iceberg.[15]

Avnery continued questioning the relationship between Jewish identity and Israeli nationality in his final writings.[1][16] His August 2018 column “Who the Hell Are We?” argued that Israel was a nation of Israelis rather than a nation of Jews.[1] In his final Haaretz article, he criticized the Nation-State Law and recalled joining an unsuccessful petition to change the nationality entry on identity cards from “Jewish” to “Israeli.”[16] The High Court rejected that petition.[16]

Avnery’s books extended from battlefield memoir to political analysis and accounts of his contacts with Palestinians.[3] Alongside In the Fields of the Philistines, 1948 and The Other Side of the Coin, his published works included Israel without Zionists: A Plan for Peace in the Middle East (1968), The War of the Seventh Day (1969), My Friend the Enemy (1986), and Lenin Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1992).[3] Fishman-Duker described Israel without Zionists as an English translation of essays advocating changes to Israel’s character as a Jewish state as a route to peace with the Arab world, and noted his writing of Hebrew fiction and contributions to Haaretz and Der Spiegel.[7]

After his years editing HaOlam HaZeh, Avnery wrote a column for Maariv and later published regular online commentary.[3] His journalism and activism received recognition both in Israel and abroad, including the Sokolov Award for journalism in 2004 and foreign prizes for peace and human-rights work.[3][10]

Avnery and his wife, Rachel, chose not to have children.[2] She died of hepatitis in 2011 after fifty-eight years of marriage.[2] In a 2017 interview published after his death, Avnery said he had bequeathed his archive and was arranging its transfer to the National Library of Israel; he also intended to leave most of his money to the peace camp.[17]

Avnery died in Tel Aviv on August 20, 2018, aged ninety-four.[2] He had suffered a stroke and was hospitalized at Sourasky Medical Center.[2] His hospitalization began on August 4 after he lost consciousness at home.[6]

HaOlam HaZeh’s influence extended beyond its circulation through its reporting methods, visual presentation, and training of journalists.[11] Communications scholar Rafi Mann called it “a school for many journalists,” while its coverage brought attention to corruption, discrimination, and groups it considered underrepresented in other publications.[11] Its scrutiny of the security establishment and use of coded language against censorship also distinguished it within the Israeli media landscape.[12]

Avnery’s papers are preserved as the Uri Avneri Archive at the National Library of Israel.[18] The archive reflects his overlapping public roles as a Knesset member, journalist, editor, and leader of the Israeli radical left.[18] His published writings likewise preserve the trajectory from combat service and war memoir to parliamentary opposition, Palestinian dialogue, and sustained advocacy of a two-state solution.[1][3]

Following his death, President Reuven Rivlin and opposition leader Tzipi Livni paid tribute despite their political differences with him.[4] Rivlin said their disagreements were diminished by a shared ambition to build a free and strong society.[4] Livni remembered him as “a courageous journalist and a rare, trailblazing man.”[4]

Avnery’s contacts with Arafat and the PLO, advocacy of Palestinian statehood, and challenges to prevailing conceptions of Israel’s Jewish national identity generated significant political opposition.[1][4] His 1982 Beirut meeting drew especially broad criticism and government scrutiny.[4][6] Avnery described the encounter as spontaneous and said that he arranged it by telephone less than twenty-four hours beforehand; a subsequent critical account questioned that description in light of his previous PLO contacts and the accompanying magazine staff.[4]

Interpretations of his ideological independence also differed.[7][19] A 2019 JCFA commentary argued that his positions aligned with the Soviet party line and characterized his politics as pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist; Fishman-Duker’s earlier review acknowledged that this interpretation conflicted with assessments of him as an independent antiestablishment maverick.[19][7] His retrospective claim that he had advocated a two-state solution almost alone immediately after the War of Independence also drew criticism emphasizing earlier Zionist acceptance of partition.[20]