Uri Davis

Davis was born in 1943.[1] In a 2020 opinion column, David Breakstone described him as having been raised in Kfar Shmaryahu by Jewish parents who had migrated to Mandatory Palestine.[7] Breakstone’s account also described Davis as holding degrees from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and recalled him as a 27-year-old student at Tufts in Boston.[7]

As a philosophy student, Davis was a pacifist and conscientious objector involved in opposition to martial law in Israel.[8] His activism included entering closed areas to provoke arrest, and his campaign against land confiscation in the Galilee for the establishment of Carmiel led to imprisonment.[8] A separate account gives his prison term as five months following entry into a military zone without a permit.[9]

Davis worked as a sociology professor at Al-Quds University in East Jerusalem.[2] His published work includes articles on land and water policy.[3][4] He also edited a volume on citizenship and contributed a chapter to a collection on Israeli-Palestinian history.[5][6]

In 1970, he and Israel Shahak published Israelis versus Israel through the Arab League Office in London; the work credited Davis as Uriel Davis.[10] The 20-page publication, which included eight illustrated plates, was presented to the UN Commission on the Israeli Practices in the Occupied Territories and the International League for the Rights of Man.[10] His article “Palestine into Israel” appeared in volume 3 of the Journal of Palestine Studies in 1973, on pages 88–105.[11]

His 1978 article “And the Fund Still Lives: The Role of the Jewish National Fund in the Determination of Israel’s Land Policies” appeared in volume 7 of the Journal of Palestine Studies, on pages 3–33.[3] In the journal’s Winter 1980 issue, Davis, Antonia E. L. Maks, and John Richardson coauthored “Israel’s Water Policies,” on pages 3–31.[4] The issue identified the journal as jointly published by the Institute for Palestine Studies and Kuwait University.[4]

Davis also collaborated with Walter Lehn on The Jewish National Fund, published by Kegan Paul International in London in 1988.[12] The volume credits Lehn as author and describes it as written “in association with Uri Davis”; it comprises 390 pages, with maps, references, and an index.[12]

Together with Nils A. Butenschon and Manuel Hassassian, Davis edited Citizenship and the State in the Middle East: Approaches and Applications, published by Syracuse University Press in May 2000.[5] The volume includes the chapter “Citizenship and its discontents: Palestinians in Israel,” on pages 263–287.[5] His later publications include Apartheid Israel: Possibilities for the Struggle Within and the chapter “Naming the colonizer in geographical Palestine: conceptual and political double binds and their possible solution,” in the 2010 edited collection Across the Wall: Narratives of Israeli-Palestinian History.[6][13]

In his 2020 opinion column, Breakstone dated Davis’s entry into Fatah to 1984 and his election to its Revolutionary Council to 2009.[7] Davis was one of nearly 700 candidates for the 128-member council and became the first Jew elected to the movement’s leadership.[2] He was married to a Palestinian woman and described himself as “a Palestinian Hebrew national of Jewish origin, anti-Zionist, registered as Muslim and a citizen of an apartheid state – the State of Israel.”[2]

Davis remained a member of the Revolutionary Council at Fatah’s seventh General Congress in Ramallah in November 2016.[14] The council was described as Fatah’s second most authoritative body, and Davis answered a reporter’s questions outside the congress hall about what he hoped the gathering would accomplish.[14]

His public activism also included signing the 2009 Toronto Declaration protesting the Toronto International Film Festival’s Tel Aviv spotlight.[15] The declaration’s roster identified him as a writer from Palestine; it was a collective statement rather than an individually authored statement by Davis.[15]

Davis’s personal and political papers, together with materials relating to Ithaca Press, form an archival collection at the University of Exeter Library.[16] Listed in the library’s 2011 accessions, the collection covers 1950–1999, carries the reference MS 96, and was listed as closed.[16] An associated archival authority entry identifies him as a Middle Eastern scholar and links Exeter’s Special Collections with the Palestine Studies Trust.[1]

Davis has characterized Israeli policies as apartheid and called for an intensified international boycott of Israel.[2] At the 2006 London conference “Against Zionism: Jewish Perspectives,” organized by the Islamic Human Rights Commission, he was reported to have called Israeli military activity in Gaza a “horrific crime” and Gaza the “largest concentration camp in the world.”[17]

A particularly charged passage attributed to his book Apartheid Israel: Possibilities for the Struggle Within states: “Zionist leaders made themselves accomplices by default, and sometimes by deliberate design, to the mass murder of Jews by the Nazi annihilation machinery.”[18] This is Davis’s allegation, quoted in a critical discussion of academic anti-Zionism, rather than an independently established historical conclusion.[18]