Yehuda Avner

Yehuda Avner was born Yehuda Haffner on December 30, 1928, in Manchester, England.[2] A Modern Orthodox Jew, he became a leader in Bnei Akiva, the religious Zionist youth movement, and served as its national director in Britain before immigrating.[3][5] He completed high school and immigrated to Mandate Palestine in 1947.[3][5]

After arriving in the country, Avner fought in Jerusalem during the 1948 War of Independence, including during the siege of the city.[3][5] He was one of the founders of Kibbutz Lavi, a religious kibbutz in northern Israel, where he helped clear the land and build the new community.[6] A memorial account dates his move from Kibbutz Lavi into the Foreign Ministry to 1958, while a later review says he was hired as a translator in 1959.[3][6] He was the husband of Mimi and the father of one son and three daughters.[3]

For most of his Foreign Ministry career, Avner was assigned to the Prime Minister's Office, where he carried out sensitive tasks.[1] In 1963 he became an English-language speechwriter for Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, and when Eshkol traveled abroad, Avner also served as note-taker and confidant.[6] He subsequently headed the foreign press bureau during Golda Meir's tenure.[7] In 1969, following Eshkol's death, Yitzhak Rabin—then Israel's ambassador to the United States—called on Avner for his English-language skills, and Avner spent the next three and a half years at Rabin's side.[6]

Avner's service continued across political lines. Although personal advisers were typically replaced when a new government took office, leaders with opposing political outlooks—including the Labor-aligned Rabin and Likud's Menachem Begin—asked Avner to stay, reflecting his reputation as a deliberately nonpartisan civil servant.[3] He served as speechwriter and secretary to Levi Eshkol and Golda Meir, and as an adviser to Yitzhak Rabin, Menachem Begin, and Shimon Peres.[1]

In November 1995, Rabin asked Avner to pause his posting as ambassador to Australia and return to Israel to assist him at the Knesset. The two signed a contract outlining Avner's new position on November 3; Rabin was assassinated by Yigal Amir the following evening. After Rabin's burial at Mount Herzl, Avner reported for work with Shimon Peres, then acting prime minister.[8]

Official records document Avner's presence in high-level diplomacy. A July 19, 1977, U.S. State Department memorandum lists him as an adviser to Prime Minister Begin during discussions that included Africa, southern Lebanon, Syrian Jews, and Middle East peace efforts.[9] Another State Department record identifies him as a special assistant to the prime minister during negotiations over proposed wording on the West Bank—known by its original, indigenous Jewish name of Judea and Samaria—and Gaza, as well as the timing of a transitional period.[10]

An Israel State Archives document records a July 21, 1977, communication from Avner and Hanan Bar On to Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan summarizing the second meeting between President Jimmy Carter and Prime Minister Begin.[11] The archive also preserves a draft of the agreed communiqué concluding President Anwar Sadat's November 1977 visit to Israel; it was prepared by Hassan Tuhami, annotated in Hebrew by Yigael Yadin, and corrected by Avner.[11] The JCPA memorial identifies the 1976 Entebbe Operation and the 1979 signing of the Israel-Egypt Peace Treaty among the landmark events Avner witnessed from the inside.[3]

After his years in the Prime Minister's Office, Avner represented Israel in diplomatic posts abroad, including assignments in New York and Washington.[5] From 1983 to 1988 he served as Israel's ambassador to the Court of St. James's and as nonresident ambassador to the Republic of Ireland. From 1992 to 1995 he was ambassador to Australia.[12][5]

On presenting his credentials to Queen Elizabeth II in 1983, Avner recalled carefully rehearsing the protocol and then speaking with the queen about having been born in Britain and leaving for Palestine in 1947. He told her he was devoted to Israel spiritually and religiously before she turned the conversation to the weather.[7]

During his London posting, Avner developed a close working relationship with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. He recalled that Thatcher saw in Israel elements of "oldfashioned patriotism" and admired its "grit and guts."[12] He said she invited Menachem Begin to lunch at 10 Downing Street shortly after becoming prime minister, although some in Britain still regarded Begin as a terrorist because of his leadership of the Irgun.[12]

Avner also recalled that Thatcher sometimes invited him to her office privately to discuss sensitive issues, bypassing the Foreign Office, which he said tended to support sanctions against Israel over its settlement policy.[12] On one occasion, he said, she summoned him to No. 10 to ask that Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir instruct Ariel Sharon to stop referring to Jordan as Palestine.[12]

After his Jerusalem Post columns on his experiences received a strong reader response, Avner turned his accumulated notes into a memoir.[3] The Prime Ministers: An Intimate Narrative of Israeli Leadership was published by Toby Press in 2010; one annotated bibliography lists it as 731 pages, including an index.[4] It is a non-chronological, first-person account of Avner's years alongside Levi Eshkol, Golda Meir, Yitzhak Rabin, and Menachem Begin, covering their encounters with world leaders and the inner workings of the Prime Minister's Office.[1][4] A contemporary review called it a valuable first-person source on Israeli political history and Israeli-American relations while cautioning that Avner's judgments of individuals could be subjective.[1]

The memoir drew on notes and meeting summaries Avner had kept over decades. He acknowledged that retaining confidential notes may have broken the law but said that without them he could not have written the book.[13] More than half of the memoir focuses on Menachem Begin.[6] The book became a bestseller and was used as a resource on the events of its era.[3]

Among the episodes recounted in the memoir is an exchange at a White House dinner in which Chief Justice Arthur Goldberg told Avner that President Jimmy Carter considered Begin's "Greater Israel" policies dangerous to the United States and suggested that the powers might eventually try to impose a settlement on Israel. Avner cited a 1975 letter from President Gerald Ford to Prime Minister Rabin promising that the United States would not impose a settlement; Goldberg replied that such letters were not binding commitments.[1]

In 2014, the Simon Wiesenthal Center's film division produced a two-part documentary based on The Prime Ministers, with Avner serving as its principal narrator.[3] Avner also co-wrote the alternate-history novel The Ambassador with Matt Rees. The idea emerged from a Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony on Mount Herzl after Avner's 1995 retirement as ambassador to Australia, when Shimon Peres remarked that Israel was "10 years too late," prompting Avner to imagine what might have happened had Israel been founded in 1937.[14]

Yehuda Avner died in Jerusalem on March 24, 2015, at the age of 86.[2][14] His son-in-law David Sable called him "Begin's Shakespeare" and described him as an articulate champion of the Jewish people and the State of Israel.[14] Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks described Avner as a "wordsmith par excellence" whose work for Israeli prime ministers and as a diplomat placed him "at the heart of many of the defining moments of recent Jewish history."[15]

Avner's career traced an arc from the fields of a fledgling religious kibbutz to service under five prime ministers and diplomatic representation abroad. His memoir preserves a firsthand record of consequential episodes in Israel's history, while the documentary adaptation of his memoir and the novel he co-wrote extended that legacy to wider audiences.[3][1]