Uri Avnery

Uri Avnery (אורי אבנרי, also transliterated Uri Avneri; 10 September 1923 – 20 August 2018) was a German-born Israeli writer, journalist, politician, and activist, who founded the Gush Shalom peace movement.

Avnery and his family emigrated to Mandatory Palestine in November 1933, following Adolf Hitler's rise to power.

All his and his wife's relatives who did not leave Germany ended up dying in the Holocaust.

He joined the Irgun, a Zionist paramilitary group, in 1938, in reaction to the execution of Shlomo Ben-Yosef by the British authorities.

Ben-Yosef had thrown a grenade (which failed to explode) into a bus carrying Arab women and children.

However, unlike his comrade-in-arms Yitzhak Shamir who joined up at roughly the same time, Avnery was judged too young to engage directly in actions such as killing Jews suspected of being informers for the British authorities, and bombing Arab markets.

He changed his surname to Avnery, a Hebraic rendering of Werner, to honour the memory of his only brother, who died serving in the British Army in Gondar on the East African front in 1941.

When Avnery was 16 years old, the Second World War broke out; it sparked in him a lifelong interest in military strategy, which he started studying in order to better follow events at the time.

From 1941 to 1946, he wrote for two far right wing newspapers, HaHevrah (Society) and BaMa'avak (In the Struggle).

Avnery's early political thought was influenced by Canaanism.

He left the Irgun in 1942 after becoming disenchanted with their tactics, stating in a 2003 interview that, "I didn't like the methods of terror applied by the Irgun at the time", noting he did not back killing people in retaliation for similar acts by the Arabs.

He abandoned Zionism at an early age, while remaining a nationalist, which he regarded as a natural feeling for desiring to belong to a collectivity, legitimate for Jews as it was for Arabs.

As early as 1946 he coined the term Hishtalvut BaMerhav (integration into the region) to express the idea that the future state of the Jews must align itself within a broad "Semitic space" (Merhav HaShemi), a choice of terminology dictated by his perception that the region had been dominated by Western imperialism and colonialism.

This "Semitic region" where he envisaged an alliance between Arab and Jewish national movements included Palestine, Transjordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq.

In 1947 Avnery founded his own small group, Eretz Yisrael HaTze'ira ("Young Land of Israel"), which published the journal Ma'avak ("Struggle").

A member of the Irgun as a teenager and a veteran of the 1948 Palestine war, Avnery sat for two terms in the Knesset from 1965 to 1974 and from 1979 to 1981.

Avnery was the author of several books about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, including 1948: A Soldier's Tale, the Bloody Road to Jerusalem (2008); Israel's Vicious Circle (2008); and My Friend, the Enemy (1986).

Zionism's mission, in his view, ended with the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.

During the 1948 Arab-Israeli War Avnery fought on the southern front in the Givati Brigade as a squad commander, and later in the Samson's Foxes commando unit (and also wrote its anthem, The Foxes of Shimshon, which has been called "one of the enduring battle anthems of the 1948 campaign").

He wrote dispatches from the front line which were published in Haaretz and later as a book, In the Fields of Philistia (בשדות פלשת, Bi-Sdot Pleshet).

His experiences impressed him with the understanding that there was such a thing as the Palestinian people.

They would enter villages where lighted fires and Primus cookers indicated that the inhabitants had fled minutes before.

It was rational for them to flee because that is what all civilians do when fired on.

Though it was forbidden for soldiers to write for newspapers, Avnery wrote articles on his frontline experiences during the 1948 war.

Avnery was wounded twice, the second time, toward the end of the war, seriously; he spent the last months of his army service convalescing and was discharged in the summer of 1949.

He was also the owner and editor of the news magazine HaOlam HaZeh from 1950 until its closure in 1993.

Shortly after his stint with that newspaper, Avnery (with Shalom Cohen and two others) in 1950 bought the failing magazine HaOlam HaZeh ("This World").

Avnery edited the weekly magazine, with its banner maxim "without fear, without bias," during the 1950s and the 1960s, turning it into an anti-establishment tabloid known for many sensational scoops.

Its impact was such that David Ben-Gurion refused to mention it by name, and would only speak of "that particular magazine".

The magazine was divided into two sections, the first half dealing with indepth muckraking journalistic investigations into corruption, the second half writing up titillating gossip.

He became known for crossing the lines during the Siege of Beirut to meet Yasser Arafat on 3 July 1982, the first time the Palestinian leader met with an Israeli.

He was awarded the Right Livelihood Award (better known informally as the Alternative Nobel Prize) in 2001 and the Carl von Ossietzky Medal in 2008.

Avnery was born in Beckum, near Münster in Westphalia, as Helmut Ostermann, the youngest of four children, to a well-established German Jewish family, his father being a private banker in the town.

His grandfather, Josef Ostermann, was a teacher in Beckum's small Jewish community.

His family roots are in Rhineland; his mother had once told him from which small Rhenish village his ancestors hailed, but he later forgot the name.

He grew up in Hanover, where his father later worked as a court-appointed receiver.

He counted among his companions Rudolf Augstein, the future proprietor of Der Spiegel.

In 2006 he said he had over time read "a few hundred books" on the subject, by authors such as Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, Liddel-Hart and others.

He attended school in Nahalal and then in Tel Aviv, leaving after 7th grade, at age 14, in order to help his parents.

He started work as a clerk for a lawyer, a job he held for about five years.