For News & Alerts
United Methodists are responding to Kairos Palestine: A Moment of Truth ,a statement of faith and urgent call to action from Christians in Palestine. UMKR seeks, through nonviolent means and in partnership with Palestinian Christians, freedom, justice and equality for all Palestinians and Israelis.
UMKR needs your support
- 1 or 2 per month –
join our mailing list!
🔸 New or Recently Updated
News & Analysis UMKR News & Alerts
UMKR Newsletter
Uri Avnery in the Knesset in 1965
ABOUT OUR NEWS SOURCES
The articles we include in our lists to 'Read More' – in our newsletters and on our website – are provided as an informational service for our readers, and the views expressed may or may not be shared by UMKR.
Some selections may be repetitive;because some periodicals have paywalls, we provide a variety of sources in the hope that every reader will find some of them accessible, with or without a subscription.
Uri Avnery interviews Yasser Arafat in Beirut, Lebanon, July 1982
We need your support.
With very limited resources, UMKR has made a major impact in the United Methodist Church.
Groundbreaking divestment and boycott actions by the UMC would never have happened without UMKR's advocacy AND the extraordinary partners and allies who have worked with us and supported our efforts.
If we are to continue advocating for Palestinian rights throughout our international denomination, we need your support.
Click here to donate online or by mail.
Please give as generously as you are able, and know that gifts of every size make a difference.
Download 2018 Review: Part One –
Download 2018 Review: Part Two –
The Big Stories of 2018
________________________
Read these sections of
Part Two on our website:
• The Top Stories
• People in the Spotlight
• Events IN Israel/Palestine
• U.S. Scene: Anti-Zionism, Anti-Semitism
• U.S. Scene: More from Trump Admin
• U.S. Scene: On Campus
• U.S. Scene: Legislation- State, Federal
• U.S. Scene: Changes on the Horizon
• Around the World
• Successes: BDS & More
• Last, But Not Least
• For Information Junkies
LAST, BUT NOT LEAST
ON THIS PAGE:
• Uri Avnery: Israel's Iconic Voice of Dissent
CLICK HEREfor three LAST, BUT NOT LEAST articles:
• Cyber Wars and Digital Justice
• The Film We Weren't Supposed to See
• BDS Nominated for Nobel Peace Prize
GO TO:
• Amos Oz: Novelist, Peace Activist, Zionist Apologist
Uri Avnery: Israel Loses an Iconic Voice for Peace
Uri Avnery died at age 94 on
August 20, 2018. Eulogized in print
as the “spiritual father of the Israeli
left,” “Shaper of the Israeli
Consciousness,” and “First Champion
of the Two-State Solution,” Avnery’s
death seems to mark the end of an
era in Israel, an era he shaped with
his powerful intellect, his dedication
to justice, and his courage to speak
deeply uncomfortable truths.
In 1933, when Avnery was 10 years
old, his family moved from Germany to Palestine to escape the rising Nazi party. As a youth, he fought with the Irgun underground militia before the founding of Israel, and he served in the Israeli Defense Forces in the war of 1948-49. He later spoke and wrote candidly of those years and why those choices were the right thing for him at the time, while also acknowledging his complicity in reprehensible Israeli policies of that era.
Early in his adult years, Avnery moved significantly to the left of the political spectrum, and for a great part of his adult life was dedicated and courageous peace activist. As the founder of two left-wing political parties, he served for ten years in the Israeli parliament, the Knesset.
At the age of 27, Avnery bought and re-created Haolam Hazeh into an iconic liberal weekly, and worked for 40 years as its editor-in-chief. He was credited with establishing a revolutionary legacy of political dissent in Israeli journalism and, for that dissent, was often denounced as a enemy of his people.
He actively participated in many of the most seminal events in Israeli history, and documented many more. In the later decades of his life, his weekly columns in Ha’retz and his Gush Shalom blog
were avidly followed by readers worldwide, for whom they were published in four languages. His diverse life experience had brought him into close contact with many historical figures, including David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, and Yasser Arafat, among many others. His writings were filled with memories of fascinating conversations, heated debates, and sometimes dangerous encounters.
Avnery never avoided
controversy and went
wherever his conscience
led him, even daring to meet
with Yasser Arafat in 1982,
one of the first Israelis to
do so, by crossing military
lines at the height of Israel’s
first war in Lebanon. He was
also one of the first Israelis
to advocate for a Palestinian state,
helping to introduce to the global
political lexicon what became known as the two-state solution.
In 1993, at the age of 70, he founded Gush Shalom (Peace Bloc) one of the leading progressive organizations in Israel opposing the never-ending and always expanding Israeli military occupation of Palestinian territories taken in 1967.
In April of 2018, four months before his death, Avnery wrote of the Israeli response to Gaza’s Great March of Return:
“WRITE DOWN: I, Uri Avnery, soldier number 44410 of the Israel army, hereby dissociate myself from the army sharpshooters who murder unarmed demonstrators along the Gaza Strip, and from their commanders, who give them the orders, up to the commander in chief. We don't belong to the same army, or to the same state. We hardly belong to the same human race.”
In a column shortly after his death, titled “Uri Avnery Superstar,” Gideon Levy, an even more controversial and just as avidly followed columnist, finds hope in the surprising impact of Avnery’s death, in the fact that, even in Israel of 2018, Avnery’s decades of controversial activism could be celebrated.
Levy clearly respected this trailblazing peace activist, writing: “now that Israel’s great warrior for peace is gone, we can see more clearly than ever just how courageous he was.”
But Levy also considered Avnery to have a limited understanding of the root injustice of Zionist ideology:
“Avnery was not radical left, as he was described. He was and remained a Zionist.
Anyone who believes in the two-state solution is by definition a Zionist. Historian
Ilan Pappe made an important distinction this week on the Israeli left between
those who consider the 1967 occupation the mother of all sins, whose end will
solve everything, and those who consider the ethnic cleansing of 1948 the original
sin that was not corrected, and feel that unless that happens, there will never be peace.
Avnery belonged to the former camp, of course. He waxed nostalgic about ‘48 and
fought against ‘67. His war was determined, courageous, pioneering and
revolutionary. After his death, it has once again become clear to what extent.”
Levy is certainly not alone is that assessment of Avnery’s positions.
The widely published author and academic, Haidar Eid, wrote of Avnery: "A white Ashkenazi Jew and ex-member of the Irgun Zionist gang that took part in the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, Avnery opposed the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza but never repented the original sin - the 1948 grand theft of Palestine. For him, a committed Zionist until the last moment, the 1967 occupation was the source of the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict”.
In other words, as a "committed Zionist" and however much he regretted the injustice that extends to today from the Israeli 1967 occupation, Avnery could not see the essential injustice of the settler colonialist enterprise that was and is Zionism and which inevitably produced the decades-long military oppression and ethnic cleansing of more Palestinian territories after 1967.
But had Avnery’s understanding of Zionism may have evolved in ways that Levy and Eid did not know? In “Uri Avnery: Still Leftist After All These Years,” a personal and rather intimate 2014 interview that 90-year-old Avnery did with Daria Karpel, he says:
“I am a person who does not long for his past. I remember the feelings of every stage of my life – contrary to the legends, this wasn’t an ideal country back then. It’s not as if things were perfect here until the Six-Day War in 1967. There is no place for nostalgia.
“The situation is worse today, and I am not talking about politics or the occupation. One thing led to another; all the seeds of this sprouted back in Herzl’s time. Zionism was a movement which could only realize its goals by expelling the Arabs living in the country. That is what it did and is still doing.” (Emphasis added)
Also from that 2014 interview:
Karpel: While reading your new book I asked myself: Is Uri Avnery a patriot or not? Is he a Zionist or not?
Avnery: I am national in my outlook. A major human right is the right to belong to a nation or collective. Human beings need this identity-based affiliation. I have always thought that the nation is important in the life of the individual. Accordingly, it was only natural for me to believe that if we have the right to a national life, so do the Arabs of this land. It was clear to me that the Palestinians deserve to live a national life. I discarded Zionism at a very young age – my view was that a new nation could be forged here.
Karpel: So you say explicitly that you are not a Zionist?
Avnery: Zionism fulfilled its goal – the establishment of the State of Israel – and thereby concluded its mission. Just as one dismantles scaffolding after the building is finished, so too this thing must also be got rid of. We are a Hebrew nation and definitely connected with world Jewry. The Arabs think I am a Zionist. I invented the term ‘post-Zionist.’
In that interview, Karpel explores why Avnery believed he he would live to see a peace treaty between Israelis and Palestinians:
“My life experience and my age advantage contribute to my optimism. I have seen so many unexpected things in my life, good and bad….I am an optimist by nature and I think we will extricate ourselves from the tangle we got ourselves into.”
Karpel: How?
“A miracle will occur. It might happen the hard way, perhaps preceded by a catastrophe. The consciousness of the Israeli public has to undergo a change. Like what happened when [Anwar] Sadat alighted from the plane [referring to the Egyptian president’s visit to Israel in 1977]. That is the essence of a miracle. Sooner or later, the two peoples will have to get along. Maybe after a war, maybe in the wake of irresistible international pressure.”
Indeed! One of the best arguments for the BDS movement, to exert that irresistible international pressure.
On the subject of BDS, Avnery has a less praiseworthy position. He wrote in 2016: “The first boycott against the occupation was proclaimed by Gush Shalom, the Israeli peace organization to which I belong. That was long before BDS came into being.”
But he goes on to say that the three goals of the BDS movement initiated in 2005 by Palestinians are a problem, especially the Palestinian refugees’ right of return. “Reversing that process now is as realistic as demanding that white Americans go back to where their ancestors came from, and returning the land to its original native owners. It would mean the abolition of the State of Israel and the creation of a State of Palestine from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River, a state with an Arab majority and a Jewish minority.”
Yes, there were dismaying and disappointing limits to Avnery’s understanding of what true justice demands and can make possible, and specifically the possibilities for fulfilling the third goal of the 2005 BDS Call: “Respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN resolution 194.” There are several plausible plans that could be implemented when Israel is willing to acknowledge the premiere injustice of the Nakba: the original ethnic cleansing of Palestine to create a Jewish majority, which required prohibiting Palestinian refugees from returning after the war of 1948-49.
For Avnery, going beyond his personal boundary – advocating for an end to the Israeli occupation – made the BDS campaign impossible. For Israelis on the right, Avnery’s goal of two states living peacefully side by side looked just as impossible. Political possibility depends on personal perspective and the capacity of one’s imagination, as well as understanding what is non-negotiable for true and lasting peace to be achieved. Even the seemingly most impossible political dreams can be realized, as India, South Africa, Poland and other nations have taught us. As we have seen in all such places, the results are never perfect and each generation must continue the work to expand the implementation of justice. But that work always requires the capacity to imagine and courage to reach for the impossible.
Yes, from the perspective of today's movement for Palestinian rights, Avnery's political vision had serious limitations, including the necessity for reparation of the catastrophic wounds of the Nakba, i.e. justice for the refugees. Despite the limitations that the era in which he was born and his earliest experiences may have placed on his imaginative capacity, Uri Avnery embodied a bold and nonconforming quest for peace and unwavering courage to speak and act on his principles, a legacy to honor. He inspired millions around the world with his uncompromising critique of injustice and exerted a powerful influence on more than one generation of Israelis that few individuals in their history can match. Avnery blazed new trails in the global discourse on Palestine, from which the global movement reaps the benefits today. We must hope that the seeds he planted in his own society have not died, but are merely dormant, and can still bear fruit in Israel.
BDS National Committee: Palestinian Civil Society Call for BDS
WRITTEN BY AVNERY
Gush Shalom: Eyeless in Gaza
Haaretz: How a Mossad Plot to Kill Yasser Arafat
Nearly Cost Me My Life
Haaretz: Palestinian Right of Return, Not Such
a Complicated Issue
Haaretz: Why Peace Activist Uri Avnery Refused
to Give Up – and Six Other Must Reads
ABOUT URI AVNERY
YOUTUBE VIDEO (2 mins): Iconic Israeli peace activist
Uri Avnery dies at 94
NY Times: Uri Avnery, Israeli Journalist and Peace Activist,
Is Dead at 94
Wallwritings, James Wall: Israel’s Uri Avnery Dies Too Soon at 94
Haaretz: President Rivlin: Uri Avnery Was a Fighter for
Freedom of Expression
Jerusalem Post: Warrior for Peace: Uri Avnery passes away at 94
Haaretz: How Uri Avnery, the First Champion of the Two-state
Solution, Laid the Foundations for Political Dissent in Israel
Haaretz: Uri Avnery, Veteran Peace Activist and Among First
Israelis to Meet Arafat, Dies at 94
Tikkun: Uri Avnery passes from this world, 1923-2018
Haaretz: Uri Avnery at 90: Still Leftist, After All These Years
Haaretz, Gideon Levy: Uri Avnery Superstar
Middle East Eye, Haidar Eid: We are better off without Uri
Avnery’s soft Zionism
Haaretz: Israel's Skeptical Generation Raised by Uri Avnery Exposed His Myths
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________
for our work to continue.