Uri Avnery

Uri Avnery: The Israeli Who Walked Into Besieged Beirut

On 3 July 1982, while the Israeli army was besieging Beirut, a 58-year-old Israeli journalist crossed the lines and sat down with Yasser Arafat. He was, by most accounts, the first Israeli to meet the PLO chairman in person. An Israeli intelligence operation codenamed Salt Fish was tracking him through the city, apparently prepared to kill both men; PLO operatives lost the pursuers in the streets. Avnery had already fought in 1948, been wounded twice, run Israel's most feared tabloid and sat in the Knesset. He was not finished.

Helmut Ostermann of Beckum

He was born Helmut Ostermann on 10 September 1923 in Beckum, Germany, into a prosperous German-Jewish banking family. In November 1933, ten months after Hitler took power, the family fled to Mandatory Palestine. He was ten. Most of the relatives who stayed behind were murdered in the Holocaust — a fact that sat under everything he later wrote about Jewish security, and which his opponents were never able to use against him.

The wealth did not survive the emigration. He grew up poor in Tel Aviv. At fifteen he joined the Irgun, the Zionist paramilitary; he stayed four years and left in 1942, uncomfortable with its methods. That early exit set a pattern: Avnery kept joining things and then finding the terms unacceptable.

Samson's Foxes

In the 1948 war he served as a squad commander in the Givati Brigade and then with the commando unit known as Samson's Foxes. He was wounded twice, seriously. He also wrote the unit's battle anthem — a detail that captures the double life he would lead for seventy years, soldier and writer simultaneously, never able to be dismissed as someone who had not paid.

The war produced his first books and, more consequentially, his conclusions. Avnery emerged from it convinced that the conflict was national rather than religious, between two peoples with claims on the same territory, and that it therefore had a political solution — a position that made him a heretic on all sides for the rest of his life.

HaOlam HaZeh

In 1950 he and a partner bought a failing magazine called HaOlam HaZeh — "This World" — and turned it into something Israel had not seen. It combined hard investigative journalism and political attack with gossip and photographs of nude women, a formula that gave a small anti-establishment weekly a circulation and a reach that respectable opposition never achieved. It broke scandals. It made enemies at the highest level: David Ben-Gurion refused to say its name aloud, referring to it only by circumlocution.

Avnery edited it until it closed in 1993 — forty-three years. It is difficult to name a comparable case of one editor sustaining a single adversarial publication across nearly the whole history of a state.

In the Knesset

The magazine became a party. Avnery entered the Knesset in 1965 at the head of HaOlam HaZeh – Koah Hadash and served, across two spells, from 1965 to 1974 and again from 1979 to 1981, later under the Sheli banner. He used the seat mainly as a platform: he was among the first Israeli politicians to argue publicly for a Palestinian state, and he argued it not as a concession but as a requirement — that without partition Israel could not remain both Jewish and democratic.

By the mid-1970s he had discarded Zionism as such while keeping a nationalist frame, an unusual and awkward position. In late 1975 he co-founded the Israeli Council for Israeli-Palestinian Peace, which pursued contacts with the PLO years before any Israeli government would.

Gush Shalom

In 1993 he founded Gush Shalom, the Peace Bloc, which became the most persistent of Israel's radical peace organisations — hundreds of demonstrations, frequently alongside Palestinian activists, campaigning against the settlements and for Palestinian statehood. Avnery called the settlements landmines on the road to peace. He advocated dialogue with Hamas, opposed successive military operations, and wrote a weekly column for decades, much of it circulating internationally through outlets such as CounterPunch. In 2001 he and his wife Rachel received the Right Livelihood Award, cited for their unwavering conviction, in the midst of violence, that peace can only be achieved through justice and reconciliation. The Carl von Ossietzky Medal followed in 2008.

Why Uri Is Called a Genius

The claim rests on anticipation and on endurance, and it is a political rather than an intellectual claim. Avnery reached, decades before it became conventional, the analysis that now underpins every serious diplomatic framework in the region: two peoples, one land, two states. He was arguing for Palestinian statehood in the Knesset in the 1960s, when the phrase was close to unsayable in Israeli politics; he was meeting the PLO in 1975 and Arafat in 1982, when contact was criminal. Oslo, in 1993, ratified positions he had held for twenty-five years. Whatever else that is, it is not conformity, and the ability to hold a position through a quarter-century of near-universal disagreement is rare enough to warrant the word.

The counter-case is substantial. Avnery was not an original thinker in any technical sense — he produced no theory, no scholarly body of work; his medium was polemic, and his most effective vehicle was a tabloid that sold partly on nude photographs. His forecast has not been vindicated: the two-state solution he championed is further from realisation at his death than at the height of Oslo, and his engagement with the PLO leadership is judged by many Israelis as naive and by many Palestinians as insufficient. He also changed his mind repeatedly and dramatically — Irgun member, then soldier, then post-Zionist — which can be read as intellectual honesty or as restlessness. The fairest description is a political imagination decades ahead of its society, combined with a temperament that made him unable to stop saying so.

Legacy

Avnery died on 20 August 2018, aged 94, after a stroke. Tributes came from across the Israeli spectrum, including from politicians who had spent their careers opposing him, and from the Palestinian leadership. In accordance with his wishes he was cremated and his ashes scattered off the Tel Aviv coast; his will left his assets to peace work in Israel. He spent seventy years arguing a case his country would not accept, and the argument outlived him intact — which is either a vindication or an indictment, depending on which way the region eventually turns.

Achievements

• Worked as journalist, politician and writer