Left-wing Israeli journalist, politician and peace activist
The Washington Post
By all accounts, the first time an Israeli met Yasser Arafat was in July 1982, after Uri Avnery — a war veteran, left-wing politician and muckraking journalist — boarded the Palestinian leader’s armored Mercedes in the streets of West Beirut.
The car swerved through the alleyways of a city under siege, one month into an Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and ferried Mr. Avnery to an apartment building where he spent two-and-a-half hours interviewing the Palestine Liberation Organization chairman, a man many Israelis deemed a terrorist.
They discussed the possibility of peace in the Middle East and, according to a report in Britain’s Independent newspaper, bonded over a game of chess.
“There was a joke about Mr. Arafat not being married,” Mr. Avnery later told The Washington Post. “I said if he would marry an Israeli girl it would solve the whole problem. He said if it would solve the problem, he would do it that day.”
As scenes of his meeting with Mr. Arafat aired on Israeli television, Mr. Avnery returned home to face accusations of treason. The country’s attorney general later said no crime had been committed, but the episode cemented Mr. Avnery’s reputation as a political renegade and leading advocate of “two states for two nations” — a position that often put him at odds with Israeli officials.
When he died Aug. 20 at 94, at a hospital in Tel Aviv after suffering a stroke, Israeli President Reuven Rivlin called him “the eternal opposition figure” whose struggle for free speech “paved the way for Israel as a young country.”
Mr. Avnery was a dominant and divisive figure in Israel, where he called for secularism in the country’s politics, negotiations with the Islamist group Hamas, recognition of the right of Palestinians to establish their own state and shared control of Jerusalem.
Once dubbed “Government Enemy No. 1” by the chief of Israel’s internal security service, he spent four decades as editor in chief of the news magazine Haolam Hazeh (This World), a nowdefunct weekly that published exposés of government corruption alongside left-wing political columns and, on its back cover, photos of naked women.
“He ran one of the few truly independent and unabashedly critical newspapers in the state’s early years,” said Haviv Rettig Gur, senior analyst with the Times of Israel. “Uri is one of the first serious journalists who introduced into our profession in Israel an ethos of independent criticism. Though he was on the deep left on the issues, he could critique left-wing parties as readily as right-wing ones.”
In his youth, the Germanborn Mr. Avnery championed an ideology known as revisionist Zionism, which called for a Jewish state that would extend from the Mediterranean through the modern state of Jordan. His views shifted leftward while fighting for Israeli independence, and — after writing a best-selling war book — he became one of the first prominent Israelis to openly call for a two-state solution.
When Mr. Avnery came out in support of Mr. Arafat, insisting that the Palestinian leader sought peace, he effectively “pioneered . . . the argument at the heart of the Oslo project,” said Mr. Gur, referring to the 1990s negotiations between Mr. Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
That peace process has long since stalled, although Mr. Avnery expressed confidence that a breakthrough would occur.
He had, he told the Independent in 2012, “the misfortune of being an incorrigible optimist,” as his views were increasingly out of step with Israel’s political leadership and even the country’s political left.
“He was ahead of his time and then lagged behind it,” said Diana Buttu, a former legal adviser to the Palestinian negotiating team. “Now the conversation among leftwing Israelis is no longer about two states. It’s about challenging and actually denouncing Zionism, acknowledging the wrongs of the past. . . . His death, in a lot of ways, marks the end of the two-state solution — he was the last activist I know of that was really calling for it.”
Mr. Avnery was born Helmut Ostermann in Beckum, Germany, and raised in Hanover, where his father worked in finance. The family immigrated to what was then the British mandate of Palestine when Helmut was 10, months after Hitler came to power.