Journalist, author, former Knesset member, veteran of the 1948 War of Independence and noted peace activist Uri Avnery passed away Sunday night at the age of 94, two weeks after suffering a stroke that left him hospitalized in serious condition at Sourasky Medical Center in Tel Aviv.
Avnery was born in Beckum, Germany, in 1923. Less than a year after the Nazis rose to power in 1933, his family moved to Israel, where Avnery changed his name to Yosef, after his grandfather. He later added "Uriel" and decided to be known as "Uri." The Avnery family was poor, and he was forced to leave school at 14 to work.
Avnery said he joined the Irgun militia at age 15 and remained with it until 1941, when he was 18.
In 1946, Avnery took a stand against the pending U.N. partition plan, warning that it could lead to a war of "historic" proportions between the Hebrew and Arab peoples. In February 1948, he collaborated in the publication of a pamphlet titled "From Defense to War – Toward a Full-Scale War," in which he and his fellow editors proposed "dismantling the Arab front from within, leading to an open revolution between the existing Arab regime and the Arab forces that aspire to a national and social renewal," and forming an alliance between the latter and the new Hebrew nation.
Once the War of Independence broke out, Avnery joined the Haganah infantry forces and was posted in a reconnaissance role. He took part in dozens of battles, including some of the most famous of the war.
After completing officer training, Avnery was appointed company commander of a Givati battalion. He was seriously wounded in his stomach and arm in a battle on Dec. 8, 1948.
When the war was over, Avnery wrote "1948: A Soldier's Tale," a memoir in which he included notes he took as a soldier before and after battles. The book was an unprecedented success, but Avnery took issue with its enthusiastic reception, saying he had not written it to glorify the war or gloss over its horrors. He then wrote "The Other Side of the Coin," an anti-war book that details the ugly side of the War of Independence and featured harsh criticism of the politicians of the time. The second book met with as much public outrage and spite as the first one was celebrated.
"The Other Side of the Coin" was banned after its first edition, but reissued in 1976 and again in 1990.
While Avnery was still convalescing from his wounds, the legendary editor of the left-wing Haaretz newspaper, Gershon Shocken, offered him a job as the paper's chief opinion columnist. Avnery worked at Haaretz for a year, after which he departed over differences with Shocken.
In 1950, Avnery bought the weekly paper Haolam Hazeh ("This World") and served as its editor-in-chief for 40 years, making it a prominent part of the local journalistic landscape. Under his editorship, the paper took an anti-establishment stance and exposed corruption cases, as well as being one of the only papers at the time to report sex scandals and gossip.
As editor, Avnery advocated for peaceful coexistence with the Arabs in Israel, against the Labor government and its institutions, and against the defense establishment, which he called "the mechanism of darkness."
Haolam Hazeh was one of the first media outlets to raise the issue of discrimination against new immigrants from Arab countries.
In 1953, Avnery was one of the founders of the Committee for the Exiles of Abu Ghosh, which was devoted to helping people from the Israeli-Arab village outside Jerusalem who had been expelled during the War of Independence, despite the assistance they gave to the Zionist fighters.
That same year, he ran an open letter to then-Prime Minister and Defense Minister David Ben-Gurion, urging him to recognize the veterans, disabled, and fallen fighters from the Irgun and the Lehi undergrounds, arguing that they had fought as valiantly as the Haganah, which formed the basis of the IDF.
As early as 1957, Avnery called explicitly to establish a Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
In 1965, Avnery decided that the only way he could counter the anti-libel laws that hampered what he could say in his paper was to become a Knesset member, giving him parliamentary immunity. Together with several other editors, he founded a party that ran in the sixth Knesset election. Avnery served a number of terms as a Knesset member.
Avnery supported the 1967 Six-Day War. Immediately after it was over, he proposed implementing his idea for an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza.
He was still an MK at the time of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. He called for an investigative committee that would probe the political and defense problems of the war, and demanded that then-Defense Minister Moshe Dayan resign.
In 1974, Avnery helped found the Israeli Council for Israeli-Palestinian Peace. He voted in favor of the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. He opposed the 1982 Lebanon War from the beginning.
After a number of Hamas terrorists were deported to Lebanon – a move to which Avnery objected – he and a number of colleagues decided in 1994 to turn the "Coalition Against the Deportation" into a political movement called the Peace Bloc. When PLO leader Yasser Arafat returned from his exile in Tunisia to sign the Oslo Accords, he invited Avnery to his press conference.
Avnery criticized the Disengagement Plan under which Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005, arguing that it was an extreme right-wing plan that was designed to freeze the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
Avnery's wife of 58 years, Rachel, died of hepatitis in 2011. They chose not to have children.
